by Deborah Schwartz
I hear my fizzy head ask the outside world for quiet. Forget it.
Those voices inside me are broadcasting my child labor
of anger, I ask them all to please be lighter. They’re fighters.
This page, for instance, made clearer by the margin,
I try to declutter like zippers that I sew onto the fly of my jeans
for a salary that no one can live on or marry. My mother. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Virginia Laurie
He was lovely then. A ruffled parakeet. We were crisp as carrot sticks and spent our days sweeping peanut shells off the bar floor. In May he called me a bouquet and took me to a field of sunflowers. Under their unrelenting chins, he sliced me in half like a diorama. There was thatch threaded through the belt-loops of my jeans. I shook like a frog standing up.
By July, I stood up with outsized force, marveling at the ache and the strength of my quadriceps. He was still a bird. Mouth an arrow. In August, there were pillows and I rested around him. He was kind, then, and grateful for me. He kissed my nose, nibbled my earrings. At night he took the trash out. He drove me home. Once he asked me where I’d go if I escaped this city. The sun was bright that day, the pavement smug, and this confused me. I told him I just wanted to be there, with him, in that moment. He left me then; I could sense it. His lips curled then flattened— a shallow rip. Then everything was almost the same. Right, he said. Me too. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
by Patrick Meeds
I’ve got a thing for rivers that wind
but that’s just a lazy way to say
I love you. Just don’t believe
for one instant that it’s not true. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Nancy Beadie
If Billy Collins were a woman, or
if I were Billy Collins, we might write
about the ironing I am doing now–
how a good iron has a life of its own
as it noses up the folds of a seam,
fingers a cuff or the hem of a skirt, Continue reading
by Mercedes Lawry
What can I say out here in the field of scorched grass?
How long will it take for the water to disappear?
Rivers thin to trickles, to dry rocks and bruised stones.
The many stars in a smoky haze, uncounted. Continue reading
Hawaii Pacific Review 