Willawaw Journal Spring 2019 Issue 6

First Memory

I asked a friend, What is the earliest memory of your childhood?
She said it was a clear winter day in the city. Said she was dressed
in a flamingo pink snowsuit with appliqued flowers. She wore little
white boots. Her mother and her aunt held each hand as she toddled
down the sidewalk. She asked me, What is the earliest memory of
your childhood? I said, I was in my highchair in the kitchen. My mother
put a powdered sugar donut on the tray, which I promptly picked up
and threw to the floor. I remember wanting to do this. . . .   I clearly
remember wondering, Is this arm mine?  Does this hand belong to me?
I liked the pasty ooze on my fingers squishing the greasy donut, the
act of tossing it without a notion of why, the little puff of sugar smoke
when it hit the floor. I remember the soft sound of the donut exploding
on the tiles, little pieces of pastry breaking away. I remember it was my
left hand that did the throwing. It was the hand that eventually learned
to write. I remember my mother laughed.

 

Maria Rouphail is the author of Apertures (Finishing Line Press, New Women’s Voices) and Second Skin (Main Street Rag). Senior Lecturer Emerita from the English Department at North Carolina State University, Rouphail has published widely, and is the 2019 second place winner in the Nazim Hikmet International Poetry Contest. She is currently at work on her third collection. She lives in Raleigh, NC.

Trying to Show You

 

The horizon makes a perfect circle
with bumps for the mountains.
From up here I can see my house,
two states, and parts of seven counties.
These high wheat fields are golden
even if it sounds like a cliché to say so.
I could use ochre or yellow madder
but really the wheat is intensely golden
and while I’m giving you color words
a red combine comes carving a pattern
through the high ripe wheat,
its red a red between brick and maroon.
Now the combine is headed right at me.
I want to snap a photo with my phone
but the sunlight is so damn brilliant
that I can’t see which symbol to press.
That’s why I have to write this down.
You, reader, aren’t standing with me
so no use shouting Look at this.
I wish I could show it to my dead father
but what good is wishing? Look, I’d say,
how wheat dust rises to float and settle
over headless stubble. Here’s the truth:
I ache to share it with everyone I love.

 

Penelope Scambly Schott is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her most recent book is NOVEMBER QUILT. This poem is from a manuscript in progress about a small wheat-growing town in central Oregon.

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.

 

First printed in Cutthroat:  Truth to Power Special Issue (2017), this poem opens the author’s new collection, Cairn, from Red Hen Press (2018).

Like An Easter Basket Filled with Candy Eggs

Or a stocking stuffed and hanging—
I want you to know if you are reading this
that I looked forward

to speech class, cutting out pictures
in magazines—station wagons, cigarettes,
signs, and sand—creating a field guide

of “S” sounds to say aloud. I loved
this time because you also had a speech
impediment. I can’t remember

what you were cutting out and gluing
to a sheet of cardboard, but I remember
the sound of slicing scissors and the nearness of you.

 

In the Blood

We are all grave diggers,
searching for the bottom,
seeking the clink and clang
of a metal shovel on rock
so that we can stop.
No one knows. Nine out of ten
days camouflage works—
we don’t remember, just go along
our merry way buying glazed donuts
for the poetry workshop, finding
the salmon, lime, and cilantro
for dinner that night. But one day
we wander—long for the light
we hope is there at the end,
hold on, hope to breathe in
another day of not knowing
where we end.

 

Sarah Dickenson Snyder has three poetry collections: The Human Contract; Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018); and With a Polaroid Camera, forthcoming in 2019. Recently, her poems have appeared in Artemis, The Sewanee Review, and RHINO.

The Last Gift

Two daughters,
cross-legged
on the hospital floor,
heads down
focused on their computers;
professors don’t wait
until your mother dies.

Neither will they.

Bedclothes barely
rise and fall,
her form
visibly shrunken,
eyelids closed
indicate
no awareness
of my presence.

It’s not about me.

Her husband
motions
to the empty
chair,
communicating
his wish
for me to sit
and stay a while longer.

He smiles as I comply.

Breaking
heavy silence,
I mention a tape
of peace songs
I’ve compiled.
My favorite, I say?
I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.

It doesn’t appear anyone is listening.

Then her husband
absentmindedly
hums the first line,
and, from the bed,
her small voice
joins in−
in perfect harmony.

The vibe in the room shifts.

The girls’ heads shoot up
from their computers,
as their mother holds the whole world
in her arms,
then they’re on their feet
standing at the side of her bed
as she opens her tired eyes
and keeps them company.

For the moment, smiles all around.

 

Elaine Sorrentino is the Communications Director at South Shore Conservatory in Hingham, MA, where she creates promotional and first-person content for press and for a blog called SSC Musings.  Her poetry has been published in Minerva Rising, The Writers Newsletter, Haiku Universe, Failed Haiku, and won the  August 2018 Wilda Morris poetry challenge.  Her non-fiction piece, “It’s All About Attitude,” took grand prize in the Write a DearReader Contest at reader advisory blog, DearReader.com.

 

Left of the Dial

     –The man on the radio says it is 5 am

You describe being intimate without the details: a loose thread
on a forearm, a tear in the driver’s seat, fresh paint on a canvas
stretched and primed. You want to forget the song you’ll never
meet, forget the: this-is the-last-stop-can’t-wait-to-see-you-I’m
-so -very-wet-for-you scene of the crime. If we were free it would
be the same crutch; another excuse, another story, another planet,
one more falling out. Look out your window. You can almost touch
the pockmarks in the street. Every last detail awash in fog and rain,
melted snow that clings to branches; unaware and unafraid.

 

Alex Stolis lives in Minneapolis and has had poems published in numerous journals. His chapbook based on the last words of Texas Death Row inmates, Justice for all, is forthcoming from Conversation Paperpress (UK). Without Dorothy, There is No Going Home is also forthcoming from ELJ Publications. Most recent releases include an e-chapbook From an iPod found in Canal Park; Duluth, MN from Right Hand Pointing and John Berryman is Dead from White Sky e-books. He has been the recipient of five Pushcart nominations.