“Soon enough—a few weeks, a few months—and the poem seems to me like a cardboard cutout of a puppy: inauthentic, inflexible, lacking in depth or life. I don’t know why this is, but I hate it.” At The Gloria Sirens, Katie Riegel encourages other poets to be humble and willing to accept help.

Battling her own cancer and in the throes of chemotherapy, Denise Archer used a late friend’s clothing to make quilts for the children she left behind. “Some of your mom’s hair is inside,” I told them.” “Also, if you breathe in deeply, you can smell her.”

Rebecca Schuman uses the lens of her ’70s upbringing to offer sage (and hilarious!) advice to readers at “ask a gen-xer.” In this installment, Schuman tackles the thorny question of how to manage a toxic sibling relationship during a wedding.

Check out Steven Zheng’s original piano composition, “Turkish Sunrise.”

There is so much character and life in Shari Blaukopf’s watercolor dépanneur, as captured on the streets of Montréal, Canada.

“Alabaster” appears in poet Stephanie L. Harper’s chapbook “This Being Done”: “I am a pink rose petal’s pale glow / black ash tamped in furrows / between the breaths of the living…”

“Across our 50 states we vote by mail, ranked-choice selection, provisionally, and by absentee— the fact we can know anything on election night is nothing short of a bureaucratic miracle. So the spectacle of election night television should be considered as just that: entertainment only loosely connected to determining the shift in political power.”

At Tenure, She Wrote, a grad student explains her decision no longer to write narratives of inspiration and gumption: “A little smarts and hard work and luck can’t make my chronically ill body ‘productive.’”

As Movember draws to a close, here’s Ross Murray’s unexpectedly hilarious post recounting his recent prostate-cancer diagnosis. (While you’re there, do check out Ross’s post-surgery update.)

Will Nicole get home in one piece after her study abroad trip? “What ensued was one of the worst character-building experiences of my life. It was over 100 degrees. The first stretch, and for all I knew, the whole stretch, was at an incline of at least 30 degrees.”