Journal

The Weight of so Much Compassion

I chew the two slices of bacon that came with my lite breakfast and think about the people who hear voices and the slender margin between them and me –

birds with asymmetrical feathers fly better. I don’t know where I learned this, but I know it’s true. When I straighten my shoulder

I limp. My shoulder is leaning more to the right, but when my sweater slipped off a man took notice: I married him and I love when a book

starts with a family tree; sometimes I spend more time studying the family tree than reading the book. I scream

at the trees for stealing all the light; I hate how they knit above me, spitting sap everywhere, a private joke they share and maybe

the trees look innocent, but I will never forget the displacement of air, the long boom, tiny eggs cracking

I wait at the therapist’s office. A blond girl lets out a gusty sigh while a man thumbs his phone. A click, a red light and I cannot stay awake; I started knitting

a scarf to help me stay awake; the scarf is long and red and contains inexplicable holes.

It rolls up on the sides and I think about how some families can curl their tongues. We’re like a family here in the therapist’s office, a real family I mean; we hardly speak and no one makes eye contact but aren’t we

looking for communion? All of us, asymmetrical birds with our dense family trees, riding too fast on our bikes, arms outstretched and grinning like mad at that dim future

we who bear the dents of gravity on our bodies, the weight of so much compassion.

 

Erica Goss’s books are Night Court, winner of the 2016 Glass Lyre Poetry Prize, Vibrant Words, and Wild Place. She lives in Eugene, Oregon. Please visit her at www.ericagoss.com.

Grandmother, Cleaning Rabbits

I shot this one by the upper pond of the farm
after watching the rings trout made rising
to flies, watching small birds pace the backs
of cows, hoping all the time she would run.

My grandmother told me they damaged her garden.

I think it was a way to make the killing
lighter. She never let me clean them, only asked
I bring them headless to her. I bring this one
to the fir block near the house, use the single-
bitted axe with the nick in the lower crescent
of the blade, smell the slow fire
in the smoke-house, salmon changing
to something sweet & dark. A fly turns
in a bead of blood on my boot. I tuck
the head in a hole beside the dusty globes
of ripened currants, talk quiet to the barn cat.

In her kitchen my grandmother whets the thin blade
of her Barlow, makes a series of quick, clever cuts, then tugs
off the skin like a child’s sweater. This one was
pregnant. She pulls out a row of unborn rabbits
like the sleeve of a shirt with a series of knots.
The offal is dropped in a bucket. Each joint gives way
beneath her knife as though it wants
to come undone, as though she knows some secret
about how things fit together. I have killed
a hundred rabbits since I was eight.

This will be the last.

I am twenty, & about to go back
to the war that killed my cousin in Kin Hoa,
which is one more name she can’t pronounce.
I haven’t told her about the dead,
and she won’t ask. She rolls the meat
in flour & pepper & salt, & lays it
in a skillet of oil that spits like a cat.
She cannot save a single boy who carries a gun.
All she can do is feed this one.

Samuel Green, poet and editor, writes about the Pacific Northwest landscape “with accessible, elemental observations of life’s small turns.” He has written eleven collections of poetry, including Washington State Book Award winner The Grace of Necessity (2008) and Vertebrae: Poems 1978–1994 (1997). More information about Green is available here.

 

Grocery Store

The grocery store is full of
what he needs to continue existing.
It doesn’t say a thing about why he should.

He doesn’t understand the smile
on the face of the guy in the mobile wheelchair
as he rolls between the chilly winds
of the dairy aisle.

Does it matter what brand of coffee he buys?
Or cornflakes? Or salad dressing?
The labels seem to think so.
He tore away his own label years before.
It was the word “goodbye” that made him do it.

The wheelchair guy has no help with him,
not even a service dog.
He can only reach the lower shelves
so many of his decisions are made for him.
He doesn’t have to stand
before a sparkling rainbow of soda bottles
and wonder which will rot his guts the least.
Maybe that’s what he’s so happy about.
Not having to stand.

 

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in Examined Life Journal, Evening Street Review, and Columbia Review, with work upcoming in Harpur Palate, Poetry East and Visions International.  

Oh, Olive!

Some of those things
that come out of your mouth.
Your honest, pithy repartee.
The moments when you can
tell your point struck
in the small center,
yet you continued to push
down on the blade.
But I can tell that it pierces
you, too, as you leave your prey
raw and bleeding
with your feigned indifference,
your sharp look of dismissal.

Many times I try to put myself
in your place, imagining how
you’d been hurt somewhere
in that Kitteridge Clan.
And little by little it seeped out—
a father who’d committed suicide,

a mother who couldn’t cope.
But you, you seemed to sacrifice
your first-born son without mercy.
You cried once or twice on the outside,
yet I wonder about the overflowing
rain that fills within—internal edges
gaping, broken with rust.

My mother was like you,
with her caustic retorts, a screen
for her scars—repelling the ones
she needed the most.
Your quiet, compliant husbands.
I mourned for her even while she lived.
Even in the nursing home,
I reminded her to be kinder to the staff,
but she said, It’s too late, I don’t know how.
Folks like you both, Olive,
like you and my mom—
that steel facade that made you
fierce, unyielding.

I want to believe
you both cry
from the joy
of seeing
what your children
have become—
my mother’s grave,
the only headstone
in our small-town cemetery
covered with a mildew,
not even the caretaker
can wipe
away.

Marilyn Johnston is a writer and filmmaker. She has received a fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts, a Robert Penn Warren prize from the New England Writers, and was selected to be a Fishtrap Fellow.  Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Salem, Oregon.

Alice Martin-Kunkle is a prize-winning Northwest clay artist and photographer who currently lives on the Oregon coast. She is one of the owners of For ArtSake Gallery at Nye Beach in Newport where you can find more of her work. 

Audumla

No grass for you to munch in Ginnungagap,
this empty land.  No trees to lie beside,

chew your cud in dappled sunshine.  Lost in fog,
you graze endless pastures of ancient, salty ice.

Rivers of milk flow from your four udders.
You suckle Ymir, mighty hermaphrodite,

find Buri lying on his back, entombed.  Gusts
of your cow-breath defrost his matted beard.

Swipes of your slurping tongue thaw his cheeks.
Buri, rebirthed to this warming wasteland.

Buri, grandfather of Odin, Vili, Ve, who slay Ymir,
cast his gray blood to form the seas, his bones

the gray mountains and cliffs, his skull the sky
and clouds of our nine worlds.  Great cow,

mother of all we see, awakened in this place,
you feed a race of giants, free a race of gods.

Ice of a past world converts to your cream.
Your next spheres rise under Surtr’s flame.

 

Her Words in the Desert

Like bats in evening, they fly
from the dry cave of her mouth.
Sand is deep on the floor.
Water once smoothed her arid features,
but no more.

How they once rippled
across the stones of my heart.
Alone in our canoe,
we drifted the river, the long route
to the edges of its meanders.

Damselflies skimmed.
Anasazi dwellings,
like nests of ancient swallow people,
perched on storied cliffs above us.
Sunlight slanted across the waters
of our morning.

Karen Jones is a teacher, poet, and life-long learner from Corvallis, Oregon.  Some of her past work has appeared in Tower Poetry, River Poets Journal, Paperplates Magazine, and Willawaw Journal.