Willawaw Journal Fall 2019 Issue 7

Not Voyaging to Brooklyn

–Re Brooklyn, Colm Tobin

I was not Ehlish, not a girl
with knit twinset, pearl necklace,
not old enough to dash away
from spiteful employer.

But, like her, I voyaged alone
over the Atlantic, I to a Brookline
doctor family, a five-dollar
seven-day a week mother’s-helper

happy with a green card, on the T
rattling along in darned knee socks,
earning a one-way trip to University
the rails fitting very well.

 

Lavinia Kumar’s books are The Skin and Under (Word Tech, 2015), and The Celtic Fisherman’s Wife: A Druid Life(2017).  Chapbooks are Let There be Color (Lives You Touch Publications, 2016), Rivers of Saris(Main Street Rag, 2013), and Beauty. Salon. Art. (Desert Willow Press, 2019).  Her poetry has appeared in US, Irish, & UK publications.  She is US immigrant from Ireland then England, her husband from India.  Website: laviniakumar.org

Why Would You Want To Move 3,003 Miles to Vermont?

Someone had to ask.
From a place as perfect as Oregon.
Yes, I know about Lyme’s disease,
shots for dogs but not for people,
the yuck pinch-it blood-swell of ticks.
Cold clamps bitter, unrelenting, certain.
They say Vermont has four seasons: freezing
to start, thaw to mud, then bugs,
and leaves that draw peepers up north
in mini-vans that clog the freeways.

Left coast to join lefties on the east side.
Feel the Bern. First state to legalize
gay marriage. The legislature says yes
to marijuana. First ski lift. Ethan Allen
had the gall to attack Montreal.

I know trees and woods. I’ve seen maple
in pipelines, creamees, bacon and cotton candy.
Let me sniff steam in the maple sugar shack.
Let me see the tom with his turkey harem
high-stepping over browned-out pasture.
Or hear the loons moan and trill at Noyes Pond.
Watch the males offer red eyes to the girls.

As for sub-zero’s, I’ll get stoves,
fleeces, flannel, down, and duvets.
As snow tiptoes in on wind, awe
is rain turned to crystal. Rain to skate on.

I can wrap up with poems
of the palace women of China,
Rilke, Szymborska, a library lugged
from Stafford to Frost.

I can migrate from Tillamook
to Cabot cheddar cheese. I believe
in creatures of the deep, Champ.

Vermont is where my daughter is. The girl
who brought home the first deer of the season
while the men went up north to deer camp.
She tagged unblemished road kill,
freshest deer the butcher ever skinned.

 

Buying On-Line With Help from Li Po of the Tang Dynasty

Picking arch supports on the web
makes little sense, you have to wed
your shoe with how you plant your foot.

Socks with stripes is a staple
home delivery. Dresses I’ve bought fit
my image of myself from ten years ago.
Socks are safe. Especially purple and blue.

A doorbell rings. The terrier fires
automatic hysteria at the man
who carries up the fermentation crock
with instructions in French for sauerkraut.
The next day the Amazon woman hands me
a used book in bubble wrap,
selected poems by Li Po
how did I get so like a withered tree?

All well and good for last minute
gifts, lambskin for the newborn,
a gravy ladle for the first-year bride
delivered on Veteran’s Day
in time for Thanksgiving.
I so desire to give you that gift hidden
by the distance to the Heavens.

Now I’m trying to buy a house.
A Vermont farmhouse built in 1850.
After the ancients.
Stone foundation covered with concrete.
No slide show pictures of the bathrooms
or the basement that leaks
when snow melts. Three sump pumps.
A carriage-house barn,
two elderly apple trees,
and a pergola with grapes
I won’t taste for seven months.

Like arch supports, I have to go,
try it on, wiggle my toes in old shag,
hope for the best over the long walk
through this last home and tiptoe
to where the sun sneaks up
through leaking kitchen windows.
Try climbing the sky!

 

Tricia Knoll recently moved from Oregon to Vermont, a distance of 3,003 miles as some bird would fly if it wanted to. She had much to leave behind and more to greet.  Her work appears widely in journals and anthologies; her most recent collection How I Learned To Be White received the 2018 Indie Book Award for Motivational Poetry. Website: triciaknoll.com 

Ritual

My grandmother reads
coffee grounds with two hands
she holds blue and red flowers
of the Turkish coffee cup. First she
presses the saucer against
the ceramic lip and the sound
of hard surfaces rings
through the room. She
flips the two together
for a moment they are dancing
to her hum. My grandmother hums
a low murmur like a chant
to what’s left of the liquid
hums to a pool of silk.
The grounds hold tight
to the walls of the cup
and the shapes tell stories
I will never understand.

I am thirteen and old enough
now to hear my grandmother
read my mother’s cup.
It takes time. They drink
the coffee first with their backs
in chairs my grandmother
embroidered, gifts she gave
when my parents married
and they talk about their lives
this time that has passed.
They talk about place and
the space that fills the distance
to there.
My grandmother holds
my mother’s cup in her hands.
She goes to speak.
We wait in the silence
of her pause

and her drifting gaze.

 

Artist, poet, and freelance writer, J.I. Kleinberg is a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee. Her found poems have appeared in Diagram, Entropy, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Otoliths, What Rough Beast, The Tishman Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, and posts online frequently at The Poetry Department.

What if your job

I fooled myself for years that all the jobs
I worked were better than one long career
because without a career I had more time
to spend not thinking about work. But really,
like you, I’d rather not work at all. What if
we got paid for nothing, not even for doing
things we love to do, like the singer in a band,
where sure, it’s fun but there’s still pressure
to perform, but just for living. There would be
no ties between what you get paid and what
you do. You breathe, you get a check.

Once I got paid for how many pounds of beans
I picked. I could pick more beans than most of
the other workers but I wasn’t any better, just faster
at picking beans. And anyway, all of us were
there just to get some money; who would pick
beans on an early summer morning if you
didn’t have to? We stood in line for the weigher
to weigh our beans, like we were waiting to get
picked for a playground team where you have to
wait until the very end just because you can’t dribble
the ball, waiting in line to see what we were worth.

 

Bill

For just one minute come here,
please come here, to where I am.
For a minute I want to stay
in this place without metaphor,
no embellishment, and tell
you, all of you, some sad thing.
My friend Bill is in a bad way;
his memory is shot and
there’s not a lot left of him.

He’s wandering the halls
of the Aspen Ridge Memory
Care Facility and that’s it;
it’s all he does, kicking
other old people’s asses
around the loop, spitting
on the floor as if he’s
remembering how he spit
on all those long
runs of ours, those long
beautiful runs we’d take
in the mountains. Now
he spits and takes his laps.

I just want to tell you
how hard this is, how
hard it is to slowly lose a friend.
And I know you know this
is about me. You know that.
So I’d like to tell you one
more final thing.
Let me tell you this now
in case I end up like my friend:
I love you all. On behalf of Bill,
we’d like to tell you something:
we love you all.

Casey Killingsworth’s poems have been accepted in Kimera, Timberline Review, COG, and other journals. He has a book of poems, A Handbook for Water, (Cranberry Press, 1995) as well as a book on the poetry of Langston Hughes, The Black and Blue Collar Blues (VDM, 2008). He graduated from Reed College. Casey lives in the Columbia River Gorge.

Memory Care

Tonight I tell Mom about the time
I took a ride from a stranger,
locked my sister out of the house
in the Minnesota snow, clung
to the back of a leather-clad driver
on a speeding motorcycle at midnight
in the middle of West Berlin.
I can finally confess the forbidden tales.
She’ll remember none of them.

And she tells me hers too,
hidden stories of her childhood.
Camping out at a mica mine
in the Rockies while her parents
prospected, fought, blasted,
loaded the truck with shining slabs,
hauled them to Denver. How her mother
traveled through New Mexico
in the ‘20’s, slept beside the road,
shot rattlesnakes with her ‘22.
How her father spent a couple years
in prison after the war.

Outside, dim cubes of fishing shacks
scatter across the frozen lake.
I step into the cold, feel my way
down the icy path in the dark.
The eastern sky glows red,
then flames orange and gold,
ignites evaporating stars.

 

Matryoshka

This mama’s smooth as an egg
in your two-year-old fingers.
Arms fold across her round belly.
Lashes wink under lacquered headscarf,
black eyes gaze into your blue ones.

You pull her apart, surprised to find
secret dolls within.  Bodies, heads spill,
roll the floor.  You try and fit five generations
back together, search for the missing baby,
laugh when you find her, this tiny heart.

Where’s your own mama, little one?
Off to Vegas with a new boyfriend.
She met him on the Internet weeks ago,
hasn’t been back since.  She’s gone,
seeking her fortune, once again.

Baby heart, you’ll need all of these mamas.
May they hold you in their wombs,
keep you from the wolves of your future.
All hearts bleed for you.  All hearts beat for you.
You too have secret lives within.

 

Karen  E. Jones is a teacher, poet, and life-long learner from Corvallis, Oregon.  Her poems have appeared in Tower Poetry, River Poets Journal, Paperplates Magazine, Willawaw Journal, Earth’s Daughters, and Rise Up Review.