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
by Marguerite Bouvard
Ana, I have learned to see
the mountain rising behind
you bearing the scars
of your ruined city, Havana, the sun-struck
panes of your grandmother’s window,
staining her hair with their reds Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Maureen Alsop
A low moan in the ironwood
rose a year before she would touch
the stubble of his face to wipe
a fleck of salt off his chin.
Saturday, five days after
his accident. A rattle of heat
from the fan all afternoon. No one
speaking. In the low pasture, cows Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
Hawaii Pacific Review 