Kinship: One Week in LA
“Ki” to signify a being of the living Earth. Not “he” or “she,” but “ki.” So that when we speak of Sugar Maple, we say, “Oh that beautiful tree, ki is giving us sap again this spring.” And we’ll need a plural pronoun, too, for those Earth beings. Let’s make that new pronoun “kin.” ...
When the Scheduler Calls and Refers to My Upcoming Procedure as an “Emergency Colonoscopy”
The images that flash in my mind are not my grandfather’s last breaths, his frail wrinkled body giving up after cancer ate away his insides. Not my mother lying in a hospital bed after the surgery to remove nine inches of her diseased intestines. Not choosing the cheapest wooden casket and a burial plot near...
How Beautiful That Unruly Tongue Unfurls
Para tod@s that still spit back Caló, trilongo, dialect, jargon, pachuco slang, pachuco caló, “code-switching” (as some academics like to call it), or simplemente el lenguaje que nace del barrio is my favorite way to commune with those I choose to commune with. To make myself legible and illegible, and knowing that I have this...
Transition Lenses
My mom is doing karaoke in the kitchen, holding a microphone that our neighbor ordered for her on Amazon, belting from her chest. Her hair is silver. Her shirt, a creamsicle orange polo. Her glasses are thin rimmed, the kind that turn dark in the sun. Transition lenses, they’re called. My mom is doing karaoke...
A Small, Previously Unknown, Hole in My Heart
The afternoon my husband left me, I collapsed on the floor in a fetal position, my face at the level of the birds on our stone patio. Through the sliding glass door, I watched juncos, sparrows, and chickadees alight to peck at seeds, jostle one another, then fly away. Over and over, they came and...
I Hear You Man
I don’t remember a time when men, young, elderly, or middle-aged, stranger, or familiar, didn’t randomly confide in me the most traumatic horrors of their reality. Is there something about my bespectacled face? My half-broken nose? Is it my beard? Is it too philosophic, should it be more fundamentalist? Or maybe it’s something subcutaneous, a...
Surf
Peter says, “I can’t sleep in this relentless surf.” “You’re the one who loves ritual and repetition.” “Ritual, yes. But this pounding is relentless.” We are sitting on the screened porch of our friend Fita’s beach house, Alligator Point near Tallahassee, watching the sun slide down from cirrus to cirrus in a blaze of lavender, hot...
An Abecedarian Nocturne for the NICU Moms
An angel got its wings today, the caption reads beneath a photo of a mother’s baby the size of a hand posted to the Facebook NICU parents page. Night nurse clicks around vital sign jumbo screens. The whir of my breast pump punctuates each beat as I doom scroll through pictures and pleas –...
It’s Only Fair
When the ax falls, we stand perfectly still, as is expected. We don’t close our eyes. We don’t take a step back to avoid the splatter. We stand off to the side, breathing through our mouths, tasting the stench of chicken shit and sweat. We can hear the chimes of the ice cream truck in...
Just a Joe
Alaska’s winter darkness can almost drive a person insane. That’s a commonplace, but I could tell from one visit to Anchorage, its absence of true darkness in June might do it too. I stepped out of a bookstore, a bit too cutely called “The Title Wave,” where I’d bought a book and a copy of...
The Last Time I Climbed A Mountain
There are a thousand things I can’t recall: the date, the place, the details of the trail. I was nineteen, maybe twenty. It was a strong ascent, somewhere above St. Gallen in the Alps. All the rest has gone to mist. What stays: the incandescent sunshine. How the air bit thin and clean against my...
Where the Dust Goes
It’s 8 a.m. You’ve dropped the kids at school and you’re on your way home when this crazy blur of squirrel runs onto Allen Drive. You don’t hear a thing. Instead, you feel him. A small bounce of the car, a tiny jolt, and now he’s just a bump under your wheel, his frantic squirrel...
Lamentation for Junior
A few months after my biological brother’s funeral, my father calls to say my stepbrother just got shot and killed by Milwaukee police. They say they tried to pull him over but he sped off, crashed, fled on foot with a gun in hand. You can imagine the rest. When my stepmother takes the phone,...
Jiaozi
Changsha, China, I’m fourteen months old. My life has swiveled on its axis and turned west, towards the United States, a new life and new family. However, before I leave, I get one last dinner. One last farewell. I sit in my highchair, next to my new parents. Curious eyes searching the room for something...
Return Journey
The night of the Space X Dragon launch, my father collapses at the kitchen table. A week earlier, he had his third surgery to correct the way his muscles, spasming with Parkinson’s, pulled at his spine, forced it into a parabolic function instead of a proud column. For the third time, a doctor split him...
![](https://brevitymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/FFU-013-MFA-Digital-Brevity-200x165-181009-Enders-1B.jpeg")