by Bethany Bruno
The first thing my mother left me was a jar. Wide-mouthed, Mason glass, cloudy at the rim. She pressed it into my hands the morning she stopped speaking. Her lips moved like pale paper fluttering in the wind.
“Keep it closed,” she mouthed. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
by Marisa Mangani
“People should know that Hawai`i is a country and should be respected as such. Because it was forcibly annexed to the United States does not mean that it is the US, except by conquest.”
– Alice Walker
I arrived on Maui from Oahu in 1971, an eleven-year-old sharing the back seat of my mom’s turquoise Maverick with my baby brother and cages full of yowling cats. Mom and Stepdad occupied the space up front, driving through the cane fields on the dusty, two-lane Mokulele Highway from the Kahului airport. They had bought us a house in a new subdivision in Kihei to start a new life away from the racial strife of Oahu, where haoles like me were being knifed in school bathrooms. (I had overheard Mom and Grandmother talking about this.) Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Beth Houston
It’s not a shell, as often thought, but bone,
A piece of sail cat catfish skull, the part
That looks like God hung on the cross, weird clone
Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Nicholas Claro
Years ago, when my father was still alive, I watched him put a cigar out on a kid’s cheek.
I say “kid,” but he was probably closer to twenty than twelve. That made him adult enough.
“He was acting like a dumbass kid,” my father told me later. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
by Darren C. Demaree
I heard you call this
a history of aesthetics
& you are wrong. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
Hawaii Pacific Review 