All animals have blood hearts Omnia animalia sanguine* corda All animals have blood in their hearts Sanguine is no longer meaty. We have squeezed out the blood. Lobbed off ventricles and arteries to leave just an outline <3 Our animal hearts once bloody / bloodthirsty now tamed to optimism. * Sanguine, adjective 1: marked by eager hopefulness : confidently optimistic 2: bloodred...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
One morning, as we ate sandwiches—mine had apples on it—a hawk appeared outside the hospital cafeteria window. Or no, it was not a cafeteria, it was a cafe. Which was meant, perhaps, to conjure a sense of normalcy. You could order paninis and mochas and bowls of soup. My husband and I sat there talking over our sandwiches, about what I can’t recall. The words are lost to me now, and yet it feels like only yesterday. When my mother arrived for her visit she immediately burst into tears. ...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
I know the sweet shape of sugar, tang, and the soft sweep of cat, mao. I know wo e le, I’m hungry; I know wo bu zhi dao, I don’t know. I know wo yao, I want; wei shen me, why; dui bu qi, I’m sorry. Last March, I learned the word ai zheng, cancer. My parents, of course, knew the word already, as native speakers who immigrated to America when they were in their late twenties. My father’s English was decent—he’d come here for grad school on scholarship—but in Chinese he was king. H...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
According to the US census, more than one-quarter of older adults live alone, one out of five men and one out of three women Nearly half of women over 75 live by themselves. 1. I live alone. Husband dead. No kids. My dog can’t hear anymore. God is the only one left who might be listening. He doesn’t answer, not in words. I can’t go out to lunch with God. He’ll never bake me a birthday cake. I can’t ask Him to fix my laundry room light or the gate that won’t stay shut. He’s no...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
In Tokyo, they measure death in hours. Nako’s began with stomach pains at a wedding reception—her own. The cake hadn’t been cut yet, but something else was already dividing inside her, multiplying with the precision of a cell gone wrong. Three hundred and twelve days from “I do” to “Time of death:” The numbers feel important somehow. Like if I could solve them, arrange them differently, I could find the equation that explains how a body becomes a battlefield so quickly. Twenty-n...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
I’m nine. I stand behind a leather couch in the larger area of the daylight basement everyone calls the rumpus room. It’s Easter Sunday and cool and hazy outside but not enough so that my grandfather will need to ignite the fists of coal already mounded in the grate of the fireplace. Three of my cousins play Monopoly. The dice on the game board fall like whispers. The broader family argues and chats upstairs: My mother and sisters, my grandparents—the six who live here along with me—a...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
Click here to jump to recipe. Otherwise, notice the tippy milk crates stacked two-high under your five-year-old feet, the white chef’s apron knotted behind your neck, draping down past your shoes, between you and the oven door of the ten-burner stove in your grandfather’s diner, the two flats of eggs, thirty to a flat, ready for you and the egg and parsley fritters you’ll sneak pieces of later under your grandfather’s approving wink, those back burners turned off so the eggs don’t o...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
Your mother won’t forget you right away. There will be plenty of time to prepare logistically and emotionally for this event. You’ll become accustomed to the usual symptoms over the course of months or years: forgetting appointments, tripping over the names of acquaintances, the first missed birthday. When she begins to fumble overlong with her seatbelt, you will buckle it for her without overthinking the sad poetry of this role reversal. Next come the bills. Then the pills. You will noti...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
(after Hanif Abdurraqib) I remember guns were a private thing we only used at camp beginning with the potshots my cousins and I took at empty Miller Lite cans the white cans with the red emblem and the time David yelled at me after I discharged the lever action BB gun across the water because I didn’t know the pellet could skip all that way and hit someone and I remember the smart satisfying crack of the pump action .22 rifle with little recoil and while it was thrilling it was safe and it ...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
He switched the headlights off and urged her up, into the night air. “Go on. Stand up,” he said, pointing at the Toyota’s open moon roof. The car rolled slowly down a country road, somewhere deep in the valley of quakes. Soon enough she would be too old for this. “Really?” the little girl asked, wide-eyed. He reassured his daughter that he had everything under control even as he knew this wasn’t true. Beyond the green glow of the dashboard, the stars seemed to hang over the Chol...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
Yesterday, I couldn’t find my passport, not that I needed it, I wasn’t going anywhere, hadn’t gone anywhere in ages, not since my partner and I decided to pack up the house we’d lived in for ten years and move to another (smaller) house, in another (larger) city, with car alarms and sirens and helicopters circling our neighborhood every Saturday night, a world that’s turned mine upside down (this is what I tell myself when I can’t find my keys or my phone or the pair of glasses I ...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
I keep a catalogue, a mental inventory. There are mothers who paint portraits of cats dressed as Napoleon Bonaparte and mothers who fall asleep drunk on patterns for XXXL pajama pants, and mothers who mouth “fuck you” to their daughter in the backseat when they get lost in the family car and the daughter is trying her best to calm everyone down. Mothers, man. Every time I meet someone’s mother, I think: Fuck. I’m glad my own mother’s dead and that I never knew my mother after I was ...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
Against a backdrop of spruce trees at the far end of a small beach, a large boulder squats at the edge of the bay. Its top half is dry and pale. The lower half is damp and dirty-bronze. It’s too big to be jostled by the tides. In the foreground of this photo, dozens of smaller stones lie half-buried in sand. Beyond the boulder, a dead spruce has been partially uprooted. Its bare branches look brittle against the other, still upright, lushly-needled trees. From the photo, it’s impossible t...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
I’m on a miniature riverboat or a Chinese junk, or a wooden houseboat with a paddle wheel. I’m captain and crew. The inlet is crowded with vessels from earlier ages of sea-going vessels: hollowed out canoes, reed boats, a schooner, a pinnace. There’s an old dock and a pier and it’s crowded with vendors hawking their wares, but I can’t tell what they’re selling, and I don’t care. I have to take a piss, desperately. There’s nothing more important than that. As my boat floats clo...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
Dad answered and put me on speakerphone, then placed a plastic plate divided into five colored sections in front of mom at their kitchen table and said, it’s Laura, time for your morning medicines; I said, Mom, pick up the biggest oval white pill in the center of the plate and she said, “which one?” and I said the biggest oval white pill in the center of the plate, and she said, “I didn’t know it was my job to take it,” and I heard her lift the glass of iced water, so I read aloud...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
Buying baby socks and three onesies and one newborn outfit on the way to the appointment where the fetal doppler told us you were dead, the same newborn outfit I now see in the box on the closet floor every day when I drag out a sweater. My parents driving across five states to stay with our four-year-old who would have been your sibling, his hand waving out the car window when they drove him to preschool the morning we left for the hospital, as if waving you goodbye. Canceling the baby books...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
The Start of It A friend of D’s wife G says there’s been a bad accident. “That’s all I know,” she says, “except that it happened on Rte. 15 and Laurel Road.” She lowers her voice as if she doesn’t want to be overheard. “D is in surgery right now as I’m telling you this. G is at the hospital. Their kids are on their way.” A Bit of It Hours later, a posted photo of the accident site on Facebook shows one car destroyed, the front end crushed, the rest damaged by fire. D’s...| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
I’ve been hanging around a lot of elderly folks recently, very elderly, and I don’t know what to say to them. I am so much younger. The techs put me on a completely different treadmill way off in the corner (at one point I am actually running), and on totally different resistance settings on the cardio-bike.| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
Nonfiction| brevitymag.com
It’s 6pm on a Sunday when Brittany calls to tell me about the mealworms.| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
Práta means potato, child. Prátaí póir are seed-potatoes best planted on Good Friday. Iomaire is a potato bed and taobhfhód its own particular sod. Bachlóga are potato sprouts; millíní are the buds. Báinseog phrátaí is a patch of potatoes in bloom, lovelier than you might think.| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
“Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.” —Philip Larkin| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
Listen: On this night, the house is an organ, an orchestra, a bellowing storm. The stream roars under a bridge and balconies, channeling into rapids, leaping and crashing onto boulders below. Nothing is silent this night—forested as dusk without sun, cloaked by rain that thunders as if to announce water is coming to find the path of least resistance, to find her way home.| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
You stand on the deck of a forty-four-meter wooden pinisi-rigged boat somewhere in the Flores Sea, close to where the Komodo dragons live. A brochure claims that this boat, the Ombak Putih, was made by hand in accordance with the traditions of the South Sulawesi people. You will spend the next five days on board.| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
A door opens onto a wall. A window is trapped behind another.| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
Current Issue / Issue 79 / May 2025 / Nonfiction| brevitymag.com
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 subconscious sense, a kindred recognition.| Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction
