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labor

Photo by Marc Albert

Drop a Card, Make the Set

I start lucky. Two friends in Southeast Alaska have a permit and a boat and invite me to join them as a deckhand, gillnetting. For three summers, we share a bunk and work within a few feet of each other, coming back to Juneau most weekends, grilling and playing ping-pong. We don’t get rich, which is fine.

 

Birds of Paradise

There is no work for Logan, not today, not in this L.A. neighborhood where he’s been wandering for hours. Since the riots began he’s steered clear of the Boulevard, wary of the Guardsmen stationed outside CVS, of the rivers of broken glass and blocks of boarded-up storefronts splashed with angry graffiti.

Two Ambulances

In July 2021, five weeks after my mother died, my husband dropped me off at the emergency room of the small hospital in the Massachusetts town where my father now lived alone.

The Work of Hands

 1.We’ve been here twenty-six days, seven of us and the dog, and everyone needs a haircut. When we left New York for my in-laws’ farm in early March, we imagined we might be gone a week or two, and that at least in a rural area we could main [...]