by Gene Twaronite
All the dresses
in the store look
made for people who
never have to worry
if they’ll fit.
Forever 21
Every Weekend
by Mariah Rigg
For Papaya, the weekdays of summer are filled with the garden. She and her mama plant cosmos, pick mangoes, watch the chunkily ridged black-white-and- yellow-striped caterpillars curl and uncurl themselves into inching balls, devouring milky crownflower leaves, weaving themselves into chrysalides, so that they can break out as delicately feathered Monarch butterflies. Some days are sprinkled with sun, sand, and salt. Other days they pick flowers on the edges of the brown, dirt trails that run through the green ridged mountains. On the steamy, lazy days they lie in the rectangular shade of the tin carport and read aloud from the Chronicles of Narnia. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Honeycreepers
by Joseph Stanton
1. Prologue
Honeycreepers speciated,
theory has it,
from an irruption of rose finches
wind-driven to these islands
four-million years ago,
give or take a million years.
Filed under Poetry
Widow’s Walk
by Rebecca Keller
1 The Mother, 1996
Yolanda fussed in her playpen, working up to a howl. Maria launched herself out of the chair like an awkward pole-vaulter. Her belly was heavy, and the sweat trickling between her breasts felt like an insect in her bra. Being pregnant the first time had been easy. Yolanda had been small and light, floating easily in her middle, light and calm. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Travelers of the Dreamless Hours
by Peter Marcus
A crone standing inside a bamboo kiosk, stirs arroz caldo.
Only faint electric light on the back roads in the Palawan
pre-dawn from the few garages vulcanizing rubber lit
by dim fluorescent tubes. A florid scent unfurls across
the valley and you know yourself as fortunate being
Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
Hawaii Pacific Review 