Journal

A Municipal Servant Serenades at the Pier

Damaged Child, Elm Grove, Oklahoma, 1936

—after a photograph by Dorothea Lange

She stands before a shelter of patched tin,
in a sack-like sleeveless dress
tied at one shoulder. The dress is soiled,
mere covering. All that she’s seen
caught in her stare, lips pursed
as if defying the camera. Her hair is short
and parted and pushed behind
her ears so that none falls on her face.

The only casual thing about her is how loosely
her hands slide halfway into her pockets.
A hint of breasts. When she begins to menstruate,
her mother will tear cloth for pads, and warn her
of all that can happen living in such a place,
men coming and going. The mother’s worries,
now more than food and medicine.
Days are long, there’s nothing beautiful here
except the sunset.

What is this child’s name?
Perhaps Lillian or Margaret,
something suited to her stance.
In another photograph, she is barefoot.
When winter comes there might be a pair of boots
already pinching her toes, but she will not cry.
She will not.

 

Gail Peck is the author of eight books of poetry. The Braided Light won the Leana Shull Contest for 2015. Poems and essays have appeared in Southern Review, Nimrod, Greensboro Review, Brevity, Connotation Press, and elsewhere.  Her essay “Child Waiting” was cited as a notable for Best American Essays, 2013. 

 

It’s Pronounced Yah-hots

Join me here on top of Cape Perpetua.
If we have patience, these clouds will relent.
Here, on fresh moss among sword ferns and maidenhair
spread through a forest of shore pines and spruce, let’s listen
to the ocean surge and hiss, watch foam curl over black lava rock
through the glisten of greens and grays.

See the group of small buildings
that seem to have washed in
like a rope of seaweed
or chunks of glass?
Yachats, gem of the Oregon coast.
So says a license plate holder in one of the gift shops.
Logging’s gone under, motels hang on, restaurants come and go
with the tides.

I came and went too.
But I’ve kept two friends
one beach north in a slightly longer town.
Like Yachats, it holds routine tsunami drills.

My friends are very old. Each lives alone. These two remain
pledged to the soft salty mist that caresses their cheeks
the way nuns persist through the loss of many sisters.

 

Marjorie Power’s newest poetry collection, Oncoming Halos, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books. Her Seven Parts Woman appeared in 2016 from WordTech Editions where you may find sample poems and blurbs. Power lives with her husband in Denver, Colorado after many years in the Northwest.

Ghost Ranch: change of vision

four days I watched wide vistas
change in minutes from blind
rain to tearing sun
to brawling clouds
& lightning
illuminating the big
stone prophets lining the mesa walls

but today I walked
with my head
down
studied the pores
in the red/black grains of sand the lizard
& bear intricately woven into iridescent
lichen on a solitary boulder
I ignored the approaching
thunder  listened
to the chanting
rattle in a cricket’s early
evening prayer

& tonight I abandon the big-
voiced writers  read
haiku
from a monk’s ancestral
brush of small soft
hairs plucked from an elephant’s
inner ear     hear
him whisper from the end
of Heaven’s River

 

Frank Rossini grew up in New York City & moved to Eugene, Oregon in 1972. Over the course of fifty years, he has published poems in various journals including The Seattle Review, Chiron Review, Raven Chronicles, & Clackamas Literary Review. Silverfish Review Press & sight | for | sight books have published his books of poems.

 

Kathy Jederlinich is a retired art teacher and prolific artist in multiple media.This acrylic painting is one of two now showing in the exhibit, Beyond Words,at the Benton County Historical Museum in Philomath, OR.

Montego Bay

For thirty-three years, your exposure to water
consisted of quarries, creeks,
and the occasional lakeside barbecue.
Life on the transplant list kept you grounded,
so this was only our second seaside vacation.
You came prepared with beach shoes,
a swim shirt because the anti-rejection meds make you
high-risk for skin cancer, and snorkeling gear.
You were determined to explore a reef that lay
somewhere beyond the buoys.
Before I knew it, I could barely see you.
You can’t imagine the panicky flutterings,
as if I’d swallowed live kelp,
akin to watching you get wheeled off to the operating room,
glaucous hospital light a universe apart
from the blue Caribbean.
I carry it with me forever, that light,
the way I will carry forever the flash of sun on your fins,
how, in that moment,
you were closer to the horizon than you were to me,
how you dove.

 

Lauren Scharhag is an award-winning writer of fiction and poetry. She lives on Florida’s Emerald Coast. To learn more about her work, visit: laurenscharhag.blogspot.com