Willawaw Journal Fall 2020 Issue 10

This Stage

Look at you, old
man—distant
dear crusty old
man—you, who never knew
me well, whom I
do not know,
though you are the only man I’ve known for all
my life.  Here you are, your fever heat
beside me in the doctor’s waiting room.
I take your crooked hand.
You let your eyes fall closed.
Without your bustle, your brocade of talk
on antique chests and etymologies and cans
you collected from the side of the road, without the light
of your eyes, I see
the hollows of your skull.
You, who never speak to me of age, or death, or love—
you know, don’t you,
that this is how it may go—this loss
of appetite, the pull
of sleep, the days folded into pale blue
sheets. Today
we sit side by side, waiting. We act
as though you have only
a cold.
But the curtain’s been pulled aside—
if not for the last act,
then for rehearsal.

 

Jennifer L. Freed lives in central Massachusetts, where she has recently completed a manuscript based on the repercussions of her mother’s stroke.  Current work appears/is forthcoming in Comstock Review, Naugatuck River Review, Rust + Moth, and others. Her poem-sequence “Cerebral Hemorrhage” was awarded the 2020 Samuel Washington Allen Prize from the New England Poetry Club. Please visit jfreed.weebly.com

The Florescent Orange Swimsuit

I wriggled into my fluorescent orange swimsuit,
the one my father and I bought together–
the last one in the last store we visited
before closing time. I had to buy it because
I had nothing else to wear
to the summer camp.

The next day, I looked at the other children,
looking normal in their black and red monochrome,
and I imagined myself
a fluorescent orange glowworm
gleaming against the pale floor tiles
of a pool that looked like a second hand copy
of the afternoon sky.

Don’t worry, I’ll give you company, said my father,
appearing in a pair of swimming trunks
just as fluorescent orange as mine.

I jumped into the pool, for the first time
eyes and nostrils bare, exposed.
My mouth opened like that of a goldfish
and was flooded with a rush of chlorinated water.

I saw a blur of fluorescence.
Then a firm grip pulled me up,
and I spluttered to normalcy,
My father hugged me and whispered it will be alright.

I did not step into the pool again under the April sun,
bunked swimming camp
till my father took charge
and said he would teach me how to swim.

After much prodding, coaxing, coddling, and pushing,
I progressed from dipping to floating.
His patience outshone the fluorescence of both our suits
put together
as he taught me how to breathe underwater
and to freestyle like an Olympian swimmer.
Before I knew it, I was in love with swimming
and my fluorescent orange swimsuit.

 

Preeth Ganapathy’s writings have appeared or are forthcoming in the Buddhist Poetry Review,
Voices on the Wind Poetry Journal, and The Ekphrastic Review among others. Currently, she
works as Deputy Commissioner of Income Tax in Bangalore, India.

 

 

Nightimeliness

Sunburnt, red raw and hurting
most everywhere. Medicine
failing. Complaints about
the thermostat, existence,
other things too. A movie
about talking bears,
another about the Second World
War. The moon eclipsing Earth
completely for the first time
since 37 A.D., or around then.
A crew of wild foxes
tore apart the garbage, scattered
chicken bones into the pool.
When it’s this dark, be careful.

 

Brighterest

A boring sentimentalism: light
reflecting off the distant sea, a light-
bulb aisle enclosed from sunlight. Heat and beams
of radiation, lightness caught in throat
and lung. Received good news today; or, not
exactly good, but not a tragedy.
We’re nauseated, full of poison light.
I’m shivering in bed. You’re dripping down
into my eyes. Your eyes are little bulbs.
You’re always scared you’re sick, and even if
we share some incoherent wrong inside
ourselves, it’s not as though there’s any sense
in visibilities, irregular
abilities to read the blurry bright.

Anthony Hagen is a native of northern Virginia and currently lives and works in Austin, Texas. Recent work can be found in American Poetry Journal and SHARKPACK Annual. 

Yartzeit

–after Li Young-Lee

Ten years ago this week
our mother died, her ashes
in a blue urn, her and his together,

the urn on a shelf in a mausoleum,
all hush and quiet, as if the dead
could hear and be disturbed by the living.

What are we to do with this story of ash,
hum of old life that still rings out to warm
the cold, dark place where they rest?

The others, each urn in its own cubby,
take up the song, night passing to day
and back to night, in a register we can almost hear.

Suzy Harris grew up in Indiana and has lived in Portland, Oregon for her adult life. She is now retired and has returned to poetry, watercolor, oil pastel crayons, and other means of playing with color and words. Her poems have appeared most recently in Clackamas Literary Review and Williwaw and are forthcoming in Rain Magazine and Switchgrass Review. She is working on a chapbook about becoming deaf and learning to hear with a cochlear implant.

Fever Dream

The wet heat loosens our skin. Unstitches us from ourselves.
‌             What could we do but let it.

We drag our carcasses alongside us like drunks, like fresh kills,
‌             down the deserted dirt roads,
‌             kicking up billowing blossoms of dust
‌             we no longer bother to choke on.

‌                            Our blood is loud against the hushed anti-

hum of the air. Our blood is loud against the sound
of what was and lives no longer. Our blood hits the air
and turns an unspeakable shade of blue.

At night we pin our skins down against the ground—
‌             dagger into ankle, penknife to shoulder
‌             —to deny them entry into our dreams. Safer
‌             to dream of nothing. To make of our heads
‌             dark vacuums, cradles for static. Our hot skins cry
‌             and whine and writhe, but still we keep them out.

‌                              In the morning they are limp like gone things,

‌             but we know they, unlike us, are just playing
‌             at death, and we coax them awake. A twig
‌             dragged on the cracked sole of the foot, ears
‌             twisted between sharp fingernails. They jump back
‌             onto us with the frenzied quickness of wild horses.

‌                              What could we do but let them.

 

Shannon Hozinec lives in Pittsburgh, PA.  Her work has appeared in Thrush, SWWIM, The Hunger, and elsewhere.