by Mary Kovaleski Byrnes
I climbed in there once, the sleeping mountain
warm from within and exhaling
through invisible fissures under my sandals.
And then the once-buried now-excavated city, Continue reading
Author Archives: hipacificreview
Volcano with Child
The Takeover
by Shane Pillay
A beautiful baby girl was delivered on a cold late December night. My wife and I were ecstatic. Now there were three. Creation is a wondrous thing.
“The future is ours to command,” said my wife. She was a gorgeous poet.
Several days later in January, I started my new job at EasyBaby. Strange coincidence – it was a startup that made easy-to-fit-and-wear baby clothes. As any parent would know, that’s an idea worth a billion hours. Babies move, babies struggle, babies cry – fitting on a bodysuit or jacket takes more than a fair share of effort. Easy-to-fit-and-wear baby clothes make dressing fun.
“So how is the new job?” asked my wife.
Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Heir
by Prana Joy Mandoe
dream this dell of trees in earth and air
spirit slip among the light orange leaves
rustle now in quiet sunlit prayer
around this room upon the valley’s lip
where I pause to rest and eat, transceive
this spiral basket awaiting her next layer Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
To Die On Kilimanjaro
by John Coyne
When I was first at the Blue Marlin Hotel at the edge of the Indian Ocean in the summer of ’63 the hotel was full of Brits. It was the last days before Kenya’s independence. By the late Sixties the Brits had been replaced by German tourists. Today, I’m told, the village, and most of Kenya, suffers from a lack of tourists because of Al-Shabbaab.
My story begins, however, in the early ‘70s when the hotel was full of Germans and where the few English speaking tourists gravitated to one end of the bar. It was there that I met Phillip and his beautiful wife, April, and their two lovely young daughters. They were finishing up dinner and I was dining alone and we started up a conversation, as English speakers strangers will when they are outnumbered. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
Sonnet X+Y
by Drew Pisarra
In the film, Victor Frankenstein creates a mate
to wed his monster. She’s a fright-wigged she-devil
who cares little for muscles. For her, what rates
is a pretty face. In Mary Shelley’s novel
of ideas, that mail-order bride barely appears. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
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