SILENCE AFTER THE MAUI FIRE

by Christian Hanz Lozada

I deconstruct the “Santa’s Village” Lego set
and the house has been quiet all day
 
while Hawaiian Uncle with stage 4 lungs watches the news
and the house has been quiet all day
 
the county asks family of the missing to submit DNA to match ashen remains
and the house has been quiet all day
 
after the fire Hawaiian Uncle escaped by sleeping on the shore
and the house has been quiet all day
 
and by crossing an ocean and by needing his niece’s husband to clean his ass
and the house has been quiet all day
 
long enough for health insurance ones and zeroes to change Hawaii to America
and the house has been quiet all day

Christian Hanz Lozada (he/him) is the son of an immigrant Filipino and a descendent of the Southern Confederacy. He knows the shape of hope and exclusion. He authored the poetry collection He’s a Color, Until He’s Not (2023) and co-authored Leave with More Than You Came With (2019). His poems have appeared in Hawaii Pacific Review (Pushcart Nominee), Bamboo Ridge Press, 34 Orchard, Mud Season Review, among others. Christian has featured at the Autry Museum and Beyond Baroque. He lives in San Pedro, CA and uses his MFA to teach his neighbors and their kids at Los Angeles Harbor College.

THE PERFECT HOME

by Indran Amirthanayagam

while Lahaina, Maui burns August, 2023

May I imagine the scene? Do you

agree? Coffee in the studio, light

streaming in, brushes and easel,

a multi-hued cat? But flames

are rising at five hundred yards.

Oh to leap beyond particulate

matter, to dream, go native 

again, python wrapped  round 

banyan branch, peeping through 

the window while monkey hops 

over the ledge and books, 

to the sugar bowl, scatters 

the grains, attracting flies, 

mosquitoes, the ubiquitous 

roach. Paradise does not look 

sweet. Fireball blows up history, 

belief, certainty, and cars,

drivers burned at the wheel, 

while thousands of miles

away as all birds fly,

by pure chance, living

on the mainland, in another 

corner of  the great expanse

of the once blue ball,

I try in vain to catch 

and douse embers flying 

this month’s perfect storm.

Indran Amirthanayagam is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is the newest collection of Indran's own poems. Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

THE STOWAWAY

by Anne Graue





Scaling the fence in San Jose
he smiled at himself,
proud to have not taken
that first drag in the seventh
grade when his friend Gavin
held out the pack of Marlboros.
His breathing was easy now,
and he felt his sneakers
hit the tarmac with some give.
He smiled again
circling the phrase "Homeland Security."
His comb in his back pocket,

he jumped inside the well
of the landing gear, finding
a place to roll his adolescence
into a position that might
outlast the flight, his unconsciousness,
his conscious act of defiance--his parents'
frantic search for their son gone
missing, who was a good kid, didn't smoke
or do drugs, who was smart enough,
who knew that hitching a ride inside
the outside of a 767 was a possibility.
His body folded up easily above the wheels--

he woke in paradise, combed his hair,
remembered how the noise was so great
and the cold was so numbing.


Anne Graue writes poetry and teaches online from her home in New York's Hudson Valley. Her poems have appeared in Paradigm, Compass Rose, Sixfold Journal, and The 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly, and she was a finalist in the Patricia Dobler Poetry Award competition for 2013. She has written reviews of literary magazines for NewPages.com.