by Charles Harper Webb
We’re bouncing The Porpis, / Bouncing The Porpis,
Bouncing The Porpis, / That is what he likes.
I made the song up for my son—porp (derived
from Shakespeare’s fretful porpentine) being
the fullness of human emotion—fear, rage, hunger,
need for love and diaper-changing—he conveyed
in cries, shrieks, coos, and general fuss
as I bounced, at 3 a.m., on waves of sleep. Continue reading
By Rebecca Mabanglo-Mayor
My mother is two years younger than my eight-year-old daughter when the Japanese attack the Philippines. She is outside in the early December sunshine, playing with her five- and three-year-old sisters and my grandfather’s sister. Somewhere inside a clapboard house nearby, my grandmother rubs her pregnant stomach, her mind on what time her husband will come home from his daily patrol. A common day for Wardville, the small neighborhood where dependents of the Philippine Scouts and US Army live and sleep. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Jeff Tigchelaar
Today on a remote trail I encountered
a man, and as we were passing he said
Beautiful morning
and I said Yes it is
and he said I bet
you didn’t think you’d die today
and I said No I didn’t but
it would happen this way, wouldn’t it
Filed under Poetry
by Lindsay Wells
“Your father’s in trouble,” my grandmother says.
I switch the phone to my other ear. I didn’t hear the ringing at first because I was translating a television manual from Icelandic to English for one of my linguistics classes, and I translate best while listening to Fats Waller albums on vinyl, so I rushed to turn the music off and managed to flip open the phone just before the voicemail kicked on.
My father is always in trouble. Last month he was arrested for pissing on the neighbor’s shrubs and my grandmother wanted me to bail him out–if she gave me the money–because she was supposed to go to the casino with her bingo friends. Six months ago he went fishing with my grandfather on the Conimicut Point sandbar, passed out, and hit his head on a rock, pole still in hand, and she wanted me to come to the hospital to visit. Last summer, at the Gaspee Parade, he assaulted some high school kid marching with a euphonium by throwing my little cousin’s poppers at him. He said the kid played like a paraplegic, and after the cops let him off with a warning, she wanted me to take him for a walk down Narragansett Parkway to Salter’s Grove to calm him down.
“What happened this time?” I ask.
Filed under Fiction
by Dante Di Stefano
In Kentucky, these guys are building an ark
exactly as God instructed Noah
and a few years ago there were these two
brothers in Burma who were ten years old,
leading this guerilla group, God’s Army;
supposedly bullets couldn’t harm them
and they commanded thousands of soldiers
invisible to the eye, but no less
deadly. Anyway, these are the stories Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
Hawaii Pacific Review 