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–Spring, Fall, and Winter. Each issue features the poem prompt of a northwest poet laureate with a model response from the editor, and may also promote a theme. 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

Issue 4 of Willawaw Journal, Fall 2018, features the poem prompt, Grandmother, Cleaning Rabbits, by Samuel Green, former Washington Poet Laureate. As always, the journal is open to submissions from  everyone, year round. The deadline for the next issue is September 1, 2018. 

Read the Guidelines & Submit Your Work

Poet Laureate Poem Prompt—Fall 2018: Samuel Green

We hope ‘s Samuel Green’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.

Grandmother, Cleaning Rabbits–Samuel Green

 

I shot this one by the upper pond of the farm
after watching the rings trout made rising
to flies, watching small birds pace the backs
of cows, hoping all the time she would run.

My grandmother told me they damaged her garden.

I think it was a way to make the killing
lighter. She never let me clean them, only asked
I bring them headless to her. I bring this one
to the fir block near the house, use the single-
bitted axe with the nick in the lower crescent
of the blade, smell the slow fire
in the smoke-house, salmon changing
to something sweet & dark. A fly turns
in a bead of blood on my boot. I tuck
the head in a hole beside the dusty globes
of ripened currants, talk quiet to the barn cat.

In her kitchen my grandmother whets the thin blade
of her Barlow, makes a series of quick, clever cuts, then tugs
off the skin like a child’s sweater. This one was
pregnant. She pulls out a row of unborn rabbits
like the sleeve of a shirt with a series of knots.
The offal is dropped in a bucket. Each joint gives way
beneath her knife as though it wants
to come undone, as though she knows some secret
about how things fit together. I have killed
a hundred rabbits since I was eight.

This will be the last.

I am twenty, & about to go back
to the war that killed my cousin in Kin Hoa,
which is one more name she can’t pronounce.
I haven’t told her about the dead,
and she won’t ask. She rolls the meat
in flour & pepper & salt, & lays it
in a skillet of oil that spits like a cat.
She cannot save a single boy who carries a gun.
All she can do is feed this one.

 

The poem, “Grandmother, Cleaning a Rabbit,” appears in All That Might Be Done (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2014). Used with permission from the author.

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. Pulled 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. And the rest is history...
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More About the Editor