Journal

If faith can move mountains,
so can doubt

McKinley as a mountain bore
the softball bolus in his lung,

its tender fibers rooting along
lymph shafts to deposit itself

in black lodes. He had spent
everything running to Iowa

where the hospital strip-mines glowed
a radioactive affordability,

his instincts said this final prospect
would king or bust him:

this stage of his lonesomeness,
just like a mountain, and his

poverty, just like a mountain,
overwhelmed his hope of hitting

pay-dirt. As his soil eroded
before me, his grandeur

flitting to scree, It is what it is,
he repeated and repeated.

Jared Pearce wrote Down Their Spears (TMR, forthcoming) and The Annotated Murder of One (Aubade, 2018). His poems have recently been or will soon be shared in Aloe, Hip Pocket, and Lucky Jefferson.  He lives and writes in Iowa, USA.  For further information, see Jared’s website.

The Growth of My Rings

Before I leafed out and bloomed beyond your intention, you sprinkled patented faith and planted your seeds. You created small pilgrims, incubated with wishes.

Eventually, we found our navels, climbed our birth cords, and looked upon your gardening labels. My sister sprouted sunflowers. My brother bore blueberries. But I could never read your language, so I dreamed of tulip trees and aimed beyond my roots.

In that garden, at first, you fertilized with love and aerated with play. We sang with bees about the bullfrog Jeremiah, and indulged with clover on a diet of sun. We danced with ladybugs, shaking it all about. We linked branch-to-branch, calling Red Rover on over. At night, you repeated the history you’d written, while my quiet hopes wandered and invented.

Then one day, the clouds became plums, and amidst a monsoon, the wind carried whispers of a different story. I grabbed the heavens and drank the sky. I offered you an arc, grafted to my side.

How was I to know your world depended on our pasture’s fences? How was I to know you’d see no path but refusal? So I grew, moving away from you.

Do you remember those times, before what was to come? Before you cursed me thorn and thistle? Before you recruited my brother and sister? Before you choked my roots and bruised my branches?

For years, I hated the soil and allowed my sap to run bitter. I needed decades to clear the confusion.

And yet our shared yesterdays still live, etched within the growth of my rings: Honeysuckle perfumes memory within those flashes of days in our garden. We play tag with grasshoppers, anxiously listen as worms and grubs tell ghost stories, then lie down and allow the sun to swaddle us, before the horizon swallows and we sleep.

 

Danny Plunkett earned his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Georgia College & State University. He teaches Composition on the Cedar Rapids campus of Kirkwood Community College. His creative interests include weird fiction, horror, and prose poetry. In his spare time, he writes and publishes fiction and poetry, and his most recent work appeared in Dime Show Review. He also enjoys hiking, fishing, and spending time with his wife and St. Bernard mix, Barney.  ​

Yorzeit

It’s my father’s Yorzeit,
anniversary of his death
according to the Jewish lunar calendar.

In three houses spaced across this continent
my siblings and I light special candles,
wax in a glass, remembrance.

We swap stories, questions, tears,
sometimes laughter, remember
how we kept vigil at his bedside.
How the night before he died
he sat up and said
I can only take you this far.

When I was little he swung me up
and settled me on his shoulders.
I remember his warm hands holding my ankles
the smell of Vitalis as I wrapped my arms
around his forehead.

I remember the wind in my curls,
how different the world looked from my high perch
scary, yet how safe,
the sure swing of his gait moving forward.

Dad, I whisper, you carried us
over continents
for decades.
You still do.

“Yortzeit” is the Yiddish spelling and pronunciation of Yarhzeit.

‌

Winter Dream

-after Li-Young Lee

What flows out of my dreams
to meet me on the other side
of night?

What voices do I hear
from another room? From
another tomb?

Are they muffled by red brick
walls? Are they electronic TV
voices setting the plaster on edge?

What is the title
winter knows me by?

Is it Shivering? Is it
Taking Small Steps Over Ice?
Is it Blinking At The Sun’s
Muted Eye?

What was in the letter
my father never wrote?

Was it my girl, you
broke my heart? Was it
my girl, why didn’t you marry
a man who could take care of you?

Was it my girl
I am proud of you?
I Love you?

What was in the letter
I never wrote back?

 

Vivienne Popperl lives in Portland, Oregon.  She finds nourishment and hope in nature
and poetry. Her work has appeared in several publications including VoiceCatcher,
Willawaw Journal, Cirque, The Clackamas Literary Review, and The Timberline Review.

Dear Zygote in Your Limniad State

Dear Zygote,

You should enjoy your limniad state,
nymph-like and windless, there on two sides

of a threshold. Howsoever, the WordHippo
wonders if I mean to speak lemonade.

This saké is murky, and it makes me wish
I could tottle off to that original somewhere

in whom even the wines sip words
and live alphabets draw on that spliff

of night air. Life Speck, here is
the ordinal pregnancy:

Without each other, we hole up
within each other. Remember, too,

I have been busy, turning
the soil in the few people’s hearts

I plan to rename the grave
when my day comes: Am hoping to sow

the silt-line conditions for a happy death—
choired by Husband Consciousness—

that wry spirit-vegetable. That solid air
loyalty. Netflix, elsewhere,

boots into verb, while power lopes in
to daily unheaven everyone. Still,

for the most part, Ms. Zygote Missive,
you are the test of the great human maybe,

there in that mother-hip meadow—
that namelessly face-free state

of between. Dear nymph-dividual:
Let me not spew lemonade,

as I’ve gotten wind of your balls-out greed
for the good of all species.

 

This poem was just published in Raptosh’s full-length collection, Dear Z: The Zygote Epistles (Etruscan Press 2020). To learn more about Diane’s life and work, go to Willawaw’s current poet laureate prompts here.

Annunciation

He wants to be born.
So first he enters the dream of the woman
a doctor has told will never conceive.

He lets himself in through the gate
of her sleeping brain during a hard snow
in late November.

He gives himself eyes and hair like hers,
wraps himself in thick fleece, his fingers curving
over the hem, like the paws of a burrowing mammal.

She wakes with the dream of him still clinging,
I’ve birthed a black-eyed baby boy, I’ve carried him
up the aisle of the church to the baptismal font.

She goes to the window where slantwise
snow erases the houses across the street.
Only a curbside lamp on its iron stalk breaks through,
‌                        a yellow clot in the boreal blur.

After she has laid aside the dream or forgotten it,
he enters her body sometime in January.
His arrival ignites engines and fires up turbines

with power unknown to her, making her whole
being a construction zone for the laying of foundations,
the framing of the many rooms of his evolving body.

In April, cornerstone and beam well set and level,
he shows her his brain and spine, a string of perfect lights
blinking in the midnight sky of the sonogram.

The doctor is speechless. But the woman
rehearses the names of her beloved living and dead.
She will pick one of them.

She watches the tiny heart strobe in its cage.
Beacon of what is coming in October.
A swaddling blanket. A christening.