by Robert W. Cording
After my brother died, my mother, the most rational person in our family, noticed red-tailed and red-shouldered hawks everywhere. Of the eighteen species in North America, these two are most common. Still, they arrived when she seemed to need them, unexpected gifts. Over the last four years, she has filled notebooks describing flight angles, call sounds, and, what I have the hardest time understanding, how these sightings helped her through her grief. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Desmond Everest Fuller
To our left, the neighbors we never see keep an immaculate lawn. Grass that’s beveled. A resentful neatness in their flowerbeds, while dandelions strangle our yard in yellow.
At the old green house to our right, the rhododendrons and the camellias receive tender care. In five years, we barely receive eye-contact. The fence between our yards is decomposing. We have, on occasion, wondered about shame. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Catherine Jagoe
Getting pregnant upends your life even if you planned it. An accidental first pregnancy, at 38, was like a detonation, blowing everything I thought I knew about my body, my life, and my career sky-high. The embryo as limpet mine. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Robin Schauffler
When we were young my sister read a book where the heroine believed that if you could count one hundred white horses in a summer you would get your wish, any wish you wanted. This seemed like powerful magic. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Stephani Nur Colby
From the memoir Walking with the Ineffable by Green Writers Press
Sometimes the clinical unit felt as if, rather than being rooted on mothership earth, it was idly circling in the meteor belt deep in space. The twelve severely and profoundly cognitively impaired children who lived in its cinderblock and linoleum capsule seemed to ramble – those who could ramble – in a kind of Brownian movement, unfocussed, drifting by walls and chairs as if impelled by eccentric, unseen gravitational forces that sent them hither and thither, reasonless. The children themselves often seemed like lonely asteroids, shot out of the shattered core of some larger planet where parts of them – the parts that gave speech, sight, hearing, linear reason, functional ability, even varying degrees of physical motion – had been left behind. And here they were, still trying to live out their lives – butterflies with only one wing. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 