by Haya Pomrenze
Sergeant returns as Major.
Fatigues replaced by a peach apron,
Stacking frozen foods on aisle nine.
A dead dog is a newborn.
A flak jacket, a baby carrier.
Rations exchanged for Happy Meals.
A rifle is now a wife’s breast.
A callused palm, a girlfriend’s cunt. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Kristin Berkey-Abbott
He says he’ll celebrate
Ash Wednesday by smoking a carton
of cigarettes. Before the sun rises,
he’s puffed through a pack.
In the early light, she repots
the plants and hopes
they’ll perk back to life. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Kirby Wright
The aina makes demands. Brownie’s thankful her husband built the bamboo shanty and filled it with axes, picks, shovels, and hoes. There are carpentry tools too: hammers, handsaws, a block plane, and chisels. She’s proud of her cinder block home overlooking the channel and the water tank on stilts the paniolos helped Chipper raise. She worries about the tank running dry and what will happen if Chip loses his Army pension. Driving cattle at Pu`u O Hoku Ranch made him mean, the kind of mean that turns everything good between a man and woman bad. Clearing trees brought hate when she matched him swing for swing. Now husband help is tough to come by.
Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Liz N. Clift
I remember the way we used frosting
to paste graham crackers to the sides of milk cartons,
the way we laid gum drops or Red Hots
for roofing tiles, licorice whips for trim,
sugar cubes mortared with royal icing
as a low stone wall, unlike the wood rail
fences of our own houses, the Necco wafers Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Mark Brazaitis
My marriage was a mistake. She was a nice girl, and she thought I was a nice boy. After a year and eight months, we decided to end things. No harm—well, some harm (I was unfaithful sixty-two days after our wedding and remained so)—no foul.
I was twenty-six-years-old and a bachelor again. Free. Or so I thought. What I didn’t count on was my ex-wife, three months after our divorce, telling me she was pregnant. Toward the end of our marriage, we’d made a certain mournful—and, as it happened, inadequately protected—love.
Filed under Fiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 