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I needed money after the move. That was my excuse. But really I couldn’t bear to live in another house with it, knowing it was in the side table, in the drawer above my vibrator. Unfired for years—so much potential. The inheritance came with a small box of bullets, the cardboard foxed but nearly full, …

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They come back to you as a signwhen someone dies, they say, a dragonfly,some dull moth skimming a mud puddle,a hummingbird in the ditch’s goldenrod.But what if they are alive? But not allowedto live? How do they return, then? Cricketunder the sink for three nights straight.Why do we call it a song? That scraping,that needy …

We once drove 900 miles—from California to Idaho—in a borrowed car, the dead-drench of summerslicking our skin with its own salt, to witnessan eclipse’s totality. The darkened sun, the skypunched through. We barely made it, but didon duct tape & faith. Bear with me. I know how easyit is to forget a journey for all …

A great many orchids, the endangered lady’s slipper for one, expend a portion of their energy creating pseudobulbs where they host ant colonies, because the formic acid ants spit at intruders gives the soil a pleasingly bitter pH. This is an example of myrmecophilia, a way of being in a love relationship with ants. Though …

This day ends in the kind of holiday where I feel knotted up in—remind me again who is the parasite and who the host? Hell-bind, strangleweed, beggarweed. A lot of people, no plants, no sky, in a small room where we tell each other how we are happy to be together. Hairweed, goldthread, devil’s-guts. A …

What if we are birds?Does that mean we also standon wires, tenderly, weightless.Are we in front ofor behind the red-tailed hawk?The last bird must watch us die.

To accompany our spring 2025 issue (22.1), we have curated a folio on family secrets (reviews and craft essays), after noticing that several pieces in the print issue include that theme. Here is James Stewart III’s craft essay on fiction: In the mid-’80s, after a job promised to my father in California failed to materialize, …