by Jeffrey Howard
The jokes I remember, I cannot deliver well, unlike my sons who prefer the knock-knock variety (“Boo who? Why are you crying, stinky man?”), or my brother-in-law, a learned astronomer, who has dead-panned to me not once but twice: “I thought I was going to be the poorest one in the family, then I heard my sister was marrying an English major.” Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Ayden Massey
when the morning glories have unbowed their soft skulls,
may you rejoice in the child of things.
may you return to the warm radius amongst the high boughs Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Sean Eaton
My short-fused mother became close with a coworker
and took us to visit her ranch in Charlotte. My sisters
and I strapped into our minivan, trundling along past
farm after farm. On arrival, she told us to make friends
with the woman’s daughters, so we did. (My kindly heart
was always hungry for love.) My wisecracking young Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Deborah Schwartz
I hear my fizzy head ask the outside world for quiet. Forget it.
Those voices inside me are broadcasting my child labor
of anger, I ask them all to please be lighter. They’re fighters.
This page, for instance, made clearer by the margin,
I try to declutter like zippers that I sew onto the fly of my jeans
for a salary that no one can live on or marry. My mother. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Virginia Laurie
He was lovely then. A ruffled parakeet. We were crisp as carrot sticks and spent our days sweeping peanut shells off the bar floor. In May he called me a bouquet and took me to a field of sunflowers. Under their unrelenting chins, he sliced me in half like a diorama. There was thatch threaded through the belt-loops of my jeans. I shook like a frog standing up.
By July, I stood up with outsized force, marveling at the ache and the strength of my quadriceps. He was still a bird. Mouth an arrow. In August, there were pillows and I rested around him. He was kind, then, and grateful for me. He kissed my nose, nibbled my earrings. At night he took the trash out. He drove me home. Once he asked me where I’d go if I escaped this city. The sun was bright that day, the pavement smug, and this confused me. I told him I just wanted to be there, with him, in that moment. He left me then; I could sense it. His lips curled then flattened— a shallow rip. Then everything was almost the same. Right, he said. Me too. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 