Willawaw Journal Fall 2021 Issue 13

Scar

Willing herself steel on the tenement rooftop
where the pigeons roosted and ate crumbs
from her hands, near dusk she watched
their steady flight above cracked brick
and the wash snapping against lines
in flags of gray with blue beyond and refused
to come down for dinner, my grandmother
showed me the scar where her mother’s frantic knife
sailed across a plane of water towers and steam
and plunged into her 4-year-old back, of slanted metal
angles past a horizon lilac with smoke, New York’s
metal wires and iron gates, chimneys and the tippy buses
crawling along the Brooklyn Bridge on their knees
and one small fingernail slant of moon.

Meghan Sterling’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, Rust & Moth, SWIMM, The Night Heron Barks, Cider Press Review, Inflectionist Review, Sky Island Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review Westchester Review, Pine Hills Review, Mom Egg Review and many others. She is Associate Poetry Editor of the Maine Review, a Finalist in River Heron Review’s 2021 annual poetry contest, and winner of Sweet Literary’s 2021 annual poetry contest. Her collection These Few Seeds is out now from Terrapin Books. Sterling lives in Portland, Maine. Read her work at meghansterling.com.

On That Moonless Autumn Night
Listening to Wallace Stevens Reading
“The Idea of Order At Key West”

It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
–Wallace Stevens

Listening to the poet’s ordered words,
his poem became my reality that night.
But his art was more than just his words.
It was also the sound and the certitude
in his voice that disturbed the silence
and the measured solitude of the dark
on that moonless autumn night.

I closed my eyes, and I was
walking with him on that beach,
and turning back to see
the brilliant lights of boats,
the harbor, and the town,
I heard the clarity in his voice,
above the ever murmuring sea.

When I opened my eyes, I saw
beyond the blind silence of that night
as the maker of his art emblazoned
the dark with a glow brighter than all
those lights dancing on the harbor,
brighter than the sum of stars
swirling above the veritable sea.

When his reading ended, the silence
returned like a rising tide and tried
to become the voice of the dark again.
But the poet’s art altered the ordered world
of that night. It would never be the same.
The certainty of his poetry assured
it was he and not the dark I heard.

Doug Stone lives in Western Oregon. He has written three collections of poetry, The Season of Distress and Clarity (Finishing Line Press), The Moon’s Soul Shimmering on the Water (Amazon.com), and Sitting in Powell’s Watching Burnside Dissolve in Rain (Poetry Box).

I am Nobody! Who are You?

–to Emily Dickinson, in her own words…

Recluse, they said, watching a fly buzz
in the stillness of your room,
but the heart wants what it wants.
Your brain was wider than the sky,
in the corner bedroom of your father’s house
the one above the porch, facing west–
sunset in a cup.

Not knowing when the dawn would come,
you opened every door,
a little madness in a spring composed of nows,
and hope, the thing with feathers–
perched in your soul.

After you felt that funeral in your brain,
and mourners to and fro,
your sister found the heft of poems
your soul ajar–
your life–a loaded gun.

Sue tended you when you were ill,
washed you after death–
then chose your coffin clothes
in that certain slant of light,
and thought of wild nights–
‘Susie, we are the poets
and everyone else is prose’

You lived as Emily,
you dwelt in possibility, until
death stopped for you.
You died for beauty,
and morning without you
became a dwindled dawn.

Lynda Wilde is a Canadian writer/photographer living between the cities of Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico. She has published in Filling Station, Freefall, Zygote, and the Amethyst Review.

In Praise of Those Winter Sundays

Ellen June Wright was born in England of West Indian parents and currently lives in New Jersey. She has consulted on guides for three PBS poetry series. Her work was selected as The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week in June 2021, and she is a founding member of Poets of Color virtual poetry workshop.

Babette Barton is an emerging artist who lives at the edge of the woods in the uppermost reaches of the Olympic Peninsula. She has navigated multiple physical/medical challenges in her young life which have propelled her to make a number of course corrections regarding her future. Her art continues to serve as a favorite mode of expression–that, and baking sweets in the kitchen. In addition to her parents, Babette is accompanied by her yellow lab, Molly, several goldfish, and a cat.

Artist Statement:
“My art calms me. I enjoy drawing animals more than plants. It’s just fun. It usually takes 3-4 weeks to complete the collage paintings. I work on them in stages. I started about nine years ago, working with paints and other media as an after-school activity. A neighboring artist, Carrie Rodlend, stepped in to guide me. So far, my calendars have been a great way to share my work.

I also enjoy making cakes and cupcakes, some with filling (but my mom doesn’t like those–oops!). It takes a while to fully understand your audience, whether with art or with cake. Sigh.”