by Bronwyn Hughes
The rusty Texaco star clung to its pedestal above Main Street, welcoming me back to my hometown. Beneath, a brightly painted visitor center had displaced the long-defunct filling station where we used to smoke cigarettes. Were they expecting tourists? I strained to see the bones of Mobjack Courthouse under a veil of self-consciously cute updates, like sidewalk bump-outs planted with native seagrasses.
Filed under Fiction
by Paula Goldman
Filed under Poetry
by Cait West
This is your hand—dried, cracked, bleeding on a January day under a muted sun. At rest on your book, it twitches in sleep, and your glasses have fallen down your nose as you lie stretched out on the floor, too busy to sit on the sofa. You’re too impatient to rest, but your body has taken over anyway in this forced sleep while reading. It’s just like when I was a child, and you would fall asleep while quizzing me on my phonics. You would make up stories in your sleep, and I would crouch down next to your open mouth and wait for the words to whisper out. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Katie Kemple
In the Sprouts parking lot with my teen, hands balancing
soap, sunblock, a bag of rainbow gummy bears, Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Audrey T. Carroll
The scurrying upstairs sounds strange now, like a million things it isn’t. There are squirrels for certain—I’ve seen them escaping onto our roof like they’re emerging from some portal to another world. There are heavier creatures, too. Our best guess has always been racoons, but how they get in and out I couldn’t say. No matter how much they all skitter and thump around, no matter how many times they make me jump in the middle of the night when I think I’m utterly alone, I haven’t got the heart to call an exterminator. Or maybe that’s just another story I tell myself. Maybe I’m just afraid—afraid of the weight of silence, afraid of hearing the ghosts that linger. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 