by Doug Ramspeck
If long-legged morning fell through glass,
I woke to the persisting marriage. You can say
the hemmed-in stars were nightingales.
You can say the grass that summer grew a small psalm through
a fissure in the sidewalk. Once you opened your eyes
beside the same person for forty years.
Continue reading
by Doug Ramspeck
When Father stepped into the dark hall
then disappeared,
I think the washed corpse of moon was buried in the sky.
Someone dreamed the horses
by the fence. Someone walked into the deep woods where
coins of rain slipped and stained the body. We watched
for familiar signs in the erratic wings of moths, in the
native tongues of jays beside the river. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Alison Stine
Pointe shoes, the wood-enforced slippers that allow ballet dancers to stand up on their toes, are dirty, hard, painful and ridiculous—and for several years, they were all I wanted for Christmas. The bright pink satin of the shoe is a shell. It conceals a hard wooden end called the box, squared off into a platform and molded with cardboard. New, the soles of pointe shoes are unyielding; we had to break their backs by bending them again and again with our hands like cracking open glow sticks or shaping the bill of a hat or the palm of a baseball glove. Some dancers held their shoes over boiling water, to steam them into shape. The long pink laces, called bindings, were tied so tight they cut into our flesh. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
When writing my signature I remember the beauty of her accusation. How she entered the room natural and unpredictable. The picture was much the same. A slight cock of the head and the smile beginning to stretch unevenly. All her weight on her left forearm. I wanted to call her sinister, but that was her word for me and always in quotations. The alignment of her body held. She always led with grammar and pointed optimism. Continue reading
by Mark Brazaitis
Becca Bishop missed her flight back to San Francisco and stayed in Pittsburgh, the last town on her Stealing Fire from the Sun tour, drinking merlot from a bottle she bought at a liquor store three blocks from her hotel at the edge of a neighborhood she knew she should have been terrified of. The next day, instead of boarding her flight to San Francisco (her bandmates were driving to California in a van), she rented a Ford Focus and soon found herself on the decrepit asphalt of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, heading toward Ohio and the town where she was born.
It was Christmas Eve. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 