Tamara MC

Tia Levings’s powerful memoir, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy, delivers a searing critique of patriarchal religious systems through the lens of her own harrowing journey. As a Gen X survivor of religious fundamentalism, Levings provides a revealing window into the oppressive structures of Christian patriarchy, offering both personal testimony and broader cultural commentary.
Levings, raised in a 20,000-member Baptist mega-church in Jacksonville, Florida, was recruite...

This summer, I am running a series of essays about Sinéad O’Connor to celebrate the publication of our book: Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O'Connor Means to Us. Our Westport Public Library event on Aug. 6 was incredible, including a panel with contributors Nalini Jones and Sharbari Ahmed as well as Beth Boquet singing “Last Day of Our Acquaintance” with David Schmidt on guitar. The question and answer period was beautiful, and included a question from a man that I keep thinking about: ...

Our toilet grew shadows that morning, breathing ammonia. The steward fed it bleach until it learned to swallow properly.
At 2:30 a.m. the sea counts minutes. He splits from our bed like cell division, returns with salt in his pores. We share a queen size ocean, legs evolving into separate species until I graft mine into his currents.
Formal night: the Russian photographer’s accent had fins. “You’re tall,” she said, her words swimming through air thick as water.
She spawned a stool from the ca...

Palms, Parties, and Pink Cotton Candy
Palm Springs sparkles with mid-century glamour, healing hot springs, and endless sunshine. Named for the natural hot springs of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, this desert oasis sits at the base of Mount San Jacinto, creating a unique microclimate that attracted Hollywood stars beginning in the 1920s. What started as a health resort for tuberculosis patients transformed into a playground for the rich and famous—a two-hour drive from Los Angele...

by Tamara MC
Twenty hours stretch between Tucson and Mazatlán, Mexico on a highway that never ends.
Hour one, 6 AM: inside the 1969 baby blue VW van, metal heats and expands as the dawn breaks pink over the Catalina Mountains. Saguaros cast long shadows across Interstate 19. My mother spends hours preparing the back for our journey—layering serapes, arranging pillows. She tucks the blankets around the edges with careful hands, smoothing their bright stripes. The rough wool scratches against m...

MC sits on a hard chair shaking her head.
It is pre-summer 2013 and MC's big breasts fall out of MC's flowered razorback bra.
MC's black thong swings up from MC's black yoga pants.
It is 11:06 am and horns are honking on the avenue.
Later, when MC will be eating cornbread casserole with the boy,
MC will put on a white blousy dress.
When the boy and MC sleep, the room's windows will frost over.
The boy will shiver. MC flashes heat, but MC CANNOT be old enough to have hot flashes.
MC waits for ...

His Murphy bed dropped from the wall in that Arizona studio apartment.
While he watched Miami Vice.
Ed wash the teacups, wipe counters. clear away his MIS textbooks.
Bight PM sharp:
catching glimpses of Don Johnson’s world between dishes and dusting.
Espadrilles with no socks. silk t-shirts.
Bangladesh to AZ
filtered through pink and palm trees on his twelve-inch TV.
The silver gray jacket hung
beside my coral blazer in our closet later, through marriage, mortgage, children.
until the hangers...

I am the only one alone on this train,
watching families cluster, friends laugh.
Mile Post Seventy-Two slides past the window,
avalanche protection standing guard.
Morning haze from last night’s forest fire
scents the air like distant campfires.
I missed the bus downtown yesterday—
another small journey undertaken alone.
It seems like old times:
everyone else, and me.
Not lonely, not ecstatic, just present in the space between.
The inland arms of Alaska stretch
like reaching hands I cannot gr...

On this the eve of Lag B’Omer, the holiday of fire on our Jewish calendar, we at Judith offer you an entire folio of poems that deal with the heat, the flame, the many passions of fire.
Lag B’Omer, as anyone who has lived in Israel knows, is that holiday when your eight-year-old comes into the kitchen, puts some potatoes in a bag and informs you that they will be out all night. “See you tomorrow, Mom!” I’m not sure it will be legal this year, but in the past its a holiday when bonfires burn a...

BY TAMARA MC
Joy radiates through my entire body like electricity. Sparks travel from my core to my fingertips in waves of pure, unfiltered delight. This isn't occasional happiness or momentary pleasure — it's a neurological symphony that plays in my brain, filling my world with color, light, and sensation that gleams and glitters in ways others might never experience. As a woman diagnosed with autism in my late 40s,
I've come to recognize that my naturally joyful disposition challenges socie...

A few words by the author: Brill’s Hidden in Plain Sight is not a conventional Holocaust memoir; rather, it is an act of literary cartography – mapping the landscapes of exile, inherited trauma, and historical erasure. She takes readers on a journey through Belgrade, where her family’s history is embedded in its streets and architecture, and where memory itself is both visible and hidden in the spaces between past and present.
In an age where Holocaust literature has become its own firmly est...

He woke me at four
We shared Ramadan's first meal
Texas stars watched close

James laced a telephone cord around his mother’s neck and pulled until he asphyxiated her.
I knew James since first grade. In fourth grade, he sat behind me in Ms. L’s class. He kicked my chair throughout the school year. My head bounced back and forth like a rag doll.
One day, before lunch, James was desperate to get my attention. “Tamara! Tamara!” I ignored him as always, and then he pleaded more. “Please! Turn just this once.” I couldn’t concentrate and thought if I swerved, he’d stop kick...

When I was 21, I discovered Chautauqua Institution during a summer stay in a family cottage belonging to my sister’s boyfriend’s mother. My sister and I lived as residents in the charming summer home in upstate New York, part of the tradition where properties pass through families.
We were in that beautiful in-between period of life—having left our family home but before marriages and children, when the world felt full of possibility and uncertainty. While the prestigious lectures and perform...

Bubbe wrapped me in a towel, baked in the Arizona sun, draping herself in the same green-ratted robe she’d worn since my first memory. Worried I’d catch a cold, she jogged us home from the pool, sprinting upstairs to draw me a warm bath. “Get in, Mara, rolling her r’s, her accent dripping in Yiddish. Soaking in the healing water, I anticipated the cut-up Red Delicious she always had waiting for me. Bubbe checked on me every few minutes, anxious I’d vanish like the rest of Holocaust. our famil...