Journal

Dressed for Success

When she went back to work
mom wore complicated clothes:
layers starting from flesh up,
hose, girdle, brassiere, all white,
to keep her trim for the weekday
nine-to-five. Hose affixed
to yellow garters on thighs
high above her knee, next the girdle
crashing down her hips, across
belly and pelvis, a hard-ribbed
dam to protect whatever soft
parts could not be shown.
She demonstrated how to put on
the bra, folding from the waist
dropping her breasts just so
in two big lacy cups. Finally,
the form-fit nylon slip rained
cascade white over under things,
smoothed creases, erased edges.

That’s when mom stopped, lit
her Pell Mell, tissued her forehead,
moist in Fresno’s morning heat.
The neat navy gabardine skirt,
écru blouse finished the rest.
In spring or fall, a sweater;
in winter, a coat. For many years,
I watched her dress, watched
how she placed the world upon
her shoulders, one foundation
after another, to fortify herself
again and again, to tackle, maybe
win in the masculine world.

Jannie M. Dresser is a San Francisco Bay Area poet with deep roots in the San Joaquin Valley. Her book is “Workers’ Compensation: Poems of Labor & the Working Life.” She lives in Crockett, California.

 

Coming Home to the Feral Body

Know how to tuck up small
in dark places—when to move
fast and quiet.

Breathe slow through your fingers
and let it out easy through your nose,
not moving the tiniest dust ball.

Slide your body, flat-nosed against
the baseboard so it doesn’t hurt
as much if the broom finds you.

Wait motionless until they’re busy,
like a sparrow watching a cat.

Flatten your frame like a snake
on a branch if you make it to
the neighbor’s tree.

Light as a squirrel—leap—
trust the branch to catch you.

Notice how your fingers
match the shape of the latch
when you pinch it open;

how the hinge doesn’t
squawk when you push the gate
outward and dash down the alley.

 

To Curley

Ten ounces of ermine fluff, you stood
on the flat of my hand when we first met—
your deep-sea eyes at my wrist, your cork-screwed
tail at my finger-tips. “Tough little kit,”

your breeder said, “part-Siamese, mutant—
we thought of you.”  Match made, we share space
covered in white fur, combat with rodents,
warm wraps on the couch. Daily, we embrace—

quick bumps only a fellow like you gives—
nose to nose with briefest whisker flick.
Some nights you come home bloody. You’ve lost teeth
—so have I, but, unlike me, you’re as sleek

as when we met. What the neighbors think
is none of our business. We’re happy.
Other girls, prettier, younger than me,
come around, asking, “Is that one yours?”
“Yes,” I say, smiling as you strut through my door.

Kris Demien lives with multiple species in Portland, Oregon. Her work appears in VoiceCatcher, The Poeming Pigeon/Sports issue and at: https://aboutplacejournal.org/issues/when-we-are-lost-how-we-are-found/creatures-and-water/kris-demien/

By flowers

–a reverse abecedarian

zinnias, Mama says, are her favorite flowers;

yesterday her most beloved was
Xerochrysum, the paper daisy or strawflower,
which Mama knew the scientific name for because her aunt,
Verlee, was an amateur horticulturist,
unusually expert at pinching leaves and stems
to root in her greenhouse —

‌                                               and suddenly Mama most prefers
Scabiosa, or pincushion flower, but no — Salvia, she says,
red spikes, vibrant and thrilling, as she recalls rare
quiet moments in Verlee’s many gardens, among
peonies and lady’s mantle in the spring border, while her other aunt,
Orene, sat in the shade sipping iced tea,
nodding as Mama headed to the vegetable garden to set out
marigolds between the rows of tomato seedlings;

late in the day, the listing of flowers falls away, light fades,
keening begins, the sundowning that closes the morning glory’s bloom,
jabbering nonsense that blossoms into rage —

‌                                                                            help her remember
iris, the purple bearded lovelies she planted behind her beauty shop,
hope she will recall how they rebloomed as perfect as before,
give her the courage to —

‌                                            forget-me-not! she is back if only briefly,
eager to remind me that the most special flowers,
daylilies, are for daughters or maybe mothers, she isn’t sure but she smiles,
calls up one more favorite —

‌                                               then by flowers, our daily therapy is done
because she has remembered from zinnia, a symbol of enduring, to
anemone, fragile flower of such short life

Daun Daemon grew up in Hudson, NC, and spent much of her childhood quietly listening to the women in her mother’s home beauty shop. Oh, the stories she can tell! Many of those stories have made their way into her fiction and her poetry. For more than 20 years, she has taught scientific communication at North Carolina State University and lives in Raleigh with her husband and four cats.

 

I Shut My Eyes

There is a darkness,
like a blindfold, or a curtain of fog—
all colors muted to dull sheen.

And the quiet, no humans,
no mechanical thunk or squeal,
no grinding gears,

only a bustle of wind—an insect drone.
Ravens cough from splayed treetops.
I wait for a shipwreck. My sisters rehearse

a shanty for the soon to be departed.
No one ever tells me, “Hey,
I was looking all over for you.”

Gargoyle-like I crouch on my precipice,
the crag between safety and oblivion—
life as it could be and death.

That space is shrinking just now.
I wonder if the fine hairs between
your shoulder blades would rise

if I put one finger to your cheek.

You’ll need to find a way to stay alive
with certain death hunkered beside you.

Dale Champlin, an Oregon poet with an MFA in fine art, has poems published by The Opiate, San Pedro River Review, Triggerfish, Pif, Timberline, and elsewhere. She is the editor of /pãn| dé | mïk/ 2020: An Anthology of Pandemic Poems from the Oregon Poetry Association. Dale has two poetry collections, The Barbie Diaries, and Callie Comes of Age, with Cirque Press in 2021. She is currently writing a collection of Medusa poems.

Stranded In Alaska, 1889

–with a nod to Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise
by Nancy Anderson and Linda Ferber

At dawn the Tlingit canoes arrived
to fetch us from the grounded steamer.
Cold rain lashed and waves banged the dugouts
into the drum of the pitched hull, but
in the end all was saved but the ship.
We stood there in the mush and gravel
with our boots soaked and nowhere to go
but into the stinking cannery
and the Chinese huts greasy with smoke.

Five days I breathed chum and gagged chowder,
watched eagles fight above the fish-pens,
shrieking and stealing despite the rain.
In the factory Tlingit women
severed fins, heads, and tails in the blade
of a second; insides spilled and scales
gleamed like flakes of rainbow. Reeking vats
drove me out to my umbrella’s drip
and patter. I sketched dull scrapwood shacks
with tin roofs weighted by stones, plotted
islands no bigger than scuffs of moss.

The Ancon lay close to shore, her length
receding into fog. From the stern
I marked the fatal tilt of the stack
against the offset beam, the yellow
paddleboxes useless and absurd.

I came for a different Alaska,
one that would pay in grand commissions,
the one exalted in tourbooks—where
the captain scouts for orca and names
the passing glaciers. I had wanted
to see their palatial facades crack
and hear them plunge among littered floes
with crushing surge, to see boreal
forests deploying from the coasts for
mile upon impenetrable mile
sweeping up to mountains and ranges
so august the Sierras seem mocked
as pencil stubs.
‌‌                        But there was only
drench and drab skies, nothing that would pay,
nothing that would pique a nation so
inured to majesty they reject
their own. As I claimed the derelict’s
foreshortened view, a Chinese man toiled
his way to my stump. Grinning wide and
jabbering, he raised a pot of tea
and a chipped bowl of pink fish and rice.

 

Wreck Of The “Ancon” In Loring Bay, Alaska

–after the painting by Albert Bierstadt

A hawser cast too early, slack fire
in the boiler—and all is riven.
Ebb tide pulls and the Ancon
breaks her keel on a hidden reef, listing
so steeply her starboard sidewheel
is nearly dry, shrugged like a shoulder
to the chill gray sameness of sea and fog.

Fast between two worlds of hope
she leans toward a lightening sky
and the headland she will never round,
yet so close to shore a loud hail
should right her. Knifing out from dark bushes,
a fallen trunk and shoreline merge
to suggest a prow, ghost of a ruined hull
and a long forgotten ore.

Kenneth Chamlee lives in the mountains of western North Carolina. His poems have appeared in The North Carolina Literary Review, Worcester Review, Naugatuck River Review, and many others. Ken has written A Measureless Land, a poetic biography of 19th century American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, and a new collection of his poems, If Not These Things, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in 2022. Check him out at www.kennethchamlee.com.

Links to painting: https://collections.mfa.org/objects/33120/wreck-of-the-ancon-in-loring-bay-alaska;jsessionid=A2FDAAA23C38D39525E067B650E7B7AE
https://www.wikiart.org/en/albert-bierstadt/fishing-and-hunting-camp-loring-alaska-1889

In the Dammed Body

This stagnant water. I watch
as a green shroud
spreads across the surface. Still,

I cannot move—cannot
will myself to return
to rivers I once touched, to quench

the parched plains with wet tongue.
I remember
when we feasted and drank by mouthfuls, gulping

air and water, nakedness
tangling in daylight
reflecting bird and bloom in our bodies.

Now earth wheezes
for life—cracks opening
like gills on her long neck, within

the memory of breath
below water. Still—death
transforms—even this motionless
place is a passing through.

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 work has been published in Willawaw Journal and is forthcoming in North Dakota Quarterly.