Nonfiction

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 …

The day is clear with light, cool winds blowing from the west.  I launch my kayak from a sandy beach on the edge of Crane Prairie Reservoir. It is a large lake, blue and diamond-studded when the wind blows, a glass mirror when it doesn’t. Its shore is twenty-two miles in length, most of which …

from the Jeopardy! category “Acronyms & Mnemonics:” You never really understood your generation’s obsession with space: not Star Wars, not Star Trek (the two of which you always confused), & certainly not actual space. Why would anyone want to go there—where the tethers were givens, more literal & restrictive than any tethers that bound you …

After my husband’s death, grief blinded me, perhaps, mercifully, so that I could not see how it would strip from me even the simplest of pleasures. In the spring, when once I had wandered the forest still wet with rain, and greedily plucked wild chanterelles, I found myself walking past them, leaving them to the …