by Kapena Landgraf
She touched nothing. Papa had died thirty years earlier, but Tutu refused to disturb what he left behind. His shirts still hung in the open closet—button-downs of light blues and whites pressed at the center with sharply ironed cuffs. Brown trousers, thick cotton and wool. Black shoes with silver buckles. Checkered neckties. Handkerchiefs tucked into the front pockets of blazers.
Filed under Fiction
by John Gerard Fagan
Yukimitsu sat cross-legged by an unlit fire. The room was still except for a slither of light inching under the door. Tea bubbled somewhere out in the dark; the smell made his throat run and jutted him out of his dream-like daze. He coughed and his breath smoked. Longed for the days before he served at Court. Longed to hear her voice in the now silent rice fields.
Filed under Fiction
by Laura Shaine Cunningham
For nine years, Len and Kit Callendar faced west. One morning they drove into their view.
Outside, in the predawn dark of Riverside Drive, Kit sat at the wheel of their car, motor running, while Len made several return trips up to 7B, to ensure that he had not forgotten anything.
No matter how hard he concentrated, his papers seemed to disappear as he looked at them, especially his own birth certificate.
Filed under Fiction
by Cathy Allman
I pace in front of the mercury glass mirror,
hold her, try to memorize us,
if only a flicker. She’s surprised to see herself.
She studies our reflection
with those eyes that are like yours,
that are like mine in color and shape,
Filed under Poetry
by Naphisa Senanarong
The day my mother and her three sisters floated out to sea on an inflatable raft, the jellyfishes were on their annual, fatal pilgrimage to shore. A sea of white, she’d described. The storms parted, like in an animated children’s movie, revealing poison lotuses blooming as far as the eyes can see. I picture them: Ariel’s sisters, muted mermaids drifting onto a patch of hostile ocean—round eyes and naive parted lips, like posters of girls in the fifties congregating around some kitchen appliance. They were too young to register that afternoon as their first brush with mortality. No matter, because life had many more for them—at the hands of loved ones, behind doors too heavy for small fingers, Ohioan winter closing like cracks around frozen throats, in rooms with too many people, hospital beds with too few, restaurants that smell like chicken oil, bathrooms that smell like old blood—leftovers—fine mixtures of rust and self. Smells that linger—how they got used to those, always finding them in unexpected places: hair, collars, breaths.
Filed under Nonfiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 