by Connor Donovan
We don’t speak of it anymore: the hilltop
bonfires holding natural light, bottlenecking
the cans & burning them green. The cathedral
clock tower above us like a jaundiced eye.
Being passed an apple packed with burnt nubs
—sucking where everyone had already sucked. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Court Ludwick
In the wooden swing, in our backyard, in the darkest part of summer right before my seventh-grade year, my mother suddenly grabs me. She grabs the smallest part of my wrist, twisting hard so this fragile underbelly of mine faces up toward the sky and I become a fractal under the light turned shadow, under the overhead tree, under the dimple-making leaves that will eventually flake and fall and die and be swept up by my father’s metal rake.
My mother’s index finger and thumb are bony. Her tanned skin stretches tighter here than finger skin should stretch. No wrinkles. Knuckles smoothed out like knuckles never look. Acrylic nails painted fuchsia pink because true red is for whores. I imagine she tells me this once. No smile lines when I look at her face. In between her eyebrows, there is one line, a sweet deep furrow. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Emma Lee
(Kyiv, December 2023)
A fir tree stands in a pot outside an apartment block,
that has one wall crumpled into rubble.
Branches have been decorated with sparkly cobwebs, Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Emily Schulten
I lied when I said that it all went back to normal.
It’s like the knife is pulled from my belly every time I see a friend’s belly grow round, see her gentle palm rest on the notch the growing child—the growing child—makes between her breasts and the new life.
And then I’m hemorrhaging all over again. It spills and pools at my feet and I walk around this way, smiling, doting, congratulating, arms full of yellow dahlias, pink hydrangeas, and red anemones of celebration, all the time trying to pretend it’s not puddling, to figure out how to clean the blood from my feet, from my soles where it embeds into the crevices, the lifelines of my footsteps, how to hide the tracks on the carpet, the tile, the pavement that look like my alive son’s ink-stamped hospital prints. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Arthur Ginsberg
To enter the world of the deep
is a return to the birthing pool–
a palette of colors evanescent
as cuttlefish, as you descend,
letting nitrogen seep into
your bloodstream, the crunch
of coral in the beaks of parrotfish
like a stone-grinder in your ears. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
Hawaii Pacific Review 