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Willawaw Journal Spring 2019 Issue 6

Notes from the Editor
Cover Art:  by Darrell Urban Black, featured artist
Page 1:  Hugh Anderson    Louise Barden   Gabriella Brand   Darrell Urban Black
Page 2:  Lauren Camp   Thomas Cannon     Maureen Eppstein    Saoirse Love   Abigail George    Darrell Urban Black    Kathleen Hellen
Page 3:   Janina Azra Karpinska      Kate LaDew   Yvonne Higgins Leach   Marietta McGregor  Darrell Urban Black
Page 4:   Kristen McLaughlin   Marcy McNally      Calida Osti   Melanie Perish   Marjorie Power   Darrell Urban Black
Page 5:  Maria Rouphail   Penelope Scambly Schott     Sarah Dickenson Snyder   Elaine Sorrentino   Alex Stolis
Page 6:   Doug Stone    Laura Lee Washburn   Rosalind Weaver   Lynn White    Back Page with Darrell Urban Black

Lauren Camp

The Creation of Altruism

The garden has become overrun already
with feverfew caught with rosemary
planted from a scoop off a woman’s garden: medicinals
plot next to yucca, an altar sits in the midst
of trampled grasses, healing spooned
to violence. My friend Colleen, the one
with cancer quietly occupying her body
while she puts in the last teaching terms
at the college, loves yucca, the way light shifts
insistent against it. Cavalier, pointed. The needles
on our plants are constantly
expanding; volunteers press in and jut up. Colleen never smiles
anymore. Not at the garden she’s toiled—dividing,
unearthing. The house she dug
to foundation and under. She hacked out
a wall and put in new windows. That home is not
luxury, but she made the curtains
and satisfactions and roasts. For years
she has wrestled the extraneous
branches, a concrete path. She won’t die
there. Hates that corner she sees
over the twice stolen
television. The series of shootings and desperate
drug deals. She craves
a new home—safe
and pretty, she says, sheepish. She is often lost
inside the pulse of death,
even when we are together eating good cheese. Why
do we resist what we want?
The end comes forward but doesn’t ask
for her yet. Fall is here in the russets and each ache
of wind. How like a blur
what’s about to be missing.

 

Commonplace Redemption

We are always just east of the breeze
with its lush rash of pollen, its sheaves again pitched

to the latest dead rabbit’s girding
and the landscape where we keep burying

our sorrows in out-of-the-way destinations
while summer spits its siren of heat

on stones that lay in and collar the path.
We curse when the sun guns past the coyote fence

and accents our fair selves. Sky corners list and cast
on greened-up elms, and already I’m busking

for winter, its wandering chill
instead of this flammable self. To be fair, I try

to remember the benefit. At the edge of my calf
a ribbon of bees takes juice

from the throne of some blossoms.
Hummingbirds skin by, mischievous, merry

and am I not joyous watching them close in,
zip around? I am! The holy rhythm of this multiplicity.

 

Lauren Camp is the author of One Hundred Hungers (Tupelo Press, 2016), which won the Dorset Prize and was named a finalist for the Arab American Book Award and the Housatonic Book Award; Turquoise Door (3: A Taos Press, 2018) and two previous collections. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Terrain.org, North American Review and The Account. She lives and teaches in New Mexico. www.laurencamp.com

Thomas Cannon

Of Music and Dancing

After the silence,
the two person polka band
began to play.
In that way she spoke
telling us of music and dancing
on plywood dance floors under tents.
And of herself.
Her old friend sang with fading voice,
but Delores refused to have a solemn occasion.
How Great Thou Art
came only after Hoop De Doo.
Music filled the funeral home
Slow, constant sound,
persistent backbeat
bellowing cords
honest, unspoken words.
moved heel to toe in my mind.

 

Thomas Cannon‘s story about his son is the lead story in Cup of Comfort for Parents of Children with Autism. His novel The Tao of Apathy is on Amazon. He is published in: The Battered Suitcase, Midwestern Gothic, On the Premises, Freedom Fiction Journal, Corvus Review and others. He is the co-host of the local TV show Author Showcase in Oshkosh, Wisconsin and each year he helps put on the Lakefly Writers Conference.

Maureen Eppstein

Daughters

My stillborn daughter
disappeared for thirty years.

When finally I named her,
learned to mourn,
women the age she would have been
began to show up in my life
bearing other names
and other faces.

Some of them would joke
and call me “Mom.”
I’d laugh with them, imagining
I heard that unheard voice.

I loved them all
like daughters.

 

Maureen Eppstein has three poetry collections: Earthward (Finishing Line Press), Rogue Wave at Glass Beach (March Street Press) and Quickening(March Street Press). Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Originally from Aotearoa/New Zealand, she now lives on the Mendocino Coast of California. Her website is www.maureeneppstein.com.

Abigail George

For you I would be insane and lovely
at the same time

–for the Dutch poet Joop Bersee, with love

Here’s looking at you at fifty. You’re
‌   fifty still living in your parents’ house.
‌   You’re not happy. You’re living in the
‌   shade of your sister’s happiness. She
‌‌   left you years ago, ventured out into
‌   the world on her own. You still think
‌   you’ll get better in therapy. You still
‌   hate your own face, and sharp objects.
‌   Steak knives with their cool, clean, pure-
‌   serrated edges. Masters of none-and-
everything. Masters of Jericho, Ruth. Boaz.
‌   The dreams you once had, you dream of
‌   them still. They’re like paper flowers.

‌   And your voice is like the agreements
‌   between them. Full of secrets, a fading
‌   sunlight of day paying attention to the
‌   resonant branches and their tensing
‌   melody. You think back to all the hurt,
‌   despondency, useless slipping-away-
‌   from-you-frustration, (honest), and it
‌   moves inside of you like the first man
‌   who molested you. You go under the sea,
‌   and become pure again (an innocent).
‌   Your hair dark lines, and haywire all
‌   over your face. The road home all-pepper-
‌   and-potholes. You’re still scared of

‌   the dark. Yes, yes, you’re still scared of
‌   the dark. And you’re all feminine-and-
masculine (girl with her hair cut like a boy). Still
‌   you long for the safe truth of women.
‌   What did you do with the angels I gave
you. I think of the coconut oil on my mother’s
‌   hands as she combed and braided my hair
‌   when I was a little girl. There’s a little
‌   girl in the advertisement I’m watching
‌   on television. It’s about hair. It’s about
‌   hair. It’s about hair. African hair, whatever
‌   that means. Oil, sheen, relaxer cream, and I’m looking
‌   at the Portuguese man again who gave
me the eye in Johannesburg all those years ago.

‌   I think about his smile that lit up my face,
his light-blue sweater as he leaned over
‌   the counter, and I think of the hair on his

‌   hands, his arms, the hair on his chest there
sticking out like a triangle. I think of his
‌   European-lover-face, and how I went up in

‌   smoke that day. How sexy he made me
feel, how beautiful, and desired, this Captain Fantastic
‌   in the paradise that was Johannesburg then.

 

Pushcart Prize nominated Abigail George is a South African blogger, essayist, poet and short story writer. Recipient of grants from the NAC, the Centre for the Book and ECPACC, her work is forthcoming across Africa in Africanwriter.com, Bakwa, Jalada, New Coin, New Contrast, the New Ink Review, and Nthanda Review.

Darrell Urban Black

Six Pathways to Parallel Existence

Kathleen Hellen

you said you dreamed you had a sister

—how did you know

it was a long time ago
before I dreamed you 

like an echo in the cells
dim gills nub-fingers

the way the dolphin locates krill
the she cells shed
in amniotic spill

a reflection—nerve, bone, clenched
cartilage scooting backward
dragged into the basin like a cradle
sometimes the basin’s a cradle

—how did you guess
a tiny fist
raw-red
in the trauma of
the jelly/in the tempest of
the stem/in the sinew of
the grey umbilical 

a memory
in saline’s solution

a long time ago
when the body’s not your own 

the drug they gave me to forget 

 

Kathleen Hellen is the author of The Only Country was the Color of My Skin (2018), the award-winning collection Umberto’s Night, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra, and Pentimento.

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