Willawaw Journal Fall 2019 Issue 7

Issue 7, Fall 2019, offers a cornucopia of beauty, diversity, insight, and depth of feeling–from all over the world, poets are sharing a wealth of spirit. Never have I felt the poet’s work to be more timely. These artists have tapped into the collective consciousness and subconscious, drawing forth to the reader a knowing that transcends the boundaries of our complacency.

Joanna Townsend’s “Somewhere near Odessa, 1900s” inspired response poems about Russia :  Buff Whitman-Bradley writes about “Looking for Chekov”; Maria Muzdybaeva, “Another One for the White Nights”. Other poets wrote to the theme of departure: Lynda Tavakoli‘s “Reach”; Maria Rouphail‘s “Heading West”; Vivienne Popperl‘s “First Winter in Kopjes”; Lavinia Kumar’s “Not Voyaging to Brooklyn”; Tricia Knoll‘s “Why Would You Want to Move 3003 Miles to Vermont?” and Lisa Hase-Jackson’s “You Find Yourself in Kansas City”. Still other poets wrote to the departure of loved ones.

Enjoy these and several other poems in this issue. Doug Stone and Diana Pinckney offer some stunning ekphrastic poems. Also, find the first Willawaw Folio at the end of the journal which focuses on the artwork of Hokusai. Martin Willitts Jr. takes us through a handful of the artist’s “stations” around Mt. Fuji, writing in Haibun and assuming the persona of the artist.

I have found the work in this issue to be a great companion as I turn inward, with the equinox, toward the “dark time” of these increasingly shorter days. I hope you find some of the same resonance and satisfaction.

Warmly,
Rachel Barton

 

silphium

They found the seventy six statues
left at Cyrene, and were there coins
scattered at their feet, bearing the signs
of the herb? Did the shapes reveal that
something like love might be there still?

I would whisper to the hedgerows
of the days when I would leave home
and though I knew nothing of that ancient land
or the smell of silphium, I knew
I was coming here, to this city,
where they sell Christmas trees from concrete lots,
where the burnt-neon buses run through the night,
where there are smaller cities inside the big city,
made of tents and trolleys and trash.

I knew I was headed your way,
that to make that perfect ideograph
our valves would be made ready
to be coerced from us and combined.
Carthage and Alexandria drove Cyrene to ruin
and Cyrene harvested silphium until there was no more
but with a doodle of your initials I capture the shape
and there is love still, here, on the other side of the world.

Shannon Wolf is a British writer living in Lafayette, Louisiana, who earned her MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster University and is currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at McNeese State University. Her poetry, short fiction and non-fiction, which can also be found under the name Shannon Bushby, have appeared in, or is forthcoming from Gravel, The Forge Lit Mag, and Great Weather for Media, among others.

Raft

It’s almost like it’s not my own memory
but borrowed from someone else, who in turn
had to rent it. We were maybe twelve,
my best friend and me, tied into our seat belts,
jostling along together in the backseat of her parents’
wood panelled Ford station wagon. The gravel road,
because we were not familiar with it, went on for hours,
and is still vibrating a part of me that remains tethered.

The road, as we travelled, narrowed,
and the overhanging fringe of the Boreal Forest
gently drew closed her jowls around us.
Her mouth was damp and smelled exquisitely of moss.
We snuggled into what remained familiar of our old selves,
and peered forward through the bug-splattered windshield,
with fear and curiosity.

To one last dying crunch of gravel
they parked the car in a rudimentary clearing
which, for the week, housed our slightly derelict wooden cabin.
As though the cabin were only cursory, beside that
the larger expanse, Lake Manitou, shone in the sun,
a vast, dented and fire-stained aluminum pan,
the small black raft floating upon the hackled shining waters
beckoning us to it, the flat floating conveyance pupil-like,
hovering densely and loosely over depths,
beneath depths.

Erin Wilson‘s poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Review, Envoi, Kestrel, A Journal of Literature and Art, On the Seawall, The Honest Ulsterman, The Adirondack Review, Natural Bridge, and elsewhere. For a while, she and her husband, also a writer, owned a farmhouse in Wabash, Indiana. They now live and write in a small town in northern Ontario, Canada.

Directions to Canaan

Passports from other worlds
are used to travel this one
passports issued in foreign tongues
unheard by ordered understanding
whisper to sleepers in forgotten dreams.
Oh Holy Subconscious!
To Thee I bow,
Sustainer of the game, Your rules curving
out of reach, creating a miracle of trust,
each creature treading earth’s crust
a satellite of the center miles below.
Two poles and a swing between-–
a sign, if only we knew.

Light Behind a Blind

–in the manner of Emily Dickinson

Behind a blind a light switched on–
too dim for me to see
who stirred upstairs before the dawn
and rose invisibly.
Did the sleeper face the day
unwillingly, with dread–
or race past clock time, keen to say
the song inside her head?
Our parts are just our history
but–still–we read them cold.
Deep into this mystery–
what light could crack the mold?
Worm-wise warblers tweet and twerk
the news–pellucent Spring!
We fly by faith–it’s always worked–
like them, we flap our wings.

Mike Wilson, a writer living in Lexington, Kentucky, has had work published in small magazines including Appalachian Heritage, Solidago, Frogpond, Cagibi, Stoneboat, and The Aurorean.

Looking for Chekhov