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3/29/2026 0 Comments My Body by Madelyn May Sean Benham CC My Body Disembodied VO: In ninth grade, Mr. Johnson was Sex-ed and PE teacher, rolled into one. He said: “the fastest way to lose some weight, is to simply stop at your plate.” He then waved his hands, a fumbling coup, “which you absolutely should not do.” But words are sparks that catch too fast, the magician’s rabbit was already in the hat. Embodied VO: I’ve lived through phases of my body —mildly thin here, mildly heavy there. Curves like old-world cinema, Sophia Loren’s shadow wrapped around the hips my Nana once affectionately called “child-bearing,” like I was some Sicilian peasant waiting to get knocked up behind the town olive grove. I was once a ballerina with D-cups. Discomfort was the only choreography. Kids spat knives: “ugly” and “weird,” yet when I wore a tight shirt, boys stared. So did male teachers. I got used to the uncomfortable silence, the restless itchiness, of growing up in a body that seemed to walk into rooms before I did and left heavy, whispering silences in its wake. When I was 21 I got breast reduction surgery. I didn’t immediately thin down but suddenly I could breathe. I could stand up straight for longer periods without back pain. My bra no longer needed to clock in for grueling 12 hour shifts. My body, suddenly, felt a little more like mine. A little more aligned with who I thought I was. You could even call it gender-affirming care, depending on who’s asking. The scars look almost identical to top surgery. The results were immediate and surreal. I went bra-shopping with my mother for the second-first-time and cried in the Urban Outfitters dressing room, this time not out of embarrassment, but out of euphoria. I purchased a soft, lacy bralette I knew would fit. But, the freedom that came like a train whistle in the dark, couldn’t stop the anxiety brain from its humming, buzzing bite. Boys never saw me and when it did it wasn’t the real part. Boys were never interested in me and the ones that were, to put it lightly, fucking loved my tits. LOVED them. Fucking worshipped them and knelt at the altar. If men only wanted me for my rockin’ rack, what did I just do to myself?! What did it mean to take a scalpel to the one thing that seemed to make me desirable? And then there were the scars. Oh, scars. Deep and sprawling, like someone hand-stitched me back together. I’m 26 now and I still flinch a little when I take off my shirt to see the skin that remembers my original sin. I call them “Frankentits.” I’ve always been one to own what makes me uncomfortable. To laugh first. Laugh before they laugh. But humor, inevitably, is excused as an permission to pry: “Can you still feel anything?” Not really. “Why are your nipples huge?” I don’t know, ask my surgeon, he had the scissors. “Can you still breastfeed one day?” Who knows. Probably not. Not that I want kids, but the idea that I’ve preemptively flunked some imagined motherhood exam doesn’t feel good. That I took a body, already hyper-feminized and sexualized since I was 13, one supposedly designed for baby-making, and rerouted it. And now, on soft, hormonal days, the kind where the silence starts narrating, that thought slips in like an unwanted hand on your lower back: You broke the one thing your body was made to do. A few pounds of yellow fat, gone. There’s literally less of me now, anatomically speaking. But the real question, the one that curls up in the lizard part of my brain, is: Am I less of a woman? Society loves that question. It hands it out to all women like party favors at one point or another.  Less Woman, 2023, pen on tablecloth by me. I don’t regret the surgery. And a smaller chest didn’t shrink the rest of me, not that I ever wanted it to. That was never the goal at the time. In fact, I still look back at photos, even from just two years ago, with my brand-spanking-new tiny tatas and think: “God, I look massive.” That is mostly because right now, I’ve drifted into the thinnest I’ve ever been in my adult life. It sounds glamorous when you say it fast, a hushed, jealous whisper in a woman’s bar bathroom, but the truth is, I just wasn’t hungry. Not in some tragic mascara-bleeding-on-porcelain, two-fingered-on-the-cold-bathroom-tile kind of way. I never sat myself down, theatrical and tribunal, and said: you need to lose weight. I just wasn’t hungry. At dinner with friends I could pass for normal: fork to plate, laughter between bites. But, when left to my own devices, I just wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t hungry, and I didn’t notice until I finally was again… and now, even hunger is as loud as a big brass band parading down Bourbon and feels like a feast rolled out on a cedar table. I’ve always been aware of my body the way a traveler is aware of their suitcase. How much space it took up. How it stacked up next to other girls’. How it moved through a crowd. But I truly never cared enough to try reshaping it. I was an athlete for most of my life. My body had a purpose, it had motion. I needed food, real food, to do what I was supposed to do. Feeding myself wasn’t failure, it was sustenance, gasoline. Bread and muscle and gravity were friends back then. And besides, my genetics lean Mediterranean and genetics are a fixed thing, unmoveable, like good bone structure. My mother always described people as being either “big-boned” or “small-boned.” She’s “small-boned,” if you’re wondering. Two children later, chocolate on her breath, and still she is the size of a French girl surviving on a cigarette diet. Honestly, the fact that my body dysmorphia is only appearing now and not during my years doing pirouettes next to anorexics and living full-time with a woman who looks like she stepped out from the pages of Italian Vogue, feels like a small miracle. As soon as the weight slipped off me, like a coat slipping from a chair, I got a taste of what it’s like to exist in the world as one of those truly skinny people. Not one of those “slim-thic” people, as I was once described by a gay man in my freshman dorm. God, it’s terrible that it feels so good. People are nicer to you. Softer. Warmer. People greet you with a smile like they’ve always known you. Or maybe it just feels that way. Does it matter? They say: “You look amazing!” and the applause feeds you. It didn’t help that this all lined up with month five of my Accutane treatment. My skin was baby-new and my waist looked borrowed from a middle schooler. I was glowing, in a digestible, wife-material kind of way. Sexualized, but softly. Waifish. For the first time in my life, I was Jackie, not Marilyn. Like someone was imagining me picking out linen sheets and meeting their parents, not fogging up the backseat of a car. Until, of course, the hunger came back. This is where I am now. Disembodied VO: Take the rabbit out of the hat and eat it too. Mr. Johnson, pray tell, I’ll eat you too. And I won’t feel bad, I won’t feel bad. I have a never-ending hunger to plan. Embodied VO: Guilt is my only second course. I tell myself it’s a money thing. One meal a day, max. Groceries are expensive. The tariffs! It’s all just economics and definitely NOT an eating disorder. I keep thinking about what my high-school sex-ed/PE teacher said. I keep thinking about what Kate Moss said: “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” I keep thinking about what Carrie Bradshaw said: “sometimes I’d buy Vogue instead of dinner. I felt it fed me more.” I’m trying not to think about how my brush with thinness is perfectly timed with the death of body-positivity and the quiet return of heroin chic. I’m trying not to think about my accidental weight loss looking suspiciously like recession-era austerity. When I walk through the grocery store and see empty shelves and eggs that are priced like luxury goods, I’m trying not to think about the way scarcity always makes skinniness fashionable again. Cleverness is being able to live a lot off a little, that’s what living in New York teaches you. When no one can afford to live here, restraint is practically a currency. Skip lunch, drink coffee, pretend hunger is elegance. And if you can master it, you can get that $25 dollar cocktail with your rich friends or see that Broadway show. Your heartbeat, more winded than it’s ever been, can beat with the city’s in small, strategic bursts. It doesn’t necessarily make you feel better, but it does make you feel slightly above things, like you’ve figured out a trick other people haven’t. So, when I see people with full plates and full bodies, some reptilian part of me thinks: In this economy? Gluttony, I say! And I hate that part of me. That smug, inverted cruelty. I see the curve of their stomachs and feel, briefly and stupidly, like I’ve won something. Some silent competition I never meant to start playing and now can’t stop. The thoughts make me feel hideous and ashamed of how I got here. Not just guilty, but the ugliest I’ve ever felt. Like I’ve peeled back my own skin and found something rotting underneath. If someone else said these things, I’d call them a bully. I’d feel sick with just how unkind it is. But, I think these thoughts anyway. And I know, I know, I know that when I’m picking other people apart, it’s just me slicing into myself with someone else’s body as the decoy. Which doesn’t excuse it. Even if that weren’t the case, I’m still judging people’s appearances. I’m still being a fucking asshole. And I hate, I hate, I hate that I have it in me, that capacity for well dressed meanness. When I compare myself to others in this way, I don’t just see what I’m afraid of becoming again. I see what I think I’ve conquered: appetite, indulgence, and the need to take up too much space because fundamentally, under ever-shedding layers of a disappearing person, I must feel undeserving of it. But, this idea of restraint and discipline and self-control isn’t restraint and discipline and self-control. It’s low esteem dressed up as disordered eating. It’s the art of folding up all the messy, hungry, too-much parts of myself into tiny compartments and labeling them “under control,” when really, it’s just a refusal to believe I’m allowed to take up more space than I already do and still be loved by myself or others. In the other corners of my brain, I look at other people’s bodies and still see my lack, I still feel that envy green: What do they possess in their hearts that I don’t that allows them to carry themselves so completely without apology, to always love themselves? To eat the whole fucking sandwich? Because ultimately, I don’t want to stand in front of a mirror and calculate my value. No one does and no one should. I want to eat. More than that. I want to gorge on the rest of my life. I want my thoughts to be consumed by other matters, other hungers. Music, books, love, work, life is all it’s strange, thrilling longness. Not the mean voice that whispers when my fork is suspended in midair. More realistically, I want to hear it and bite down anyway. This goes for every mean voice, embodied and disembodied. Disembodied VO: Fullness is an illusion, my dear. Listen closely and it’ll whisper your death in your ear. Open your mouth, reach down, and regurgitate only one thing year after year: That lucky rabbit’s foot, carry me in tow, that pale little talisman, etched into my bone. Remind me only of the wildest, feral seeds I can sow. Madelyn May is an essayist, playwright, and poet based in New York City. She has a BFA in Screenwriting and History from Chapman University and has worked and written across mediums such as television, film, and journalism. She currently works in the Art Department at HarperCollins Publishers. Her work has appeared in Dreamworldgirl Zine, Chartium Magazine, and Raiya Magazine. Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation.
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 Sean Benham CC
To Leave Behind a Trail of Light, a Trail of Goodness Decades ago, when my husband and I were young and still unmarried, our friend John’s parents frequently extended their house in Maine to our friend group (and to the friend groups of all six kids in their Irish Catholic family). If they resented the extra work and noise, I don’t remember them showing it. Marie urged us to eat what she’d cooked and seemed amused by us. With Alan, we walked the beach, him gesturing toward the sky while marveling out loud at his luckiness in a way that allowed us to feel we were a part of it. Still, I was shy back then, not the kind of twenty-something to go out of my way to connect with friends’ parents, so I never knew Marie personally and she didn’t really know me. When I flew with my husband and son last weekend from Virginia to Boston for her funeral, I did so not to put closure on my own grief but to show respect and support for her kind, bereaved family and to reconnect with friends. I got more from the weekend than I expected. ## Marie died at age 87 surrounded by family. This wife, mother, grandmother and great grandmother took pride in her work as a stylist by trade and as a creator of clothes, quilts and meals by avocation. A respected mentor, passionate Democrat, and lifelong Christian, she walked her talk—calm, quiet, but not passive, especially when it came to asserting herself to defend those in need. At the funeral service, I took in the sermon and the family tributes to Marie, all of which resonated. But when Reverend Callahan spoke of Marie’s legacy, a charge bolted through me. “A Christian is a person who leaves behind a trail of light and goodness. Marie was [this kind of] Christian.” No stained glass windows (that I noticed) in the church, and it has been years since I’ve identified as Christian; nevertheless, I saw it: Marie’s trail of light and goodness everywhere, in everyone around me. No come to Jesus moment, but a mini miracle nonetheless. It was almost embarrassing the way that I, as an unrelated attendee, kept needing to cry during the rest of the funeral service—every time the light in the sanctuary sparked to a blaze: tears whenever, popcorn style, a family member got up from their pew to hug their father-grandfather-great grandfather, the recent widow. Tears when the youngest son of the deceased teased his siblings who’d forgotten to put his name in the program, his feigned hurt giving way to laughter; and tears again when the entire family laughed with him. Tears and light, tears and light at: “Aww, I know they love me,” and at how, right up there near the altar, the siblings pummeled their youngest with hugs. “Our mother gave us each what we needed to love each other—together we’ll get through this loss,” said one of the sisters. They hugged again and the light shone again; and their father joined them again; and again my tears fell. Such goodness. ## All that light and goodness seemed to blaze right through my dead leaf memories and even some of the murk and confusion which were how I knew myself in my twenties. I stopped drinking, eight years ago, at age 53. Between this and my recovery from what became an addiction to my daughter’s addiction, I’ve seen little of old friends in recent years. Compared to others my age in my circles, I lack nostalgia for the past. I brag this letting go of the past keeps me young and present. But at the funeral and the reception, I let myself go there. ## As a young twenty-something, I occasionally did see light. Certainly I did. Those sunsets on the Maine beach. Fires in New England fireplaces. Tender moments with my then boyfriend, now husband. The womblike pink/gold paintings of a loved friend. But what most alights my memory are sun rays glinting off a wine glass, precariously perched on someone’s back porch railing. Then the glass to my lips and the light reflecting off the faces of my friends—dear faces, beautiful faces, I love them still—but only those right next to me shone, and eventually, after more wine, only those right up in my face did, flickering in and out as my vision narrowed and everything outside the narrow frame grayed. Then no field of vision. Nothing to frame. ## Do stories of addiction and recovery always involve light (or lack thereof)? When at age fifteen our daughter Raven began sneaking out to drink and drug, her natural consequences hit swift and terrifying, like nothing I’d ever seen. My own drinking--which had already slowed over the decades--came to a full stop. It seemed wrong even to flirt with substances, the enemy of my first born and of so many of my loved ones. Soon I would trade this martyred sobriety for chosen recovery-- only then would my life begin to change. Meanwhile I scrambled for the right kind of help for my daughter, fearing I’d never find it, even as the light within me, the light within her, and the light between us flickered on and off. ## Because “teenagers need their sleep,” the private ‘hippy’ school to which we sent Raven for a few months of her tenth grade (in our ‘throw money at the problem’ phase) started late, about 10 AM and ended early. Fortyfive minutes from our home, the small school offered no transportation. I drove Raven each morning, then went to try to write until pickup time at a cafe a half hour away, one filled with lonely old men and oddly flavored coffee options—one I learned to hate. My daughter and I didn’t talk much on those morning drives, rather zoned out to Passenger, one singer we both liked. Land mines riddled our relationship that year; even so, occasionally we still had silly conversations of the sort that had been typical a year prior—about whether or not we’d marry Passenger or whether or not he’d marry us if I was younger and single or she was older and marriageable. Was he already married? Was he even into women that way? Is Passenger really his name? We didn’t know. We didn’t look it up. Maybe we could each just court him as a friend. In retrospect it’s strange, or maybe telling that we liked his songs so much, since his lyrics raised the specter of all we were trying to avoid. In All The Little Lights, our crush mourns: “One went out when I lied to my mother, said the cigarettes she found weren’t mine/One went out within me…it’s getting dark in this heart of mine.” Passenger’s song, Dreaming, when I let myself think about it, troubled me the most: “If you can’t get what you need/you learn to need the things that stop you dreaming. /All the things that stop you dreaming.” In the years of my active addiction to my daughter’s addiction, denial stopped my dreaming even more completely than drinking or drugs ever had. And beneath the denial, a drumbeat of worry. What had caused her to drop friends, her dancing, her school work, her laughter, our family? ## “You’re free for the day,” I told Raven one morning as she opened the car door in front of her school, trying to pretend I didn’t want to hug her close and keep her with me. “You must be so relieved.” Trying to pretend that the rare laughter we’d just shared hadn’t mattered to me. “If you can’t be what you want, you learn to be the things you’re not.” “No more ‘Mom music’ for another five hours,” I continued to joke, as if cavalierly. That year, even on mornings when we’d been getting along, Raven typically flounced out of the car swearing at me. Not this morning. “Listening to Passenger with you is seriously the best part of my day, Mom,” she said. My daughter stood stock still, hand on the door handle, and held my gaze, her blue eyes clear and serious for that moment, before closing the door, and I saw that for a part of her at least this still was true. I didn’t know it would be another year or two before I glimpsed this part again and another five before she would embrace long term recovery (four years and counting now!) from an opioid addiction that nearly killed her. ## How did it happen? People want to know this about themselves and their loved ones, even about their acquaintances or strangers whenever a light goes out—in a single night’s blackout blatant enough to lead to IG posts and gossip, or for long, long periods of darkness when grades, friends, jobs, and health are incrementally, then totally lost. When a light goes out for good, the questions buzz then echo. How? Why? Whose fault? Too much pain for the recipients of these questions. Our daughter lived, is alive today, still friends ask me what went wrong. I ask myself so I don’t blame them. I tell them what I tell myself that I’ve found clues, but no one answer. Maybe in recovery Raven will find answers for herself? For now, for her, for me, it seems enough, fulfilling enough and hard enough to build good lives on what we do know. ## Surprisingly, when the reverse of active addiction happens and the light floods back, when the goodness does, the hows and whys aren’t definitive either. At least in my experience. My daughter did get clean and I did regain my agency. We both discovered hope. Our talks shine radiant, feel good and non-compulsory, admittedly among the best parts of my week. Separately, we each are problem solving, failing better; growing braver, learning, loving. Still, we know there is no one-size-fits-all path to a freer life. In each of our cases, some of our worst mistakes led to recovery. Somehow—through community, boundaries, divine intervention, hard work, deep prayer, and through resources we were lucky enough to have, Raven and I each got enough of what we needed to start dreaming again. These days we don’t usually dream together, but we always respect each other’s dreams. ## I used to say I’d do anything, would never ask for one more thing, and would be forever grateful if Raven went into recovery. Hah! How quickly we forget! I wasn’t considering my good fortune when I boarded the plane to Boston for the funeral. I was low-key nervous about reconnecting with old friends, berating myself for what my self esteem problems and the ways I’d chosen to deny them had cost me in accomplishment compared to these friends’; had cost others too, including my daughter, for whom, until recent years, I hadn’t been a strong enough role model. Humility is one thing—a good one; it inspires amends-making; positive action; change. Looping thoughts about past inadequacy, joined to ones about current weight gain and the impossibility of “catch[ing] up” career-wise are another--not so good. Both before the funeral service and after, at the reception, rumination threatened, once again, to narrow my field of vision. The darkness never goes away completely, nevertheless I’ve learned to leave one shade in my heart window cracked at all times. Just as the reverend’s words did at the sermon, songs, poems and testimonials at the reception, all speaking to Marie’s legacy, turned the lights back on. One anecdote, in particular, lit me up. A twenty-something, the partner of one of Marie’s great grandsons, spoke in a slow, accented voice about how Marie had warmed her and made her feel accepted. When the two cooked dinners together, the young woman was reminded of loving moments from her own family in her own country (I missed which country this was). Her voice broke and she looked down at her hands as she acknowledged how much she treasured these memories. She would miss her partner’s great grandmother. She felt fortunate they had met. This speaker had only known Marie for three years before Marie died which meant Marie must already have been about eighty-five years old at their meeting. Who would I meet in another twenty-five years should I live that long? How would I affect them? It’s not over til it’s over, I reminded myself. I reminded myself that legacy isn’t exactly quantifiable, is not only a matter of money or titles, or publicly celebrated accomplishments. So there was hope for me yet! As in the church, my vision widened. Warmth spread through my body. My chest expanded and I took in extra air. I hugged my son standing next to me, before thanking him for joining us and when he tugged me close and said in his man’s voice (how did this happen?), “you are welcome,” a light flicked on in my heart. I snapped a photo of my evergreen friend Carolyn at another table, head thrown back and grinning as she played with her three year old grandson. The sight of them turned on another light. Nearing this friend’s table, I heard the grandson say in a piping tone, “can I spend the night at your house?” and when I drew even closer, I put my hand on my friend’s cheek, remembering how her now laughing face had crumpled only an hour before, how she’d sobbed, following her mother-in-law’s casket with her husband John and his family out of the church. Same face. Same day. That kind of miracle. Such deep connections. That kind of goodness. ## Carolyn and I made plans to see each other again with our husbands and some other friends, the ones from the old Maine days. I’ve made such plans before. This time I meant them. As I spoke, I could just see it: how they’d probably drink wine and I’d definitely drink mocktails and we’d find new light in our memories of old times. My friend mentioned offhandedly that Marie never drank--not that that mattered, or maybe it did? No matter what the friend reunion would all be okay, I knew it would, even though for years I’d been looking for doors to shut, had thought that shut doors made me tougher. It would be even more than okay—our meeting--my old friends and I, me being sober on a big boat or at a beach bar. ## I suspect all stories of great change involve images of light. Writing this, again I see the planned reunion with my friends from back in the day, how I’ll focus on their faces, growing softer and more beautiful with age. I’ll scan, too, the lilac sunset and the purpling shadows bouncing off the water, I do see us by water, and gold sun beams bouncing off their shoulders. I’ll remember my one friend’s pink paintings and her cute clothes she used to let me borrow to go out. And I’ll remember my other friend’s liberating energy, the way her laughter bounced off the walls and set our nights on fire. And no, I won’t forget the devastating headlines or my pressing need to respond, or my work, or my sister with whom I share my every day, or my 12-step sisters, or my relatively new friends, or my goals, or my husband for better, for worse, for in between. I’ll hold in my consciousness the small ache in my hip when I don’t stretch and I will not forget my aging father or the weird dream I had last night. Nor my adult children. Nor my favorite anecdotes about them. Not the book I’m writing. Not the other parents I’m writing it for. Not the world at large. These intentional, sober days I can sit with my friends and with myself and stay with all of it. ## What people don’t tell you, what I needed a funeral to remind me of, is there can be a whole lot of light in growing older. There’s no need after so many years to throw up walls or hide in the shadows; no need to escape. By this age my old friends and I have all been through it—troubled kids, sicknesses, family addictions, lost jobs, disappointing jobs, depressions, the deaths of loved ones—our separate somethings.There is more to come; we feel it in our bones. We grow in and out and into our marriages again. Soon we will grow in and out and in and out of good health. Some hours we’re lonely as hell and other hours our lives are overcrowded, and the crowds are on our last nerve. Our very last nerve--and yet so far, so many times, we’ve come out the other side. When I see past myself, past my dim corner of suffering, I see the broad vista of all there is to love in this life and how we share it, all of us. I see I am not special, for which I thank the god of my understanding. At this very minute of writing I am growing older, at this very minute of writing I am forever young enough to step out into the light. May we stand in this light together. May we invite all others in. Extending our hands and smiles and welcomes. Extending our strength to share the pain. ## This is my holding up dream, my senior prayer, my elder’s promise to myself: we will meet again, old friends and I, old friends if we’re lucky growing older. Let us see to toast the light and goodness already trailing in our wakes.This light we can only hope will bathe our future generations. A recent regular contributor to Psych Central and Healthline, Karen Sosnoski's essays on resilience lost and found have appeared in Eat, Darling, Eat; The New York Times; The Sunlight Press, This American Life and elsewhere. Currently she is revising Above Us Only Sky, a creative nonfiction memoir about life beyond her addiction to her daughter's addiction. Last year, Karen spoke at the Department of Behavioral Health’s Recovery Pathways Conference and the Faces & Voices of Recovery’s 2025 gala; she co-facilitated a weekly mindfulness group. This year she is taking steps to make advocacy in the addiction field her late life's work. Just ask and this former loner will happily tell you about the joys of courage found in community. Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation.  Sean Benham CC
Welcome: Accessibility in Craft Yesterday, I checked off one of the items on my bucket list: I taught a Pie and Poetry class to working adults. Eighteen people filled the room. It began as a craft talk and then moved into a poetry workshop. Yesterday, I gave myself permission to free myself—to liberate myself through poetry—and in doing so, I felt my burdens soften. I also took myself out to sushi before the class. The green tea was necessary. * At 4:00 in the morning, I wrote: If you were to ask me what this session would be, I’d say this—ideally, we eat pie and think through poems that explore longing, the body, and whatever remains. In class, I want to share poets who write about desire, joy, vulnerability, and grief through the body. I want us to consider how poetry transforms physical experience into emotional meaning—how sweetness and sorrow can coexist in the very same moment. * When I was in college, I avoided poetry classes that had the word craft in the title. It scared me. It sounded rigid, exclusive—as if poetry were a secret club I could never afford. But then I began thinking about writing the way children think about arts and crafts: scissors, glue, paint, glitter—make a mess and learn from it. Suddenly, craft felt less like a gate and more like a tool. A tool anyone could pick up, experiment with, and play with. * So what is craft, really? In poetry, craft is how we build a poem. It is the choices we make—the words we select, the line breaks we trust, the hyphens we use—that make a poem generous, cohesive, and alive. When we understand craft, we take our baked, broken emotions—our imperfect, messy bodies of experience—and shape them so they land with clarity and power. Craft does not make our feelings smaller. It gives them the room they need to breathe. * I may be stating the obvious, but I want anyone reading this to understand what I mean when I say craft. I am not trying to make poetry easy. I am trying to make it approachable. I want a middle schooler, an older person at the end of life, an immigrant feeling isolated—to read this and feel invited. Making poetry accessible is how we grow it. And isn’t that what poetry is for? To connect. To reach. To remind us that poetry is people. * Beyond gratitude lives freedom. Beyond gratitude lives generosity. One of the most generous acts, I think, is to study the craft of poetry. I realize this now, after years of avoiding it. There is something deeply loving about looking at a poem together and sharing what we see. Teaching someone how to read a poem is giving them a quiet form of attention. Poetry is people. * Form. Meter. Imagery. Rhyme. Theme. My former high school English teacher once wrote, “Write a storm. Shape the storm. Share the storm.” These elements—form, meter, imagery, rhyme, and theme—are how we shape that storm. They allow us to take emotion and experience and turn them into something others can enter. Craft lives in the music of a line. It is in the architecture of a stanza. It is in the image that feels like home. It is in the quiet rhyme. It is in the naming. It is in that connective thread. * What is poetry? Perhaps I should have started here. Poetry is an art form that uses language to evoke emotion, create image, and carry complexity. It communicates human experience in a way that is both tangible and exact. But poetry is also labor. It is practice. The craft of poetry is a space—a room we enter. It measures. It reasons. It argues. It apologizes. It practices deep empathy. It is vital. It is necessary. It is a way to process the intensity and uncertainty of the world, especially now. Poetry helps us navigate identity, justice, climate change, and the fragile condition of being. * The craft of poetry is something poets work hard to understand. Sometimes they spend their entire lives trying to comprehend what it means to write even one poem well. In Pie and Poetry, we discussed Khalil Gibran’s The Great Longing, Ross Gay’s Throwing Children, Robert Hass’s The Story About the Body, and Victoria Chang’s Obit. * Before our discussion, we talked about the difference between the narrative poem and the prose poem. Narrative poems often share a clear story or arc. If we were to play God and arrange poems into a family of siblings, the narrative poem would be the oldest child—responsible, observant, honest, filtering the most important details, and right most of the time. The prose poem, by contrast, would be the strange middle child—attention-seeking, experimental, impulsive, always taking risks, like bungee jumping without warning. It fights to be seen and often leaves others dumbfounded. Yet that very impulsivity gives it its power. There is beauty in its odd details, its raw humor, and its sense of wonder. * In The Great Longing, Khalil Gibran writes: Here I sit between my brother the mountain and my sister the sea. We three are one in loneliness, and the love that binds us together is deep and strong and strange. * How many weddings, funerals, and celebrations have you attended where a poem was read? The craft of poetry allows us to name what otherwise feels nameless. It offers language in moments of deep emotion or confusion. It gives calm. It gives safety. It gives attention—that quiet, steady attention. I love this poem by Khalil Gibran, especially that it begins and ends with the line, “the love that binds us together is deep and strong and strange.” I love how it holds mysticism, lyricism, and love at once, drawing the reader inward through its questions and longing. I also love the word strange. Here it feels closer to mystery than to weirdness. Like every sibling relationship, we instinctively know why that word is right. The poem moves between what we share and what keeps us distant from one another. And yet those very differences are what allow us to show up for each other—and what make the poem possible. * The class then moved to Ross Gay’s Throwing Children. Ross Gay writes a seventeen-line poem with only one period at the end. because you’re pouring with sweat and breathing a little bit now you’re getting a good workout but because the kid laughs like a horse up there laughs like a kangaroo beating her wings against the light because she laughs like a happy little kid and when coming down and grabbing your forearm to brace herself for the time when you will drop her which you don’t * If sonnets are rooms, the prose poem feels more like a first apartment. It has the energy of a party. There is breath, movement, and a kind of beautiful disorder. I love this poem by Ross Gay for the joy that fills it—an unapologetic joy in giving someone else delight. I love the vivid details: the kangaroo, the ants, the mourning doves. I love the long run-on movement that seems never to stop. The poem feels like it is working as hard as the caregiver. Those breath-driven sentences feel spoken aloud. Joy appears alongside exhaustion, and tenderness becomes a form of strength. Ross Gay gives us permission to feel openly. His work is accessible without being simplistic because of the careful labor behind it. * In Robert Hass’s A Story About the Body, the poem centers on an interaction between a young composer and a Japanese painter. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my breasts.” Then the young composers says: “I’m sorry. I don’t think I could.” * The magic in the poem comes at the end when the composter finds a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door, full of dead bees and covered with a layer of rose petals given by the painter. * One participant read this and said, “You call this a prose poem, but it feels narrative to me.” And that’s part of the beauty of poetry — it so often holds multiple elements at once. The closer you read, the more you discover. I remember reading Robert Hass in my undergraduate workshop and feeling almost magically moved by his work; it followed me everywhere. My first reaction was — and still is — something like: this young composer is such an asshole. And yet I love how empowered this artist feels within the poem. I’m also struck by the older Japanese poet, who continues to create even in the midst of everyday, practical acts — sweeping dead bees into a bowl and placing rose petals on top. Those rose petals make me think of childhood, of pulling them off one by one while saying, “he loves me, he loves me not.” And even though the title reads “The Story About a Body,” what stays with me is the oddness, strangeness, and beauty in the characters’ behavior and language. That texture — the attention to the peculiar, the intimate, the quietly mysterious — feels, to me, like the truest quality of prose poetry. * We then discussed the poem, OBIT, by Victoria Chang * There is so much happening in this poem. The speaker’s almost clinical voice and the title itself work almost like a news headline. Yet beneath that restraint, the poem feels intensely hungry, as if it is working hard to prove its own need to feel and to live. I’m struck by the image of the fake teeth at the beginning and the way she places them in her mouth. It makes me think of how toddlers first encounter the world — sensing everything through the mouth, putting objects there as a way of knowing. That detail carries both vulnerability and instinct. I also love the line about Sprite. “Her last words were in English. She asked for a Sprite. I wonder whether her last thought was in Chinese. I wonder what her last thought was.” It feels magical, not only because it balances so carefully on the edge of identity and doubleness, but because it gestures toward something language can barely hold. The poem suggests that language does not die with the body; as the poet writes, “it scatters.” There are resonances here with Hass’s poem, too, since both end with bowls filled with something — containers holding remnants, traces, offerings. This poem feels deeply rooted in the body, in the way we experience the world through all the senses: smell, touch, taste, sight, movement, and love. And what it reveals is that grief is not an object we can point to. It is something lived through the body — something felt physically, a way the body knows it is still alive. * A poet friend once asked me, “How do you grow poems? Are poems living or dying?” For me, to go into a poem, I must go through. And to go through, I must feel it fully in the body. The craft of poetry lives in the body. * I will end with the dismissal of the Pie and Poetry class. Last night, eighteen people shared the room. We ate apple pie, chocolate cream pie, and a Gluten-free cherry pie. Just like in poetry and these four prose poems, we bring our longing, our grief, our joy into a space the way pie is built into its crust. We shape it. We name it. We share it. When we teach craft, we are not building walls around poetry. We are setting the table and inviting others in. We are saying: there is room. There is enough. Bring your body. Bring your storms. We will practice and shape them together. Poetry is people. Pie in our hands, poems on our laps, I now understand something I once feared: Craft is not a gate. It’s an invitation. Viola Lee received her MFA in Poetry from NYU. Her book Lightening after the Echo was published by Another New Calligraphy, and her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Bellevue Literary Review, Mississippi Review, and Another Chicago Magazine. She lives in Chicago with her family and teaches 4th, 5th, and 6th graders. Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation. 3/29/2026 0 Comments Little Red and Me by Kathy Curto Sean Benham CC
Little Red and Me As far as I know, Little Red Riding Hood didn’t complain when her mother asked her to deliver food to her grandma. She just did it. Maybe it even came natural to her. Someone isn’t feeling well or is hurting? Bring food. Invited into the home of a loved one? Bring food. I relate. It’s what I do, too. I get it from my mother. **** This, too, I get from her: a little lipstick never killed anyone. **** Like Little Red, I appreciate a pop of color. I have a waffle weave cotton neck scarf the same shade of yellow as French’s mustard. I wear it in every season. And I once wrote an essay about red shoes. I forget most of what I wrote except for my thesis: A pair of red shoes can change things: the course of an evening, a mind, a love life. So now, on days when nothing makes sense and confusion rules, I follow this recipe: combine one soft yellow scarf, a pair of ruby red flats and a handful of dreams about night and curiosities and real humans in love. Mix well. Let sit. Enjoy. **** Oh, but then there’s the wolf. Ready and hungry to deceive, frighten and intimidate. To trick, to create pain. But mostly to devour. Lipstick might not kill, but wolves do. Why was there only one in Red’s story? Don’t they travel in packs? In my forest, the one that lives in me, the one that is of the heart-soul-mind variety and the one that rattles my bones when winds are cold and dark, there is more than one wolf. In my forest they travel in packs. Big, scary ones. They hide behind trees and jump out at me showing off glistening teeth and their grey see-through-me eyes. Sharp, sharp, sharp. Everywhere. What if this happens? What if that happens? What if this happened? What if that happened? What if? What if? What if? The wolf pack of what-ifs. Ready to eat me up, no condiments needed. **** “Snap out of it,” my mother might say if she were here. Her brown eyes might widen and her hand might be perched on her hip. There might be a long hard sigh, the final note of her directive. Her body telling me, “You’re stronger than any wolf pack.” And that’s what I do. I snap. Out of it and into the woods. With red shoes and a yellow scarf. Like ketchup and mustard. Like blood and sunshine. Kathy Curto is a writing professor and the author of Not for Nothing-Glimpses into a Jersey Girlhood (Bordighera Press, 2018.) She lives in the Hudson Valley with her family and can be found in her front yard, on most mornings, replenishing her Little Free Library with donated books. This practice has become one of her daily delights. Please visit: www.kathycurto.com or on IG @kathy.curto. Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation.  Sean Benham CC
How to Survive a Burning House Our main goal here is survival. In order to survive a burning house, you need to recognize when it’s burning and where. Is it in the kitchen? The bedroom? The hallway, or all three? When you’re a kid, you won’t know much about fire. You won’t know how it spreads, what to do, or just how detrimental it can be. The important part of this first step is that you need to have this moment of recognition when you’re young. About ten or eleven. I was only able to recognize my house was burning because someone told me it was. You need to remember that because you grew up in the burning house, you won’t know that it is on fire until you step outside and see all the other houses on the street still standing. This is the most important step. After you realize your house is burning, you’ll need to come up with an escape plan; a survival effort. Now, because you’re young and because your parents didn’t provide you with the tools to be able to survive outside and inside of your house, you will feel very lost. So when you start to feel very lost and the burns from the flames grow larger, you will need to find a therapist. With this therapist, you will talk about your escape plan. You’ll talk about how the burns keep reappearing, getting worse, and how to treat them. You will start to understand how and why they crisp your skin the same way a grill chars a piece of your hamburger. You’ll begin to learn how the fire in your house works, and why it never extinguishes. And after years and years of extinguishing efforts, you’ll accept this fire is too strong. Your escape plan will start to take place. Once you step outside the first time and breathe fresh air, you’ll be astonished at how truly happy you can be. You’ll gain an understanding and recognition of yourself that you never had before. You will start to thrive off this fresh air. It feels healthy, clean, and refreshing. It’ll be so different from how you’re used to feeling so much, all at once, all the time. You will start to believe in yourself, in the fact that your ability to feel so largely is a good thing. You’ll quickly realize that the reason you’re like this is because you’re outside of the house. You will want to run and never look back. But even though you’ll want to run, you have to stand in the driveway and watch. And involuntarily, you’ll also have to go back inside periodically. Your parents keep you attached by one singular string: financial control. You will also need to check on the dog and your brother. While doing so, you need to be prepared for seeing your parents throw lighter fluid onto each other trying to see which one turns to ash first. And then get a few splashes on yourself, too. So then you get burnt. You’ll stand in the driveway, outside, looking at your house burn, but the fire department will not have shown up yet. This wait for them will feel like an eternity. Your family will be inside, yelling manipulative tactics to get you to run after them, and you’ll have a small need to run in and save them. Not because you love them and they are your family, but because that’s who you are. You are the kind of person who will run into a burning building for someone no matter who they are or what they did. But your years of pain, misery, depression, and trauma makes that part of you dwindle when noticing their cries. You’ll be quite confused at the fact that these feelings coexist. It’s important to remember that you have a right to feel that way. Keep in mind this does not make you a bad human, it means your brain is traumatized. They did it to themselves. Your time in the driveway outside of the burning house allows for those burns to heal up and scar. And although each time you walk inside, either thinking that your entire body is basically a scar at this point and there’s nowhere else that could possibly burn or prepared for what the fluid does to your skin that makes it crisp, the flame is always worse than you think. And so is the recovery. During this time in your driveway, you’ll need to come up with what you want your own house to look like, because you refuse to let it burn. You’ll want warm colors instead of dark and cool ones. Pink, yellow, light blue, pale and soft shades of red, pretty greens. You’ll want lots of plants. You’ll decide to have windchimes that blow in the wind instead of loud voices. You’ll want warm lights and candles instead of cool and bright ones to drown intensity. You’ll keep people in this house that are soft and caring instead of intimidating and mean. This cycle of going in and out and in and out of your burning house will continue, all the way through college. All the way until the fire department finally shows up. At this point, you’ll be able to run and never look back. Because once the firefighters come and grab you, they cut all your ties to that house. The misery, the abuse, the emotional neglect, the control it has over you, the financial manipulation, the people in it. You never have to go back. Surviving it will be hard. Surviving it is hard. And you wouldn’t be who you are today if you don’t survive it. You like yourself today. Give yourself some grace. If you could leave, you would’ve already left. Remember that it’s awful you couldn’t be a kid and had to grow up so fast, and that your emotional maturity is a gift. Although confusing, these can both be true. Your ability and intuition to read people is helpful. You make people feel comfortable. You know what to do in every situation, you know how to help, and you provide great emotional space for others who need it. And also please remember to find someone like that for yourself. You cannot do it alone. He will make you feel so loved and remind you of these facts when you are too burnt to remember yourself. Once the firefighters pull you out and you run away to safety, you have accomplished our goal. Survival is more than enough. It will be then, that you can live. Sam Holmes is a 2nd year English major student at Roosevelt University, with a minor in writing. She is a writer in the Chicago area, and just getting started on publishing her work. Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation. 3/29/2026 0 Comments Stay by Bruce Bromley Sean Benham CC
Stay We’re sure that Larry would be a terrible name for a ghost. So tiny, so already over, without the sprawling vowels of Lavinia, Bertram, Annabella. But maybe any ghost wants to find it possible to say—I need to touch you; I’ve tumbled into love with you all over again; I remember how your hair smelled of the long grass that’s never cut. So, this short name, this sound gone before you hear it, this Larry and his ghost must match the need that intends to stay. You’ll try to punch out that longing with what used to be your lungs, your throat, your mouth, in the hope that something in the living world will slow enough to answer it. Needs resemble questions, we speculate, since both announce the expectation of being met or that their thwarting should be recognized. But the impossibility of negating the impulse to yearn means that the dead, like the living, are hungry. And hunger’s this stomach-slap that says again, again. It makes the body—alive or dead—a transporter of desires knowable through their repetitions. We’re two men watching a movie seen from the ghost’s point of view, and we’ve loved each other longer than my college writing students have been alive. Nadia’s end, the story tells us, involves spiked juice and a plastic wrap muzzle and this Chris so innocuous that every parent imagined he can only be good. Nadia works at saving Chloe, a high school friend, from the horror that muffled her and meets this goal while lightning’s antlered across our skylight. As if all of Brooklyn reverted to a sticky marsh, where creatures pad appetites around in a world that seems theirs. Until it isn’t. We get silly/sad, Neil and I, listing ghostly names and conceding that an ordinary Larry merits his space among the phantom ones. But really I’m worried about the compulsion to repeat. When the noise in my head begins to lag, I see her, treating words as though they were in a pail. She drops a pail of feeling down into the belly’s busy dark and hauls up what she thought words could never say. Yet the thing she needs to squint at shudders below the words and exceeds them, even while their formulations suggest the fact of shuddering. This Hilda Doolittle fractionized her name. In 1933, she’s the poet H.D. who lies on the famous Viennese sofa, hovering between two global collapses. The first pulverized her brother, silenced the pump of her father’s heart, and stilled her daughter in the act of being born. The second’s set to rhapsodize about Hitler and the Jews who will be stateless, because that’s what law can do: rub out the lives that so many don’t want to look at, anyway. Adam Phillips introduces H.D.’s Tribute to Freud by maintaining that “without repetition there is no improvisation, and no history,” nothing to modify or vary or transform. But not all repetitions are equal. And all of them require judgment. The two planetary bodies that any animal life sees with ease disappear and return, and that rhythm means: what vanishes can come back. This coming back regulates every repetitive process beneath our skin that keeps us upright on ground that always moves. Our eyes stabilize the turning, misrecognize it, so a vision of immobile ground becomes an illusion we can use. To go on walking. To invent a notion of value tied to what works. And, the customary logic argues, what works must sustain those systems intended to organize the human lives inside them, rendering them legible, worthy of being seen. I know that Neil and I live in a place whose white founders journeyed on the intention that their landing would deliver them to this paradise, resurfaced for their employment. That the inconvenience of the brown ones who preceded them should be wiped out, shunted away—and it was. We’re citizens of a country that values the price of eggs over the widening of executive powers and multiplying deportations and the breaking apart of diversity support for those who fail to fit the approved profile. We know that this yearning to go back bewitches all who submit to it, that the past was never so uniform as its manufactured picture. We’re here to be made narrow and small and to vanish. But how can the unseen refuse their invisibility? On our way to bed, the sky sounds like a stomach’s slosh and grind when missing food. We talk about Michelle Williams’ Molly in Dying for Sex. I don’t know the connectors between needing to be fed and the being seen that’s so urgent for Molly’s character. I know that the affirmation of visibility converts you into a sort of footed fire, a mix of speed and sheen for which some will want to hurt you, begrudging a life without interest in or aptitude for repeating theirs. Not far into the first episode, Molly’s on a bench in front of a bodega close to our place. She holds an acid-green bottle whose scale dwarfs her right hand. It’s called Good Value Diet Soda, and she drinks from it as if goodness and right valuation could be transferred from one receptacle to another. As if that travel down the gullet would generate more good, more value, and you were equal to their accordance. This happens after Molly escapes her couples therapy session with a husband for whom she’s a thing to be scrubbed and wiped, dirtied by the cancer that now returns. She admits never knowing the flash of loving heat with a body other than her own, notes the muteness of husband and therapist that declines to serve her. In her friend Nikki’s car, Molly drives into the time that her proliferating cells allow. She’ll burnish and be burnished by men who see her as more than the object of a caregiving that couldn’t save her. Neil and I recall: showing the first episode to my students, I asked them to reflect— how does this material help you to look at what you don’t want to see? We went around the seminar table. They were all about their rage at Molly’s husband, at that unwatchful therapist. When I said, but no one notices Molly, so how does your raging differ from the erasure you’ve identified?, the room got more than quiet. I’d stilled an almost last shot on the screen. They looked up. There was Molly on a hospital bed in a swell of light, too bright—in this moment—for negation. I haven’t known unbroken sleep for so many months that I’m afraid to count them. But watching Neil slide into that other place inside this one seems a beneficence to me: letting go of what you can’t control, can’t undo, the twitch of his eyelids at the tale rising up on their inner folds, which he’ll be skilled at reading. Watching dulls the rumble between my ears in response to the contempt for what isn’t you that remains this nation’s primary lesson. I think about the living spellbound by cell phones and social media platforms with their incessant capacity for self-promotion, which betrays our anxiety about being here at all. About tight-hearted leaders and the population whose votes render their policies actionable. Maybe we’ve misnamed ourselves and belong in the company of the dead, the ones believed to be over and who fight the knowing of it. But swapping one side of a polarity for another leaves the oppositional charge between them in place and makes nothing happen. No, I’m not looking for a polarity in this world that depends on them for its rigidities. I know how more than half of our human microbiome comprises what isn’t us—bacteria, viruses, fungi— and that their connectivity determines our continuing to breathe. We’re stranger than we know, and strangeness is a force. Why should the dead be blockaded from participating in this hectic fusion? I understand: many, faced with stressors we can’t quite dominate, deploy what we think we know as a foundation for what we don’t. But staying with that “don’t” forwards our ability to resee, to intervene in, to counter the old and favored repetitions. That’s what any improvisor can do. Bruce Bromley is the author of Guesting: Essays, Essay/Stories (Understory Books, 2022); The Life in the Sky Comes Down: Essays, Stories, Essay/Stories (Backlash Press, 2017), nominated for the 2018 Victoria & Albert Best Illustrated Book Award; and Making Figures: Reimagining Body, Sound, and Image in a World That Is Not for Us (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014). He teaches writing at New York University, where he won the Golden Dozen Award for teaching excellence. Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation. 3/29/2026 0 Comments Freight by Scott Bethay Sean Benham CC
Freight Johnny: I remember you always seemed so tall. You and your mother toured the South with a captured Nazi fighter plane, selling war bonds at carnivals. You worked the rigged midway games but always told folks how to beat them. And there was the freight train at Verona, where you used to hop the boxcars. One day you convinced all your classmates to play hooky and hop the train to Memphis with you, but they chickened out. The truant officer caught up with you at the depot somewhere around New Albany. So, next you lied about your age to join the Navy and cruised beneath the polar icecaps in a submarine. Next the Air Force, and after that a traveling salesman. Through it all you pursued my grandmother, Stella, relentlessly. After you scared off all her suitors, you camped out in front of her dorm and convinced her to leave college and marry you. There were four kids: June (my mother), Frank, Gus, and Mimi. Living out of motels and old cars. Laundry in sinks. Family in tow. Money an afterthought. You called beer “Milwaukee Tea” and drank too much of it. When Frank was still a child, you took him and all the neighborhood boys to a Cardinals game in St. Louis—but you forgot to tell their parents. Then there was the time Stella had to threaten divorce to prevent you from joining the mob trying to stop James Meredith from enrolling at Ole Miss. Later, you drove a giant Chevy station wagon called the Yellow Submarine and taught us grandkids to fish and play poker. When Stella was dying of cancer, you said to her: “Don’t go! If you do, I’ll be right behind you!” Without missing a beat, she looked you in the eye and said “I’m sure you will, Johnny. You can’t let me have a moment’s peace.” She got about seven good years in heaven until you succumbed to a combination of grief, chronic pain, and opiate addiction. At your funeral Frank said, “Dad was a great playmate, but not much of a father.” The Great Escape: We were living with Johnny and Stella then, after Mimi had married Dwight and moved out. I was four or five and mad because I wasn’t allowed to spend the night with them. I decided to run away to Memphis: where Johnny had failed before, I would make good my escape. There was a crossing near our house where the train would slow down enough that I could climb up in a boxcar. I would take Tramp- an Airedale mix that Johnny had rescued from the pound- with me. He was my protector and companion, like Ben the Bear was to Grizzly Adams on my favorite TV show. We made our way to the tracks, but the train never came. I started to wander, Tramp still at my heel. We passed by the old man in the wheelchair who always sat in his yard and waved as folks drove by. Rumor was that he had been a POW during World War II, his condition the result of abuse suffered at the hands of his captors. They had cut out his tongue. He smiled and waved as usual. A member of the neighborhood search party soon caught up to us, and my mother demanded that I explain myself. I calmly told her that Tramp was aware of my plan and had been with me the whole time. Aunt Mimi: You were sixteen when I was born. I remember when I was a little kid you would take me to the local diner, and I would dance the funky chicken atop the tables. When I was a bit older you made us purple cows, and we watched the Midnight Special with Wolfman Jack. You had a Siamese cat named Bogus, a gift from your friend Lee who had a stutter. I thought he was cool so I copied him, and he would get onto me: “S-s-Scott you better s-s-top that s-s-stuttering, boy!” I saw y’all shooting dope but knew even then not to tell. I also knew not to talk about the time Dwight was strangling you, and you smashed that jar of VapoRub upside his head just to get him off you. It turns out he was a Son of the Confederacy and a card-carrying knight of the invisible empire. You always kept a man but deserved better. And you were prone to a certain mania not unlike Johnny. One Halloween you were Tina Turner. Then it wasn’t even Halloween, and you were Calliope from Days of Our Lives. There were overdoses and the time you shot yourself with what you thought was a .357 magnum. It happened to be loaded with .38s. Otherwise, it would have made a hole the size of a basketball in your side. I sat with you after the surgery and chaperoned you on your trip to the state hospital once you had recovered. Such was often the case— you considered me a kindred spirit even when you thought everyone was against you. I was grown and living in Little Rock when I got the news: You had jumped in front of that freight train right in the same spot where I had waited as a child. Scott Bethay is a clinical psychologist from Mississippi. He enjoys writing, music, the outdoors, and spending time with his wife and young son. He is a recovering alcoholic with about 33 years sober. Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation.  Sean Benham CC
I Eat Sandcastles for Dinner I sweep dry forest hearth up into mounds with my palms—sandcastles of dust and pinestraw—and then smooth it out, patting it back into place. I do this over and over until my breath slows to a steady rhythm. I imagine all the dust of dead creatures that lived before me clinging to my skin, burrowing in the ridges of my knuckles, seeping into my pores and entering my bloodstream, imbuing me with their memories. A thousand cells melted down into evolutionary lore. *** That's why I knew to run when I heard the metallic click of the window latch. Why I bolted from bed, flinging the bedroom door wide in a single breath. Why I tore down the hall, out the back door, slipping on the last porch step until my bare feet hit the wet grass, striking it away in a sprint for the treeline. Phantom breath slipping down the back of my shirt, tracing my spine wrapping round viselike, stabbing icy fingers into my stomach. *** Dad’s back. He's at the window. Or he's coming around the house now. Maybe he's right behind me, hiding in the trees, waiting for me to pop out like a rabbit from the den so he can chase again. I thought I had a long start, but what if I couldn't hear him over the sound of my feet slapping the earth and my heart beating against my eardrums? Or maybe it was someone else playing the drums, some forest demon watching the hunt, chanting for the end. *** I made it about a mile before my lungs began to burn and the stitch in my side felt like it would burst, threatening to spill all the things I promised the guidance counselor I would not swallow onto the forest floor. My stomach a ripped-open bag of trash. Grandpa’s oversized ARMY t-shirt I wore to bed hung down to my knees like a nightgown and kept sticking between my clammy thighs as I ran. The humid summer air hovered above eighty degrees even after midnight, and the cold sweat made my skin feel slick. I stopped running when I tasted lighter fluid on my tongue, regurgitated from the cartridge I swallowed a few hours ago instead of the pills mom set out when she came for her weekly visit. The long green-white pill and the triangular-white one were probably still where she left them, on my nightstand in that silver seashell-shaped dish she’d picked up at the local Goodwill. The BIC lighter was at that point capsizing in the sea of my stomach, sending tiny plumes of lighter fumes like emergency beacons as it battered against the icebergs of dice and dominos. An assortment of knick-knacks swirling in the undertow of paperclips, hairpins, and applesauce sludge. That’s when I hunched over behind this large pine tree. One hand clamped to my mouth to keep from puking, the other gripping the sturdy bark in the dark, not warm or cold but just there, bristling under my touch. Stomach acid rippled out to my toes, and I envisioned a trail of wet footprints, stomach juice leaking from my toenails, leading him straight to me. I couldn’t keep from vomiting. All the items dislodged like little plastic seeds and white liquid dribbled out of my mouth, a long string extending from my lips to the ground like an umbilical cord until I cut it away with the back of my hand. What would grow from the seeds I spewed, a filing cabinet, an office depot? Through the glass, his face had looked distorted. I’d glimpsed it over my shoulder as I dashed from the room. That always leering smile slipping from his face, the teeth falling cracked from his mouth. As if he’d been flattened and gathered up again. Like if you were to push applesauce around on a plate to the shape of an apple again, over and over, until you’re the only one left at the dinner table. I'd told them he would come, the parents of my mother. But they'd brushed me off like always, said, where he’d gone he couldn’t come back. I started to wonder if they hoped he would come, pull me through the window like a fox in a chicken coop. And then they wouldn't have to be called down to the school every few days, wouldn't have to have alternating bi-weekly meetings with mom and the counselor, check-ins with DFACs. They wouldn't have to keep a lock on their stationary supplies and hide sharp objects or explain to their church members why their fuck-up of a granddaughter got arrested for shoplifting a pregnancy test. *** I flex my fingers in the dirt, pushing and pulling it toward me, like little mounds of applesauce. I wonder how it would taste if I swallowed it all. Chandler Gates (any/all pronouns) is an emerging writer working in the film and media industry. Their most recent work can be found in FRUITSLICE: A Queer Quarterly. They are currently writing a debut queer horror fiction novel, experimenting with poetry, and committing art crimes. Chandler's creative work across film, writing, and photography can be found on their website https://chandlergates.myportfolio.com/. Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation. 3/29/2026 0 Comments The Odd Bend by Steve Saulsbury Sean Benham CC
The Odd Bend Bad enough going to A.A. meetings, but Wednesday night was upstairs at St. Paul’s. Two flights, like going up the hangman’s scaffolding. That’s how it felt some nights, especially when I was new, and doing the whole one day at a time thing. I sat next to Mike W., feeling like a child beside him. I couldn’t even grow a beard. Mike’s was black shot with gray. But he was troubled that evening and laid out his forearm. The skin was tan, almost blending in with the scarred church table that had probably been around since I was a teenager, attending Youth Group in this same room. “I don’t know what to tell my son,” Mike said, tracing his trigger finger over a large, dark tattoo. His son was about middle school age, I recalled. The tattoo was a marijuana leaf, not a great rendition. Older and not professionally done, it could almost pass for an Ace of Clubs. “I thought I’d tell him it was a symbol from our platoon.” Mike, 20 years after Vietnam, was consulting me, the alcoholic who couldn’t grow a beard. I had no tattoos. I had never shot anything, besides a BB gun. But he trusted and supported me. Even more than my own father, in that “room.” “That might work,” I agreed. I was drawn to the underdogs. People a little left of center, like that old Suzanne Vega song. You might not know them unless you were one yourself: ones who had each other’s backs. After the meeting, Mike and I had a cigarette outside. A huge tree, probably 100 years old, grew very close to the church. One of those witness trees that had seen funerals for a few of the boys killed in Vietnam. In recent years, a sidewalk had been laid alongside the church, with an odd bend curving around the tree trunk. The odd bend went right to the side entrance, where the underdogs go on Wednesdays. Where some of us have transcended the basic achievement of sobriety and now have each other’s backs. Steve Saulsbury’s flash fiction has appeared in many journals, online and in print. He is the author of the chapbook, "Wildlife Study" (Bottlecap Press, 2025), and a member of the Harper’s Ferry writers' group A Reason to Write. Besides writing, he enjoys physical fitness, wishing his body was as enthusiastic as his brain! Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation.  Sean Benham CC
Seashell Boxes Grandma Gale gave me a seashell box the last time she came to the house. It is a small box with bright red, faux-velvet lining covered by tiny yellow conch shells. In it, I keep some chewing gum, a chocolate-smudged sticker, several pogs stolen from my older brothers’ collections, and a few baby pinecones. I love the seashell box because it feels good in my small hands. The weight of it, like a hefty rock, and the sharp edges of the conch shells satisfy something in my fingertips. I often find myself unconsciously pressing down hard enough on the outside of the box to create little indents on the edges of my fingers. I smash the seashell box for the first time after being locked in my room for being bad. I don’t remember what I’ve done to deserve it—but I know I deserve it—so I scream as loud as I can, until my throat is raw and it hurts too much to keep going. After a long while, in which I finally accept no one is coming, I notice the seashell box sitting in a lonely corner of the room. I don’t know what compels me to throw the box; it is special to me. Maybe that’s exactly why I throw it because it’s not really a box being slammed into the ground with all the force a five-year-old can muster. It’s me who wants to shatter so Mommy will come back in and glue all my pieces together and feel very sorry for me that my seashell box is broken. But it doesn’t break, and now throwing it against my floor becomes that much more appealing. A few pieces of conch chip off the edges, but it has been painted, reinforced with resin so as not to be destroyed with ease. I stare at it hard, examining the missing bits of shell and the new appearance of my beloved trinket box. I sit down on the floor and sob into my hands, harder than before. My seashell box has changed, and I’m unsure what to do about it. As the years go on, the seashell box is slammed against things more often. Every time I’m sent to my room, screamed at, or punished, the seashell box receives all my anger. I am frustrated by the seashell box’s seeming indestructibility. More than a few chunks of shell are missing from every side of the box, but it endures the abuse. I throw it at the wall with more conviction as I grow, but it never comes completely apart, and I must continually navigate the emotional journey of being livid about that fact while also indescribably relieved that the seashell box is still intact. No one in my house knows about the seashell box, though they probably hear the dull thud of it against my floor. For my brother, Zach, it’s cookie jars, and he always performs in the center of our family kitchen. Dad broke an ugly cookie jar in the early years of my parents’ marriage—either by accident or during a fight—and Mom has been to every antique store and junk auction in the state searching for its replacement. Instead, she comes home with ugly cookie jars that only remind her of the one gifted to her by some beloved grandmother. The first few times Zach lifts a cookie jar off the refrigerator and smashes it, Mom cries. But, after a while, she learns not to react. There is always a moment or two before the collision when the whole scene becomes suspended in time, Zach’s arms swaying a little under the unwieldiness of the jar, his eyes searching Mom’s face across the chasm between them. Anyone can see by the way her jaw is locked into place, her body rigid, that Mom is working very hard to pretend none of this hurts. I always cry when it’s time for another cookie jar to be smashed, either because I’m empathetic towards Zach’s rage and his desperate need for a reaction from Mom, or Mom’s unspoken, unhinted at inner devastation. Mom watches impassively as each cookie jar bursts against the linoleum tiles of our kitchen over the course of a year. She never swerves, never admits how much it bothers her. But Zach knows, it’s why he keeps doing it. I cannot bear to watch the cookie jars break, which is why I never throw anything but the seashell box, because I’m the only one who suffers when I do. It’s a while before I’m aware of my hatred for it. I find the ugly, red velvet lining that’s begun to separate from the box itself humiliating to look at, the broken bits of shell whose insides are all exposed embarrass me. I hate Grandma Gale for giving me the box—it’s always been ugly, why would she think this is for me?—So I keep it tucked under a pile of toys to avoid looking at it or having to explain it to someone. Why was this thing ever special to me? Why can’t I get rid of it? It never really occurs to me that the seashell box is me. Angry, ugly, broken, but not completely, not enough for anyone to do anything about it. In middle school, my best friend says it’s babyish to play with Barbies, so I rid myself of all my dolls, and the seashell box goes with them. I’m too old to be throwing seashell boxes. After, I feel lost without it. I’m scared to throw anything else, and there’s very little of mine to break that would satisfy me as much. Instead, I run to the woods, the only place where family fights don’t crash against me until I feel exposed with my bits of conch shell busting off. By the time I am a young adult, the seashell box is long forgotten, but that doesn’t stop me from throwing things—like a child—when I feel small, powerless, and alone. A second-hand phone is thrown at my college dormitory wall. I rediscover the feeling of breaking something important to me halfway, but not all the way. No one is coming to fix my phone or me, so I carry around a cell phone with a fuzzy screen for two years that makes me ashamed every time I answer it. The last time I throw my seashell box, it is actually a bottle of scented body spray, and I don’t throw it at my boyfriend, but near him, close enough that he storms out of the building. I’ve never thrown anything in front of him before, but I’ve wanted to, so today I do. I’m unsure if he’s coming back, which is why I slam a door with a mirror on it so hard that several pieces of mirror become lodged in my palm. My boyfriend hears the shattering from outside our apartment, and he returns to extract chunks of mirror from my hand, calmly placing band-aids across the bloody little cuts as he gently explains he will leave me if this happens again. He means it, and I believe him. I cry, and cry, and cry. It’s not his job to fix me. But I’ve been waiting twenty years for someone to come back into the room. It feels like just my luck that, when he finally does, I feel worse instead of better. Maybe I’m not an adult until I can mend the seashell box. In therapy, I’m told that the seashell box can’t be repaired or even replaced, but I can learn to love it in this new state. I still haven’t completely healed the girl who first threw the box. Sometimes, I’m worried she won’t forgive me for staying angry for so long. The irony, of course, is that I’ve only prolonged things by refusing to face her. I wonder when I will be brave enough to step into the room with that angry little girl, hold her seashell box in my hands, and say, “It’s okay that you broke it, it’s okay if it can’t be fixed, and it’s okay to still love your seashell box”. I am in my 30s the first time my four-year-old tells me he hates me. “I hate you! You’re a bad mom!” he screams, his lip quivering, a little foot pounding the floor of my bedroom. “Okay,” I scoff and roll my eyes. My first instinct is to pretend I’m indifferent and invulnerable, like it doesn’t fucking gut me that my favorite person just told me I’m bad at being his mom. But anger is inherited as much as dimples or brown eyes, and this is how it starts. With a child whose parent pretends not to care. I stand at the doorway to my bedroom with my back to my son, petrified for just a few seconds that the moment has passed too quickly. That I won’t get a chance to do this over. I step back into the room, and what comes out of my mouth is, “Actually. That really hurts, bud. It really hurts that you would say that to me.” And even I’m surprised at my honesty. I sit on the edge of my bed so we are at eye level, and hardly any time passes before he buries himself in my arms. After a while, he mutters, “I’m sorry” into my chest, and I say, “Me, too,” because I love him. And I want to help care for his seashell box. Hillary Transue Moser is a writing professor at Widener University with an MFA in creative writing. She lives in Northeastern Pennsylvania with her husband, son, and two terrible dogs. She writes about the strange vulnerabilities of childhood. Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation. |
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