Willawaw Journal Fall 2019 Issue 7

If You Were Here Now

I would write down every word you say
and fold them into an origami crane.

Your words would rustle into the air
with a whirring sound like grasshoppers

battering a field of rattling wheat—
each letter a drop of rain.

As the drops spill I catch them
in the cup of my hands

until my thirst is quenched.
I hear your voice in the shush of rain

and I sing along, my head thrown back,
my drenched ears ringing. I smell

your breath in the rain as sorrowful as
the first drops on the surface of water, or dust.

Your words turn into a creek in a coulee,
a river, water coming out of the spigot

in my kitchen where I wash and rewash
plates and bowls and reading glasses—

where I make chicken soup to feed
your children and grandchildren.

Plenty of water is left over
for two dogs yapping at the back door

begging to come in and lie down beside me
on the bed where you used to lie.

 

Mint Julep

The possum isn’t pretending
snug up against the curb
on its bed of leaves
under a blanket of maggots.
I try not to breathe and grasp
his curled pink tail.
It does not come off
when I lift the heft of him
and drop him into a garbage bag.
The maggots wriggle.

Yesterday, I bought mint
at the farmer’s market.
I make mint juleps and mojitos.
Crushed mint infuses
my lingerie with its scent. I mix
mint jelly into vanilla ice cream.
A bouquet of mint and lilies
graces my sideboard.

The man I live with,
the one who should have
cleaned up the possum and will
soon leave me and move to Cuba,
says “there’s such a thing as
too much mint.”

Oregon poet Dale Champlin is the editor the Verseweavers poetry collections and director of Conversations With Writers, a monthly presentation by accomplished writers leading spirited discussions about the craft of writing. Dale has published in VoiceCatcher, North Coast Squid, Willawaw Journal, Mojave River Press, The Voices Project and other publications. During the month of January, 2019, Dale wrote a poem a day as part of the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project. 

Transit

We are somewhere near Odessa;
The year is 1900.
The war to end all wars is just a dark shadow on the distant horizon,
A storm brewing on the furthest shore.

I turn to you
Like the moon turns towards the Earth when her face
Is so full of sorrow that even the tides rise to weep alongside her–
And though I can still trace the constellations
Of the years you spent spinning like the world on her axis
On a collision course towards someplace I could not follow–
Though I can still finger the border along which our lives were split in two–
Though I can still hear the cadence of my name upon your lips,
And though I can still draw a line between our two points of origin
On a map of the world as it was, fingers straddling the ocean,
You are gone, having departed for someplace
Where every star always points towards home;
And every faint point of foreign light
We used to watch set at dawn
Shines brighter
Than I ever knew how to.

 

Caitlin Cacciatore is a writer and poet who lives on the outskirts of New York City. Her work has been published in Blink Ink, Encounters Magazine, True Grit Anthology, and Paragon Press: The Martian Chronicle. She believes poetry has the power to create change and brighten lives, and wishes for her work to be an agent of forward motion. Caitlin lives by the sea, writes by the moonlight, and can often be found taking long walks on the beach.

First memory

In Greek, truth is alethea.
A for not, Lethe for the river of forgetting.
True is not the opposite of false.
True is the opposite of forgotten.
This is my first memory, the first boulder
piercing the waters.
A clear roundness at eye level, and inside
a tiny waving flag of orange
with a head. Two frills on either side,
pumping like accordions. What lay behind?
What was the secret power? I had to know.
I scooped the creature out, into my hand.
It pumped a few times harder, and then stopped.
I am sorry now, poor fish. I had no time
to be sorry then, or even to understand
what had happened. I had no notion of dying.
But I had fear, as Mom arrived
with a bang and a roar, and a strange
accusation: Did you stab the fish
with a pencil? I didn’t know what “stab” was.
There was no pencil there.
But she seemed oddly satisfied, as though
I’d finally done the horrid thing
she had been waiting for.
I could not argue, for I had no words
for what I’d done, but felt
it must be something even worse.
Safer to give in to her story,
accept her punishment, comply.
The first thing I remember is learning to lie.

 

Mountains of things

“It’s gonna take all my mountains of things
to surround me…” Tracey Chapman

Any house can have drawers that stick.
In ours, the bottoms fell out.
My mother bought more dressers.
My father built her more closets. They filled,
spilled over, split their wooden seams.
With what, you may ask? Expired coupons,
old shopping lists, bubble packs
of emery boards with one removed,
makeup, hand cream, chewing gum, mints,
obscure newspaper clippings. Like the dregs
of a handbag, but clogging the entire house.
The kitchen cupboards were crammed
with dead spices and old cans. I was made
to wipe them and keep them alphabetical,
tomato paste before tomato sauce. The fridge
was packed with cold slimy jars to wash
and put back, again and again and again.
In her forties it metastasized.
The dining table mounded high
with her piles of rubbish. My father’s side
of the double bed grew
the paper tumors, as he moved
to a folding couch in the basement.
They died in their fifties, six months apart.
I was living in France. I did not return
to clean her house, which must have looked
like a scene from “Hoarders.”
Now I think of a term from that show,
“a hoarded house,” and I imagine
dressers and closets hundreds of feet tall,
glutted with bulging houses, filling the sky
for people whom nothing can ever satisfy.

Cheryl Caesar lived in Paris, Tuscany and Sligo for 25 years; she earned her doctorate in comparative literature at the Sorbonne and taught literature and phonetics. She teaches writing at Michigan State University and gives readings. This year, she’s especially pleased to have published poems in Agony Opera (India), Prachya (Bangladesh) and Nationalism, a Zimbabwean anthology, and to have won third prize in the Singapore Poetry Contest.  She escapes to books, cats and Michigan lakes.

Wing

I walk, nineteen, car broken down
on my first trip after moving to Nebraska,
leaf cut from limb on the dry bank of the Platte River
walking over ancestral history.

At sunset, western Nebraska sits as plain as most people
perceive the once vast prairie grassland.
The river trickles, dust
a thick red cloud gone angry above Colorado,
nearby twin channels of Conestoga wheel fossils
widened by a century of wind, rain, and withering droughts.
Brigham Young brought his brood through these plains,
seeing nothing here that permitted a promised land,
and chose the salt fields of Utah for a home.
Nebraska is the land of my grandfather’s father.

Waiting for a cool radiator sitting on the porch
of Ralph Spann’s three-room paint-poor house,
near Kimball, I am told repeatedly how nothing
will ever grow naturally here except what’s fit
for crows and snakes and grazing herds.
Ralph tells a story of a lilac his father planted,
the bush dormant for three years,
so his father re-planted the lilac
over a hole of an old outhouse.
“Be damned if you don’t bloom now.”
Ralph tugs at my sleeve, takes me out back.
I pick a purple sprig.

My great-great-grandfather—
not a ten acres-and-mule pioneer,
but a stonemason from Bristol, England,
who moved to upstate New York near Bath
and worked with tackle, pulley and slag again.
Blue-collar artisan
of chisel, pike and trowel,
lush lakes, roiling Mohawk River,
drawn by a yawning prairie devoid
of Pawnee and Sioux,
the pride of owning a plot of land larger, for once,
than the space occupied by the grave,
which had been all that England offered,
no longer prying, shaping, and scribing for someone else,
he planned, hewed, and set for himself.

He was involved in the shape
or form in every church and city building
and major structure needing rock or brick.
While his name is not attached by brass
or bronze plate to the buildings,
his blood and fingerprints remain.

Philip Henry, his son, traveled by train to sell
tubas, trumpets, and fiddles,
the music man of the 76 trombones
in the big parade. He knew an embouchure
when he saw it on the face of a child,
whether the smile could truly pucker
and push the cheeks into a forceful blow,
lips puffed, the jaw agape
ready to receive the purse of the rim.

Marriage grim, he traipsed two states
to escape the knowledge of his wife’s affair.

Compulsive, he’d use the sound of the train
on the tracks, the swaying of the car,
to think about each student, their fingertips
pressing the valves, thin fingers, fat fingers,
how the boys and girls with no plush
to their upper lips would ache, their teeth
would yield and split as well as the upper lip
to the pressure of the horn.
He imagined who would clean the spit,
who would shine the brass, who would take it to bed.
But there was no music in the fields,
no lilt, no lark ascending on the prairie.
When he died, his wife retreated to Iowa.

My grandfather went to college, then to war.
He forgave his parents the sobriety of Nebraska
by heading east to Wisconsin laughter
and worshiping in well-shaped words,
became a printer, an editor,
had the spare riverbed of his youth
replaced by a full Wisconsin river,
the Flambeau, river of flame.
He became a conservationist, a walking
repentance for the extinction of species.

I stand by the thinning Platte.
Swallows cull the river, veer, vanish.
I bed down near the barn where the wind whistles
through the brush. Stars burn.
I rise with the moon and walk in the light.
I stop at the axis of the great migrations,
the east-west passage of pioneers crossed
by the millennial path of the Sandhill crane
that sojourns on the Platte, the axle-gauge
of the gadabouts intersected
by the perennial fidelity of wings.

When I reach down and touch the soil
of my ancestors, I touch wagon wheel and wing bone,
and they whir ear to ear.
I round the river bend and perceive
from ancestor to descendant.
I am troubled, pleased, ready to leave.
Before dawn, I wake.

I turn to the cranes scissoring the purple sky
and I remember the lilac, and here,
three years, will I stay, waiting to bloom.

 

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, with his wife. He works in mental health. He grew up in Wisconsin, was tempered by Texas and Nebraska, and found a home in California, though landscapes of the Midwest still populate his writing. He has work in Rabid Oak, The Nervous Breakdown, Spry, Mojave Heart Review, and The Monarch Review. He was the featured 2015 summer issue poet of Clerestory, and won the 2017 Cold Mountain Review narrative poetry prize and the 2016 Consequence Magazine fiction prize.

A Journey into the Fog of the Living

When I came to the place I needed to be, I waited.
The people were not the people I expected to meet.
I had picked a muddy spot on a fold in a map and left.
When I finally arrived, I knew I had not arrived.
Arrival should note a coming to an end of a journey.
Arrival for me meant a break before moving on.
The day I left, the sun was shining and it was snowing.
The snow was coming down hard, a hail kind of snow,
The kind that tears potholes in blacktop and injures cars.
I left anyway. The sun was beautiful against a backdrop
Of nothing, no mountains, no rivers, no prairie grass.
At the first gas station, I went out into the blizzard.
I filled the car with ice balls and black stones.
On the road, the snow began to whimper. The sun left.
Thick clouds covered the horizon, the road, the land.
Soon it was so dark, it had to be night and it was night.
I slept in a rest stop too noisy and nosy for rest.
In the early hours of the next week, I took off again.
I drove and drove until I reached the ocean.
My car stalled in the sand on the beach. I watched the surf.
There was nowhere else to go. I took off my shirt,
Felt the frost in the air, and dived into the large waves.
This is the best part: I woke Sunday morning in Japan
Surrounded by the thick bones of people the whales killed
Their blunt spears interlocked within the skeletons.
A small boy came to me and spoke a small boy language.
I understood everything, took his small hand,
Walked to the end of the beach where the horizon faltered
And found a way home. This is where we depart.

Michael H. Brownstein‘s first book of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else, was recently published by Cholla Needles Press (2018) in which the poet explores the linguistic world of Alzheimer’s.

Before the Big Bang

The rainy evening
has sealed us
with fluid wax of rain
inside a taxicab
along with the driver and a bag of groceries.
The rainy evening
boasts its streetlamps and illuminated shop windows
it shoves in its bent fingers with massive rings
like a crazy rapper;
it shakes a heavy gilded chain on its neck:
yo, dude, listen to the freestyle of the street drops!
And I listen and heed to the shower.
I see a man of rain hanging from the roof,
spewing quicksilver from the downpipe.
It’s so difficult to believe
that once we used to be fish.
We vanish in  the depth of unphilosopher stone.
The diamonds turn into graphite dust.

The monumental, big-boned grand piano of the avenue thunders.
It sags on its crooked dragon’s legs.
A passer-by presses the gray keys of the crosswalk.
The headlights snatch from the darkness the keys of the tree trunks
clinging-black like wet dresses.
The night strums us.
The night plays us back.
The night fools around with a waltz of bitten-off fingers.

I wonder, had anyone known before the Big Bang
that we both of us (not counting the driver)
would get  stuck in a cab in the middle of the Universe?
Did the divine plan include our love and dinner:
meat and mushrooms, cheese, grapes, red wine?
The god bluffs,
and the royal flush of zodiacal signs is highly suspicious.
The game will last long, believe me. The shower, some jellyfish things–
wet, octopus-like–
lash their arms against the roof and the windows;
the benches shine glossily;
the light jumps up and down like a cornered rat.
I think, I feel you – it means you’re alive.
It’s a great luck and great happiness to live and to love.
It’s a great crime against the stars,
against black holes, galaxies,
space zombies.
You slightly press my hand in the darkness.
Your finger strokes my palm, and my fingers answer–
outside of me–the fingers snuggle, play and kiss each other
like seals on an iceberg.
Streetlights sweep past outside;
they are gray-haired old hags with burning unbound hair;
they curse the slowing rain in ancient witchese.
Dull sinister windows float by,
and the sleek mannequins
look at us with envy in their tense postures.
We are alive, my love
Alive, alive,
we’re living bait in this deluge of the world…

Dmitry Blizniuk is an author from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in The Pinch Journal, River Poets , Dream Catcher, Magma, Press53, Sheila Na Gig, Palm Beach Poetry Festival and many others. Dmitry Blizniuk is the author of ‘The Red Fоrest’ (Fowlpox press, Canada 2018). He lives in Kharkov, Ukraine.