Willawaw Journal

Online Poetry & Art

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Willawaw Journal

Willawaw Journal is an online magazine for poetry and art, published three times a year–Fall, Winter, and Spring. Each issue features the poem prompt of a northwest poet laureate with a model response from the editor who may also promote a theme. Our mission is to encourage writers and artists to create, and to generate a community where a diversity of voices is welcome.

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Willawaw Journal,  Fall 2020, features the poem prompt, “Dear Zygote in Your Limniad State” by Diane Raptosh, Idaho Poet Laureate. The editor invites artists and poets to respond to this poem or to create your own epistolary poem. Someone out there, past, present or future, needs a letter poem from you! General submissions are also welcome.

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Poet Laureate Poem Prompt—Fall 2020 Diane Raptosh

We hope Diane Raptosh’s poem, “Dear Zygote in Your Limniad State,” 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.

Dear Zygote in Your Limniad State

Dear Zygote,

You should enjoy your limniad state,
nymph-like and windless, there on two sides

of a threshold. Howsoever, the WordHippo
wonders if I mean to speak lemonade.

This saké is murky, and it makes me wish
I could tottle off to that original somewhere

in whom even the wines sip words
and live alphabets draw on that spliff

of night air. Life Speck, here is
the ordinal pregnancy:

Without each other, we hole up
within each other. Remember, too,

I have been busy, turning
the soil in the few people’s hearts

I plan to rename the grave
when my day comes: Am hoping to sow

the silt-line conditions for a happy death—
choired by Husband Consciousness—

that wry spirit-vegetable. That solid air
loyalty. Netflix, elsewhere,

boots into verb, while power lopes in
to daily unheaven everyone. Still,

for the most part, Ms. Zygote Missive,
you are the test of the great human maybe,

there in that mother-hip meadow—
that namelessly face-free state

of between. Dear nymph-dividual:
Let me not spew lemonade,

as I’ve gotten wind of your balls-out greed
for the good of all species.

This poem has just been published in Raptosh’s new book, Dear Z: The Zygote Epistles (Etruscan Press, 2020).

More About the Poet Laureate Poem Prompt

The Editor

Rachel Barton is a poet, teacher, writing coach, and editor. She earned a B.A. in English from West Virginia University where she also pursued graduate studies in the art of printmaking. Drawn to Alaska by an older sister, she continued to pull lithographs at the Visual Arts Center until her new family began to manifest. From there, she dove into clay and watercolor. Upon her arrival in the Northwest 25 years later, she earned a Masters in Teaching from Western Oregon University. It was while teaching that she became acquainted with the Oregon Writing Project where she resumed her writing life.
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