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Willawaw Journal Winter 2017 Issue 2

The second issue of Willawaw Journal features a hybrid of poetry and image as well as poetry in response to Poet Laureate Lawson Fusao Inada's "Everything."
Cover Art: Rose of Sharon, by Lorelle Otis (artist statement on back page)
First Page: Editor's Notes  Carolyn Adams   Deborah Bacharach with Keiko Hara   Devon Balwit  Eleanor Berry
Second Page: Jonah Bornstein   Lisa Marie Brodsky   Linda Cheryl Bryant with Zsazan   Tiffany Buck   Corinne Dekkers  Darren C. Demaree    
Third Page:  Steve Dieffenbacher   Salvatore Difalco  John Van Dreal   Judith Edelstein  Amelia Diaz Ettinger   David Felix
Fourth Page:  Delia Garigan   Abigail George   Brigitte Goetze  Audrey Howitt   Lawson Fusao Inada   Clarissa Jakobsons
Fifth Page: Colin James   Marc Janssen   M. Johnsen   Jola Jones   Shirley Jones-Luke   Michael Lee Johnson
Sixth Page: Matthew A. Jonassaint  Tim Kahl   J. I. Kleinberg   Joy McDowell   Catherine McGuire   Amy Miller
Seventh Page:   Lorelle Otis   Jerri Elliott Otto   Sue Parman   Diana Pinckney Bart Rawlinson  Leslie Rzeznik with Lewis Carroll
Eighth Page:  Yumnam Oken Singh   Sarah Dickerson Snyder   Barbara Spring   Andy Stallings   R. S. Stewart   Doug Stone
Ninth Page:   Patty Wixon  Vince Wixon  Maddie Woda  Matthew Woodman    Back Page with Lorelle Otis

Patty Wixon

Red Shoes

‌    A little trick we have or have not learned–Jim Harrison

1.
In Anchorage, she put her maroon boots by the bed
in case she needed to run when an earthquake hit.
She woke feeling the bed rocking like a hammock.
Would buildings collapse, roads buckle, or bedroom walls
slide side to side before crashing together?
Five hits then it was over. Turnagain-by-the-Sea was gone
as if a giant mouth bit off then spit out those fancy houses
into the ocean below. A megathrust underwater landslide
came inland, twisted railroad tracks into Copper River
and rolled to a stop at 4th Street.
2.
In Los Alamitos, she put on her red sneakers ready for a field trip
with her fourth graders. They chased each other on the playground
waiting for the start-of-school bell to ring. That’s when she felt it hit,
knew an earthquake was on the move. She instinctively crawled
beneath her teacher-desk, looked out to see the classroom piano lurch
across the room gaining speed with each sharp report of splitting
tectonic plates. Was the earthquake connected to wearing red shoes?
When it stopped, she ran out to join her students who’d corralled themselves
in the field far from anything that could drop.
3.
Her book group was discussing Women of the Silk when windows began
to rattle. She saw she’d worn her cherry-red flats, said, Must be an earthquake.
No one agreed—there weren’t earthquakes in Ashland.
When the next jolt hit, everyone stood and rushed through the door.
A strange silence followed her through town and when she got home
she opened a window to listen. Then it began: first a boom from distant mountains,
then echoes closer as if rock ridges were clapping, sending sound sliding off crests
of hills. Again a boom shouting, This time the earth is changing.

 

Patty Wixon’s most recent book is Dear Spoon. Her previous collections are Side Effects and Airing the Sheets. In 2014, Patty and her husband Vince received the Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award for contributions to the literary life of Oregon.

Vince Wixon

Neighbors

Michael and Leslie put off building the play fort
in the southeast corner of their land
until the killdeer eggs hatched
and the chicks sprang up and sprinted across the field,
their mother lagging behind crying
and feigning a broken wing.

 

A bear got into the orchard,
tore limbs off the apple tree,
then clawed at the hen coop’s doorframe
and terrified the layers,
who wouldn’t speak until
Michael smoothed their feathers,
and broadcast feed
to urge them down the ramp.

 

One night, within half an hour,
a camera on a tree by the pond
recorded a cougar, bear, bobcat,
two deer, and a skunk parading by
on their way to drink,
eyes glassy from the flash.

 

At the end of a long workday,
Michael and Leslie lie fast asleep,
while a flock of wild turkeys
crowds the back porch,
and the sound of freeway traffic
breaks over like waves rushing to shore.

 

Vincent Wixon’s new book of poems is Laying By, published by Flowstone Press (https://leftfork.org/flowstone/available/). His previous volumes are Blue Moon: Poems from Chinese Lines, The Square Grove, and Seed. He is co-producer of the documentary video, Lawson Inada: What It Means to Be Free.

Maddie Woda

Fun Things to Do in Columbus, Ohio #2:
Spend Downtime Relaxing with Friends

We try to be the girls in the back of the classroom with
blush left over from the night before, furtive when our
dads stumble home from work, but we’ve come this far
as canny and precocious and barefaced. We sound like
a chorus of clicking pens and nail files, chattering over
$10 wine purchased with a fake Louisiana license that
your mother said would only trick the bouncer if he was
legally blind in ten states. We have Ella on in the corner,
crooning with Louis and the band, and detonate one
bomb after another: my mom dreams in Hillary
conspiracy theories, everyone lied about that green
juice bullshit, we each kissed a girl this year but nobody
knows if the smoking gun is at the dinner table with us.
We spear cheap marshmallows on wooden skewers
and dip them in chocolate, grown up campfire treats,
until you mistake your cigarette for dessert and
tap the double burner full of ash. Better in there
than in your lungs, we all shriek as we light up another.

 

Maddie Woda is an undergraduate at Columbia University and has been published or has forthcoming work in Midway Journal, South 85 Journal, and others.

Matthew Woodman

Academic Painting

      –after Rufino Tamayo’s Pintura académica, 1935

Lightning strikes yes sometimes
the artist catches burnt
without scarring but sometimes
high tides with rocks pocket
full of ovens in the head
or bridges to fall what
I mean to say electricity
can surrogate Venus no
but half shell yes and away
I pen I palette the tickled
pink of slipping and standing
still bringing down to earth still
light touch as vulnerable
in one’s disarray juggled
step stumbled right up
release the sprung glimmer
desire sometimes mismatched
collaborate mind could be all

 

Matthew Woodman teaches writing at California State University, Bakersfield and is the founding editor of Rabid Oak. His poems appear in recent issues of Sonora Review, Oxidant/Engine, S/WORD, Sierra Nevada Review, and The Meadow, and more of his work can be found at www.matthewwoodman.com.

Back Page

 Pear, watercolor and poem by Lorelle Otis

Lorelle Otis has been a painter, illustrator, and graphic designer for 45 years and has taught art and design for 32 of those years. These poems are from an ongoing project, A Few of the Ten Thousand Things. All works are watercolor with personally designed and hand-drawn type, composited in Photoshop.

Artist’s Statement:  I discovered mindfulness meditation through painting when I was a teenager. Walking in nature, collecting treasures, drawing, painting, and writing help me to get away from technology and experience the world around me.

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