by Lucas Smith
On our last day of volunteering
There were leopard sharks
In the shallows breeding.
Hundreds of sharks
Swarming like milk in coffee.
Continue reading
Safe Harbor
Filed under Poetry
Everything Will Be Taken Away
by Donna Obeid
Every new moon they arrived, the People from Elsewhere.
I’d stand upon the shore with my angel-trumpet earrings and banana leaf crown and gaze into the offing, waiting for the boat to appear. Sometimes there’d be a whole family which made the wind blow strong. Sometimes a man and his wife who could change the color of the day, and occasionally, when the sky surrendered itself, there’d be an older woman who’d come all the way alone, little more than a notebook and a knapsack slung across her shoulder, seeking her soul. Continue reading
Written on the Floor of an Office on Madison Avenue
by Michael Mingo
This morning, as the window washers pulled
their platform into place and smeared the glass
with dripping soap, I read an article
about how satellites are leaving streaks
in photographs of distant stars, like cats
scratching an antique landscape out of boredom.
Even the country nights, the author warns,
will teem with noise. They’re lucky: they can see
the sky. My office offers me a view
of other people’s views, a vista packed
so thick with masonry and glass the sky
is a faint border now. Though I twist
my line of sight around corners, through gaps
where the streets surely run, I’ve yet to see
a single patch of heaven; even the sun
is only what’s reflected on the buildings,
a problem for geometers to solve.
Is there an answer? Amidst the space debris
and fragments of façades, I still detect
the shimmers of what was: a constellation
sewn in fluorescent lights, a swarm of rockets
all dancing to the music of the spheres.
It’s hardly consolation, but the view
is raw material. It must be finished.
Michael Mingo is a poet and medical editor from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He earned his MFA in poetry from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Spillway, RHINO, Third Coast, and The McNeese Review, among other journals.
Filed under Poetry
I Stumble into a Portal on 4th Street
by Marie Henry
Yeah, things are grim. But not all of it. I get buzzed into my bank which is almost pandemically empty. And am invited to sit down in a cushy chair by the lovely teller seated on the other side of the plexiglass.
Filed under Fiction
Charm
by Laine Derr
My cat kisses finches on the neck, red
feathers masking want, a body finely limp.
I learned burying from my father, animals
killed on country roads, soil rich in blood. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
Hawaii Pacific Review 