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, and 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.

Welcome

Submission Window for Fall 2019: August 1– September 1

Willawaw Journal, Spring 2019, features the poem prompt, Parenthood, Unplanned, by Peggy Shumaker, former Alaska State Writer Laureate. The editor has invited artists and poets to respond with their own versions of giving voice to the voiceless. Look for a new poem prompt from Joanne Townsend in midsummer for the Fall 2019 issue.

Read the Guidelines & Submit Your Work

Poet Laureate Poem Prompt—Spring 2019 Peggy Shumaker

We hope ‘s Peggy Shumakers 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. Photo Credit: Rasmussen Foundation/YouTube.com

Parenthood, Unplanned

When a jasmine-scented
teenager (not yet my mother)

came up pregnant
with me, my father

stepped up.
They did what teenagers did

in 1951.  Married.
Mismatched

spectacularly–
fifteen years of yelling and beer.

Four kids and two
miscarriages

before she turned
twenty-four.

No education
past high school.

So after the divorce,
crap jobs,

crappier men,
government cheese,

no sleep.
Haunted, her eyes.

There are men
making decisions

right now
about lives of girls

and women.
Some do not want

children to know
how their bodies work.

Some do not trust
women to make

decisions.  As if
women were people,

as if women
know what’s best

for their lives,
for the lives

of their children.
That broken teen

who carried me, who
pushed me out

into this world,
that brilliant

ragged girl
died young, worn down

in her thirties.
One small life,

I know.  The only life
she had.  I speak for her

when I say
Let women live.

 

Let women be.

 

Parenthood, Unplanned was first published in Cutthroat:  Truth to Power Special Issue.

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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More About the Editor