by Michael Roque
A provincial girl,
her state is vegetative
as the moors she walks. Continue reading
Provincial Girl
Filed under Poetry
Under the Pear Tree
by Asa Merritt
In the moments before she bit him, Belle was running faster than I’d ever seen her run. A black mass zooming across the immense sunset, towards the pear tree, towards my nephew underneath the pear tree, who even then was about to throw another pear. Pelt her, another time, even though she’d snapped her massive jaws in his face only hours before. I saw it happen, walked from the screen porch to the yard, lit a cigarette, and told him not to treat her like that. This time, when the pear struck her face as she ran, she didn’t snap her jaws, she opened them and kept them open. I screamed at Belle as I ran from the porch and the door slammed behind me, then it slammed again, and his mother was beside me, and we ran. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Market Street
by Pattabi Seshadri
I was walking home
down Market Street at midnight
at the end of a long night of drinking. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
Grasshoppers
by Andi Boyd
My best friend and I used to tear the legs off grasshoppers. Worse, we also sometimes popped their bright bulbous eyes. That summer one of our parents had gone to Shopko and bought us a bright, neon kiddie pool to share. This was where we held our swimming lessons for the ladybugs not wise enough to hide. We were not very good instructors. Mostly, we drowned them in droves. When we flung our collection of insects from the side of the plywood that nested in the crevice of a dead tree—our tree house—into the pool below, we called it diving school. Though diving was not something either of us was brave enough to do yet. Our swimming days at Crossroads Health Club were spent mostly in the hot tub, where we begged the supervising adult to spin us around like we were cooked vegetables in a hot stew. I was a carrot. My best friend, potato. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
There’s an Angel Stuck in the Windshield Wiper
by William Hawkins
We’re on our way to Disney World when an angel flies out from a ditch. It never stood a chance. The windshield rattles but doesn’t crack. You can hardly see the road for its wings. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 