Willawaw Journal Fall 2018 Issue 4

Oh, Olive!

Some of those things
that come out of your mouth.
Your honest, pithy repartee.
The moments when you can
tell your point struck
in the small center,
yet you continued to push
down on the blade.
But I can tell that it pierces
you, too, as you leave your prey
raw and bleeding
with your feigned indifference,
your sharp look of dismissal.

Many times I try to put myself
in your place, imagining how
you’d been hurt somewhere
in that Kitteridge Clan.
And little by little it seeped out—
a father who’d committed suicide,

a mother who couldn’t cope.
But you, you seemed to sacrifice
your first-born son without mercy.
You cried once or twice on the outside,
yet I wonder about the overflowing
rain that fills within—internal edges
gaping, broken with rust.

My mother was like you,
with her caustic retorts, a screen
for her scars—repelling the ones
she needed the most.
Your quiet, compliant husbands.
I mourned for her even while she lived.
Even in the nursing home,
I reminded her to be kinder to the staff,
but she said, It’s too late, I don’t know how.
Folks like you both, Olive,
like you and my mom—
that steel facade that made you
fierce, unyielding.

I want to believe
you both cry
from the joy
of seeing
what your children
have become—
my mother’s grave,
the only headstone
in our small-town cemetery
covered with a mildew,
not even the caretaker
can wipe
away.

Marilyn Johnston is a writer and filmmaker. She has received a fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts, a Robert Penn Warren prize from the New England Writers, and was selected to be a Fishtrap Fellow.  Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Salem, Oregon.

Alice Martin-Kunkle is a prize-winning Northwest clay artist and photographer who currently lives on the Oregon coast. She is one of the owners of For ArtSake Gallery at Nye Beach in Newport where you can find more of her work. 

Audumla

No grass for you to munch in Ginnungagap,
this empty land.  No trees to lie beside,

chew your cud in dappled sunshine.  Lost in fog,
you graze endless pastures of ancient, salty ice.

Rivers of milk flow from your four udders.
You suckle Ymir, mighty hermaphrodite,

find Buri lying on his back, entombed.  Gusts
of your cow-breath defrost his matted beard.

Swipes of your slurping tongue thaw his cheeks.
Buri, rebirthed to this warming wasteland.

Buri, grandfather of Odin, Vili, Ve, who slay Ymir,
cast his gray blood to form the seas, his bones

the gray mountains and cliffs, his skull the sky
and clouds of our nine worlds.  Great cow,

mother of all we see, awakened in this place,
you feed a race of giants, free a race of gods.

Ice of a past world converts to your cream.
Your next spheres rise under Surtr’s flame.

 

Her Words in the Desert

Like bats in evening, they fly
from the dry cave of her mouth.
Sand is deep on the floor.
Water once smoothed her arid features,
but no more.

How they once rippled
across the stones of my heart.
Alone in our canoe,
we drifted the river, the long route
to the edges of its meanders.

Damselflies skimmed.
Anasazi dwellings,
like nests of ancient swallow people,
perched on storied cliffs above us.
Sunlight slanted across the waters
of our morning.

Karen Jones is a teacher, poet, and life-long learner from Corvallis, Oregon.  Some of her past work has appeared in Tower Poetry, River Poets Journal, Paperplates Magazine, and Willawaw Journal.

Let’s Say It’s Tuesday

A small town under examination.
It occupies the corner of a memory,
where time’s sawdust accrues
and spiders entertain visions.

A camera cranes in a high arc.
We see each slat and eave.
We tumble through doorsills,
tap on windows, slump against walls.
For the sake of argument
let’s say it’s Tuesday, long after dark,
midnight creeping along.
Summer has ended and autumn hit hard,
the last of the strangers departing
for the cities’ wider boulevards.

And let’s suggest there’s music,
the intertext of subtle ambiance,
a light wind chortling,
none of which is noticed
by those pressed listlessly to their slumber,
surfacing rarely from the deep waters
of sleep’s sanctions, actors
in a part but forgetting their lines
and the play long closed.
And the theatre darkened.

 

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician currently residing on Salt Spring Island BC, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with well over a thousand poems published internationally in magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. His books are ‘The So-Called Sonnets (Silenced Press), ‘An Unbecoming Fit Of Frenzy’ (Cawing Crow Press), ‘Like As If” (Pskis Porch), and Hearsay (The Poet’s Haven).

Mexican Fever Dream

The lack of you
unbearable

My tea cold
My feet cold

My sleep cold
My mind mushy

Five minutes out of
an hour I get relief

and then my eyes
yank open.

I’ve been eating avocado for a week
I dry the seeds; I grind the seeds
I mix the seeds; I drink the seeds

I see you in a delirium
Me bathed in red

You swooping across the frozen Lerma River
With me in tow… laughing as we fall

I scurry up to the top of a mesa
Where I see the mountain lion stalk

It’s you. It’s you!

Josh Medsker‘s writing has appeared in many publications, including: Contemporary American Voices, Haiku Journal, Red Savina Review, and Virga. For a complete list of Medsker’s publications, please visit his website (www.joshmedsker.com)

The Vegetarian Dismembers a Chicken

There’s no good way to do it,
snapping the ribs under the delicate
breast, shoulder bones and their pearl ends.
I’d rather this went faster.

But the wings that moved a little,
if it ever had room to run,
refuse to come away. The knife and I
together can barely bruise a leg
backward as if a car had nailed it.

And here, the heart like a slender thumb
and the lobed liver, wet as pudding,
but shaped with a strange intelligence.

It’s a world of sacrifice: the cat
to the coyote, the deer to the boulevard,
damp hands of steam pushing the windows,
my mother asking for the one last thing
she might be able to taste. It’s April,
and the surgeon showed us the shadow
while outside the clinic, lilacs popped
their innocent heads against the fence.