Willawaw Journal Fall 2020 Issue 10

I am sending out this little flag of poems to the people who have said they want to hear, to see. I have gathered them from the 4 corners, culled from them a multiplicity of voices—grieving or celebrating, loving or dying—the human experience on every page. I know it is only a finger in the dike, a stop-gap before the flood of catastrophic events again subsumes our attention. But if the sages are correct, if putting our attention on what we want to “increase” is the key, then it is well that we look to poetry. And if it is our calling to write the words onto the page, then that is an even better keener focus of our attention; perhaps we can stay the floods another moment or two.

So let’s step out of catastrophe and into poetry as respite, beginning with a few statistics.

First, in regards to the epistolary prompt, there are seventeen poems written to someone. There are four water poems. six poems concerned with illness, four with death. There is a snake poem, a rat poem, a squirrel poem, a sax poem. Also poems to or about dads, moms, grandmothers, and babies. An orange swimsuit, an engine, a couple of dreams, and two poems about editing or darning words.

There are ten poets from Oregon, five from California, four from Texas, three from Iowa, two from Seattle, WA. Vermont, Idaho, North Carolina, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Massachusetts are the other states represented in these pages. Also, Vancouver Island, Bangalore, India, and Lahore, Pakistan. Fifteen identified as male, sixteen identified as female. Emerging poets and accomplished.

Robert Eastwood’s “A Note to the Young Woman who took the Dead Squirrel off the Street” wins the prize for best title.

I’ll leave you to gather your own statistics and perhaps to find your favorite poem of the day as we turn towards the dark on this Fall Equinox,

Yours in poetry,

Rachel Barton

Dear editor:

Sir/ Ma’am: (I’m never sure)

Today, you said, I’ll dole out bits of words,
snippets of ideas. And you’ll be grateful.
And I am grateful, dragging my fingers
over the keyboard, twitching here or there
in vain hope that some metaphor
will drape herself seductively on the mattress page,
pouting her carmine lips, daring me to clothe her,
daring me to slide into the poem beside her.

Not, you said, good enough.
What you’re giving me grates on my nerves
like lemon rind, or maybe parmesan.
It stings; it smells. I’m listening, really I am,
dispensing with whole harems of image
in favour of the hunter, the camouflaged watcher,
stealthy and blind, waiting for the imitative
gabble of flocks of words alighting
on the white expanse.

Why not just retire? you shouted, You
have no artistry, no talent for the new.
You stood there, shredding what little symmetry
had settled on the page. I fumbled with the fragments:
my lovely metaphor reclining, my fleeting words.
I can hear you laughing at my numb fingers
assembling this poor mosaic, mocking my efforts,
But understand that this not a resignation, just a reminder
that I’ve worked here more than 30 years
and you haven’t won yet.

Hugh Anderson lives on Vancouver Island which seems a pretty solid place in a world no longer certain of reality. Recent publications include The Willawaw Journal, Panoplyzine, Vallum, 3Elements Literary Review and forthcoming in Cold Mountain Review. He has one Pushcart Prize nomination and a Best of the Web nomination.

Vermin Hotel

To the two brown rats
that frequent our new birdhouse,
the one atop the oak stump
outside our window:

I suppose you have to eat
and seeds make a fine meal.
I’m okay with you feeding there.
But let me say I don’t want you
playing house in our wood pile.
We are not a vermin hotel.

I understand the importance of diversity,
the value each creature brings,
whether I like it or not.
I’ll share with you
as long as you stay outside.
You’re on your own with the cats.

 

Frank Babcock lives in Corvallis, Oregon and is a retired Albany middle school teacher and owner of a bamboo nursery. He writes poetry to share the strange thoughts that rattle around in his head and to get them off his mind. He started with an interest in the beatnik poets, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg.  He has a long way to go and much to write before he sleeps.

To My Great-Grandmother:
In case the post office is still delivering where you are

Granny, I sit in the garden reading the letter you wrote
your sister when you were the same age I am now.

Lena, I guess I’ll never get to see the orange trees in Florida. I’m too old
to travel and my eyes don’t work as well as they used to. 

Now I know how you felt. But unlike you, I made it — lots of times, in fact. If I could
I’d send you pictures of the groves, verdant branches hung with glowing fruit,

and pictures of my mother, your granddaughter, living there. After she died,
I found a postcard you sent me, its one-cent stamp postmarked

at the Memphis train station on your way home. Your familiar cramped cursive
has faded with age: Cry loud if they aren’t treating you all right. I’ll come get you.

Here in my backyard, ruddy penstemons crowd purple salvia spikes
and flannel milkweed. Bees hum a song of autumn coming soon among the asters

and the daisies’ last summer snow. My dahlias explode red as your strawberry jam,
those jars you filled with sweetness and lined up on pantry shelves in pre-dawn light

before your daughter woke and fussed about you messing up her kitchen once again.
That morning you led me out the back door at sunrise. There was something

I should see. We walked together past Grandmother’s neat beds of hybrid roses
to the far back lot, to where a wire fence embraced your tangle of stems, leaves,

flowers whose names I no longer know. Granny, once when someone asked me
the time and place I felt the safest and most loved, I remembered

holding your hand beside your garden crowded as this one I sit beside today.
You pointed to a web where day’s first light split gold through hanging dew,

and at the center a fragile ladder spun by the great black-and-yellow spider
suspended there. You said Look. Look how beautiful it is. 

 

Louise Barden is a transplanted Easterner who has recently and happily re-settled in Corvallis, Oregon. She has been a university English instructor and a marketing-advertising executive. Barden’s poetry has won awards from Calyx , the North Carolina Writers’ Network (Harperprints chapbook contest for Tea Leaves), and the Southwest Review (2017 Marr Prize finalist). Her poems have been published in Chattahoochee Review, Timberline, and others.

Finding Freedom

The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing,
whispering, clamoring, murmuring…
-Kate Chopin, The Awakening

See me disrobe & wade into the water,
feet sinking into the white sand, skin
horripilating from the sea breeze as I submerge.
Because what lies beyond this shore
is something better, maybe. Because
there is nothing left for me here, nothing
I can bear. Because all I see are birds
with broken wings, shackled
to the shore. I swim out, treading
toward the waves breaking further
than the eye can see. The sea is seductive,
the way it can swallow us whole.
So swallow me. Take me somewhere
where I can be free, where I can be
touched without turning whale-like,
without the blood of my body staining
the bedsheets. No hope here. I kick
harder. Scissor my legs, arms pulling
saltwater. Inhale the scent, swish the sea-
water, swallow it. Sea, you speak
to me, speak to my soul. Let me be
free. Swallow me whole.

 

Despy Boutris‘s writing has been published or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, American Literary Review, Southern Indiana Review, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, The Adroit Journal, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Currently, she teaches at the University of Houston, works as Assistant Poetry Editor for Gulf Coast, and serves as Editor-in-Chief of The West Review.