Journal

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.

 

Artist statement: I live in a place where rain is a refrain. It can be both partner and adversary and always has something to say to our bodies and emotions. This selection of visual poems was suggested by reading and rereading CMarie Fuhrman’s poem “Hells Canyon Revival.” Using the word rain over and over (a refrain!) Furhman’s poem about rain is not a poem about weather. Drawn from an ongoing series of more than 2700 pieces, my found-word collages exploit the accidents of magazine design — the places where, by happenstance, unrelated words stack upon one another or cast unintended meaning across the boundaries of sentence, paragraph, and column break. Each text fragment is the approximate equivalent of a poetic line. The text includes no attributable phrases and the lines that make up each poem are sourced from different magazines.

An artist, poet, and freelance writer, J.I. Kleinberg lives in Bellingham, Washington, USA, and on Instagram @jikleinberg. Her visual poems have been published in print and online journals worldwide and were featured in a solo exhibit at Peter Miller Books, Seattle, Washington, in May 2022, and displayed at the 2022 Skagit River Poetry Festival and in The Cutting Edge: Art of Collage in Asheville, North Carolina, in April 2023. Chapbooks of her visual poems, how to pronounce the wind (Paper View Books) and Desire’s Authority (Ravenna Press Triple Series No. 23) were published in 2023 and another, she needs the river, is forthcoming from Poet Atlas.