Journal

What I Miss

–after Arianne True’s “Seattle Sonata”

It’s hard to be in love
with Portland these days. So much
is broken, disjointed, so little
makes sense. I still feel at home
in my neighborhood, though. The trees
in the park across the street still
whisper and tower and sway.
The London Plane trees still dance
their static ecstatic dance
in the early morning sun,
kick up their branches under the light’s
caress. Homeless men and women
still sleep on benches, tucked
under coats and tarps, still linger
while joggers and small children
in strollers pass.

‌                           Maybe what I miss
is my youthful optimism. I am not surprised
by the tents, the trash, the bike parts. I am
not surprised by the stumbling bodies,
the hopeless faces, the ragged clothing.
I am in shock that I am still living
in this neighborhood and that in real time
we seem unable to rescue real people,
help them pull together
the frayed edges
of their lives.

Vivienne Popperl lives in Portland, Oregon. Her poems have appeared in Clackamas Literary Review, Timberline Review, Cirque, Willawaw, About Place Journal, and other publications. She was poetry co-editor for the Fall 2017 edition of VoiceCatcher. She received both second place and an honorable mention in the 2021 Kay Snow awards poetry category by Willamette Writers and second place in the Oregon Poetry Association’s Spring 2022 contest “Members Only” category. Her first collection, A Nest in the Heart, was published by The Poetry Box in April, 2022.

I Want to Go (Home)

I do a search:
‌               sixty-three of the songs in my library include home in the title.
‌                               (It’s not telling because I try not to talk about things
‌                                that make me feel like I’ve been scraped out or deveined,
‌                                not even to myself, not even to he–)
Once is coincidence, twice is an incident,
sixty-three times? That’s
‌                                     (a hell of a pattern for a girl who won’t talk
‌                                     won’t think won’t act why how do I wrap my fingers
‌                                     around a number like that, make them stretch, make them hold,
‌                                     how do I say–)
about what I expected, really.
Sixty-three songs.
I listen maybe two hundred times to each,
three hundred, more,
‌                              (it depends how many times
‌                              the sun has hurt me that day,
‌                              how many hours I’ve spent locked in a bathroom
‌                              wishing zombies would come and eat everyone else in the building)
I ask Google.
‌                 Still no zombies.
‌                               (Please shut up, please shut up, please be quiet
‌                               I am so tired of voices and music and fingers
‌                               attached to my hand that are not mine why–)
Is this all I will ever have? All I will ever want?
For the world to be quiet,
for a home that feels like a song that feels like home.
‌                    (I’ve heard that watching porn will make the reality of sex unsatisfying,
‌                     and I am afraid because–)
What if I never find it?
What if reality never measures up to the song
and I end up homeless in every building I inhabit
because none is enough to inspire sixty-three songs
‌                                                                                    about the moment I open the door.

Lindsay Regan teaches English Language Arts to ninth and tenth graders in western Washington. She has been writing since elementary school, and has long believed that words have their own magic.

Holy Radishes & Other Acts of Desperation

Close the drapes & cast a circle of salt.
(I am not a witch. I’m simply lonely.)
Call up your father’s ghost. He can hear
but he cannot answer back.

I am not a witch, I’m just lonely.
Perhaps that is the story of every witch.
My father will not answer back,
which is a shame. I have questions.

Perhaps that is the story of every witch:
bored & ignored. You can tap the power
of your shame. Write your questions
in that pretty notebook you’ve been saving.

Bored? Ignored? Try tapping the power
of Making Shit Up. O holy radishes,
O pretty notebook. Make sure you’re saving
fingernail clippings & menstrual blood

for Making Shit Up. Now hold the radishes
high, chant He will never hurt me again.
Toss fingernail clippings. Menstrual blood
helps us remember we are animals.

Chant He will never hurt me again.
Maybe he will, maybe he won’t—
but it helps our animal selves to hear it.
Shout it loud enough to snuff a candle out.

Maybe he will. Maybe he won’t.
He definitely will. I am not a witch.
Say what you wish, then snuff your candle out.
Cry until you have no salt. Open the drapes.
‌

Links

Years, years! This is what it has come to:
I mailed a letter & the answer was bored silence.
My father etc. would rather not read &
I honested myself out of his family photo.
My grandfather died & nobody told me.
I discover so much by accident.

My grandfather died & nobody told me.
What is a grandfather anyway?
Only a father’s father, right? How many do I need?
How many can I bore to death? Bye, Walter—
I didn’t get to tell you what you never asked
& your great-grandkids would not have played football.

How many do I need? This suitcase is small
so I choose my best books & the clock on the wall.
I’m not running—no one’s looking for me—
I am preparing for fire. If you don’t start one I will.
Might as well do something worth being blamed for.
I sold my father’s watch. He never owned a watch.

If you don’t start a daisy chain, I will.
Don’t try to keep me from ruthlessly flowering.
This isn’t his field. He never owned a field.
You will not find your copper coins here, grandfather.
You did not drop your silver watch here, father.
The only loose change in this field is me, face like a dime.

Erica Reid is a Colorado poet, editor, and critic. Her debut collection Ghost Man on Second won the 2023 Donald Justice Poetry Prize and will be published by Autumn House Press in early 2024. Erica’s poems will appear in Rattle, Birmingham Poetry Review, Colorado Review, and more. ericareidpoet.com

Small Table in Evening Dusk

‌–after Henri Le Sidaner’s oil on canvas (1921)

the small, round table set
with two possibilities

teacups, thin porcelain, a gold
lidded teapot, raspberry tarts

second possibility two raffia-wrapped
wine bottles, wine flutes, and

crusty rolls pushed against
little table’s edge

the small blue table
silver pitcher beaded in sweat

could have served either possibility
two friends or two lovers

yet the blue raspberry tarts were
pecked over by sparrows

teacups unstained
crystal flutes clean

wine bottles uncorked but stoppered
ripe camellias dangling

their branches reaching over
the canal––the ladder-backed

chairs awaiting bodies other
than their own––twilight

blue spindrift coats everything

Sher A. Schwartz is a retired University of Alaska Southeast-Ketchikan Assistant Professor of Humanities living on a two-hundred-acre historic farm in eastern Oregon. She is currently working on a chapbook, plays old-time fiddle music, plants gardens for pollinators, and trains bird dogs.

 

Keepsake

We wear smooth all beloved things,
even though life itself might fail
from overuse, from all that touches us
over time, however softly.

Even gods erode from too much care
and must endure their lack of place in sky
invisible, inarticulate, while we go on
talking out loud, unthinking.

Shall we now lie down in the house of the sea
where the planet’s pulse is unfelt
the passing birds unseen,
and take its darkness as a lasting love?

Roberta Senechal de la Roche is an historian and poet of Miꞌkmaq and French- Canadian descent, born in western Maine. She now lives in the woods outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. Her poems have appeared in the Colorado Review; Vallum; Glass: A Journal of Poetry; Yemassee, Blue Mountain Review, Sequestrum, and Cold Mountain Review, among others. She has two prize-winning chapbooks: Blind Flowers (Arcadia Press) and After Eden (Heartland Review Press, 2019). A third chapbook, Winter Light, and her first book, Going Fast (2019) are published by David Robert Books.