by Isaac Rankin
Before the nurse can draw back the bay curtain, you cup your hand and yell at a whisper, Your beard makes you look like Jesus! It’s not you but the valium talking, winding it’s way through your veins, preparing your body for a microscopic speck soon to sail for a distant shore.
Filed under Nonfiction
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 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
Hawaii Pacific Review 