Journal

The Lost Boys

…for she thought that she
had seen him before in the faces
of many women who have no children. ~ J.M. Barrie

I peered darkly
into the night’s lens
where the soft searing skin
of newborn galaxies
stretch out like a yawning
crocodile jaw
breathing
black holes of borrowed
energy from a
cosmic core
that contained me
and then didn’t
me and you –
and then didn’t

I peered down the barrel
of the universe
only to travel towards
myself marigold
metamorphosis fissured
face-to-face with my own
celestial singularity expanding
clock kernel core
wayward waning
like a triple moon

But when we were
one space I
saw the universe
as a shadow at our feet
to collect crease the blankets
of energy roll them up
and place them in
a pram of my own plans.

Instead, I found it
Peter Panning
towards its own end,
and you –
ticking towards yours.

Audrey Towns, a literature and composition instructor in the heart of Fort Worth, Texas, dismantles the nature/culture binary in her prose and verse. New materialism is her muse, landscapes her canvas, and the connection between the human and nonhuman her essence. She has published in several places, including The Stone Poetry Quarterly, (forthcoming) Eunoia Review, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, and The Ulu Review.
Insta: @Audrey_Haferkamp_Towns

When The Dead Visit

People I know tell me their dead visit
disguised as a cardinal at the window,
a butterfly fluttering a finger length away,
a fox watching from a tree’s shadow.

I’m told their dead leave pennies on sidewalks,
add songs to a playlist, stop a car spinning on ice,
lie next to them in a lonely bed
just before the alarm goes off.

Maybe it’s the people I miss
who grace my empty space
with a scent, a faint tune,
a memory I’d almost forgotten.

But I never say,
I loved them,
past tense.
I love them still.

Laura Grace Weldon lives in an Ohio township too tiny for traffic lights where she works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops, serves as Braided Way editor, and chronically maxes out her library card. Laura was Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books.

Smoke Signals

—Sequoia National Park

From the switchbacks above Soda Creek,
I can see green smoke blowing across
the Chagoopa Plateau. What gives?

A forest fire in ecologically sensitive
colors, fit for a national park?
A new wilderness pope, just declared

by a conclave of bear bishops?
The answer comes with a brush of my hand
against a pine branch by the trail.

Not wildfire, not the solemn choice
of His Holiness by ursine cardinals,
but lodgepole pollen loosed on the wind,

clouds of fertility crossing the earth,
incense released to the gods
and given back to the trees that burn it.

Paul Willis grew up in the Willamette Valley, worked as a mountain guide in the Cascades and Sierra Nevada, obtained his graduate degrees at Washington State University, and taught as a professor of English at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, where he still lives. He has returned to the Northwest to serve as an artist-in-residence at North Cascades National Park. Willis has published seven collections, the most recent of which is Somewhere to Follow (Slant Books, 2021). Individual poems have appeared in Poetry, Ascent, Writer’s Almanac, and the Best American Poetry series. Learn more at www.pauljwillis.com.

The Canoe

A canoe comes for me
in stillness before nightfall,
when darkness still hovers far away
over the drumlins
with its star-promises.

The canoe is silent.
A waterlily-boat,
seemingly waiting for me to enter
and paddle into silence.

Water whispers, a lapping sound,
a kitten tonguing milk from a flat saucer.
An interlude of tree frogs begins
high-pitch clicking for love
and intense longing. Fireflies start glow-blinking.

I enter the canoe cautiously, trying not to tilt it
as it rocks with my shifting weight;
motion ends
when I settle in, relax,
skimming the surface.

I do not care where the canoe will take me.
I trust it to take me into night’s arms;
all I have to do is relax,
let water carry me,
let shores disappear.
It never occurs to me
if this is what I want,
if this world wants me.

My days of needing rules
and a good sense of direction
no longer guide me.

When I drift like this,
allowing whatever to happen to me,
I don’t care what happens next.

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 “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” will include all 36 color pictures. Five of the poems appeared in Willawaw Journal.

 

Bowing to No Gods:
A Family Liturgy

Coffee is the blood,
cigarettes the body.
The sole communion
before noon. Our voices
form a choir, but we don’t
kneel to pray. In my family,
the women stand strong
and proud. Bowing to no man.
I don’t worship the Father;
no gods linger here. Instead,
my mother is revered.
Flesh and blood. She
who sculpted me
from her very own body.
The gossip of the week
becomes our gospel. Instead
of church clothes we wear
pajamas, and housecoats.
Our sacred spaces are
front yards, trailer parks,
and the smoking sections
of hotels– wherever
the morning finds us.
We deliver sermon in turn,
praising only
each other. No pews
grace our churches,
just lawn chairs and
hard benches.
In our sanctuary we
find communion.
Shared laughter and
whispered secrets
our confessional. The family bond
our unspoken devotion.
Unholy and raw fueled
by coffee and smokey breath.

Sam M. Woods is a full time janitor, perpetual student, lifelong writer and avid reader.
Currently enrolled in English Literature and Pop Culture at Toronto Metropolitan
University, she started sharing her work as part of a creative writing class, and has been
exploring more ways to share her work since, including spoken word performances. None
of her work has been published in any form as of now.