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
by Emily Schulten
I lied when I said that it all went back to normal.
It’s like the knife is pulled from my belly every time I see a friend’s belly grow round, see her gentle palm rest on the notch the growing child—the growing child—makes between her breasts and the new life.
And then I’m hemorrhaging all over again. It spills and pools at my feet and I walk around this way, smiling, doting, congratulating, arms full of yellow dahlias, pink hydrangeas, and red anemones of celebration, all the time trying to pretend it’s not puddling, to figure out how to clean the blood from my feet, from my soles where it embeds into the crevices, the lifelines of my footsteps, how to hide the tracks on the carpet, the tile, the pavement that look like my alive son’s ink-stamped hospital prints. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Jeffrey Howard
The jokes I remember, I cannot deliver well, unlike my sons who prefer the knock-knock variety (“Boo who? Why are you crying, stinky man?”), or my brother-in-law, a learned astronomer, who has dead-panned to me not once but twice: “I thought I was going to be the poorest one in the family, then I heard my sister was marrying an English major.” Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Keira Deer
I do not confide in my father and mother. They would not understand. How could they? He is English, she is Chinese. I am different to both of them– a stranger, tho their own child. “What are we?” I ask my brother. “It doesn’t matter, sissy,” he responds. But it does.
-From Sui Sin Far’s “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian”
My Yeye’s name was John Deer, though it was not his first. He was my father’s father. Pulled from the mothballed corners of bedroom closets and dresser drawers, he wore slacks and a white tank top every day I knew him, staking a cane alongside him when he shuffled quietly, room to room. In his high cheekbones and thin face, I could see my father’s, and I could see mine.
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Filed under Nonfiction, Young Writers Edition
Hawaii Pacific Review 