Hawaii Pacific Review

by hipacificreview | 09/04/2014 · 12:24 pm

Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend

by Erika T. Wurth. An excerpt from her novel Crazy Horse‘s Girlfriend (Curbside Splendor Publishing)

Driving up, I couldn’t believe how beautiful it was. It was late May, and although the mountains still had some snow on the peaks, it had been a hard but short winter and things had been warming up for some time. We had packed Mike’s big, blue SUV and were on our way up 103. His right hand was resting on my leg and he was driving with his left. Our windows were rolled down, and Mike was playing another one of his white noise bands that I didn’t recognize, and I closed my eyes and let the raspberry, deep green, pine, dirt smell roll over me. It didn’t take too long to get to the foot of the mountain. We were planning on camping somewhere around the lake, but we decided to drive to the top of the mountain first. They had just opened the road up for the season and we drove, things getting bumpier and bumpier, which just made us laugh as we rocked back and forth in our seats, firmly buckled in. Continue reading →

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Filed under Fiction

Tagged as Book Excerpt, Curbside Splendor Publishing, Erika T. Wurth

by hipacificreview | 09/02/2014 · 8:31 am

The Shine

by Pui Ying Wong

On the day when nothing happens
windmills nod in the haze,
cars sprint to the ramp
like mice on running wheels.
In the geometric space between two
arching branches, the sun broods. Continue reading →

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Filed under Poetry

Tagged as Pui Ying Wong

by hipacificreview | 08/28/2014 · 12:05 pm

Soap

by Joseph Han

I’ll start when I still had the blue car. Karen, these are all the things I wish I told you before you broke up with me because maybe it would’ve changed something at least.

The parties I went to. At first it was just to be away from all those people I went to high school with. Even now when I run into them, these ghosts in new clothes, it’s a game of seeing how long you can ignore or avoid that person until courtesy gives. I’d hang on the walls leaning like a crooked painting, going whole nights not saying anything, just sipping on my beer with my mouth and words getting dry. Me not actually talking to other people, especially girls. Continue reading →

June in the Badlands

by Rachel Jamison Webster

Submerged in sun, white
as from a flashbulb—

a faded Ford truck blue on gray road,
a driftwood barn splintering horizon.

We are not the blindly enduring, we are
those who won’t lay down our burdens Continue reading →

The Beaches Of

by Johnathan Harper

In the divide of pavement and sand stands a sign with a stick-figure drowning under white waves, the words: “Beware of Riptides.” Parents keep their children close, distract them with scarping shells from the strand, the salt grime wrapped to their fingers. Two brothers sit in ankle deep water, the one that’s seven has his arms wrapped around the waist of the younger to anchor him. They try to tug against the tide, where the ocean sucks them in, inch by heaving inch. Continue reading →