Journal

Unstitched

I am held together
by tiny stitches
on small scraps of feed sack,
snatches of wool, snips of gingham.
A patchwork of pastels—
a slipshod collage of cotton.
I’ve been silk, satin, taffeta;
I’ve been flowers, polka-dots, and plaid.

Thin white thread
‌                           ‌zig-zags
‌                across
‌                           the decades
‌                hemming me in, keeping me
from ripping.

I’ve been zipped.
‌                Buttoned.
‌                           Unsnapped.
I’ve been bumblebunched, twisted,
and straightened. Held pins in my mouth,
pricked fingers, and calloused
my thimble-less thumbs.

I am done.
Unravel me now:
Rip out the seams
one by one, untwist strings
and untangle knots. Fold me gently.
What I haven’t finished—
take now.
Begin again.

Life Cycle

September’s cicadas are in a frenzy of crescendo
and diminuendo, their sound boxes like kettle drums,

tymbals flexing in celebration and lament, buckling
and unbuckling, ridges rubbing faster and faster, drumstick

clicks on washboard: We’ve done it, they cry! We’ve met
and married; mating’s done; our progeny buried in bark

to emerge next summer or maybe in seventeen, tiny nymphs
that slept through our deaths, never knew how the song

rose and fell one last time that late summer day. How fast
it all transpired once we fed and left our old skins behind.

Sarah Cummins Small lives outside Knoxville, TN. She taught creative writing, literature, and composition for over 20 years to students at all levels, from elementary to college. Her poetry has appeared in Yalobusha Review, Willow Review, Appalachia Bare, Free the Verse, among others. She holds an MA in English/creative writing from Iowa State University.

Li Bai on His Way to Meng Haoran’s Grave

The anger of a gathering storm
stirs the sullen sky with dark
clouds fringed with first rain.
The boatman will be impatient
to get ahead of the bad weather.

But I will pay him well to take
this journey slow. I am in no
hurry to stand beside your grave.
I’ll ride the river’s rough currents
and add my voice to the howling wind.

I want to embrace the rage of nature
that knows how much I’ve lost.
After I allow myself to say goodbye,
I’ll walk away from your grave
into the waiting arms of sorrow.

Northwest’s Mind of Winter

December shoulders into our lives
dragging with it, November’s dark rain
to help ignite the Northwest’s mind of winter.
As our thoughts turn to the holidays, rain
raps on our windows whispering, “I am here.”
Leafless trees mourn summer’s memory, their
voices all rattle and clash, but December’s song
is already in firs fattened with wind and rain,
their verdant voices, a choir praising the months
of dark skies coming. They sing a rich, green
celebration of a season shimmering in a glaze
of incessant rain that shakes the earth awake
and begins to quench her thirst for winter.

Doug Stone lives in Albany, Oregon. He has written two chapbooks, The Season of Distress and Clarity (Finishing Line), The Moon’s Soul Shimmering on the Water (KDP), and a full length poetry collection, Sitting in Powell’s Watching Burnside Dissolve in Rain (The Poetry Box). His poems have been published in numerous journals and in the anthology, A Ritual To Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford.

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.