by George Freek
I stare into the lake,
where the moon is reflected
like a shrunken pear. Continue reading
Night Poem
Filed under Poetry
The Limbo
by Zach Murphy
The cicadas are extremely loud this summer, and so are my mother’s outfits. The leopard print high-heels, the oversized sunglasses, and the hat with the pink floral arrangement on its brim are some of the more understated pieces in her wardrobe.
“You don’t hear about the sun when it’s behind the clouds,” she once told me as she put her beet-red lipstick on in the mirror. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Sutton Hoo
by Bex Hainsworth
For Mercie Lack and Barbara Wagstaff
Summer, 1939, and the past is pressing itself
against windowpanes like the children
in your classes when the planes fly overhead.
Gas masks clunk in cardboard, there is
a parade of plague doctors in the playground.
Time doesn’t feel linear: it folds like an accordion,
like the earth beneath a plough.
Filed under Poetry
Born of Both
by Keira Deer
I do not confide in my father and mother. They would not understand. How could they? He is English, she is Chinese. I am different to both of them– a stranger, tho their own child. “What are we?” I ask my brother. “It doesn’t matter, sissy,” he responds. But it does.
-From Sui Sin Far’s “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian”
My Yeye’s name was John Deer, though it was not his first. He was my father’s father. Pulled from the mothballed corners of bedroom closets and dresser drawers, he wore slacks and a white tank top every day I knew him, staking a cane alongside him when he shuffled quietly, room to room. In his high cheekbones and thin face, I could see my father’s, and I could see mine.
Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction, Young Writers Edition
All In Good Fun
by Bastet Zyla
Dinah’s mother had only passed but two days ago, and here she was going through her attic all alone, to decide how to best proceed with a livelihood left behind.
Dinah’s younger brother had been gone since her adolescence– leukemia. While her oldest brother was stationed somewhere in the Middle East and couldn’t make it to the funeral (that is, if he had even gotten news of her death). She couldn’t tell you exactly where he was located, as he never wrote to anyone but his wife all the way down in Georgia. So with no other remaining siblings alive or present, Dinah was left to manage her late mother’s affairs singlehandedly. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction, Young Writers Edition
Hawaii Pacific Review 