“Being a woman (cis, trans, or otherwise) means that you grow accustomed to men and sometimes women, commenting about your body on a regular basis without provocation.

[The landays] lilt internally from word to word in a kind of two-line lullaby that belies the sharpness of their content, which is distinctive not only for its beauty, bawdiness, and wit, but also for the piercing ability to articulate a common truth about war, separation, homeland, grief, or love… the couplets express a collective fury, a lament, an earthy joke, a love of home, a longing for the end of separation, a call to arms, all of which frustrate any facile image of a Pashtun woman as nothing but a mute ghost beneath a blue burqa.

Mother’s Day Coming home late from my daughter’s preschool’s Mother’s Day tea, a feast of banana-walnut muffins made by those who’ll, one day, discover elements Q and J or become Secretary of […]

Prayer for a Field Mouse by Pat Riviere-Seel Bless the gray mouse that found her way into the recycle bin. Bless her tiny body, no bigger than my thumb, huddled and numb […]