by Kate Tagai
Here: South Pacific, July 2011
Anna seems to grow from the woven mat spread between her and the dusty ground. Her skirt’s elastic stretched and sagging around her waist from so much wear, like Anna’s own skin. She is eighty, or maybe closer to ninety years old. She doesn’t know, but measures her years in world events and the thirteen children she has raised. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Peter Krumbach
The composer has inserted his head and upper torso
into the lacquered case of the grand piano.
Trembling harmonics rise through the symphony hall.
Opera glasses aim at his satin braided pants and black
swallow-tailed coat writhing under the open wing
of the Steinway. He resembles a mechanic
Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Richard Key
June 4. I’m one hundred days from turning sixty. Seems not so long ago I calculated that I had exactly one thousand days remaining in my fifties, which didn’t bother me so much. That’s almost three years. You could get a law degree in that time. People have biked around the world in less time. Sixty is intimidating. You’re supposed to be grown up by then. I mean completely grown up. Fifty is the youth of old age, according to Victor Hugo, and maybe that’s the rub. Now even the youth of old age is fading fast. My “over the hill” T-shirt has holes in it…and they’re getting bigger by the day.
Filed under Nonfiction
by Bryce Berkowitz
after Edward Hirsch
Today we drift through a peach orchard,
scabbed and calloused,
branches bent in black and gold angles,
while the sun sets over the prairie.
Continue reading
by Sue Allison
One day the weather disappeared: it wasn’t fine or foul, hot or cold, wet or dry, mild or severe. It wasn’t anything you could name. It wasn’t light but it wasn’t dark, either. It was murky. The outside was murky, as if an opaque scrim had descended and hidden the blues and greens and lilac shades and all the varying temperatures there wasn’t a scale could measure, there were too many and they were in flux. At first, everyone assumed it was a new weather, but still weather and as such would burn off or blow through in a day or two, the way weather did. If anyone had known it was going to be permanent, something might have been able to have been done about it, or so people said afterwards; but, as other people said after that, it is easy to say things afterwards. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 