A New Kind of Literary Pulse

January was just another year.  A year closer to the election.  A year farther from the end of graduation and all the promise that entailed.  A year closer to midlife.

In February I turned ...  [+]

What Do You Really Think, or Really Know? Understanding Thoughts (Thinking) and Knowledge (Known Facts) This morning I woke up to a sunny, hot day in the deep south where the weather is now becoming ...  [+]

I met Mario my sophomore year in high school; we had five of our six classes together. I was not arguing with that kind of fate, and I was going to know Mario. Our high school was ninety two percent ...  [+]

Ending my shift in the darkness of the night. Walking to the car quite exhausted. Climbing slowly into the driver's seat. Inhaling a deep breath prior to starting the ignition. I exhale and listen ...  [+]

I wish I could speak to the young mixed girl in rural Delaware when she hated her knotted curls, brown eyes, and skin that was shades darker than her mother’s. She was still growing, expanding unde ...  [+]

My America is so free until its dysfunctional. My family is as functionally, dysfunctional as they come. Because of them, I have loved and can persevere anything. I have never discussed what it has ...  [+]

My first memory of racism, well, my first realization of racism, happened when I was a young child. My little friend was black, and I had never thought a thing about it either way. Our families were ...  [+]

The thing about trauma, when it is survived, is that it can prepare people for the future. Sometimes people develop skills to handle a crisis or deescalate violence. Veterans can become police ...  [+]

America, I can’t color you in. You don’t exist. America is not a country. There are three Americas: North, Central, and South. You can't be drawn on any map. However, I will color you a name ...  [+]

I always wonder if cavemen and women knew what time was? And if so, did it seem to accelerate and decelerate to them, as it appears to us today? The concept of time has only changed recently (a few ...  [+]

I lived in America. My family has been featured many times in magazines and newspapers. We are nothing special. Yet, we’ve been photographed because we showed up at the right time, at the right ...  [+]

America is made up of hundreds of unique minority populations, and one is the Deaf Community. Our country borrows its principal spoken language from our one-time colonial power, England. Howeve ...  [+]

Surprisingly, there are more people outside now: the parks, the streets, the front yards. An order to stay at home has prompted people to take more walks, to redesign their gardens. In the ...  [+]

The train takes exactly 12 hours to get from Los Angeles to San Francisco, leaving at midnight and arriving in the high noon sun. This is quite apt in a way, for by making you wait for the good ...  [+]

I have worked in the same office space for twenty years. It’s in a small house, built in 1949, and faces a park with paths and trees. I’m a therapist. Clients come to tell me their deepest hurts ...  [+]

How different could it be? It was only four or five blocks from where I lived, just across the tracks.

The Southern Pacific railroad lines went through my little town in the Central Valley of ...  [+]

He had an orange, irregular shaped stain on his white tank top, and the thought of it brought heaviness to his lungs. He hated it, despised it. He appreciated symmetry in things, including color, it ...  [+]

We drove south on York Road, passing the large brick house that always stole my attention. I peered past my mother's arms and the steering wheel, to take another long, unblinking look. The exterio ...  [+]