Issues | Page 4 | Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction

Issue 31 / Fall 2009

I’m sorry about that time I ran over a piece of wood in the road. A pound of marijuana in the trunk and a faulty brake light—any minute the cops might have pulled us over, so you were edgy already, and then I ran over that piece of stray lumber without even slowing down. Thunk,...

Issue 30 / May 2009

I notice the guy sketching even before I sit down, but it’s not a strategic decision at all. When I have a choice I try to sit facing the eye candy, and this guy’s not even close to handsome. But it’s the only available chair in the coffee shop, so I end up facing the...

Issue 29 / January 2009

Without warning, as if following some Biblical injunction, the boy reached in and plucked out his left eye. He did it quickly, right hand ambushing his face. My sister and I stepped back. It’s rare for a glass eye to make it into your home. And even more rare for it to pop out. There...

Issue 28 / Fall 2008

One time when I lived in Chicago I spent an hour talking to a woman who was wearing a dress of the brightest red I have ever seen in all my born days and I have lived fifty years. This was on the Cicero Avenue bus at three in the morning. She said she was...

Issue 27 / Summer 2008

I was, at age nine, a god of snails. On the quiet San Francisco cul-de-sac where my family lived, Helix aspersa, the brown garden snail, was by far the most plentiful and least evasive wildlife around. Snails plied the long green fins of our neighbor’s agapanthus like barges transiting green canals. I’d unglue them from their...

Issue 26 / Winter 2008

There is a nothingness of temperature, a point on the body’s mercury where our blood feels neither hot nor cold. I remember a morning swim on the black sand eastern coast of Costa Rica four months after my twenty-two-year-old fiancé was killed in a car accident. Walking into the water, disembodied by grief, I felt...

Issue 25 / Fall 2007

Walking to the Tattered Cover bookstore past the lacy battlements of Denver East High and Pete’s Greek restaurant, I hear a faint scrabbling of plastic on concrete. Not far down an empty side street I see a shaggy figure in an army surplus jacket waving a blind man’s stick and turning uncertainly in the corner...

Issue 24 / Summer 2007

Jewelry, tides, language:things that shine.What is description, after all,but encoded desire? Mark Doty A nor’easter smacked into Cape Ann last night, and this morning the wrack’s dark line lies tangled and heaped. Hundreds of shells have settled sideways and tilted on the beach, half in, half out, sand-dribbled, seaweed-draped, partially rinsed. On the outside, they’re...

Issue 23 / Winter 2007

When Chico, my parents’ beloved pearl cockatiel, flew away, Father drove circles around the lake—windows rolled down in ninety degree heat—calling the bird’s name in a thick, coconutty Indian accent while Mother paced the sidewalks carrying Chico’s three-story white iron cage hoisted high above her head, doors blown wide open in hopes that Chico would...

Issue 22 / Fall 2006

i. The origin of sausage is the boar. Spices are added because it’s a bad cut of meat, all tough and bland. I refused to eat it when I learned its source through a 4-H project—one that had me tour a meat packing plant as an adolescent. ii. For as long as I live I’ll...

Issue 21 / Summer 2006

I snuck into my teacher’s house with L.—she’d never been inside. I lived in the apartment out back, up three flights of rickety stairs. For hours every day, the dalmation, Pal, clanged her chain up and down my stairs, like Igor, some damned thing. At the landing, she’d peer into my window screen, a shadow...

Issue 20 / Winter 2006

It is morning, winter solstice, the darkest day of the year, and you are lying with your boyfriend on his bed. You are from New Orleans, but you are now in Pittsburgh, where you came for a job and, where you fell in love a few months ago. There is snow on the ground and...

Issue 19 / Fall 2005

1. The fish jumped a ladder built of electricity and concrete. Swimming up the Columbia is a lesson in progress. Even before the dam, the waterfalls would have battered her forefathers. The rocks would have packed a wallop, broken the skin, bruised the flesh. Now the flesh starts bruised, already whaled on by 40-pounds-per-inch spray...

Issue 18 / Summer 2005

When my mother tries to touch me, I flinch. I don’t like her to touch me at all, ever, and I don’t remember a time when we cuddled or hugged or she took me “uppy,” although it happened. My grandmother has proof, the old black and whites of me in my mother’s arms, in a...

Issue 17 / Spring 2005

Look at me. At me, over here. Look and shake your head all you want. At my uneven bangs, these broken-down shoes, my momma, all us kids, and all our belongings shoved into just one car. Whisper and sigh all you want because I have something better than good clothes and a permanent address. I’ve...