by Shayna Cristy-Mendez
My body feels it before my brain can ever make sense of it; words always fail in their attempt to capture the sense of abandonment that comes with losing a parent to drug addiction. That particular sense of abandonment also tends to be exaggerated when their death falls on your birthday. As it happens, death has a habit of being a real foot to the groin of celebration. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction, Young Writers Edition
by Paul Grussendorf
On June 4, 1980, in a remote region of Lower Saxony, West Germany thirty-five hundred riot police forcibly cleared a population of one thousand anti-nuclear protestors out of a make-shift village which the activists had established on top of a nuclear bore site. The overwhelming police response to peaceful protestors was oddly similar to the recent eviction of a group of environmental protestors from a village sitting on top of a coal mine in Lutzerath, Germany on January 11, 2023. In 1980, I was there in the middle of the action with my camera crew. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Kelsey Coletta
The music is drowning out our words and I want to scream louder. He’s seething, demanding to know why I left his side. I roll my eyes, sip my drink, bite my tongue and swallow the ache. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Julie Paul
In every wave, a multitude of yellow fish.
It’s November, 2017, and we’re in Kona, on the Big Island of Hawai’i. We watch the ocean from the wraparound lānai of Daylight Mind, a laidback cafe with good coffee and the wifi password “perfectview.” The ever-promised rain is falling, the first real rainfall in six days. A yellow-billed cardinal just visited for our muffin crumbs, and the scent from a foraged plumeria blossom beside my plate transports me back to high school. I wore frangipani essential oil on my wrists then, a strange coral pink elixir in a glass vial from the health food store. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Megan O’Laughlin
One of these days, I will find a dead body on this beach. It’s written in the stars, or at least in so many true crime stories: woman walking dog finds dead body on neighborhood beach.
Every morning I walk the new puppy to our small neighborhood shore where he sniffs seaweed while I hunt for sea-glass. I walk because I’m tired and my depletion comes from something that has a lot of terms: secondary trauma, compassion fatigue, vicarious trauma, all terms for various forms of caregiver exhaustion, definitions for intense weariness. I used to believe such symptoms indicate how I’ve given too much, but perhaps it means that the needs outweigh any possible gifts. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 