G&S Sporting Goods is a hallmark of New York City’s Lower East Side. Their specialty: Their own line of Boxing Equipment. The small family-run store was opened in 1937 by local boxing champ Izzy Zerling, now 96. Izzy’s son, Len took over in 1957 and has managed to keep the […]
topic: TRAVEL medium: TEXT It was the first Christmas Eve I had ever been outside Iceland and away from my family. Alex and I were driving up to Vermont in the Subaru Outback she had inherited from her father. I had never been up to Springfield to see where Alex […]
topic: TRAVEL medium: TEXT Flying somewhere over Greenland My Dearest Sons, I left this morning with a heavy heart. Usually your mother drives me to the airport with you in tow, you jump out once we’ve parked and hug me with an intensity lasting my whole trip. This morning it […]
topic: CHANGE medium: TEXT My mother once saw me for who I was. It was as if she had prepared herself – had made the resolution to see her child not as a part of her body but as a stranger, unconnected, with no memory of having breastfed me or […]
topic: CHANGE medium: TEXT I took an oath. My hand on the book and I said I would not go. Swore to her I would not. Trust me, I said. I am an honest man and though my pockets are empty, I am my father’s son […]
topic: CHANGE medium: TEXT I see my papa’s eyes weighted with two round stones, smoothed by river water. My mother’s tears drip upon my neck. I reach across a crude, rough-hewn wooden box, a kind of boat to me, lined with my mother’s shawl. With me, I see my mother, […]
MONEY PenTales Intern Matthew Gutierrez takes to the street to talk to New Yorkers about money Meandering through the streets of NoLita, I stopped in a local coffee shop to gently prod the usual café-goers for a donation. The pitch: “Help a growing boy build a working, on-the-ground definition of what “Money” […]
topic: QUEER medium: TEXT Shall I suppress the lipstick-lesbian fantasies of my male heterosexual id for a while? Fine, have it your way. In some respects I have no idea how to answer the query. The truth is I don’t think about the issue all that much, which, if you […]
