Articles

Take not endeavor from me. To the last
Give me the quick blood and the eager heart;
The ecstasy of striving; and the smart
Of failure’s needles pricking fine and fast
To goad me to achievement. Unaghast,

Nearing thirty and walking on the Marcellus Shale, Mina pauses when Gould asks her to marry him. In the small, quick window of her hesitation, she compares her studio apartment in the city to his three-story brownstone with the park green opposite.

Josh MacIvor-Andersen is the author of the memoir On Heights & Hunger, and the editor of Rooted, An Anthology of Arboreal Nonfiction.

1. This is how the story normally goes: a young bride, a virgin, is sewing outside her humble home when the Angel of the Lord appears and says: Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.

The summer our parents tried to split up, my sister Teresa drank half a bottle of bleach. The year before that, she’d climbed to the top of the monkey bars and jumped,

My island has been awake for hours by the time I, in my Midwestern suburb, rise and hunch over a screen to wait for news. It is May 31, 2014, and on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Cyprus is having its very first Gay Pride Parade.

Out of the daily feedings and training and classes and animal-visitor encounters of a zoo, there is little that makes it into the news.

Okmulgee, OK. “Okay?” A leather sofa. Warm air. I laugh as I throw toys behind the sofa to investigate. Grandpa’s cat, Chang, can fit underneath.

I surface aspirate-blue, the mother-of-pearl edging on a button blanket, cedar strips steamed then bound, a bentwood box cupping tidal foods:

I stay with my mother in the waiting room
of the Juneau Public Health Center

to see about an abortion. The last night
they made love, my father anchored

his fingers in the sable-thick
of my mother’s hair and made me,