by Loukia Borrell
When my brother was getting cancer treatment, he’d drive to his townhouse after the appointments, get sick and spend the rest of the night on his sofa, curled up and shivering. It was always the same. Get injected, drive home, get sick, curl up and shiver. On these nights, I would go to Andy’s place, just to be nearby and get him whatever he needed. He always asked for blankets, so I would pile several over him, but nothing was enough to stop his shaking.
Filed under Nonfiction
by Mollie Hawkins
1. When he started his job at the organic grocery store, Produce Man brings me apples with names like poems: Pink Lady. Ambrosia. Gala. American Beauty. He brings me the sweet ones he knows I will like.
2. I know three kinds of apples: Red Delicious, the mouth-puckering Granny Smith, and whatever bitter kind grows on my grandmother’s trees in the Alabama woods.
3. Produce Man and I don’t feel like grownups. We slip in and out of college, like we are window shopping at a luxury department store. Work schedules and school schedules do not overlap on our Venn diagrams. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Kiy Pozzi
a gap; a slit; the fissure a cottonwood branch makes at dawn; the stretch of time between thoughts while idling at the window. My mornings are an interstice of leisure from the two obligations that afford me my body, as are the evenings after work. But these intervals are often brief within themselves, being prone to interruption. Earlier it was my neighbor pinholed in the door, an interstice, and now it’s the blue jays going off like car alarms. The moment between their shrill calls becomes one too. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by E Townsend
My father sends me a panoramic video of an electric pink dusk settling over snowblinked Pikes Peak, the yolk of the sinking sun blown out, viewfinder shaky and fogged with cigarette ashes. I know he’s trying to hold his balance, cane gripped in his left hand, Motorola weaving like an unsteady heartline in right. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Court Ludwick
In the wooden swing, in our backyard, in the darkest part of summer right before my seventh-grade year, my mother suddenly grabs me. She grabs the smallest part of my wrist, twisting hard so this fragile underbelly of mine faces up toward the sky and I become a fractal under the light turned shadow, under the overhead tree, under the dimple-making leaves that will eventually flake and fall and die and be swept up by my father’s metal rake.
My mother’s index finger and thumb are bony. Her tanned skin stretches tighter here than finger skin should stretch. No wrinkles. Knuckles smoothed out like knuckles never look. Acrylic nails painted fuchsia pink because true red is for whores. I imagine she tells me this once. No smile lines when I look at her face. In between her eyebrows, there is one line, a sweet deep furrow. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 