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Domestic Violence
Fire
A chair flies through your window and someone’s screaming for you to come out and you’re fourteen and he’s twenty and there’s nowhere to go and no cops coming and no one to make this any better, and you become a flame that can’t be extinguished.
October 2023Poems I Won’t Write
The one where you blow your head off with the gun, the gun / I searched for, the gun you fired over the phone while you / stayed silent to make me think you’d finally done it.
August 2022Past Lives
I know now this is the most dangerous time in an abusive relationship: right before the woman leaves. It’s when some women get murdered. I was lucky.
March 2022My Father Got Beat
My father got beat / but he never beat me. / His skinny frame would tighten up, / he’d start to shake with a seething rage / at my errors, my arrogance, / he’d clench his bony fingers and say / “I’ll sock ya” but he never did.
March 2021The Most Dangerous Place
Rachel Louise Snyder On The Persistent Problem Of Domestic Violence
Another woman’s husband got a rattlesnake and kept it in a cage at home. He would threaten to put it in the bed or the shower with her. That kind of emotional torture needs no physical violence.
September 2020September 2020
Featuring George Gerbner, Stephanie Coontz, Ani DiFranco, and more.
September 2020Train Songs
The breakfast rush was hitting its peak when we learned about the dead woman lying not far from Table Four.
February 2020Dark Houses
Gingerly, creeping, my mother drives her “safe” back way home, winding through the subdivisions bordering downtown Orlando, Florida. The little truck doesn’t have air conditioning. I stretch my arm out the window as if I might be able to feel the Spanish moss hanging from the trees like witch hair.
January 2018Breaking The Law
An illegal abortion, a brother’s drug habit, Cold War secrets
May 2017To Have And To Hold
Stephanie Coontz On The Past, Present, And Future Of Marriage
One quality that helps a marriage work is when partners respect each other and are each grateful for what the other brings to the relationship. Relationships run on an economy of gratitude. And if your partner needs to change his or her behavior, it’s important to ask for that change without attributing bad motives to the behavior. When you do argue, or when your partner gets angry, look for the soft emotion under the hard one and talk to that. A belief in the goodwill of the other person is critical.
September 2016