by Shayna Cristy-Mendez
My body feels it before my brain can ever make sense of it; words always fail in their attempt to capture the sense of abandonment that comes with losing a parent to drug addiction. That particular sense of abandonment also tends to be exaggerated when their death falls on your birthday. As it happens, death has a habit of being a real foot to the groin of celebration. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction, Young Writers Edition
by Paul Grussendorf
On June 4, 1980, in a remote region of Lower Saxony, West Germany thirty-five hundred riot police forcibly cleared a population of one thousand anti-nuclear protestors out of a make-shift village which the activists had established on top of a nuclear bore site. The overwhelming police response to peaceful protestors was oddly similar to the recent eviction of a group of environmental protestors from a village sitting on top of a coal mine in Lutzerath, Germany on January 11, 2023. In 1980, I was there in the middle of the action with my camera crew. Continue reading
Filed under Nonfiction
by Veronica Montes
Her tears and her spit and all her complicated feelings fly into the air.
She says many things including don’t make it about you, Mom, don’t. I nod and stop talking. I sneak a look at my son, who just flew in from New York. He’s scrolling through his texts. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
by Tyler Dunston
Though there is nothing magical
about this city, I can see my father Continue reading
Filed under Poetry
by Anthony Otten
With you and your dad gone, I live in the quiet. Mostly I’m fine with it. When I want my conversation fix I sit in my wicker chair on the porch, like I am today, and wait for the mailman. He’s a young Black guy in a blue cap and shorts. Real polite. I don’t know, maybe I scare him. Old white lady in socks and sandals, feet too sore for shoes. Squinty little glasses I hardly need since Medicare did my cataracts. Continue reading
Filed under Fiction
Hawaii Pacific Review 