Willawaw Journal Fall 2024 Issue 19

Nested Blizzard Books a la Hedi Kyle. Papers: Shizen, paste, origami, chiyogami, decorative.  6”x 20”.

Welcome to Our Hill

Sandals are fine:
it’s a mild, 10-minute climb.
From the top, looking west,
you’ll see fields of corn,
wheat, and alfalfa.
Its grassy eastern slope
descends to a housing development.
The patch of gravel at the south base
never fills with cars—
and from the north can waft the scent
of a hog farm the field of wind turbines
beyond doesn’t actually send our way.

Scattered oaks, prairie grass,
turkeys, rabbits, squirrels—unpretentious,
yet we locals troop regularly to the top
with its wooden platform and bench
where we cuddle our loves, mull our debts,
or eat sandwiches.

Coming here, you’re likely content
with the ordinary, foregoing Everest
style thrills and chills for the grounded
silence of Native Americans interred
in the bird mound near the hill’s summit.

A hill like ours can’t be boastful:
time and the elements keep paring it
down. Still, what good fortune
to have a hill because, sometimes,
a body feels the need to climb one.

Darrell Petska is a retired university engineering editor and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. His work appears in Verse-Virtual, 3rd Wednesday Magazine, San Antonio Review, Amethyst Review, and widely elsewhere (conservancies.wordpress.com). Father of five and grandfather of seven, he lives near Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife of more than 50 years.

Fine China

My parents’ wedding china was Honiton Green—
gifted by my grandparents, dainty Honiton Green.

Delicate porcelain by appointment to the Queen,
teacups, saucers, side plates, platters, all Honiton Green.

Four settings made it down the years to me,
I keep them behind glass doors, the Honiton Green.

I remember winter afternoons when my family took four o’clock tea,
sunlight glinted and gleamed on Honiton Green.

Things are made to be used says my mother in my dream,
but I’m afraid I’ll break them, the Honiton Green.

You can fill teacups with hot black tea, stir in sugar and cream,
clink edges with a silver spoon, tough Honiton Green.

Creamers and sugar bowls, lacy gold borders, green filigree,
garlands of flowers, looping and scooping, all Honiton Green.

I yearn for that elegance, that riotous glee,
but I can’t bring myself to use, I can’t bear to lose, the Honiton Green

On The Umpqua

Smoke roils the valley air
hangs brown in the sky
weakens the sun
to an orange rheumy eye.
Afraid to breathe, we are grateful
for the yurt’s shelter.

Semi trucks shudder
down the highway
juddering brakes rat-a-tat
the night.

Early morning we flee
past an elk stag guarding
his sleeping harem, speed
to the ocean where west winds
battle the smokey east, push
the sky clear.

But that motionless stag,
protective, remains
in his green meadow,
the curtain of smoke
silently drifting down.

Vivienne Popperl lives in Portland, Oregon. Her poems have appeared in Clackamas Literary Review, Timberline Review, Cirque, Willawaw, About Place Journal, and other publications. She was poetry co-editor for the Fall 2017 edition of VoiceCatcher. She received both second place and an honorable mention in the 2021 Kay Snow awards poetry category by Willamette Writers and second place in the Oregon Poetry Association’s Spring 2022 contest “Members Only” category. Her first collection, A Nest in the Heart, was published by The Poetry Box in April, 2022.

Ghazal: Earth: Hear, Here

–-after Ronald Johnson (EarthEarthEarth) and thinking of Kirschen, Russolo, and Schafer

Sound is personal. A lonely vibration finds its emplacement in the ear; th
e cozy conception of the space a wave makes of the place for the ear. Th

e Futurists were celebrated for having an ear for the noise of the machine.
[To hear] pure sound… now fails to arouse [the heart]. Perhaps ancient noise —
rustlings, grumblings, cracking wood, sobbing hearts — to placate the ear. Th

e sounds of planes and cars today, they say, vibrate as a kind of heartbeat.
Transmuting stores of sun into the sounds that play Coltrane to the ear. Th

e deep-earth sounds that we seldom hear have been translated through sound art.
(Behold the new orchestra: the sonic universe!) The repeal of a predicted deafness —
the Krakatoan concession — that could arouse an evolved placentation of the ear. Th

e screams from the Kola borehole were faked, and so Hell did not await us.
But hadal deep spoke to Lotte Geeven. A thundered plea to charge the ear. Th

e lover notices the life within earthly pleasures or, as Hass writes, the other shock /
of the singular lived life. The tandem redundancy; the heart notes the burden of life
in another. He hears hoofbeats. The faithfulness of a pulse, plainly coddling the ear. Th

e spiders of Issa’s house, growing indifferent to the methods and the murmurs
of man. Sweeping whispers of community like plagal calmatives to the ear. Th

e murder flew silently by, though the one crow forever laughing in the linden tree —
No, Lindsay, do not mistake the placid cadence of tiny surges in the February lake —
I’m here, I’m here, her clicks proclaim, and her presence plying the caves of my ear-Th

Lindsay Sears writes as a way to practice attentiveness. Good days always include birdsong and times of discovery with her human and feline companions. Her poems have appeared in Still Point Arts Quarterly, Green Ink Poetry, and Poetry Pea Journal. She has worked as a high school science teacher and mental health nurse. She is currently a graduate student in liberal arts at Auburn University, Montgomery, Alabama.

Postcard from March

I write to you amidst a great thaw—not quite
the advent of spring, not yet quitting winter.
Some mornings
I am a thought barely there,
an island hovering in the mist, a mirage
you can’t reach. This is what I’m telling you:
it’s as if the ground beneath your feet
is a hardpan floor, and hours later,
all fecund with a bitter pungency.
You can’t straddle that place forever, where dawn
is but a stutter step, a hesitation waiting
to be unplugged. The whole world is a door ajar.
Icicles melting. Crocus stuck between seasons.
You stand at that threshold, in the mud
of your own limbo. Midway between here
and the frontier ahead.
Go ahead, take the first step.
It won’t come to you.

Connie Soper lives and writes in Portland, Oregon. She often finds inspiration while hiking or beachcombing. Her poems have received recognition from the Oregon Poetry Association, Calyx, and the Neahkahnie Poetry Prize. Her first full-length book of poetry, A Story Interrupted, published by Airlie Press in 2022, celebrates walking and witnessing her native terrain.

The Migratory Seasons

Golden plovers, in the migratory seasons,
fly for days, seemingly tireless,
over open ocean,
from Alaska to Hawaii,
no place to land along the way.

Yet they know it’s time to move on,
to balmy, green islands.

It’s a wonder—few creatures
are capable of this. A slow-wave drowse,
catnapping in flight, this curious trick—

keeping one eye open,
one brain-hemisphere alert
while the other side drops into sleep,
letting the other eye close down.

We humans can hardly approximate
this state—and only in our troubled rest—

one hemisphere slow-sleeps while
the other half-dreams in shallows
of a turgid river, going nowhere.

In such states, the body feels
so restless that by morning, we
scarcely feel like ourselves
and can’t move easily into the day.

On good nights, sleep wants us
to discover how to find an old friend,
and on what search engine. A deep-dive
into our interior rooms—

and we probe the possibilities
for a new relationship,
a fresh start,
or a way to solve an old problem.

Not often, we feel an airy uplift,
and are quickly carried aloft—the start
of our own migratory season.

San Marcos Springs

Each time I dive into the green pools
toward the white rocks
legs kick and tangle in chilled ribbons
of spring water and
plunging down and down

I force open my eyes. In the flash of the dive
I might as well be blind
water shifting and bubbling, fingers
tearing on fossil imprints
at bottom, the cost

for just missing my skull
and rare blind salamanders
I’ve sent turning like verses on the water’s vellum.
This is a rough register of what it feels like
to live extravagantly

at the end of an era—
never the same body disappearing into the green
or holding its breath, then beginning
its rise to surface. Bits of it
sloughing

into the springs, feeding the source,
the uncommon life forms
collected under cypress knees on either bank,
sun drawing freely from these springs
into thunderheads above the shoals.

Rebecca A. Spears, author of Brook the Divide (Unsolicited Press, 2020) and The Bright Obvious (Finishing Line Press, 2009), has her poems and essays included in TriQuarterly, Calyx, Crazyhorse, Barrow Street, Verse Daily, and other journals and anthologies. A writer, living in the Piney Woods of East Texas, she has received awards from the Taos Writers Workshop, Vermont Studio Center, Dairy Hollow House, and most recently, the Open Door Poetry Fellowship at Porches Writing Retreat. Brook the Divide was shortlisted for Best First Book of Poetry (Texas Institute of Letters).