Willawaw Journal Fall 2024 Issue 19

Three Hidden Box Booklets. Shizen, stardream, lokta with agate closures. Each 6”x 4”.

 

Domestic Opera

Through the glass pane I catch bird song
while longing to receive your call.

The exertions of joggers passing by
exhaust me as I note their strain.

For a moment I block out all noise and focus
on enchanted memories of your solo voice.

Gas-powered blowers interrupt my train of thought
and foul the transparent air.

Nearby workmen whistle as blades and leaves
lumber across the lawn. Their melody now an earworm…

Boring through my brain, an overwrought
glum “Everybody Hurts” Top 40 tune.

In dismissal my new-found love ghosts me
not even feigning to recall my number.

Worry, mounting panic usurp all other distractions.
Other than drinking and weeping, I refrain.

I still can’t move far from my phone’s doubtful chirp
while my wristwatch hand sweeps time away.

David A. Goodrum is the author of the collection Vitals and Other Signs of Life (The Poetry Box) and the chapbook Sparse Poetica (Audience Askew). Recent and upcoming publications include Tar River Poetry, San Antonio Review, Triggerfish Critical Review, among others. Born and educated in Indiana, David now lives in Corvallis, Oregon. Find out more about this poet/photographer at www.davidgoodrum.com.

Princess of Pain

~for Jahan Malek Khatun (1324-1393)

A Persian princess’s family, murdered, brought the pain
and she continued writing through her grief and pain.

She longed for her creativity to help her blossom
into another version of herself, one without so much pain.

Her verse transported her feelings, showed her crystals
pregnant with meaning and energy, relief from pain.

The abyss was familiar to her, waiting on the other side of her door
promising a nothingness but no end to unendurable pain.

In fact, the emptiness promised more of the same
and never pretended to be anything but her recognizable pain.

She removed spoons from a drawer one by one
replacing them with Grace and teardrops shed in pain.

I Got You Babe

I wore out one of the first Sonny & Cher albums, Babe,
with deep needle grooves in I Got You Babe.

At the end of every show, holding their son Chaz,
they sang as if they were there alone, telling him, we’re here Babe.

I soon tired of the song, listening to the skips that pointed
to my adolescent pining, my obsession with I Got You Babe.

My sisters mocked my fanatic fandom, my scrapbook of photos,
articles, and lyrics saved long after they recorded, I Got You Babe.

Part of the culture, it showed up long after Sonny’s death, and after
Gregg Allman’s, who sang on their show a song much raunchier than I Got You Babe.

Years after their split, their careers and love lives splayed open,
late night Letterman made Sonny & Cher sing I Got You Babe.

Iconic as the couple, it shows up at regular intervals, and inevitably
every morning the clock radio in Groundhog Day plays I Got You Babe.

I wonder if Cher finds herself humming it absentmindedly as she goes
through her days. Who’s to know? Save her and those she’s called Babe.

Anne Graue (she/her) is the author of Full and Plum-Colored Velvet, (Woodley Press) and Fig Tree in Winter (Dancing Girl Press). Her work has appeared in Gargoyle, Verse Daily, Poet Lore, Kenyon Review, and Glass Poetry Journal. She is a poetry editor for The Westchester Review and lives in Mahopac, New York.

What’s Wrong With Me

Is what’s wrong with a hummingbird caught in the open,
‌            beaten to the ground
by March hail-storming the coast,

‌            amphetamine heart arrested in the sand.
She buries it, drawing a circle lined
‌            with gull feathers, kelp, pebbles, shells.

I say a few words stupidly
‌            asking which species–Anna’s or Rufus?—
before we return to the potpourri-mildew

‌            nuanced room, and queen bed
with its gaudy autumnal duvet,
‌            plus balcony and ocean view.

Afterwards, when I say I don’t see you
‌            as the earth goddess type,
she shoots me

‌            a look, tosses off the sheets,
‌slides into her jeans, “haven’t you ever wept
‌            for a pet you had to put down,

‌or a thrush who crashes the window,
‌            beak crushed, lying on the ground
‌crying out—more likely, simply crying—

‌            while the ginger tomcat slinks
‌through the wood-sorrel?”
‌            Two seal cows sleeping

on rocks at low tide, look up from their nap,
‌            care nothing for my answer,
nor feel the need to clap.

When You Meet Your Maker, Try Writing a Sonnet

The ambulance siren dopplers its way
out of darkness into lyric. Flurries drift
under a streetlight dome. I’m splayed
on a gurney, pain-level 8, not getting the gist
of night geese calling above. I used to mock

the hackneyed seasonal clichés, the L.L. Bean
catalog plaids, the wooden decoys on the mantle,
and yet I’ve always looked for meaning
in the sound of his whittling blade, in the smell
of sugar pine shavings, a freshly carved neck.

Alas, he’s a jealous, angry, whirlwind of old man stench,
with a drinker’s nose and shredded-wheat beard
sheathing a whetted tongue—and just as I feared:
sculpting knives and a jar of glass eyes on his workbench.

Born in Detroit, by now a long-time Oregon resident, David Hargreaves is a poet, translator and linguist. Most recently, his translation of Chittadhar Hrḍaya’s River, from Nepal Bhasa, the endangered, ancestral language of the Kathmandu Valley, appeared in the anthology River Poems (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poet Series, 2022). His own work, Running Out of Words for Afterwards, (Broadstone Books) earned a starred review from Kirkus Review, appearing in its top 100 indie press books of 2022. Other poems appear in a wide variety of journals, including American Journal of Poetry, Passages North, and Catamaran. For more info go to his website here.

August Ghazal

‌     Corn is universal,
‌ ‌    so like a Roman senator.
‌              —Ruth Stone

County fairs: 4-H barns of piglets and paper boats of roasted butter-slathered corn.
At dinner, my mother offers a choice: large kernels or small on our cob of corn.

Abundance: fields and fields of young girls dancing—
country roads between acres of waving tasseled corn.

What makes me feel old? Not ten for a dollar,
but more than a dollar for a single ear of corn.

My daughter rolls her eyes when her aunt and I show up
with our haul from the market—watermelon and a dozen ears of corn.

Corn Mother, Demeter, Grandmother Selu—beloved matriarchs
who brought us this golden goodness we call corn.

Michael Pollan was the first to teach me this lesson:
we are not the cultivators—we are cultivated by corn

Solstice

–after Carlos De Andrade’s “Corona” (tr. by Elizabeth Bishop)

Early summer eats all the green, leaving
scattered windfall, leaving strawberries

picked clean, leaving wild fires too close.
Time is different now, more baked in and

mutable at the same time. Energy,
too, starts strong, fades by mid-afternoon.

During the day, we love each other by
chopping vegetables and heating water.

We sleep restlessly then burrow like small
mammals when morning light breaks. I wake,

unbroken, to a day so cool autumn lurks,
blooming summer days already too short.

We stand as if on a train, watching
green flash through the open window.

Suzy Harris lives in Portland, Oregon. Her poems have appeared in Calyx, Clackamas Literary Review, Switchgrass Review and Williwaw Journal among other journals and anthologies. Her poetry chapbook Listening in the Dark, about living with hearing loss and learning to hear again with cochlear implants, was published by The Poetry Box in 2023. Born and raised in Indiana, she was an Oregon special education attorney for many years and is happy to call the Pacific Northwest home. She enjoys making soup, walking among big trees, and watercolor journaling.

Bushwack

No trail. A compass reading.
We can’t walk a straight line. Blowdowns
force us into detours, we climb
over massive trunks, the stream meanders.
Not clear how the topo aligns
with rises and valleys. We could be
anywhere, do not have the vision
of the raptor banking above.

The land shifts and groans over time,
turning in sleep. It doesn’t tell
its dreams, a language we can’t decipher,
intimate as we are, crawling through underbrush,
scaling boulders in the dry creekbed.

We might remember when we arrive,
wherever that is: raw feet, scraped knees, thirst.
What traces have we left?
Should we blaze the trail, melt into trees?
Feel them, even now, watching us.

Alison Hicks was awarded the 2021 Birdy Prize from Meadowlark Press for Knowing Is a Branching Trail. A new collection, Homing, is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in November, 2024. Her work has appeared in Eclipse, Gargoyle, Permafrost, and Poet Lore. She was finalist for the 2021 Beullah Rose prize from Smartish Pace, an Editor’s Choice selection for the 2024 Philadelphia Stories National Poetry Prize, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Green Hills Literary Lantern, Quartet Journal, and Nude Bruce Review. She is founder of Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which offers community-based writing workshops.