by Khadijah Abdul Haqq
On the first day of the conference, I tell myself that I don’t believe in zodiac signs and that I must give people a chance based on their personalities and not where the sun was when they were born. I remind myself that not everyone born in January shares my unequivocal thirst for solitude or management. And that I am a Muslim and referring to zodiac signs is against my religion. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Anna Scarpone
There’s a room alive with the heat of bodies, and a booming bass its ever-pulsing heart. Limbs press against limbs, flushed skin is illuminated only by the opening and closing of the bathroom door. Now and then, some shrieking, drunken laugh rings out over the crowd like a descant. In this darkness, I’m no more than a body. No sun casts a shadow on my face, revealing its familiar imperfections. Hidden is the bump on my nose, the freckle on my upper lip. The telltale inflections in my voice become another part of that universal chorus, the beat blasting from the DJ stand. In this ocean of bodies, we are all grasping desperately for anything, anyone to ground us. Continue reading
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
Hawaii Pacific Review 