Willawaw Journal Fall 2019 Issue 7

I thought it was only me feeling empathy

(for Mishka and Stuart Hoosen-Lewis)

The sea’s green eyes watch me with care.
I have to get my soul out of here, the river is here
now swallowing me whole, meta lost in translation.
Then there are the difficulties of being a young
mother, eating liver. I go under the water of the
river, I drown in despair, hardship, tumult, the
romantic earth thinking of what truth sounds like. It is lit, cause
or something beautiful, something divine. Leaf
falls and the tall man catches it. The lonely woman
kisses his cheek, but he refuses to be drawn into
her shadow, her inner music, she must look for a
new home, men in suits despise her for her lack of
sexual expertise, women in clothes don’t want to
be her friend. The lonely woman looks bad in a
dress, in a skirt she looks as if she’s trying too hard,
as if she’s making waves, but no one looks at her.
Not the tall man, not the thin man, not the dark
man, and not the sad man. Like a machine, she is
half-formed by the virgin sea, by sex, by dirt, by grace.
The lonely woman is in search of tenderness,
love, a first love, some bright energy that can
heal her pain and suffering, the sorrow in her eyes,
and she thinks of leaves falling, and the tall man
catching those leaves in his hat, with a smile on
his face, a smile that doesn’t meet his eyes. The
men don’t care anymore. The men don’t love her
anymore. And now, she must become death, and life,
change perspective, become cultured and love
the sea creatures that surround her on her educated
island. They have no more conversation for her, the
men, the men, the men dazzle her, but there’s no
room for her in their mansions to grow, to consider,
to laugh, and smile, and play, and all she knows
is running away, and all she knows is to be laughter,
and fragile, and chef. Her voice never sounds like
that with me, declares one man, the fattened ghost
with his multiculturalism quotes, his isms, his museum,
his ephemera. And the clock in the wall is an
animal, and the windows are Rwandan, her poetry
is an elixir, but all the men, all the men do not
care for her, or love her anymore. They have shut
the door on her minority. She is an accident waiting
to happen, waiting to be kissed. There was
something pure about the day, but when bad mothers
happen, bad mothers happen, and daughters who
have bad mothers do not become lovers, do not
call Romeo, and prose is food for thought, food
for the soul, and the title of her novel is in gold lettering
but she doesn’t care, because the men are like air.

 

In Pétra

the black shadows of women
pass. I cannot tell
if they are the shadows of ancestors
or the women who live in the small
white-washed houses along
the village road that runs
down the coast and then branches
off through the square to
scurry up the mountain. The
houses rise up like houseplants
slowly growing and extending
their reach up and down the path
to spread out over its dirt
or cobblestone, houses that cast
shadows, long, hard shadows,
deliberate and unforgiving. I peer around
their corners and catch a glimpse
of a woman lowering the latch
of her gate, wild flowers weedily
growing along her path,
and then she is gone. The road
is empty of people. A stray
cat scurries across the path.
I hear goat bells in the distance
as though the past were living
in the silence of my trespassing.

 

A Look at Moving

At first, it is only a place to visit, far
wilder than the place you live—cliff, beach,
and secret coves teeming with fish and silver

octopi, roads high into the mountains,
where few expect to see you, except in passing,
but your heart has found a vessel for wandering,

a land with its hand out, its men roughed and sexy,
its women welcoming and warm, at first. Seems
even the shepherd can find a greeting for you,

even the priest, if you’re lucky. Who wouldn’t
want to live where the fishermen pull up to the dock
each morning with buckets of barboúnia,

where the reef holds silken waves of sea urchins;
and the groves, thousands of pungent olive trees?
Why would anyone not want to stay?

When winter curls up in a wave in September and
roars down the beach, you’re aware of what may be
coming. The dogs hurry in packs under the faint moon,

and the half-deserted taverna serves only to the men
in the village. The women in black move from window
to window, hall to hall, checking that the latch on the door

is up, that the supper left early on is waiting for someone
to come home hungry. Their own hunger is a secret gnaw
on the bone of night, with a hole in the sky, with a witness

to what goes on outside, before the unwelcome season
comes, before the last tourists leave, except for one—
and you are looking at moving again.

 

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee is the author of Intersection on Neptune (The Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2019), winner of Prize Americana, and On the Altar of Greece (Gival Press, 2006), winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award and recipient of a 2007 Eric Hoffer Book Award: Notable for Art Category. Her poetry has appeared in publications internationally, including The Bitter Oleander, Cimarron Review, Feminist Studies, and The Massachusetts Review. She lives in New Jersey.

“She”–9″x7″ oil and acrylic on discarded paper

Merlin Flower is an independent artist and writer from India. Find her on twitter: @merlinflower

Artist statement

Once done, the paintings are out in the open. Independent and strong, they seem to live in a different world. To call it the artist’s own would be far from the truth. Often, a stranger arrives in the painting to stay. The paintings may or may not get sold immediately; they may reach a friend or stay with me or linger a bit more on social media…

Containers

Roots form trees.
Trees form leaves.
Leaves form shadows
that hold memories
I wade through
with no path out.
Sunlight dapples
and rays blind.
I thrash through
brush to awaken
at grove’s edge,
look out across
a hay field, at pond’s
calm surface,
another pool
of secrets to wade into
when I reach
water’s edge.

 

Between Secrets

A short walk from
tree’s darkness to
pond’s shore, I stand
a giant at water’s
edge.  Waves slap
a furious rhythm,
my toes barely
damp, my body
a tower that throws
a long shadow
back toward woods.
I contemplate
another deep mystery,
wait for water
to calm and reflect
my own countenance
toward an empty sky.

 

Richard Dinges earned an MA in literary studies from University of Iowa, and manages information systems risk at an insurance company.  Home Planet News, Oddball Magazine, Studio One, North Dakota Quarterly, and Gravel hold his most recently published poems.

Small

I never missed stars
until I felt their absence.
Here, the horizon is
littered with skyscrapers
and strung with windows
of perfect symmetry,
Millions of piercing electric eyes
much too close to resemble
the distant pinpricks of galaxies
whose red planets, not yet seen,
await discovery.
Although an edifice of masoned stone may
overwhelm with size and power
perhaps it is more real to feel small
under an expansive night sky
among the rooted switchgrass on the lonely prairie
where space does what it does,
to see that even what we know of stars
is not beautiful enough.

Rachel DeVore Fogarty is a freelance musician, composer and poet in Astoria, NY.  Her poetry will appear this fall in Ancient Paths, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, and Transcend: A Literary Magazine. 

Acidic Truth

The problem with the last Creole tomato
sandwich of the season is that you never
know that you’ve just eaten it. Even as July
comes to an end, you convince yourself
that there’s still a basket at a roadside stand,
or a leftover bin at the grocery store.
And so you continue to reverently devour
them, but perhaps not reverently enough,
and one day—you discover that they are gone.
You have eaten them all, and now
you have to wait almost a year for the next
appearance of what must be the tomatoes
they eat in heaven—the huge, red near-globes
whose slices appear geologic in their juicy
complexity. You know the pleasure has to end,
but your wishful thinking—like a light sprinkling
of salt and a sharp grind of pepper—brings
out the essence of your desire, and you forget,
for a moment, that the seasons always change.