The Statement
Voices from the back of the house
- Phillip Kurdunowicz
By: Mara Gay
The hope, fear and isolation of the city's immigrant workers
A hitchhiker's guide to I-94
By: Drew Philp
The inside of Chicago's Greyhound bus station is like Ellis Island. The air is flush with humanity grinding against itself to get somewhere, anywhere. Photographs are taken. Tricolor beads crackle from lush black braids. Eastern European women dangle on their lovers and Midwestern girls chirp on cell phones.
But this story isn't about what I found when I arrived at my Spring Break destination. It's about how I got there.
(I hitchhiked.)
View this week's Statement
- Brian Merlos
Click here to view this week's issue of The Statement as seen in print.
The Editor's Notebook with Gabe Nelson
By: Gabe Nelson
A look at the big news events this week and how important they really are. Conveniently rated from one to 10.
New Rules
rule 90: If you hit it off with someone at a party, but afterwards can't remember what you said, don't call for a date.
rule 91: If studying in the UGLi by yourself, don't snag one of the nice group tables. You know which tables. Fourth floor, in the window nooks. Back off.
- E-mail rule submissions to TheStatement@umich.edu
A pint for your thoughts
By: David Mekelburg
The local club for all beer-loving Bush bashers
Hanging limbs
- Clif Reeder
By: Beenish Ahmed
One thing I don't like about people is how they assume things they have no way of knowing. It's a little like being trapped in the dark and just a little afraid I guess, just so that you're unable to know the perimeter of a room, with shadows shrouding the peripheries of your small frame in a larger one. Uncertainty is scary and to cope with this, you begin to think you know what's where.
Letter from the editor
By: Jessica Vosgerchian
Ernest Hemingway in a letter to friend Maxwell Perkins in 1928: "This bull market in letters isn't going to last forever and I don't want to always be the one who is supposed to have made large sums and hasn't and doesn't."
A less than inspiring confessional. If this grand poobah of 20th-century literature fretted over the value of his work and the future of the trade, what does it say for aspiring writers almost a century later?
New Thanksgiving
By: Andrew Klein
A break from work or school or anything
is a vacuum of everything I
already know: Holidays move
farther away after the fact or closer still before,
depending; a few minutes or an hour or
a drink or two devoted to everything.
The drive home is about 8 albums or so, a flatline
through Ohio and Pennsylvania.
If cameras still had great flashing bulbs I'd be up early the
next day sweeping glass out the door hoping the cats
didn't already hurt themselves - the new kitten I
Poet's notebook
- Clif Reeder
Auburn Lice
my mom lay in the tub for two hours forcing me
to use the toilet before I go
in my Winnie the Pooh panties
I go, watching her use silver scissors to cut
her dark brown pubic hair into a straight vertical line
she blames her stretch marks on me
I think they're beautiful
making shapes like I do with the clouds
