by Richard Schiffman
When he called a month later,
I asked him how he was doing,
and he said, weeks of hell, weeks of hell.
And I nodded, though he couldn’t see me.
No doubt he nodded back (ruefully
I suppose) And that was that. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Anthony Otten
With you and your dad gone, I live in the quiet. Mostly I’m fine with it. When I want my conversation fix I sit in my wicker chair on the porch, like I am today, and wait for the mailman. He’s a young Black guy in a blue cap and shorts. Real polite. I don’t know, maybe I scare him. Old white lady in socks and sandals, feet too sore for shoes. Squinty little glasses I hardly need since Medicare did my cataracts. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
by A. J. Bermudez
I love a Western.
Give me sky & land
sun as a doomsday clock
whalebone stays & fourteen-inch waists
whatever’s for dinner’s whatever you shot Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Kristi Ferguson
He learned if he could make Mom laugh, everything would be okay.
He relied on that certainty when she discovered him sneaking to the corner store, first for candy, then for beer and cigarettes. He used it when he was months behind on child support after the first unplanned pregnancy, before the DNA results came back and the baby turned out not to be his. It was there again when he admitted to the second baby, which was his, after Mom received a midnight Facebook message from the pregnant ex-girlfriend, telling her everything. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
by Sean Eaton
(after Margaret Atwood’s “Habitation”)
We lie on the soft couch, our legs twining like freckled eels,
enmeshing in pearly needled grins of pelagic happiness.
We sip our wine and listen to the radio whinny, spurs jingling
in the pueblo twilight, light spilling from canteen windows. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
Hawaii Pacific Review 