We recently published a story in our monthly e-mail newsletter prompted by a note we received from Brenda Miller, a writer whose nonfiction work has received three Pushcart Prizes and has been published in prestigious literary journals (including this one) and several anthologies. Miller had been told by Poets & Writers, Inc.,

There’s a Moscow inside of me. Perhaps it’s existed for a long time, but I didn’t know it. In my subconscious, a balalaika plays. I hear the language and remember my grandparents’ names: Witkowski, Vachie and Dobrovsky.

On a summer night many years ago, when I was 8 or 9, Cousin Marvin escaped from Great Lakes Veterans Hospital and found his way to his mother’s house on the west side of Chicago, some 35 miles south of where, essentially, he was incarcerated.

My nephew Aeden, a pale, tow-headed, bilingual 5-year-old, is a piglet, but as he spent the first years of his life in Honduras, he is also un chancho and, along with his sister Keeley, part of los chanchitos.

Midnight, and Aaron is sitting behind the wheel of our rented car. “So what’s this book we’re writing?” he asks. His voice is uninflected. We’re both exhausted from the day’s heat.

The 500-franc note wouldn’t fit into the battered, metal box. I could stuff it almost all the way through the slot, but it wouldn’t drop. Visitors to the Eglise St-Sulpice filed by, and as I wrestled with the stubborn clump of paper, I felt the look of suspicion in what I imagined as their frugal French eyes.

A bride-who-never-expected-to-be contends with centuries of cultural tradition and expectations

Mario Delia Grotta is 35 years old, with a shaved head and a tattoo of a rose on his pumped left shoulder. He wears gold rings on three of his beefy fingers and a gold chain around his neck.

On the way, he said, “When you visit the cemetery, you do it for yourself. They don’t know you’re there.” But maybe some part of me believes she will know, that she’s brought many good things to me after her death, that she’s taking care.

A poet friend has sent me a collection of lines that were either cut from his poems in composition or never made it into a finished stanza. He has assembled these lines on a page—all gleaned from different mornings’ work and stirred by separate impulses—into a common cluster.