by MaryAnne Hafen
My mountains bleed into my sky
on paper, and it looks wrong,
but it’s like real life;
virgo at summer’s end.
The world is too strange
to paint as it really is, too filled
with poorly pruned trees.
Tag Archives: Love
Simulacrum of a Weeping Willow
Filed under Poetry
The Tourist
by M. Anne Kala`i
Naiwi’s first and only visit to the mainland nearly burned him down. Desperate to escape the island that knew him better than he knew himself, he sold what valuables he could scrape together from distracted vacationers and his cash-strapped family, and lit out for California. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Apples
by Mollie Hawkins
1. When he started his job at the organic grocery store, Produce Man brings me apples with names like poems: Pink Lady. Ambrosia. Gala. American Beauty. He brings me the sweet ones he knows I will like.
2. I know three kinds of apples: Red Delicious, the mouth-puckering Granny Smith, and whatever bitter kind grows on my grandmother’s trees in the Alabama woods.
3. Produce Man and I don’t feel like grownups. We slip in and out of college, like we are window shopping at a luxury department store. Work schedules and school schedules do not overlap on our Venn diagrams. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
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
Filed under Fiction
Two Syllables
by Virginia Laurie
He was lovely then. A ruffled parakeet. We were crisp as carrot sticks and spent our days sweeping peanut shells off the bar floor. In May he called me a bouquet and took me to a field of sunflowers. Under their unrelenting chins, he sliced me in half like a diorama. There was thatch threaded through the belt-loops of my jeans. I shook like a frog standing up.
By July, I stood up with outsized force, marveling at the ache and the strength of my quadriceps. He was still a bird. Mouth an arrow. In August, there were pillows and I rested around him. He was kind, then, and grateful for me. He kissed my nose, nibbled my earrings. At night he took the trash out. He drove me home. Once he asked me where I’d go if I escaped this city. The sun was bright that day, the pavement smug, and this confused me. I told him I just wanted to be there, with him, in that moment. He left me then; I could sense it. His lips curled then flattened— a shallow rip. Then everything was almost the same. Right, he said. Me too. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 