Resilient Pieholes

The Nourishing Gourmet’s Golden Turmeric Sipping Broth is the only kind of recipe I can manage these days, the throw-everything-in-at-once kind, the kind that doesn’t care if I’m particular in my measurements, the kind that will end up colorful and comforting without me having to focus for more than a minute.

I drink it alone because I live with myself and no one else. And no one else is allowed to come over or at least that’s how we all feel, or at least not for the frivolity of an unnecessarily fussed-over cocktail, thick and sweet and frothy.

Right now, our country faces a crisis of mass incarceration. With five percent of the world’s population, we have twenty-five percent of the world’s incarcerated people.  The majority of these are held not in the federal prison system but in local facilities—jails.