Willawaw Journal Fall 2020 Issue 10

Annunciation

He wants to be born.
So first he enters the dream of the woman
a doctor has told will never conceive.

He lets himself in through the gate
of her sleeping brain during a hard snow
in late November.

He gives himself eyes and hair like hers,
wraps himself in thick fleece, his fingers curving
over the hem, like the paws of a burrowing mammal.

She wakes with the dream of him still clinging,
I’ve birthed a black-eyed baby boy, I’ve carried him
up the aisle of the church to the baptismal font.

She goes to the window where slantwise
snow erases the houses across the street.
Only a curbside lamp on its iron stalk breaks through,
‌                        a yellow clot in the boreal blur.

After she has laid aside the dream or forgotten it,
he enters her body sometime in January.
His arrival ignites engines and fires up turbines

with power unknown to her, making her whole
being a construction zone for the laying of foundations,
the framing of the many rooms of his evolving body.

In April, cornerstone and beam well set and level,
he shows her his brain and spine, a string of perfect lights
blinking in the midnight sky of the sonogram.

The doctor is speechless. But the woman
rehearses the names of her beloved living and dead.
She will pick one of them.

She watches the tiny heart strobe in its cage.
Beacon of what is coming in October.
A swaddling blanket. A christening.

 

Dear One Medical

You are here for me,
for my physical needs
for my mental needs
and did you say,
did I read correctly,
my other needs?

Did you mean my
material requirements,
organic cotton, and
radicchio and endive,
dressed lightly with lemon?
Or my spiritual needs, so

neglected these past
few decades, what with
work and exercise  and
diet and no faith in
miracles, although I
would not mind one,

as long as you are offering,
I wish to be transformed
from this inauthenticity
to the next level
of transcendent
reality and bliss.

You have my name,
my address, heart rate.
blood type, weight,
my blood pressure,
I have given all.
I am waiting.

Darning

She is always darning the frayed fabric
Of things. Socks or sentences, she contrives
To darn them, with the needle and the word.

Like the pruning spade, she heeds the warning
Clink of steel against roots. Though something loth,
She locks word threads and sound cloth in a truce.

Where a simple seam would mend, her darning
Is forced always to masquerade as cloth,
Or as an oath arm in arm with the deuce.

She is darning, darning, darning a trick,
A mirage of freedom that chirps and strives
To pretend wholeness, like a wing-clipped bird.

Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, and a happily eccentric blogger from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Black Bough, Nine Muses, Borrowed Solace, Ligeia, Cordite Poetry, and a number of other literary magazines. Studying life, languages, and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries holds a particular fascination for her.     Blog:  hibahshabkhezxicc

 

Eating Infinity

Crouching on a long-shore bar,
I watch hairy-chested men
with a shovel, grill grate and lighter fluid
dig a pit in the curving barrier island.
A glow emerges
as the midsummer sun fades
behind the dune ridge.
Children in dripping bathing suits run
in along the tidal flats to join
the tribal gathering.

I feel the radiating heat on my ankles
from the white hot coals.
Ground beef patties
imbued with chopped red onion,
garlic powder and tongue-tickling season salt,
on paper plates covered with foil
on tailgates of Suburbans
parked backwards in a semi-circle
like an armada of covered wagons,
are now audibly searing on the open flame,
rapacious faces illuminated by firelight
in anticipation, the continual beat of humanity
by the edge if infinity
as the deep blue sky gives way to black.

Sand burgers have the taste of eternity
after Gulf winds have kicked up mud blanket grit,
we eat them with our hands
and don’t mind if drops of grease roll
down our bronzed arms.
The rhythmic ebb and flow
of smooth, round, symmetrical waves
can wash us clean.
But the terrigenous particles of
quartz, feldspar, and garnet that
we have unwittingly delighted in,
washed down over millennia from the Rio Grande,
the Colorado, the Brazos are now
forever part of us.

Nothing can separate us from the siliceous
grains of diatoms and radiolarians that
wind has blown into our charred meat
from the timeless face of the shore.

Bradley Stephenson is a retired attorney living in Burlington, Vermont.  He is a native Texan and his writing is shaped by gulf coast beaches, hardscrabble hill country, and the Chihuahuan desert.  He has advocated for disability rights and increased federal funding for neuromuscular disease research. 

 

 

How Are You Doing?

You always jerry-rigged your life, just made
it work, never worried how it looked or if the fix
would last, just made it work until it didn’t.

You married her in the moment, knowing
if it wasn’t right, you’d cobble it together
if you could or walk away. You never dreamed
you’d come to love her more than life itself.

Does the distance from this place
make your days any easier now?
You always knew you couldn’t fix
the sadness and would have to leave.
The trick was knowing when.

You said if your grief ever made you hate
those low-slung October clouds
scudding over the Coast Range,
you’d walk away, head for California
where people die in sunshine not in rain.
At least you’d have a shadow. Maybe get a dog.
So, how are you doing?

Doug Stone lives in Albany, Oregon. He has written two chapbooks, The Season of Distress
and Clarity (Finishing Line), The Moon’s Soul Shimmering on the Water (CreateSpace), and a
full length poetry collection, Sitting in Powell’s Watching Burnside Dissolve in Rain (The
Poetry Box). His poems have been published in numerous journals and in the anthology,
A Ritual To Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford.