Journal

List

A list on the back of a receipt,
items of errors to confess to your son,

a thing of a shadowy pencil
grinding with friction begging forgiveness

against the hard plastic that rimmed
the center of the steering wheel,

then placed in the pocket of your pants,
slippery, like mercury

spilled on the floor in drops
one cannot re-gather,

in-between the first and the second
of November, a cold night

when your nineteen-year-old son
gave you a roll of twenties to cover your debt,

placed it near you on the bench seat
of your plow horse Pontiac

as the headlights bottom-clipped
by the stone wall in front of the hood

shone in the eyes of five deer
escaping the seasonal hunt in a shorn cornfield.

You’d eaten a good thick navy bean soup,
remember the smell of husk, the money,

the unused list that scratched your leg
through the hole in the pocket of your pants.

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, spending the seasons dodging fires, floods, earth-shaking, and all the other scrambling life-initiatives. He has contributed to Heartwood, Tiny Seeds Journal, Vita Poetica, and Willows Wept Review.

From Ingraham Flats

–on Mt. Rainier

Like an animal, she followed
‌          in the night. A lone
‌                    headlamp stalking—

‌          mouths of ice gaping
open—crevasses—visible screams,
‌          our breath a rising

‌                    fog—ragged life, warm
‌          droplets. I don’t know what
she sought—the only certainty:

the clatter
of crampons, metal grinding rock
and ice—the crunch
of ice axes
cleaving—

to the tether
‌          between our bodies, my hand
‌                    bony wing on animal shoulder,

‌          drawing back from black abyss. The desire
to live electric.
‌          The desire

‌                    to die like an animal,
‌          consumed by the great
indifference, a stalking, eerie light.

Natalie Callum is a writer and poet living between St. Louis, Missouri and Wyoming. When she is not writing, she can be found outside free-climbing and exploring with her much beloved husband. Her most recent work has been published in Willawaw Journal and North Dakota Quarterly.

Violent Outbursts

After we watch the video—
a possum pushing a skunk into the pond—
all three of us laugh until we snort.
Jack and Colleen stage reenactments.

I’m the skunk and you’re the possum.
No I’m the possum and you’re the skunk.
The couch is the bank of the pond.
The rug is the water.

The war between siblings ticks up a notch.
In the kitchen, knives pierce a wooden block,
ready at a moment’s notice.
I rush the knives to the basement—

hide all the weapons—swords
and cap guns, wooden arrows,
Nerf guns in every caliber—
Day-Glo orange tipped, green and navy,
pens, broken pencils, the stapler—
even cardboard is a threat.

There’s kicking and scratching,
snarling and weeping.
The skunk’s eye pits glow like swamp gas
the possum bares all fifty teeth
and rises up on its hind legs.

I crouch in the reeds by the pond.

Dale Champlin, an Oregon poet with an MFA in fine art, has poems in The Opiate, Timberline Review, Pif, and CatheXis. Her collections include: The Barbie Diaries, Callie Comes of Age, and Isadora. Medusa is her most recent as yet unpublished collection.

Boundaries

A Japanese woman separates her husband’s dirty clothes
from the rest of the family’s with a long chopstick
and flicks them into the washing machine.

Undershirt, cotton briefs, trousers—
all stinking of smoke and the perfume
of bar hostesses, who drape themselves
around salarymen, doped up like monkeys.

When she sees his clothes spinning
in the final rinse, she feels ecstatic.
Is this how an owl feels when it eats a snake?

In the next load their wash:
Kenji’s t-shirt with a paisley unicorn
Mariko’s school uniform
her own soy-splattered apron.

Listening to the slush of soil and sweat,
she feels the presence of river gods.
But who will erase the stains
on her white negligee?

She heaves the clean clothes into the dryer.
Yellows, reds, greens, blues—
a kaleidoscope of her days.

Soon she will fold them
into neat piles and tuck them
to their proper drawers.

How many owls can you fit inside
a cardboard box?

Will they look at each other
or just stare out at the darkness?

Margaret Chula has published fourteen collections of poetry including Firefly Lanterns: Twelve Years in Kyoto, which received an Honorable Mention in the Haiku Society of America 2021 Book Awards. Her poems explore the interconnectedness between our everyday lives and the natural world. A featured speaker and workshop leader at haiku conferences around the world, she has also served as president of the Tanka Society of America, Poet Laureate for Friends of Chamber Music, and is currently on the Advisory Board for the Center for Japanese Studies. She lives in Portland where she swims, gardens, hikes, and creates flower arrangements.

Sleep

My wife sleeps around
in any room, under
lamp’s glare, in front
of TV’s blare, splayed
across a brown sofa
or in fetal curl
on pale beige cushions.
I doze in easy chairs,
follow old habits and sleep
in a bed too large.
Awake, we wander
most our rooms together,
separate only in the shadows
of our own dark dreams.

Richard Dinges, Jr. lives and works by a pond among trees and grassland, along with his wife, two dogs, three cats, and ten chickens. WINK, Green Hills Literary Lantern, SBLAAM, Roanoke Review, and Home Planet News most recently accepted his poems for their publications.