by Kalani Padilla
The cabbages will survive at 24 degrees fahrenheit
whether they tolerate or desire the frost
is their secret.
Rodeos
by Isaac Rankin
Before the nurse can draw back the bay curtain, you cup your hand and yell at a whisper, Your beard makes you look like Jesus! It’s not you but the valium talking, winding it’s way through your veins, preparing your body for a microscopic speck soon to sail for a distant shore.
Filed under Nonfiction
Grief Island
by Amy Fleury
Into the circle of chairs at the coffee shop
or church basement the newly bereft,
bedraggled and numb, are hauled ashore
by those long ago wrecked, those who know
the ropes, handing out Styrofoam cups
to be bitten and clutched. The coffee
isn’t bad for such a sad, uncharted place.
Salt water inundates us, so we pass around
the tissue box like a conch shell. All loss
is ours, we who are stranded together,
each with our own stormy story to share.
What unlikely castaways we make—professor,
pipefitter, nurse, veteran, and even undertaker.
Filed under Poetry
The Feline Scale
Filed under Fiction
I Hate Everybody
by Alice Kinerk
Chase was standing by the whiteboard in his fourth-grade classroom, banging his math book against the tray at the bottom, where his teacher kept Expo markers. He’d discovered if he wailed hard enough, if he spread his stance and put the textbook above his head and brought it straight down again, like his gramps used to do with an ax, he could make the markers jump. Chase made it his goal to make the markers jump so high they would fall out of the tray. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 