Willawaw Journal

Online Poetry & Art

Journal

Vincent Wixon

Surface Tension

In the place where an embarrassed silence falls,
I put a candlestick or a water glass.
–Yannis Ritsos, Monochords
Sometimes
it’s simple objects
that matter, a candle
lit on the windowsill,
the ceiling light off
so the glare dissolves
and the faces relax.
It’s still silent, but different.
The couple at the kitchen table
reach out to a glass of water
which has begun to inch
across the oilcloth.

Vincent Wixon’s recent book of poems is Laying By, from Flowstone Press. Previous volumes include Blue Moon: Poems from Chinese Lines and The Square Grove. He co-edited Sound of the Ax, a collection of William Stafford aphorisms and poems. Vincent Wixon lives in Ashland, Oregon.

Elizabeth Woody

My Brother

It was bruise marks of hands that alluded to tracks of murder.
Her neck was twisted too many times in short rope,
and the tree too high for a small woman.

“He was here.” He says,
“He came to her new Man,
too, and said that he was coming for him next.”

The nightmare is black tongue.
No footprints.
The form in the room
laughs, “Ha Ha, Goody!”
He sees that it is vapor.

Later, when he cuts her down,
he knows that she came to him,
to him, she laughed.
The night will not make her unhappy.

He had no time to hunt,
since he had to bury
three more brothers the next day.
Car wreck on ice.

The insidious soul danced across the river
to entice other women to death.

If he is man,
he is subject to will.
If one prefers Archangels,
he can be cast into oblivion.

That does not comfort the people
and we must battle
with Bell and Prayer, for the brother.
This will take up the nights
and the rest of our thoughts.
The brother has seen the foreshadowing of events.
He will bring the damned down in his fisherman’s grip
into the mad boil of the river’s strength.

 

From Luminaries of the Humble by Elizabeth Woody.  © 1994 The Arizona Board of Regents.  Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press.

Back Page with Delores Pollard

Where You Have Been is But a Shadow of Who You Are–30″ x 40″ Mixed Media Collage

Delores Pollard, a native of Montana, says she is attempting to tame the wildness of her art. She had her first solo art exhibit this Fall at Pegasus Gallery in Corvallis where you may purchase some of her works. Returning to art at the age of 70, she uses magazine pages as her paint, working intuitively and guided by the temperature of emotion she senses in different colors. Pollard has had art lessons since she was 10 years old and makes conscious use of the rules or breaks them on purpose in order to access the transformative powers of art. Learn more at call2Heartinlight,com  

Notes from the Editor

Samuel Green’s  poem, Grandmother, Cleaning Rabbits, inspired a certain elemental gravity from a handful of our contributors:  Tim Barnes with his Writing a Knife; Joe Bisicchia’s See beyond the Missing Leaves; Amy Miller’s The Vegetarian Dismembers the Chicken; Doug Stone’s Another Battlefield; and Elijah Welter’s In the Winter of Separation. Death, loss, the knife, and/or the Fall/Winter season are recurring themes with which the reader will likely resonate.

Another handful of poets responded to the prompt to address an author or character that had stayed with them long after the reading. Marilyn Johnston addressed Olive Kittredge; Brigitte Goetze spoke to James Joyce; Ben Sloan, Eva Braun; and Cristina White called up Georges Simenon and Oscar Wilde. Would your conversation be the same? Or have you been sifting through your responses, words still unspoken? Sometimes cultural history deserves the direct address as these poets demonstrate. See what you think.

It is our good fortune to read within these pages a number of established poets in addition to Samuel Green:  Tim Barnes, Amy Miller, George Perrault, and Erica Goss among others. There are several Oregonian poets you will likely recognize as well as names new to the reader. I hope you will enjoy the exploration as I have.

For your visual pleasure, we honor the labors of potters in this issue, especially those who stoked the fires of the East Creek Anagama kiln in Willamina. Alice Martin-Kunkle shares pictures of her wood-fired wares as well as of the kiln’s firing (Back Page).  Betty Turbo invites us into her Green Series with two paintings on wood. Brady Chambers celebrates the opening of his Independent Print Works with one of his handmade screen prints.

 Happy Autumnal Equinox! May the art and poems on these pages prepare us to turn inward with the season and celebrate the riches we find there.

Rachel Barton

Yvonne Amey

Unworkshopable

Write a poem about a town [person] that haunts you
but instead of his or her name identify the place
as a pot of scalding water being thrown in your face
then write this poem [person] a letter but in the letter
mention a few facts about how the summer moonlight
saw every [fucking] fist then ask the poem [town]
whom is still not in Hell if it ever visits the dogdead
pines where this poem lays and ask the poem [my mother]
where the Sig Sauer is buried,  make a grocery list of all
the animals it’s [you’ve] killed but not until I find
the photo [bullets] of the boy sitting with his chicken
on my porch both [burning] pale and starched like a stuffed priest.

 

Yvonne Amey is a poet with an MFA from the University of Central Florida. Her work has appeared in The Florida Review,  50 Gs, Vine Leaves Journal, and elsewhere.