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 August

For Willawaw Journal, Spring 2022, the poem prompt is “Sweat” by Montana Poet Laureate Sandra Alcosser. The editor invited artists and poets to respond to this poem with its lush imagery–sounds, smells, and visuals–wow!. General submissions are also welcome.

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Poet Laureate Poem Prompt—Spring 2022–Sandra Alcosser

We hope Sandra Alcosser’s poem “Sweat” 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, something driven by the sense of smell or by other richly imagistic language.

Photo Credit: The Missoulian

Sweat

Friday night I entered a dark corridor
rode to the upper floors with men who filled
the stainless elevator with their smell.

Did you ever make a crystal garden, pour salt
into water, keep pouring until nothing more dissolved?
A landscape will bloom in that saturation.

My daddy’s body shop floats to the surface
like a submarine. Men with nibblers and tin snips
buffing skins, sanding curves under clamp lights.

I grew up curled in the window of a 300 SL
Gullwing, while men glided on their backs
through oily rainbows below me.

They torqued lugnuts, flipped fag ends
into gravel. Our torch song
had one refrain–oh the pain of loving you.

Friday nights they’d line the shop sink, naked
to the waist, scour down with Ajax, spray water
across their necks and up into their armpits.

Babies have been conceived on sweat along–
the buttery scent of a woman’s breast,
the cumin of a man. From the briny odor

of black lunch boxes–cold cuts, pickles,
waxed paper–my girl flesh grows.
From the raunchy fume of strangers.

Credit: Sandra Alcosser,”Sweat” from Except By Nature. Copyright © 1998 by Sandra Alcosser. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.

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