Alice Martin-Kunkle was one of several potters who gathered to load, cut wood, and then stoke the anagama kiln in Willamina. (See Back Page for more details.) She is a prize-winning northwest clay artist and photographer whose work is currently represented in the ISEA (experimental art) now showing at the Newport Visual Arts Center. Alice Martin Clay Studio (FB), ETSY, and For ArtSake Gallery in Newport are a few of the places where you might find more of her work.
Journal
Tim Barnes
The Worst It Got
A couple of summers I did temp work,
Manpower, Barret Services, between teaching jobs.
It was the eighties and I was in my thirties.
The warehouse was huge and the sump
at the center of a large concrete floor
half a gridiron wide.
There were big turbine engines in one part
and great rolls of metal rope along the walls.
Long canals ran from four directions
into the corners of the sump,
ten feet deep.
On the bottom was a pool of muck and sludge—
oils and fluids and old cruddy cardboard.
We stood there and looked down,
the two of us, the other temp guy and I,
and then climbed down the metal ladder
into it
with plastic buckets and shovels,
rubber boots on our feet.
It took most of the day to scrape and scoop
and slop up
the grime.
At three in the afternoon we were on our knees
with rags cleaning out corners.
Then, though, both of us stood up
and took the afternoon break.
He lit a cigarette and said he didn’t care
if the whole place
blew up.
The walls of the sump were dark and grey
with long drippings of crude the color of crap
and we could see above us metal struts
and the corrugated fiberglass of the roof
where the day was sealed in sickly green.
We could hear the trembles and huffs
of engines and big doors clanging closed.
I didn’t care either and thought if
I keep getting jobs
like this
I’ll probably start smoking too.
It wouldn’t matter what brand,
just light a match
and burn.
Writing a Knife
–after Robert Bringhurst
I want this poem to be sharp
as a knife, a hunting knife,
the kind I used to hone
with a whetstone and spit.
It will be so sharp I can shave
with it, using cold water
from a mountain stream
to wet my face. The scrape
of the knife will sound
like two stones struck together
to start a fire, the kind
that cleanses.
I want this poem to cut
the sadness from your heart,
to hunt all day in the forests
of grief, sniffing the air, staying
downwind, stepping carefully
among the dead leaves.
I want it to cut along
the tissue between the
good flesh and the bruise.
It knows what to pack out
and what to leave for death
to use—coyotes and wolves,
the vultures’ helical hunger.
A good poem knows
its way around the flesh
where the heart has hidden
its pain. Let it track down
that pain and slice it out.
Here it is, the pain
in the poem’s hands.
Go now and wash
the blood from the blade.
Toward an Ordinary Mythology of the Sparrow
Creating gods is something that human beings have always done.
— Karen Armstrong, A History of God
When speaking of the ordinary, sparrows come
to mind and so the ordinary can seem like a gift
when it sifts into the honeysuckle and chirps
like joy. It seems so wildly ordinary this thing
this ordinary bird flocks and flutters in
little swiftnesses. It seems, as well, so simple.
But the markings of sparrows are vivid
and complicated and there are dozens of kinds:
swamp sparrow, sage sparrow, lark sparrow,
white-throated, black-throated, and golden-
crowned sparrow, fox, vesper and song sparrow.
This suggests something extraordinary–
diversity, variety, complexity, by god.
One sees, since every sparrow is different,
that nothing is, really, ever ordinary,
which is an arrangement, a setting
of threads, a ranking, a framing, a choice.
I am reminded of an old saying, Where there is
veneration even a dog’s tooth emits light.
The same may be said of the simple sparrow.
There is a god of smallnesses, a god of sparrows,
a god so ordinary he happens in the honeysuckle.
Tim Barnes, a poet and scholar who lives in Portland, is author of Definitions for a Lost Language, editor of Friends of William Stafford: A Journal and Newsletter for Poets and Poetry, and co-editor of Wood Works: The Life and Writings of Charles Erskine Scott Wood.
Joe Bisicchia
See Beyond the Missing Leaves
There is a dead dear rotting hollow out back
beyond the bleached white bones of a birch.
He was a friend of ours.
Chameleons on this same path, this Highway 61.
At the loss of the petals we may wonder
of the magnolia and of ourselves,
and of the chrome horses
of which we’ve heard Dylan speak,
and of the new neighbors, the strangers,
who just moved in years ago,
and if by grace we shall ever see
beyond the missing leaves our souls underneath.
And this morning the birds speak without words
about the arrival of spring.
But,
are we listening?
Joe Bisicchia writes of our shared dynamic. An Honorable Mention recipient for the Fernando Rielo XXXII World Prize for Mystical Poetry, his works have appeared in Punch Drunk Press, The Wax Paper, the Inflectionist Review and numerous other publications. His website is www.JoeBisicchia.com
Dale Champlin
A Vision of Colleen
No longer a fish in an inland lake,
impatient to be born in the vigilant room,
Colleen blurts into the doctor’s waiting hands
bird-bright and wary.
Her skin’s fine translucence
exposes the ruddy blood beneath
pulsing with secret calmness
as if saying, “See how relevant I am.”
In this exact moment Colleen, miniature bride,
marries the harsh air. Arms flung wide, she startles—
then impossibly—reconciled to the expansion,
anchors to the full weight of gravity.
I will never forget bending down to see
the vision of her pansy face,
I imagine panné velvet, perfume,
white chocolate and tulle ballet costumes.
Her miraculous compendium of cell after cell,
an embryonic construction
transformed into limbs, fingers and toes,
the arch of her fine foot, a graceful arabesque.
She is herself as independent
of her mother as her mother is of me—
complete and individual.
And I am reminded of an old photograph—
my eight year old grandmother, in a time,
two centuries removed from the one we are in now,
draped across her gray-haired father’s knee,
both she and Colleen, breathing angels,
and beauty, beauty, beauty.
Dale Champlin is an Oregon poet with an MFA in painting and photography. She has authored a book, Doggerel; twelve dogs and one cat (2017), and a chapbook, Twisted Furniture (2017). She is the 2017 editor of Verseweavers (the OPA anthology) and co-director of Conversations with Writers. Her work has been published in Social Justice Poetry, VoiceCatcher, and North Coast Squid, and is soon to be published in Moments Before Midnight.
Betty Turbo
Betty Turbo‘s Green Series, of which “Overgrown” is one example, is back home in her studio after a stint at Monster Art in Seattle. This particular piece now resides 99 miles north of Anchorage in a cabin overlooking a glacier. She gets around, Miss Turbo, and if you want to see more of her fine art paintings, cards, posters, pins, and other paraphernalia, go to Betty Turbo on Etsy or Betty Turbo.com.
Merridawn Duckler
Cold Mountain to Red Pines
–-in memoriam, Mike McCarthy
Red was your omnipresent scotch,
your ruddy face of broken blood vessels
the bluffs of California,
where you were born.
Even your claim
that you were related to Joe McCarthy
(you’ll need redder bait than that, old man)
was Red-centric.
One night when we got so drunk
at that horrible family reunion
we witnessed something or someone
descend the roseate clouds
carrying a walking stick,
his embarrassing junk wrapped in a torn cloth.
Who is it, he thundered, who doesn’t know a wasp’s waist from a crane’s knee!
Us, we laughed and threw our empties at him,
two fools, bowled over by the bigger fool.
Now, only I am left to remember that,
my head on a grey rock;
beside tangled brush, a branch sways
after the cardinal has flown.
Slab Creek
Where birch reach the road,
ghosts of the last snow,
while tourist’s clear cut to icon beach,
I’ll take you to my true state,
diesel and superlatives
the way moss silvers, how the woods
are darker than our memory of the woods.
A shocking innovation when we reach the ocean:
the waves are colored robin’s egg blue!
but still unhindered space
between where light falls
and light reflects. Turn here, turn here, I say
like I built this place;
my own fine, salt-soaked houses
along the beach where fires roar into sumac.
I want to roll down the frosted glass at the mother who smiles
as we pass, her beautiful daughter in citrus across the road
shout: my state, my state, my estate
say: no words, no words, but find them anyway.
Merridawn Duckler, a poet and playwright from Portland, Oregon, is the author of INTERSTATE from Dancing Girl Press. She’s an editor at Narrative Magazine and at the philosophy journal, Evental Aesthetics. Hear her read “The Spectrum” at Cleaver Magazine.