By Patrick J. Murphy
The wind came in off the plains to the town of Milan, Ohio and curled around the clapboard house of Thomas Alva Edison. It reached the walls and climbed to the eves outside the attic window. When it howled, the bed seemed to move, as if it were carrying the boy away.
“Pitt.” His older brother slept against the other sloping wall, a long shape sprawled beneath a wool blanket, hardly a comfort, barely a presence.
“Go to sleep.” Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
By Tommy Dean
Before Audrey had left for the city and the college that promised her a new kind of life, she had called her Daddy a hick. They were pretending she wasn’t leaving the next day, that her bags hadn’t been packed for weeks, that she hadn’t turned over all her flannel shirts to her mother, piling them up on the dining room table, repeating the word “Rags” over and over, as she heaped more clothes onto the pile. She’d given up her cowboy boots too, making a big show of it at her cousin’s fifteenth birthday party the month before. Her brother had taken her aside, pointing a stubby finger at her saying, “Setting the barn on fire wouldn’t be as rude, and least there was some insurance money in it.” Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
By Laura Sweeney
In the midst of the monsoon
and the thousand year flood
my Nica nostalgia rises. Continue reading
By Nels Hanson
In a cave in Abington, Pennsylvania,
dwarf and hunchback, once common
sailor, Benjamin Lay lived alone. No
thing grown or made by slave labor
would he touch, instantly he walked
away from any supper if he learned
his host owned black slaves. Only Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Jaimie Gusman
It is Tuesday. It is Sunday.
It is napkins and Windex
and garbage bags on Monday.
When I arrive the oven
is already on, burning
a place for her to stand. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
Hawaii Pacific Review 