by Vivian Faith Prescott
Acquire animal skills.
Become a loon, a haunting crier,
swallowing the remains of this world underwater.
Learn to skin. Yourself.
Pull your feathered hood
over your head, adjust your chinstrap
to your throat.
Know where the sacred places are,
because there is no Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Monica Drake
(from her new collection The Folly of Loving Life)
Our dad, when he taught forensic science, said it was the art of looking at a problem and tracking backward, analyzing the smallest pieces to find out where things went wrong. When he actually did lab work, it usually involved investigating tampered with or otherwise faulty pre-packed food. He’d analyze unknown objects found in a box of cereal, a can of soup, a carton of orange juice. He’d determine if an item was molding mouse feet, somebody’s fingers lost in an industrial accident, or only an ordinary clump of burned cereal ingredients that had fallen off industrial machinery into the Wheatie-O’s mix. Continue reading
by Emily A. Benton
With skin chalked by salt
tossed in a history’s making,
I tottered across the shore
collecting pumiced stones
and searched for fossils,
myna feather, and coins. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Evalyn Lee
It was like having a stream of people mooning her, looking out the window as the train traveled down to Washington, D.C. This was the close-up asshole view of America: the graffitied walls, all the warehouse depots with their empty ledges, the broken glass, the broken pots, and always the dying, grubby grass on the ground beside the train tracks.
Deborah lifted up her iPhone 4s and took a picture.
Then she updated her status to “Single.” Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
by Kathryn Merwin
You thought of Elke, nightclub lights
strobing through her skull (colors
I have never seen), the last night of her small
life. Said things like, before common era, processed Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
Hawaii Pacific Review 