Willawaw Journal Fall 2018 Issue 4

After The Restraining Order Expires,
M. Begs Me To Meet Him For Lunch

Tlaltecutli By Starlight in Puerto Escondido

Los Angeles poet, Alexis Rhone Fancher, is published in Best American Poetry 2016, Verse Daily, Plume, Rattle, Nashville Review, Glass, Tinderbox, and elsewhere. She’s the author of four books of poetry. A multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, Fancher is also poetry editor of Cultural Weekly. Her latest book is Enter Here.

Brady Chambers is a printmaker and artist from the Willamette Valley. Chambers grew up in the skate and punk culture and in his early teens was introduced to the medium of screen printing. After a 25 year career in commercial and industrial screen printing, he now owns his own studio, Independent Print Works, where he produces high quality, short-run, paper and textile images. He teaches screen printing at OSU in the evenings. Or he may be behind the bar at the neighborhood pub. You can also find him on Instagram at Mixed Species or at Mixed Species.com

James, I Tried Your Arms, But…

… the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning.
James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

When each “What for?” limped my tongue with its frost,
just a few buds, hidden below hard leaves, could
bloom and, visited by a rare bee, ripen into seed.

It took time to see how
discipleship had shackled my soul.

But my mind, fertile, flexible, firmly rooted,
vast as a marsh of bulrushes
and my heart, that wild azalea, splayed open,
pulsing its spicy-tart scent into the breeze,

conversed, considered, resolved to turn
this self-made exile into an immigrant.

My choice: living arms
of bone and flesh. Akido-taught,
I aim to keep my three-point stance:

accepting challenges, I engage
to redirect what was received.

Brigitte Goetze lives in Western Oregon. A retired biologist and angora goat farmer, she now divides her time between writing and fiber work; in either case she spins her own yarns. Her work has been published in print and on the web. Links to recent publications can be found at: brigittegoetzewriter.com.

The Weight of so Much Compassion

I chew the two slices of bacon that came with my lite breakfast and think about the people who hear voices and the slender margin between them and me –

birds with asymmetrical feathers fly better. I don’t know where I learned this, but I know it’s true. When I straighten my shoulder

I limp. My shoulder is leaning more to the right, but when my sweater slipped off a man took notice: I married him and I love when a book

starts with a family tree; sometimes I spend more time studying the family tree than reading the book. I scream

at the trees for stealing all the light; I hate how they knit above me, spitting sap everywhere, a private joke they share and maybe

the trees look innocent, but I will never forget the displacement of air, the long boom, tiny eggs cracking

I wait at the therapist’s office. A blond girl lets out a gusty sigh while a man thumbs his phone. A click, a red light and I cannot stay awake; I started knitting

a scarf to help me stay awake; the scarf is long and red and contains inexplicable holes.

It rolls up on the sides and I think about how some families can curl their tongues. We’re like a family here in the therapist’s office, a real family I mean; we hardly speak and no one makes eye contact but aren’t we

looking for communion? All of us, asymmetrical birds with our dense family trees, riding too fast on our bikes, arms outstretched and grinning like mad at that dim future

we who bear the dents of gravity on our bodies, the weight of so much compassion.

Erica Goss’s books are Night Court, winner of the 2016 Glass Lyre Poetry Prize, Vibrant Words, and Wild Place. She lives in Eugene, Oregon. Please visit her at www.ericagoss.com.

Grandmother, Cleaning Rabbits

I shot this one by the upper pond of the farm
after watching the rings trout made rising
to flies, watching small birds pace the backs
of cows, hoping all the time she would run.

My grandmother told me they damaged her garden.

I think it was a way to make the killing
lighter. She never let me clean them, only asked
I bring them headless to her. I bring this one
to the fir block near the house, use the single-
bitted axe with the nick in the lower crescent
of the blade, smell the slow fire
in the smoke-house, salmon changing
to something sweet & dark. A fly turns
in a bead of blood on my boot. I tuck
the head in a hole beside the dusty globes
of ripened currants, talk quiet to the barn cat.

In her kitchen my grandmother whets the thin blade
of her Barlow, makes a series of quick, clever cuts, then tugs
off the skin like a child’s sweater. This one was
pregnant. She pulls out a row of unborn rabbits
like the sleeve of a shirt with a series of knots.
The offal is dropped in a bucket. Each joint gives way
beneath her knife as though it wants
to come undone, as though she knows some secret
about how things fit together. I have killed
a hundred rabbits since I was eight.

This will be the last.

I am twenty, & about to go back
to the war that killed my cousin in Kin Hoa,
which is one more name she can’t pronounce.
I haven’t told her about the dead,
and she won’t ask. She rolls the meat
in flour & pepper & salt, & lays it
in a skillet of oil that spits like a cat.
She cannot save a single boy who carries a gun.
All she can do is feed this one.

Samuel Green, poet and editor, writes about the Pacific Northwest landscape “with accessible, elemental observations of life’s small turns.” He has written eleven collections of poetry, including Washington State Book Award winner The Grace of Necessity (2008) and Vertebrae: Poems 1978–1994 (1997). More information about Green is available here.

Grocery Store

The grocery store is full of
what he needs to continue existing.
It doesn’t say a thing about why he should.

He doesn’t understand the smile
on the face of the guy in the mobile wheelchair
as he rolls between the chilly winds
of the dairy aisle.

Does it matter what brand of coffee he buys?
Or cornflakes? Or salad dressing?
The labels seem to think so.
He tore away his own label years before.
It was the word “goodbye” that made him do it.

The wheelchair guy has no help with him,
not even a service dog.
He can only reach the lower shelves
so many of his decisions are made for him.
He doesn’t have to stand
before a sparkling rainbow of soda bottles
and wonder which will rot his guts the least.
Maybe that’s what he’s so happy about.
Not having to stand.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Examined Life Journal, Evening Street Review, and Columbia Review, with work upcoming in Harpur Palate, Poetry East and Visions International.