by Christopher Stolle
(for Dad [died March 20, 2010], Grandpa Mathews [died March 28, 1996], and Grandpa Stolle [died March 22, 2012])
Grief is a wound
you keep bandaged,
the damage never healing,
never becoming an afterthought,
always a lingering presence,
a fierceness unyielding,
like a tyrant bellowing
for more destruction,
never getting enough. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by James Hartman
I stood at the window, still watching those bare limbs on that birch tree along the slope of bright snow in the dark because I wanted to believe I saw one flutter a little red.
“Oh, Jonathan,” my father called. “It’s there, right? One has finally come?!”
Cardinals were my father’s favorite animal. When they were younger he and his brother used to set bird feeders throughout their backyard, strategically placed according to what they had learned from their Audubon book. My father always talked about them. He always believed they meant the return of something.
Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
by Jim Tilley
Cracked pottery houses the pink begonias,
hairline fracture not yet grown large enough
to cleave the pot in two, the soil drained Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by David M. Alper
You were never the boy who fell. You were the boy who
jumped. Let them call it hubris— you call it hunger. Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Scott Ortolano
The shadows cast by the tall trees seemed to mock them with the illusion of coolness in the simmering Florida afternoon. A constant drone of singing cicadas, or what his Uncle Rupp called a swamp chorus, was only broken here and there by the rustle of lizards startled into saw palmettos by this pair of mid-afternoon intruders. Nothing else stirred—or would for hours. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 