Issues | Page 5 | Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction

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...

Things That Will Make You Cry in the First Six Weeks of Your Son’s Life

Issue 16 / Fall 2004

The shape of his mouth when he cries—like a thick rubber band stretched to breaking. The arc of his back as he stiffens away from you, his belly filled with gas. Your hunger for him to be soft and be held. Exhaustion so deep you sleep through a feeding and wake in a pool of...

Issue 15 / Spring 2004

I remember my father with his pot belly, polishing his bowling ball, standing on the lane, taking a deep breath, getting ready to swing his arm back and then forward. I never told my father how beautiful he looked and how grateful I was that when he threw a strike, he always turned around to...

Issue 14 / Fall 2003

I remember circles—the swirling cuff of my father’s pant leg, the layered hem of my mother’s skirt. A neighbor lady polkas by, the one who yells so loud at her kids every night when she walks to the barn that we can hear her across the still fields. She has a delicious smile on her...

Issue 13 / Spring 2003

I am sitting in the sanctuary, a few rows from the front, to my left my mom and dad, my little brother Timmy in Mom’s lap and sleeping, to my right my older brother Brad. Brad and I have just received these thin blue books, every kid in the service passed a brand new copy by...

Issue 12 / Fall 2002

Summer reminds me, God knows why, of my friend Ed, who is a whole species of man unto himself, the only one of his kind, the very archetype and all possible subsequent permutations of Edness in his own singular person. He is sensible, brilliant, unusually accomplished – he’s a neurosurgeon of great skill, a self-taught...

Issue 11 / Spring 2002

I could split my heart on the anvil and put her inside…” — Anne Carson My heart, these days, is much too dense to break. It would require a difficult configuration of tools — mallet, wedge, hatchet, and maul — to make this kind of severance possible. It’s tough as those deep knots in the...

Issue 10 / Fall 2001

In nine years I have been graced with three children and here is what I have learned about them. They are engines of incalculable joy and agonizing despair. They are comedy machines. Their language is their own and the order of their new halting words has never been heard before in the whole history of...

Issue 9 / Spring 2001

We’re walking to the Avis outlet on 12th Street when Kat makes me cry. We’ve just had dinner, and she’s asked me to walk with her to pick up her rental for the next day. She has errands to run that require lugging around large objects. Soon she’ll be gone for six months, to start a...

Issue 8 / Fall 2000

I have been in this place before, in spirit if not in form. Perhaps I have been beneath white pine towers, the lowest limbs high overhead and an interwoven parquet of needles below. Only prickles of remote sunlight penetrate the branches to the ground and, without underbrush, the forest opens to gray vista and silence. ...

Issue 7 / Spring 2000

I am passing the library when I see them. Fourteen men walking down a side street, all dressed alike, all stepping to the same steady rhythm. They wear black brimmed hats with black ribbons; the kind all men used to wear before Jack Kennedy made the bare head appealing. They wear black suits and white...