POETRY PACIFIC

The Self "The study of myself is the study of all I do not know." --Montaigne What kind of day was it. Clean the house. Noti...

Drops Falling After a Downpour Stick my head out the window from our hotel room into the alley so dark with a bad smell and feel th...

​I wanted I wanted her to love me. I wanted to be her big brother, sitting there with her in the windswept corridor just beyond the rev...

A Life of Disbelief what is coming back over dusk's edge is the part of you set adrift years ago on the sea of disillusionment i...

I Lost You Somewhere Where were you in dreams of the shore? Where were you in the hours before? Sitting, writhing, eating away I lost y...

MAGICIAN The old man lifted himself from the chrome wheel chair and stood bravely before the audience. He waved a red bandana in the air, ...

An Anthem for a Warlord I (Published in the March 2016 issue of Scarlet Leaf Review)  Sought refuge in underground bunkers Nor did you s...

Fallen Leaf don't say, "you are beautiful!" i did not want to fall onto the ground. i wanted to remain in the branch w...

November Last November is lost like a blocked vowel making a long ago name unpronounceable . This year’s version is another toddler’s...

Reaching for Light Sunrise illuminates puddles left upon dirt road by yesterday’s rain. Atop high ground, stacked beehives rest, await ...

How The Sky Came When I was a grain of sand, I saw a rainbow robe the sea - the weather passed and turned me into rock. When I was a...

Seven-Thirty Sunset As grandmother and toddler turn to home, the Hispanic boy with gold necklace runs through a back yard and the Haiti...

Self-portrait at Sixty-five Mental notes flutter like confetti down a chasm made from facing rows of stone and glass. What once had ...

​ Five Haiku  tree on forest floor lays on pillow of green moss soft bed of brown leaves flower bud opens slowly with green toothless...

MIRROR MAN  A mirror with nothing in it burns with magic on its wall in a Quincy bedroom. Moody, a man hangs it in his garden and pond...

from The Unreturning... 10. The majority illusion Don’t wander off to chew berries with the enemy and stay within your primate group. Wh...

TIME Every moment has its own meaning, significance, For me, for you, for him. In every moment there is an action important For me, for...

​ Four Tanka autumn comes with a price… the world caves in on itself, yet at the river's edge a heron lifts in flight nothing t...

Politics, God, and Science During breakfast, a grin Saving up for change, but seldom paying. Teeth bared like train tracks, a holle...

A Photographer’s Eye It pauses for small things: in Santa Fe, an ant negotiates a door frame where layers of peeled paint take turquoi...

SUMMER DANCE                                       Lucy dances in the back yard  with her eyes closed               and  her arms held ou...

the skeleton keys of long dead martyrs you can sit in the night listening to trees sing of otherworldly laments while someone x-rays you...

Forgotten (First appeared in Wilderness House Literary Review ) With no lullabies to sing, no stories to tell, no songs remembered, I ...

To Namremmiz Samoht The mythic mumbo jumbo you’re a sucker for—the vagina dentata in Dracula, all those trees that haunt Macbeth, the lo...

Seahorse No need for wings or legs in the buoyant tide of the ocean. Like the f hole in a cello where the music seeps through. Misce...

flowers of the galaxy koi fish swimming in the pond beneath the colorful singing tulips it makes me wonder if we aren't all just...

Silence My mind is a machine that cannot rest A tool that always overheats Constantly whirring Constantly humming Like a house on the ...

Poem             After Alice Notley’s “Poem” A finger is a kind of tool the men bending his in the shed is thinking:  I wonder, are the...

A Thousand Miles  highway wind against fingertips tractor trailers on interstate 80 tornadoes across the plains a stranger at a r...

DEAD END We seem to be in the same black hole of which edge has something like asphalt flowing in hot Forget these lines in case I...

The Making of self in the light of the tree (i) I’m Rooted in Self-discovery I’m Stemming out in Self-realization I’m Branching forth in...

The filth and the rag brine The mirror looked like it had been up all night. A sunken, netted and pilfered salmon Marked by the severity...

Avril and Shernaz together developed the innovative genre of collaborative poetry writing that they called “Tapestry Poetry”. They published...

This Windy Morning The gales cry, their sounds rise, so strangely like the wailing of children. The gales have ripped a rift in purga...

Tableau On my mother’s patio above the canal I saw a marriage in the clouds. Not only loose doves, but small animals feeding each other ...

Bird Arrows Sparrows wheel in formation of small, sleek flyers keeping more or less to an arrow head of birds, of wings, moving. Towa...

Do sluts have confidence? When summer is about to unbutton my shirt I think of winter never wanting to make love to me I think of the ti...

Dead Moth cicadas' calls glitter more silver than the moon when you go part of me tears away when you come back the rejoining g...

TRACING THE SIN (TO THE SOURCE) Lamp light obscures winter’s burn on barren trees. I change the mistake, clear my conscience, roll int...

Pouring a Steaming Wife “On my death bed, you’ll tell the Doctor, just make her a cup of tea.” Having faith in tea is having faith in int...

As vertical as possible I place my feet with care in such a world – William Stafford I have fallen twice recently, Once onto the rocks ...

my first night back we were far apart once but you can hear my heart now in this chest, and your hair used to itch my skin if you didn...

Today’s Report An iceberg, blazing blue, slides through a folded Greenland fjord. An Arctic Tern tears by, its travails are set in win...

The Supplicant I know what a house is. It’s warmth and safety and food. This house smelled kind. I’d been lost so long I couldn’t rem...

POETRY PACIFIC [autumn issue 2017] Photo by Tao Zhijian

POETRY PACIFIC [spring issue 2017] Coverart: Locke Duane