For as long as women feel weird talking about their periods, The Vagina Monologues will still be relevant. I hope it won’t continue to be. For as long as there is violence against women, the Vagina Monologues will still be relevant.
If you get off the N train at 8th street, walk past the tattoo parlors and bright storefronts of St. Mark’s Place, you’ll find the Ukrainian East Village Restaurant next to a corner of other Ukrainian bakeries.
It is October in Chicago and somewhere in the Susquehanna River a salmon is preparing to die. It has spent the last few years in perpetual transit, wandering the yawning expanse of the Atlantic and its arctic abyssal plains, upstream through currents and wave crests and darkness of unimaginable depth.
The wind in the west blows across the Sioux prairieland, bending the wheat stalks at their waists. Nelson Elling lies beneath the swaying stalks, and from where he’s sprawled the wheat fields are dusted in a purpling haze.
Since the beginning of time, editors at The Nassau Weekly have taken their pens to each other’s Common Application Essays. And yes, The Nassau Weekly has been around since the beginning of time. Here, in the billionth incarnation of this … Read More
When I was in eighth grade, a girl two grades up from me was writing a novel. I didn’t know much about her aside from her name, the fact that she was my classmate’s older sister, and that she was in the finishing stages of creating a work of fiction, but I wanted to become her, cut my hair short and type importantly on my laptop in my small school’s even smaller library.
It was the first night without my parents in some hotel on US Route 1. I was alone and somewhere near East Pyne, brimming with the feeling of being lost and alone in a new city, juggling the oversized, color-coded freshman orientation specialty map that a volunteer organizer had gravely slipped into my purse.
There is a stain on our wall in Wilson and we haven’t spoken about it for a few days, my roommate and I. Streaked and coarse, a stain ground into the whitewash like graphite. It’s not visible if you don’t look for it, not something Building Services would fine us for. A stain, the length of two bobby pins held end to end. The diameter of a champagne grape. It doesn’t come out with Windex or Seventh Generation dish soap or OxiClean, left instead as a perpetual effigy of my fury and my guilt.
The dining hall lurches with athletes. You sit down next to your friend’s maybe-roommate and she looks down at her own plate. “Wow,” she says, “you’re eating so little.”
