The Monthly Theme Essays are a collection of essays written each month on a predetermined theme. These essays are always published during the last week of the month. To submit a Monthly Theme Essay check out our upcoming themes.
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"You're not very gracious, are you?" he said, flashing a wry smile from his perch near the ultrasound monitor, next to the exam table on which I lay. I felt a pang; I don't like to think of myself as ungrateful. I hadn't shown much appreciation when he declared that the wound from a biopsy performed a few months earlier had healed well, that everything looked fine, and that I could now go a whole eight months, as opposed to six, or three, before my next round of precautionary imaging.
Read MoreOnce again, I find myself in a strange place where nobody knows me. I am naked. And drunk on Jack Daniels and fucked up on Quaaludes and coming out of another blackout. The blackouts are coming more frequently now since I am drinking on a daily basis. Because of the blackouts, I’m never sure where I’ll wake up.
Read MoreMy body is a windowless cage. The vessel trapping me in the memories of how I have been maimed and wounded. I look at old videos of myself laughing with friends and wonder about this stranger who laughs so freely, before she felt the weight of rape and womanhood set on her shoulders. After all, what is being a woman, if not being a plaything for others to abuse?
Read MoreI was sitting upright for the first time in about a week. I’d tried a few days earlier, but very soon my head pounded, and I vomited down myself. They said the lumbar puncture could do that. Now though, I could use the bed remote control to sit myself up. Under the white sheets I could make out the shape of what was supposed to be me.
Read MoreGrowing up, the Black girls I saw hid in mirrors.
In the wood panel bathroom, the girl had endless marks on her face. She looked back at me with disdain as I moved through middle and high school. Her ears flew out the sides of her head under hair too short and not straight enough.
Read MoreNoah and I were walking the other day when we heard a baby crying. Like really crying. Like drowning out the traffic and the birds and the kids playing in the schoolyard across the street.
“Mom, did I cry when I was a baby?”
Read MoreDay 1/42 in fourth trimester.
The universe shifted
and changed,
made space and formed
a new being
within my old self
and now
I too am remade
It’s been eight years since you left me. The same amount of years we’ve been together. Has it really been that long?
I still have your letter, but today, I think it’s only fair that I write this letter back to you. To bring up the things left unsaid between us. To ask all the questions I never got to ask.
Read MoreSome hot and humid afternoon in July, it was the 20th, a Wednesday, I think, I ventured off into the unknown abyss of modern lesbianism and vegan Asian cuisine. The sweat trickled down the crisp colored skin of my forearms as I made my way from the bus stop to an unfamiliar vegetarian Asian restaurant with an obnoxiously huge sunflower sculpture on top. The hostess greeted me.
Read MoreI have loved my girls ever since I got them, maybe because I don’t have beautiful legs or a JLo butt. I’d like to declare my feelings of femininity come solely from my character, but I am not that evolved. When my girls arrived around the age of thirteen, they felt wonderfully womanly. I’ve loved them ever since.
Read MoreWhen the nurse called and said, “Your biopsy results show malignant ductal carcinoma in situ,” I was shocked. Did she say, “carcinoma?”
“What?” I sat down. “What do you mean, ‘malignant?’”
She said a few more words and I interrupted, “Wait a minute. Are you saying that I have CANCER?”
Read MoreAt first, they were nothing but trouble.
“I want her to wear a shirt from now on,” my father barked at my mother. He refused to address me now that I had the smallest hint of breast development.
A short time later, as my tops clung to my chest and my flat torso became round and foreign, I felt weird and ugly.
Read MoreThe Charles River Esplanade, a green and flowering oasis in the heart of Boston, is a popular place for cyclists, picnickers, parents pushing strollers, and college kids looking to rent kayaks and sailboats. But on a September Sunday I spent there, the majority of park visitors had a different activity in mind: a 5-mile fundraising walk while wearing lots of pink.
Read MoreIt's been a year since I haven't had breasts, and I think I’m pretty well adjusted. At first, I thought that I was going to have new breasts made from fat taken off somewhere else on my body, but it turns out that I lack “the right kind of fat,” so, at the last moment, I opted to forgo reconstruction.
Read More“Why me” never crosses your mind. Maybe you feel it’s inevitable; after all, your best friend and first boyfriend both died from cancer—not breast like you, but cancer nonetheless. And your favorite grandfather and most of his brothers and sisters—except the sister who died in the influenza epidemic—died of cancer.
Read MoreThe joke about Bath, Michigan, where my grandparents lived, was that it was fifteen miles and fifty years outside of Lansing, the capital city. A wooden sign painted “Welcome to the Community of Bath, Michigan” with the moniker of a Boy Scout Troop from the early 1970s was the first indicator that one was leaving urban civilization.
Read MoreMy grandmother’s teeth have been the lively topic of family jokes for many years. This is not cruel, but rather a kind of family shorthand, coded with her legacy of the need for levity during adversity. Even today, mention of my grandmother’s teeth prompts laughter and joy.
Read MoreFor months after my abuelita died, I slept with the covers tucked around my six-year-old face. The breeze that blew in from the Caribbean, cooling along the way as it traveled across the mountains, through the concrete city of Caracas, past the iron bars of my bedroom window, entering my mouth, my nose, my ears, felt like something my grandmother had sent from above, just for me.
Read MoreGrandma Helen was my fancy grandmother. Born in 1909, she was the firstborn child of Julius and Mary Nelson’s five children. Her tall, blue-eyed father liked to tell her that her birth brought him luck. After Grandma arrived, Julius went from selling newspapers on the Lower East Side to learning the trade in his wife’s family’s coat business.
Read MoreI am standing in front of the microwave with its door open, ready to insert the bag of popcorn I’ll have for dinner. As I reach for the bag, I hear the lush opening notes of “The Blue Danube Waltz” by Johann Strauss. My body freezes, immobilized as if zapped by some 1950s, paralyzing ray gun. Before I can turn around to see if it’s an ad on TV, my eyes puddle up.
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