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 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 Jona Whipple
She kneels at the edge of something, ragged dirt at the mouth of a hole you can’t see. Her arms encircle the bundle like this: One high around the shoulders, the other around the legs, palm hidden under the white bag. It is tied at the top, a crude knot like what I make with the handles of grocery store bags, a shredded tuft. She turns her face into the top of the bundle, where there is the shape of a head, a curve, the shroud pulling softly under her arms. Her lips move, she whispers into the primitive shell of the ear, she speaks softly through the cotton, her hands move, one rubbing softly at the shoulder, the other patting gently at the back of the legs. She rocks side to side, patting, whispering, her arms around this child in a hold like a figure eight, infinity, a hold recognized by mothers worldwide as the safest, the most secure. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Esteban Rodriguez
I stole a green ball from the ball pit at Peter Piper Pizza. When my mother asked me where I’d got it, I said at my cousin’s birthday party, that it was under our table when we—cousins, aunts, uncles, friends—all gathered at the table after eating and playing and gossiping and sang to my cousin Eloy, wished him another happy year on earth.
My mother bent over with the ball in her hand, thrust it in my face and asked again where I got it, and although I didn’t have a thorough understanding of lying, I knew that the green ball would no longer be mine if I told her I took it from the pit, that while Eloy and his brother Eddie were starting a side war that required at least three ball hits to the face, I saw the roundest and shiniest ball in that pit and stuffed it in my pocket. How no one saw it on me at the table or play area or in the car on the ride back home with the ball bulging from my shorts was nothing short of a miracle. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 