Willawaw Journal

Online Poetry & Art

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Willawaw Journal
Willawaw Journal is an online magazine for poetry and art, published quarterly at the cardinal points of the year. Each issue features the poem prompt of a northwest poet laureate with model responses from the editors, and also promotes a theme specific to demographics or media. Submissions are open year-round. Our mission is to encourage writers and artists to create, and to generate a community where a diversity of voices is welcome.
Welcome

Call for Submissions

Our first issue, Summer 2017, features a poem prompt from Poet Laureate Peter Sears, (below), and will highlight those poets under twenty and over seventy (U20O70) whose voices tend to be underreported. We also welcome submissions from everyone else.

We are calling for your poetry and art now!

Read the Guidelines & Submit Your Work

Poet Laureate Poem Prompt—Summer 2017: Peter Sears

We hope Peter's poem will inspire you, as a reader, to discover a feeling you hadn't named before or a resonance you hadn't expected. For the writer/artist, let the poem as prompt carry you to some place new in your work.

JUST A THIRD GRADER—Peter Sears (2017)

During the war, I wanted to be a fighter pilot,
but I would probably have crashed and be captured
and tortured. All I could do was pull my wagon

around from house to house, collecting newspapers
for the newspaper drive, and in a basement room
at school, Janitor Wesley weighed my papers, gave me

a slip of paper with my name, date, and weight—
then tied my papers into bundles and neatly stacked
them against the wall. I kept his notes at home.

Paper-clipped, in a box in my chest under my bed.
I liked to take them out and thumb through them.
Each day the pile of papers at school climbed higher

up the wall. Then one day a delivery door
opened and light poured in. The truck backed up
to the door and a guy got out and threw

the bundles of papers in the truck,
closed the door and drove off. The room
was so empty it felt like a torture room.

More About the Poet Laureate Poem Prompt

The Editors

Rachel Barton is a poet, teacher, writing coach, and editor.
Jade Rosina McCutcheon is a writer, scholar, poet, and theater director.


More About Our Editors