by Anne Champion
In East Texas, the vultures’ hunchback stare, starving
and relentless, pierces you like a beak to the gut,
as if they know something you don’t. They circle in flight,
stalk from telephone poles, glare in a way that accuses: Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Sam Liming
Done floating, I come in on a wave
and skin my knee.
It’s South Carolina. All the beach
moms are wearing a red lip
and a flounce at the hip. I’m at that age
where I look at seventeen-year-olds Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Matt Prater
It’s July. You’re alone. Upstairs.
A storm is coming in: green-grey,
but yellow on the wallpaper’s
crest of checkered flowers. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Kevin Grauke
A slightly famous actor, once loved
by our younger selves, has died, I see
on my morning feed. I tell you immediately,
just as you would tell me. The two of us
are eating eggs and toast, drinking coffee,
and scrolling through our phones, looking
to see what happened while we slept,
which, as always, was both nothing and
much too much of everything. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Robert Garner McBrearty
My teenage son says that money doesn’t matter, and on one level I get it, but if you’ve ever been short of it, you know it does.
I point out that we stay in nicer hotels now when we travel, and he admits that’s sort of pleasant, though he says, and I know it’s true, that he’d be fine staying in a hostel. In fact, he might prefer it.
We eat at better restaurants now, I tell him, and he says that is enjoyable, but he’d be fine really with just about any grub, beans from a can, maybe some tuna, and again, I know it’s true for him.
But you wouldn’t want to sleep out on the streets, right? Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 