In 1964 the campus library burned. The guard dog custodian was engulfed like a skiff in hungry sea. She had tried clumsily to douse the hall, the great oak doors with water. It was a Sunday. Trucks came with red lights ripping the grass. After this event she would be seen, most often in the … Read more
CXXVI. Red cabbage and bronze lilies. In my dream a woman says, I am a radio violinist. I imagine that continents communicate by music, the way dolphins do. Is it thunder or is it coal in the cars on the tracks below, sliding over the gravel beds stubborn as black pearl, baroque? Precious as pepper … Read more
Two Hawks Quarterly Editors, Fall 2015 Pictured left to right: Nusrath Ahamed, Kimberlie Carrington, Amy Ballard, Nick Wenzel, Deborah A.Lott, and Amanda Ikin Two Hawks Quarterly Editorial Consultants Deborah A. Lott, M.F.A. Deborah A. Lott is the author of the book In Session. Her creative nonfiction has been published widely in literary journals and anthologies. Caley … Read more
Two Hawks Quarterly Editors, Summer 2016 Pictured left to right: Rachel Tenorio, Will Stegemann, Nick Wenzel, Meg Burby, Amy Ballard, and Ashley Okonma Pictured Front, left to right: Brooke Hebert, Francesca Ingrassia, and Taune Lyons Two Hawks Quarterly Editorial Consultants Deborah A. Lott, M.F.A. Deborah A. Lott is the author of the book In Session. Her … Read more
In the fields, a girl stumbles on the remains of an antelope. She was hoping for gnomes or gold, not a skull nestled between a rock and a clump of paintbrush as if deliberately composed by some amateur painter. The flesh long since plucked clean by scavengers who, once full, disbanded to stash each bone … Read more
They submit, let the current take them, their bodies a tangle of elbows and knees that smack against the portable pool. In the desert, every ounce of water is coveted. Kids slosh in every direction, oblivious why soil beyond the plush green lawn cracks. On the Pacific, miles of beaches shift, claim entire towns, playgrounds … Read more
After the last house is lifted onto the truck, dust swirls, chokes workers as they lash the final frame in place, the building left wobbling in the middle of the street uncertain of its new foundation. The front door unlocked as if anyone could just climb up and walk inside. Tire tracks left behind soon … Read more
after “Die Jahre” by Goethe If not for oil, the town would’ve never existed, would not have sprung from barren soil. The years brought families, brought water, pipes entrenched for miles beneath the ground. Frayed power lines hang from poles lashed to homes that emerge from nothing. Then, as if the town changed its mind, … Read more
Understand that everyone bathes differently. When you’re fat and in a bath, every movement becomes an event, and every event occurs on the surface. This is not Shamu’s pool, and though you wish to dive, to flatten yourself under water, to decrease the amount of curvage peaked above, realize it will prove impossible. You are … Read more
It’s funny, the things you remember and the things you forget. For instance, I can’t recall what day it was, exactly; I just know it was a warmish evening in June. And I have no clue if I was wearing a sundress or a nightgown or if I’d gotten my braces off yet, but I … Read more
Shortly before my 37th birthday, my husband, Garrett, and I decided to go to Nicaragua, also known as the land of volcanoes and lakes. We built our trip around a two-day, 20-mile hike up a volcano called El Hoyo in order to see as much of the former as possible. To prepare, we wiped cobwebs … Read more
An 8-year-old girl and her 7-year-old brother died after getting trapped in a hope chest in their home. ―NBC News It started as a simple game of hide-and-seek, a father watching television as his two children raced up the stairs on little hands and feet. The mother still stuck at work while her kids played … Read more
Time is the accumulation of all things, only in the way dust whirls through an abandoned parking lot, clogs the wheel well of a rusted pickup truck. Trying to distinguish one noise from another; a rabble of crows hunched over on a barbed wire fence, their oil- dipped beaks & feathers slick with fluorescent, orange … Read more
A cardinal opens its ragged wings against the sky like an old wound; something red and feather-fringed caught up by the sweeping cold, berry in beak, as it dips in and out of the wind. Shaky in its first flight, the cardinal adjusts its tail, throws its body onto the strongest current, quivering in the … Read more
“Everything from here on out is a rat race—” I write on my grad school application, in the words of my late brother. He isn’t really dead, but his career may be. It’s so far gone that he talks of settling down and having children. Just a year ago, he told me that he could … Read more
She thought the role rubbish but she had agreed to it because he swore there’d be a good part in his next play: It Is What It Is something more than the usual witch, wench, lady in waiting, something, he had hinted, with weapons and the chance to use them. She wasn’t naïve. She knew … Read more
We see through the disguise, as we’re meant to. Just as we know who is Rosalind and Viola and Portia no matter their clothes. We smile when Henry the Fifth, camouflaged by a cloak, says to his soldiers, “The king is but a man as I am.” We recognize the deceptions of Iago and Aaron … Read more
Shipwrecked and washed ashore, disoriented in a strange new world, it’s a story familiar from The Odyssey, Robinson Crusoe, Lost, video games, our immigrant grandparents, our divorced parents. And it will happen to us as well. The key is to recognize when you’re free from family, you’re free to make yourself into what you can … Read more
I watch for a house in a moon crater. Smoke nudges the rim. A light hangs across three chimneys, and an astronaut sits down on the roof, and she waves. It might be the ghost of one of my aunts. She might be looking for a hinge that bounced from a rocket. She might … Read more
A Blackfoot legend tells us that the buffalo taught a maiden how to sing and dance — to restore life, year after year, to the buffalo who were killed. And so the people believed that the animals were willing to be killed, that there was a mystical covenant between the animal world and the humans, … Read more
Mom brought the hamburger, Gerald the buns. Aunt Shirley brought coleslaw and a Neil Diamond CD. Gary from across the street brought plum pudding in an antique bowl. Lawrence brought pickles, Steven brought cider, and Marsha carried in the yellow folding chairs. You brought a cake and I brought potato salad and an extra-big plastic … Read more
to look, again, at her lips — pinked and mysterious and to look at her gray eyes through her glasses. (She waved at me and I waved back.) Even though she is majoring in Finance, she never heard the expression bean counter which I, laughing, explained to her— well, you see, the beans represent other … Read more
The day you crashed the boat there were hardly any people on Okanagan Lake, just you and me and a lone fisherwoman trolling for rainbow trout. We were mostly alone on the lake but we weren’t alone in Okanagan. That September, I remember, we were there with your dad and your maman and your aunt … Read more
Did you ever stop to think some crosswalk buttons you push each day are connected to nothing? You push and wait longer than seems right, musing maybe the universe is teaching you patience. Then one day you experiment by not using the button and discover time between signals is almost the same. This makes you … Read more
My lungs are already clearing alveoli pinking and perking my breath the breathing of great whales rush of sound massive ingulping. Now I want my last cigarette. Do you have matches? Just one cigarette please. This is the last one. I’m stopping tomorrow. I prefer aprons egg beaters rolls of clear tape walls adorned with … Read more
