Tag Archives: Hawaii Pacific University

As the Sky Loses its Blues

by E Townsend

My father sends me a panoramic video of an electric pink dusk settling over snowblinked Pikes Peak, the yolk of the sinking sun blown out, viewfinder shaky and fogged with cigarette ashes. I know he’s trying to hold his balance, cane gripped in his left hand, Motorola weaving like an unsteady heartline in right. Continue reading

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Filed under Nonfiction

Parrotfish Eulogy

by Courtney Hitson

This sky unpeeled her eyelids’ opal interiors
and tossed you in the ocean—blotches of rainbow
bled onto your scales. Like flicking
shiny, pastel wishes into the sea. Diving, Continue reading

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Filed under Poetry

October 13th

by Rachel White

Bark shed, the redgum
stands near a stone—
makeshift grave.
Radio drones: hostages
in Gaza; we voted down
The Voice. Blade of knife
in avocado seed, its shape
exacts a hole in the flesh. Continue reading

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Memories

by Fabiana Martínez

If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder.

Plato, Phaedrus, 274c-275 b, Reginald Hackforth, transl., 1952.

 

“You will have to sign page four and make three copies. One for us, one for you and… I’m confident they will require one at the funeral home, Sir,” the big blonde hospital administrator with one missing fake nail pronounced matter-of-factly. Continue reading

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On the Interpretation of Dreams

by Daniel Webre

The dreams were never the scary part. It was Allison’s interpretations. Even these weren’t terrifying in a conventional manner. It’s just that Allison’s mind could make connections no one else would ever think of, and though most of these made no sense, once they were in her head, she’d become so convinced of their reality that a part of me was never quite sure anymore.

Let me give you an example. Once I dreamt of my cousin Fred. Fred and I were picking pineapples with a machete, reaching carefully inside the palm fronds and cutting just below the ripe fruit. I had not seen Fred since my childhood, and this was a grown man with a Hemingway beard. But in my dream I knew the man was Fred in the same way you can tell in the movies when time passes and someone has aged and maybe isn’t even played by the same actor. This was Fred all right, and the thing was, even though we were out in the tropical heat and there were a lot of these pineapples to harvest, we were having a wonderful time. Continue reading

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Filed under Fiction