Willawaw Journal Fall 2024 Issue 19

Zhen Xian Bao 35. Papers: marbled momigami, paste, antique acupuncture booklet, mulberry, fabric cover. 10”x 22″

I think I should have loved you presently

–after Edna St. Vincent Millay

Better yet, I should have loved you unflaggingly,
‌‌           instead of beating you with words harsh as bone.
‌ ‌                    Lavender night, a strong house looms for all to see,
melancholy rooms. I clutch your hand to atone;
‌          to dazzle you, all my pretty flung foibles drape
‌                    a shawl, or shroud—your hair, your dress undone,
you trip, stripped of innocence and shorn of escape,
‌          up to the attic through a skylight darkly spun
‌                    eleven stars caught by a black-branched tree spill
in silver moonlit slashes—a metaphysical dream—
‌          only to halt and falter until, hot animal breath
‌                    bears down—a sudden scream—ghost in marble
‌                              oh melancholy girl
‌          you who I would have kissed—yesterday or this.
‌                              Delicious wildness.
A warbler drinking from my wineglass strikes
‌          its wings against the stem—the pressure point
‌                    of my pulse. My ardent arms embrace you,
you swoon—too soon—reflected in the pier mirror
‌          laddering up the whitewashed wall.
‌                    The goblet shatters.

Sex-couplet Ghazal

Your gleaming eyes spark across my shining-sky sex—
your hips, your thighs, your kiss are my learning to fly sex.

I see you in naked moonlight and stare like a fool.
My flower melts in your sweat—my learning to cry sex.

Every time I fall, I spout hidden thoughts I should not say.
I explore your dips and gullies in spite of my shy sex.

You gather me into your fist while I smolder,
You—both my despair and my addiction-high sex.

Yet you remain a treasure tucked under my pillow,
I would gladly make this night, this lifetime-entire my sex.

Oh but wake up and get up, Dale! Such thrills sting.
Without your touch another woman would surely buy sex.

Dale Champlin is an Oregon poet and artist. Many of her poems have appeared in The Opiate, Timberline, Willawaw, Cirque, Triggerfish, and elsewhere. Dale’s poetry collections are: The Barbie Diaries, Callie Comes of Age, Isadora, and Andromina: A Stranger in America. A collection of poems about Medusa is forthcoming.

Your Abrupt Departure

Cooled candle wax.
Pile of burnt matches, whiff of sulfur.

Salt lacing the plate,
cork wedged in the neck you would

absently rub. Your door
key found near the front door whose

knob would shiver
at your touch. Dawn light stretches

heel to toe, yawning.
Indented throw pillow waiting it out.

You don’t say

you’re sorry. You call
to say you’re sorry you didn’t call.

Your idea of sorry
is to call and remain silent,
exhaling into the phone.

You’re sorry,
you now admit, that you didn’t
speak on the first four tries.

I counted six
but perhaps others dialed. Others
weary of words?

This gives me pause.

It was a misstep when I
accepted your exhale by inhaling,

a form of buddy breathing. Only
we aren’t buddies. I hope

you quit. Calling.
Exhaling. Believing I will breathe.

I am holding my breath.

Margo Davis has been awarded ten writing residencies, the more recent in
Southern Portugal, Budapest, and Italy. A three-time Pushcart nominee, her poems
have appeared in Equinox Biannual Journal, Lamar Press anthologies, Verse Daily, The
Ekphrastic Review and Panoply. Her chapbook Quicksilver is available on Amazon.
Originally from Louisiana, Margo lives in Houston.

Gratitude

After we’ve set the book down,
it’s all right if we only
remember the paper cuts.

It’s all right if Eliot stands under
a bare bulb for days
writing two lines.

We should thank our suffering—
Chopin coughed up blood
composing his last mazurka.

We come from an ancient family
of weepers—A certain grief
gave birth to us all.

A flash of agony stokes the coals
in the heart’s furnace. We burn
like the scrolls of Alexandria.

It’s OK to break down before
the poem is over. Everything we’ve lost
carries us on the wind.

Alexander Etheridge has been developing his poems and translations since 1998.
His poems have been featured in The Potomac Review, Museum of Americana, Ink
Sac, Welter Journal, The Cafe Review, The Madrigal, Abridged Magazine, Susurrus
Magazine, The Journal, Roi Faineant Press, and many others. He was the winner of
the Struck Match Poetry Prize in 1999, and a finalist for the Kingdoms in the Wild
Poetry Prize in 2022. He is the author of, God Said Fire, and, Snowfire and Home.

June in the Garden

The bamboo shoots are tossing their slim stalks
higher than the neighbor’s rented roof.
I don’t know the names of the birds that are singing,
but I know the hummingbird at the nectar flute,
sipping crystal with her snake’s tongue. Her wings
spin a tilde between frazzled sentences of Spanish moss.
Grape vines poke fingers over a fence sand-washed
with sunshine. Now the trees begin their breath-work.
In the frog-pond, lily pads hob-knob with chuckling water
while nearby a honeybee mumbles to itself,
stinger-deep in a Rose of Sharon. The gate is swung wide,
settled in dirt. Cicadas are singing sex tunes.
I can feel the garden’s heartbeat against my skin,
its pulse in the faded curtains on the porch,
its kiss on the dimple in Taylor’s cheek. The cat’s tail
twitches as he watches through the screen
the hanging basket by the porch umbrella. Ian says
only a wren would nest in such a silly place, but I know better.
The wren and I, we build our nests where we are loved.

Unburial

My mother had warned us away
from the dump behind the barn,
but in November she put on Daddy’s jean jacket,
rubber boots,
gardening gloves.
My mother said, “Watch for snakes and
broken glass.”
We dragged mildewed carpets from beneath
damp forest loam, uncovering
the rotted corpses of dish mops,
bathmats, sponges, crockery,
a decrepit Hoover,
a TV with rabbit ears.
Because I begged her, my mother said
I could keep the salad plate.
I scrubbed it at the pump until it shone:
red and green chickens
in a field of wheat.
The salad plate held pride of place in the treehouse
where I served plastic food,
orphaned and resourceful
in battered, fuchsia-colored Crocs.
Other girls dressed their Barbies,
watched Wizards of Waverly Place,
played soccer and learned ballet.
By the hour I considered the salad plate,
dreaming parentless dreams.

Years later, on a miserable family trip,
I locked eyes with the salad plate
in an antique shop
in Boone. I had started grad school.
I had lost a lot of weight.
I was trying to say I was gay, but
my mother did not want to hear that.
I was trying to say, I’m afraid of you,
but she did not want to hear that either.
I locked eyes
with the salad plate.
We recognized each other.
We didn’t speak.
The salad plate wore the same green polka dots,
the scarlet rooster’s feathers,
the sheaf of grain. It sported a price tag
for $3.99 inked in ball-point pen.
I wore the same frightened face
behind my smile.
I felt like I was going to cry,
but I swallowed it down.
For a long moment,
we held each other’s gaze.
Then my mother called me.
I walked away.

Sophie Farthing (she/her) is a queer poet and artist living in South Carolina in the USA. Her work has appeared in outlets including Right Hand Pointing, Beyond Queer Words, Impossible Archetype, and Anti-Heroin Chic. Her poetry is also featured in the horror anthology it always finds me from Querencia Press. She is the 2024 recipient of the Elizabeth Boatwright Coker Fellowship in Poetry from the South Carolina Academy of Authors.

Feeding My Wanting

I’m hoping for healing, for the sun to slice its light
on the overcast world, I’m hoping this wind,
fierce enough to knock down a body,
can tornado the voice lying cold in the lungs.
I’m hoping the baby, looking in the mirror,
will smile at himself again, that his angry skin
might cool like a river, once we find the right salve.
I’m hoping for salves and salvation
and vacation and a murmuration
of starlings to remind me: yes, I have come home
to roost. I’m hoping for roosters crowing
like they once crowed that long-ago morning,
waking me from my roof in a ghetto in Mexico.
I’m hoping all the world’s rooftops can be safe
from snipers, vipers; I’m hoping for drumming.
Thrumming. Humming, for all these hem
and haw times to morph into shiny threads,
a needlepoint tapestry of calm. A psalm.

D. Dina Friedman has published in over a hundred literary journals and anthologies (including Rattle, Salamander, The Sun, The Ekphrastic Review, and Rhino) and received four Pushcart Prize nominations. She is the author of two young adult novels: Escaping Into the Night (Simon and Schuster) and Playing Dad’s Song (Farrar, Straus, Giroux), a short-story collection: Immigrants (Creators Press), and two chapbooks: Wolf in the Suitcase (Finishing Line Press) and Here in Sanctuary—Whirling (Querencia Press). Visit her website www.ddinafriedman.com or her blog on living creatively in a creatively challenged universe at https://ddinafriedman.substack.com.