By Mark Belair
A toddler in a stroller
was absorbed in
a one-on-one encounter
with a lollipop
she held
so close to her face
her eyes crossed
as she talked with a frown Continue reading
Lollipop
Filed under Poetry
Baobab
by Doug Ramspeck
He can’t be certain how much he actually remembers and how much he has been told by his mother. The stories and his memories are the vine and the tree so intertwined you can’t know to distinguish one from the next. He does know he was very young in that time before they left for the United States. His father showed him how to hide beneath the Baobab tree behind their house. It was a great tree, as old as the moon—or so his father teased—with spirits waiting in the fruit from which they sometimes made a porridge. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Two by Two
by Daniel Pecchenino
Every few years
I lose the plot.
What came before
is submerged
beneath what is,
and now becomes
the past’s new
point of departure. Continue reading
I Used to Play in Bands
by David R. DiSarro
There were always
sad women,
striped socks, tattoos,
the names of ex-husbands,
strained against
low cotton tops. Continue reading
A Woman Nurses on the Beijing Subway
by Bryn Homuth
A stop at Qianmen station—
passengers battle through turnstiles,
striding from platform and through doors,
some lucky, collapsing into a seat,
straphangers finding a hold
from a suspended row of grips. Lurching,
the subway glides as if through water,
an eel through a cavernous network
of coral tunnels. Riders sway
like the subaquatic drift of anemone. Continue reading
Hawaii Pacific Review 