By Dane Karnick
After the Sculpture by Deborah Butterfield, 2013
Not the tethered rock in space
but the same desert
for this horse withering
in unforgiving light
Half Moon
Filed under Poetry
No One Is Looking
by Thomas Christopher
My friend Eddie’s sister, Shannon, was seventeen. She was eight years older than we were. Even though she was hardly around, I always felt her presence whenever I was at his house. Sometimes her door was open and I stole a glimpse of her rumpled bed or some scattered clothes on the floor. But even if her door was closed, simply being near it thrilled me in a way I couldn’t describe.
One day when Eddie was showing me his new football cards, Shannon appeared in his doorway. She was wrapped in a red bath towel. Her honey-blonde hair was wet and her skin flushed pink. For some reason the sight of her bare feet sprinkled with water was exciting. She smiled, leaned her shoulder against the doorframe, and said, “What are you boys up to?” Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Love Note
by Eugenie Theall
I stand in long, green dashes—
tombstone shadows—like in a Dickinson poem.
Cool air falls in tendrils, cups my face,
murmurs: Poor old girl, still a spinster.
Do you have a white dress? Continue reading
Pneumonia
by Michael Derrick Hudson
How ironic it is I’m dying of pneumonia, he said, some years
after high school, back when he was dying
and I was still finding out about irony. I was bluff, dithering
Watson to his aquiline Holmes, both of us
harrumphing like a couple of madcap Monty Python colonels,
snifters of brandy and the fake glass eyes
of stuffed tigers, sloths, armadillos and wildebeests glittering
in the firelight. I’d puff on my cheroot (such a great word,
cheroot) and he’d moodily suck the stem
of his streaky old meerschaum. How ironic it is I’m dying Continue reading
A Spectrum Analysis
by Jessie Carty
–after the documentary “Nostalgia for the Light”
The woman palms objects small and white, explains
the coral-like ones are from inside bones:
porous spaces for the processing
of calcium. The flatter, sharper
segments are shards
from longer bones.
She’s learned
a new vocabulary
while searching for what
remains of her family: dead
from a dictator’s decision, skeletons
purposefully scattered to prevent reunion.
The desert’s open spaces and lack of humidity
tend toward the large scale: work camps, telescopes, Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
Hawaii Pacific Review 