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
Love Note
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
Alternative Energies (Anatomies)
by Jessie Carty
– after a line from the movie adaptation of “Cloud Atlas”
Nobody says anything.
To tell her would be an admission
of how we gave careful
consideration to the spaces
on her body not occupied
by clothing; to her tanned
and then alternatively lined skin;
to the ratchet of her spine. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
In the Night Mirror
by Rebecca Givens Rolland
Blunt the axe, carve out the weapon: make the war good.
What starts in the mind stays in the mind for good.
A pearl from my necklace, dropped string: you noticed
nothing. War on, you strung up promises, none good.
Middle of the night, packed bags: no man travels simply.
In spooled hours, I breathed you in: weightless, good. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
Hawaii Pacific Review 