Willawaw Journal

Online Poetry & Art

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Willawaw Journal

Willawaw Journal is an online magazine for poetry and art, published twice a year–Fall 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 Closed Until February

For Willawaw Journal, Fall 2022, the poem prompt is “It was the Summer of Hard Tomatoes” by Moscow, Idaho, Poet Laureate Stacy Boe Miller. The editor invited artists and poets to respond to this poem, maybe on the state of your tomatoes, or to the pulling inward as you or someone you love makes a big or the biggest transition. General submissions are also welcome.

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Poet Laurea Poem Prompt—Fall 2022–Stacy Boe Miller

We hope Stacy Boe Miller’s poem “It was the Summer of Hard Tomatoes” 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.

 

It was the Summer of Hard Tomatoes

sucking into themselves like I shied
inward when asked, How
is your father? like my father’s shoulders

collapsed toward his ribs.
I rubbed them softly
while mom magneted
Do Not Resuscitate

to the fridge. I learned
to sleep everywhere—plastic
chairs, a bench at the end
of his hospital bed,
even with the fourth of July
outside, helicopters daily
landing on the roof. I pulled

food into myself with a new
desperation—dark pudding with skin
on top, papery rice noodles,
fresh cherries until
I was sick. In the last days,

his mind went back
to work. He worried about the concrete
truck waiting, asked my mom to feed
his crew, fell asleep exhausted from
cleaning out the shop. I watched

his hands move in his sleep, his lips
fretting measurements. It’s OK, my mother said,
just let your father work.

 

This poem was first published in the Bellingham Review, June 2022, and is reprinted 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. 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