Win a copy of BROAD STREET’s issue 3.1, “Small Things, Partial Cures,” on iBooks!
Enter our drawing by sharing your own “small thing” by midnight on July 5, 2018, and you might get a free download for weekend reading!
Readers!
Do you want to savor some ferocious new nonfiction, poetry, and visual art this weekend? Our “Small Things, Partial Cures” is calling you!
To win a free download of the iBooks version of the latest Broad Street, simply go to our Facebook page, give us a thumbs-up if you haven’t done so already (if you’re already following us, you’re already on our list), and send us a message through the page naming or picturing (or both) a small thing that delights or bothers you. Photos are welcome — we’ll post the winners on our website and Facebook.
There will be three winners chosen at random. If your small thing is particularly share-worthy, you might earn an extra download.
By entering a small thing in this lottery, you agree to let Broad Street publish your submission.
Browse the contents of this issue by clicking here … or by going to our home page, broadstreetonline.org.
To skip the drama and buy your copy through iBooks, go here.
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Small Things, Partial Cures
An Overture
The smallest things move us the most. They hold our focus when the big entities — call them God or History — overwhelm. We zero in on our selves, our bodies, our own sorrows and hurts and joys. Family life. Poetry. The fine-tuned exertions of sport and sex and the pursuit of a cure for whatever ails us, restless body and uneasy soul. The glass half empty or half full. The glass that doesn’t matter at all.
We make lists in order to master minutiae. We lose our lists. We lose ourselves. We spin into the ever-widening universe, dust that has already been smashed into something else by the time we form the word.
Go ahead, hunt for the devil in details: A hole punched into an earlobe. A doll adrift among a mother’s possessions. An injury in a land of the body beautiful.
Or, if it feels better, look away: From a mob that lynches a neighbor. From a boy so packed with psychotropic drugs he has become another boy. From cancer’s toll on a body and a bank account. From beggars all over the world who plead for the smallest of offerings.
Then, slowly, invite the small things back in, for it is also in the miniature that we are most likely to find joy. It bursts over us in the bubbles that wash our hair or our car, or in a glimpse of old toys in a shop window. Gaze at bacteria through a microscope and find a new understanding of Emily Dickinson.
Celebrate the folds of flesh and even the scars that record decades of wholehearted living. Isn’t this bliss itself small in the end, a partial cure for the neverending chore of careening toward death?
A camera’s eye clicks, a writer’s pen curves, and years of preparation fuse into a single, small image.
At last, love and pain and sorrow evanesce. What remains are the smallest of objects: a feather, a hospital bill, a head fallen from a statue. They become the tokens — gods, if you will — that future blastocysts will recover from the wreckage of our lives. They carry into an uncertain future in the fragile scratches on a magazine’s pages.
— The Editors
