by Josephina Hu
“A girl,” I read aloud, “found herself in a strange room, where the ceiling was sky and the walls open air. In the center of the room stood a lone mountain, and its solemn shadow obstructed all to her left. On the right was a forest of flowering trees, and among them, in the distance, an apparition. The girl decided to venture into the forest.” Continue reading
by Lisa Bren
In cities with paved roads
and sidewalks, the trees
can’t get up and stretch
their legs, they’re caged,
Filed under Poetry
by John Attanas
In the dining room
of the Holiday Inn,
Salem, Massachusetts,
Dad has just ordered
a third vodka martini.
Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Bethany Bruno
The first thing my mother left me was a jar. Wide-mouthed, Mason glass, cloudy at the rim. She pressed it into my hands the morning she stopped speaking. Her lips moved like pale paper fluttering in the wind.
“Keep it closed,” she mouthed. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
by Marisa Mangani
“People should know that Hawai`i is a country and should be respected as such. Because it was forcibly annexed to the United States does not mean that it is the US, except by conquest.”
– Alice Walker
I arrived on Maui from Oahu in 1971, an eleven-year-old sharing the back seat of my mom’s turquoise Maverick with my baby brother and cages full of yowling cats. Mom and Stepdad occupied the space up front, driving through the cane fields on the dusty, two-lane Mokulele Highway from the Kahului airport. They had bought us a house in a new subdivision in Kihei to start a new life away from the racial strife of Oahu, where haoles like me were being knifed in school bathrooms. (I had overheard Mom and Grandmother talking about this.) Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 