by Gina Williams
Vinh Ho won’t tell me his mother’s name.
“It’s bad luck to say the name of the dead,” he says. “It could bring her ghost around.”
I don’t know if this is really true in Vietnamese culture or whether it’s something he believes for himself. But he says it while we stand there. He’s not any taller than me. We’re the smallest kids in high school. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Stuart Ching
I surfed at Graveyards—a soft, hollow wave just beyond the Kuhio Beach breakwater. I’d paddle into a set, glide over the reef, and navigate the coral heads jutting from the water like tombstones. If I sped fast and far enough down the line, my momentum propelled me past the breakwater and around the pier, where the wave gathered into an inside section. Far from the enormous surf of O`ahu’s North Shore, the waves at Graveyards—even during the biggest summer swells—rarely topped the height of a man. Still, whenever I made that inside section, the bottom of the wave vanished, and in the space of my child’s imagination, I became the legendary tube-rider Gerry Lopez dropping into a fast-rolling barrel. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Rob Wilson Engle
Ships to Tarshish are always headed into storm.
Here I give you my supinated arms with fingers
curling lightly like the Mediterranean.
I am an archipelago of inconvenience.
Will this Wednesday work for you? Continue reading
by Mercedes Lawry
I talk about Ian Fleming
and James Bond.
He talks about Lord of the Rings,
the movie, gently pinches
my arm and stabs. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Black Knox
And so they went Mauka in their four wheel drives
Jolting beyond the heat pitted lava crust ever higher into the cool canopy, limbs spreading above towering
Trunks
Swelling thick boughs
Remote Island in the midst of a vast
Slumbering blue
The only place on earth where one can still find these primordial trees, the Koa
And the Native Hapu‘u Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
Hawaii Pacific Review 