by Nancy Kline
1.
Flash! One minute to the next.
Short circuit in the brain, struck dumb.
When I get the call, I am eight hours away from her, by car. It takes me six, foot to the floor.
Light and Windows
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
Hourglass
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
Pointe
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
apology
by Erich Schweikher
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
Hawaii Pacific Review 