Willawaw Journal Fall 2024 Issue 19

Hard cover accordion-bound twist boxes. Papers: recycled commercial, sumigami, origami, momigami, botanical photo copies, shizen. 5”x18”.

Your Photo I Took Inside Simon Prim’s Bookshop in Kinsale

Here you are, a supplicant, genuflected at a row of Irish books
with one hand reaching, as if fingering relics among the books.

Not that you knelt to propose marriage years ago, more like we
assumed our union after discovering our mutual love of books.

Inside Simon’s shop, we found poetry, “The Stinging Fly,”
and an early Salmon Press volume, “Gonella,” among the books.

With quirky upstairs, this one of many shops with book jackets
in windows to lure us in, to devour Galway and Dublin books.

How grand then, to enjoy designer soup and sandwich next door
at the Poet’s Corner after buying a stack of Simon’s books.

Leaving Kinsale, a most propitious purchase, one lilac blossom
duffel bag, now needed to haul homeward bound books.

We found each town had bookshops that to us were so like
museums we had to drag ourselves away from shelves of books.

Back home in Seattle, surrounded by unpacked treasures,
I, Mary Ellen, recline with you to read amid our shelves of books.

Hiking to Snow in Summer

She climbs over slate and shale of an old avalanche chute

‌            Cold air from the falls mists her face
‌            as summer water dances over lodge pole pine

Roots and boots do their thing as switchbacks scissor the hillside

‌            Raspberries vermillion‌     Leaves viridian
‌            She dodges a slurry of horseflies in hot wind of the rise,

rubs a cluster of snow crystals into the bark of her skin
as tingles erupt into goosebumps
She collects huckleberries in a spent water bottle

‌            and stops to scan a vista of peaks beyond
‌            Down the hillside, she eyes the spent zigzags of her path,

inhales the fragrance of damp cedar branches

‌            The tight-knee return descent is part of the bargain
‌            Branches joust in the gusty wind and slanted rain
‌            Palms of her hands could be pinecones and needles

Mary Ellen Talley’s poems have been published in Gyroscope, Deep Wild, Willawaw, and Banshee among others. Her poems have received three Pushcart nominations. She has three chapbooks: Postcards from the Lilac City from Finishing Line Press, Taking Leave from Kelsay Press, and Infusion online at Red Wolf Journal. Her website is maryellentalley.com.

Fragments

1.
Parking lot of a Florida motel, after dark
Humid smell of swamp, diesel, approaching rain
Moths battering the buzzing mercury lights
Car engine ticking as it cooled

I was a boy when that trip was made
Old now, this is all that is left from that night
No answer to why I was not inside, asleep
Why the memory holds a thrill and a threat

In Antarctica once, I watched an iceberg flip
Its huge hidden bulk rise into the sky
We waited to see if the wave would drown us
The door opened, my father stood in the box of light

2.
Beach of a fishing village in Mexico, 1965
Twelve years old, bare feet, ragged shorts
Skinny and brown, I was taken for a local
Shrugged, smiled in Spanish, ran away

Inland, the pit of an opal mine
A boy on the rubble pile, hoping for a stone
Startled to see an American kid, shy
Held out to me a rock slivered with fire

Now, I hear that the village is gone
The boy I was and the boy I met
Are now old men, as long as we live
The gift still heavy in my hand

3.
We waited for the days when snow covered the roads
Cut us off from school and all outer voices
Granted us the cold sanctuary of the attic
Where we enacted journeys ending in feasting and celebration

Sister, what silks you conjured there, what gold and rubies!
My imagination faltered at the tresures you could name
But I played my part, and our sailing ships and caravans
After many perils came at last to shelter, always

Rolling your wheelchair through the Tranquility Garden
You called out the flowers, cosmos and columbine, peony and rose
Never doubted, or admitted to doubt, the adventure’s end
That other world, safe behind shivering panes of glass.

Pepper Trail’s poems have appeared in Willawaw, Rattle, Atlanta Review, Catamaran, Ascent and other publications, and have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net Awards. His collection, Cascade-Siskiyou: Poems, was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry. He writes and explores the world from his home in Ashland, Oregon.

Our Father as Actaeon

Just after we were fed and bathed, safely
sleeping in our rough beds, he’d wake us

to go back into the forest. We could feel
with our noses where the path was,

where he walked. We knew him, even when he’d soak
his vest in urine, call every creature in. We’d get to chasing,

carry turkeys in our mouths back to the cabin
where he’d gut them, hollow their bones to make calls

which sounded just like those turkeys.
Imagine being called by your own bones.

Is this the part where we are supposed to thank him
for the rest he’d give us after, the plates of roast turkey

placed lovingly at the foot of our beds, for the old boots
we’d chew into nothing. How long until he called us

with our own empty bones. We’d curl into him,
still. I don’t know why except

there is always something beautiful about a man who wants
so little: good dogs and open land, a man who can take

a gun and fire and hit something, a man who looks
into a chink in the trees and finds a clean body of water.

What did he sully, you’ll say. When our father changed,
even though we did not see what happened, we knew his body.

He lengthened, thinned out, his face sharp, those eyes–
what he’d sacrificed to run wild. Yes, we knew him,

and we tore his heart out with our teeth,
our sister cut clean his head and it rolled like a drum

of wine, split open. We broke our father, or so
our grandmother says. Looking back, it was our nature,

what we did to our father in the woods
when we did not recognize our father–stripped him,

our coats wild tendrils, rubbery and unwashed,
as we always were when he’d return us to our mother.

Sara Moore Wagner is the author of three prize winning full length books of poetry, Lady Wing Shot, winner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Prize (2024), Swan Wife (Cider Press Review Editors Prize, 2022), and Hillbilly Madonna (Driftwood Press Manuscript Prize, 2022) Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals and anthologies. Find her at saramoorewagner.com.

The Other Side of Language

The other side of language begins with a girl
chasing swallowtails, her feet covered with dust
of soft music, as she finds the butterfly within her grasp.
She reaches for an elusive world, one with yearning
beyond her touch. Her hands want to fetch
those darting colors of numerous swallowtails.
She ignores the unspoken truth she desires
what she cannot have. Life can’t be contained.
This is the delicate world she enters but
she’s enchanted. She doesn’t know what she’d do
if she caught a butterfly. She’d probably release it.
Who would want to harm such a harless creature?
Even Butterflies have a home. Her hands move
like haiku: quick, short, suggesting a season
with a hawk circling over a target too small to see.
She skip-leaps after a swallowtail, one of many
unobtainable goals she’ll chase someday.
All life contains immediacy, evidence of chances,
as she wanders into the heart of it all, finds buoyancy
on the other side of language, tender moments
never knowing what to say, what’s viable,
what’s not, what jerks suddely in front of her.
She realizes she doesn’t need to say a word;
just experience. Chasing becomes everything.

Martin Willitts Jr edits the Comstock Review. Winner of the 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, 2015, Editor’s Choice; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, Artist’s Choice, 2016, Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, 2020. His 25 chapbooks include the Turtle Island Quarterly Editor’s Choice Award, “The Wire Fence Holding Back the World” (Flowstone Press, 2017), 24 full-length collections including Blue Light Award “The Temporary World.” His forthcoming is “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” will include all 36 color pictures. Five of the poems appeared in Willawaw Journal.

 

Zhen Xian Bao interlock of 31 boxes. Recycled eco-journals, stardream covers. 8”x 22”.

Artist Statement:

Zhen Xian Bao (ZXB) is a container of 15-30 interlocking boxes from the Miao, Dong, Han and Yao tribes in China. Also known as a ‘thread book’, it was carried by women throughout their lives. Folded boxes held threads, needles, embroidery patterns, notes, family photos and shoe patterns. Masu, rectangular, flower, and twist boxes are made separately to layer so that the upper ones lift and open those below. 

Since Covid, I turned to painting, folding paper, and handmade books. With basic book construction in hand, the books are now vehicles for narratives of family history and rocks I have known, illustrated stories of heroines, empty books for grandchildren, and eco-collages of global collapse perspectives in the world of the hyperlocal. 

I have been fortunate to meet great teachers in online Book Arts workshops with Paula Beardell Krieg, Susan Joy Share, Hedi Kyle, Scott McCarney, Shawn Sheehy, and a global network of colleagues.

An Alaskan for 50 years, Sarah Barton lives in a place of dramatic scale (largest state, lowest population density, highest mountains), wandering charismatic megafauna (moose and bears), extremes of light and dark, and an assortment of inspiring people. Home is perched between two mountain ranges overlooking the Matanuska Glacier in Southcentral Alaska about 100 miles northeast of Anchorage.

In her early days, she worked as a painter and university instructor after completing a BA in Painting and MA in Renaissance Art History from Tyler/Temple in Philadelphia. The practicalities of divorce and raising kids led to a career in public infrastructure and community mediation. For 35 years, she lead teams to deliver roads, ports, airports, clinics, libraries, and museums in Alaska and nationally.