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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Submissions Open Nov. 1st

Willawaw Journal,  Winter 2020, features the poem prompt, “Seven Seas” by Kathleen Flenniken, Washington Poet Laureate. The editor invites artists and poets to respond to this poem or to create a poem of their own which uses a single concept in multiple contexts.  General submissions are always welcome.

Read the Guidelines & Submit Your Work

Poet Laureate Poem Prompt—Winter 2020 Kathleen Flenniken

We hope Kathleen Flennikin’s poem, “Seven Seas” 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.

Seven Seas

The one we’ve fished to death,
that tosses ships till they sink,
so deep the fish at the fissures
squiggle instead of swim, glow
instead of gaze.

The one inside a conch shell
that sweeps us from the couch
to its shore—our first metaphor.

The sea of ones and zeros
with tributaries pressing Send,
where our secrets glitter
in the data gyre.

The sea of refugees, turned away, turned away, turned away,
crashing the razor-wire fence.

The sea of cash, thick
with trawlers’ tangling nets, green
with the drowned and drowning.

The sea of regret
that surges and retreats
and sucks at our feet,
a tide that takes us nowhere.

And the final sea of liquid light
we’ll only know from below.

from Post Romantic (University of Washington 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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More About the Editor