Nonfiction

Lisa is the cousin I do the Ouija board with. We put our small hands on the planchette, waiting for guidance. We are too young to light candles, but we dim the lights and that will have to do. We feel the push and pull of each other. We swear we feel a presence. “Are …

The first summer of the pandemic, my parents sold the house in the Poconos. The place was beloved – I loved it for the natural world that surrounded it, for the century old trails and primeval trees and glacial creeks and bogs, while my mom loved the nearby outlets, low sales tax, and cheap gas …

The Criminal Justice System threw us in a cell on Rikers Island to rot and die. We were two teenagers from Brooklyn, born into bondage and a bunch of bad luck. Our teenage years tapered off into being animalized by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision. No one had taught us …

She left two button-down shirts, pressed and folded, size large, and a promise from the landlord to deliver the package if her son returned. She left a birthday card: slid into a cubby at the nurse’s station, pushed into the hands of a skin-and-bones roommate, mailed with extra postage to his last-known address. She left …

Winner of the 2023 Annie Dillard Award for Nonfiction I fell fast, to my knees, both hands buried deep in the mud of a newly turned field saturated by the Seattle January rain. I bent to the earth, too tired to move under the weight of my upended twenty-five-year-old world. My mother, now sleeping in …

Form, fragments, and new motherhood in Jazmina Barrera’s Linea Nigra These days pour out like water through a sieve and This is how many of my sentences end these days: interrupted, still searching for the closure of punctuation. My journal and the Notes app on my phone are littered with fragments like this. Some days …

Body, I want to be polite and remember the quaint concepts: modesty, womanhood, prayer. I know these old phylogenies of shame. You still feel them, something I refuse to acknowledge. I think this split between us happened in a bed in Austin: I slept naked for the first time. The rented Kirkland sheets, come undone, …

My stomach and mouth are furious. My eye is misbehaving, and the doctor says, “Do not fly.” This also translates to: You cannot fly . . . to New Jersey . . . to eat! She is Asian, like me; a food freak, like me. She knows the enormity of her words. Covid did this …

You can read/view Michelle Peñaloza’s poems and collages in BR’s Issue 86 here. I. I started making collages at the start of this year, the day after I learned the pregnancy, we’d been trying to make happen for two years, was not viable. The day I waited for a way to help my body—what is …

When your live-in boyfriend asks you to move to New York with him but suggests that you get separate apartments, it is a sign that things are not going well. A hint you do not heed. You insist. Demand. Wear him down. And then, the most convincing argument of all: you have a job and …