Journal

Mapping the Sky

Sometimes I feel like I’m flying over Alaska
And can’t see anything
Or I’m a moose shot in the snow
Too deep for transport
My relatives seemed to serve
On military bases in Alaska, anonymously
Without talking about it
Not even with each other
Nothing top secret
Just the quiet which must
Settle on soldiers when it’s winter
My grandfather was like a co-pilot

Who watches the storm pass under us
And says nothing about it
Seems like the sky’s the limit in Alaska
And bald eagles walk around downtown
Waiting for dinner

 

Prairie Waves

Grand Forks, North Dakota

It could have been a January like this
when the afternoon light
from that bowl of blue sky
illuminated the tips of snow
drifted across fields, like waves,
the harrowed land
glittering like a prairie ocean.

So we took the children out to see
the ocean. A woodpecker beat
its steady drum into a fence post
and a cardinal flashed brilliant
across the white waves.

The children averted their eyes
then scuffed their boots
across clumps of snow.
It was no good.
They wanted a real ocean
with salt and sand and seagulls
across a turquoise sky.

Because

After Because by Linda Pastan

Because it was winter and we were young,
we drove to the coast on a whim.

No, it was because it was Christmas
and just the two of us
and our presents were small and disappointing.

Or maybe it was because
we wanted to escape Christmas altogether.

So, we drove to the coast
and walked on the boardwalk.

Sideways rain seeped into our socks,
soaked our rain jackets

and because it was Christmas
we were alone on the beach,
the shops and cafes closed.

It was just the two of us
and I remember how we stopped
in the rain to hold each other,
laughing as the sky and ocean merged,
a giant soup of salt, water and sand,

us in the middle,
holding the whole wet world in our embrace.

 

 Suzy Harris grew up in Indiana and has lived in Portland for her adult life, as teacher, lawyer, parent, spouse. She is now retired and has returned to poetry, watercolor, oil pastel crayons, and other means of playing with color and words.

 

On the Road to Oakridge

Mid-morning and I’m late to a meeting
at the Town Hall, and I’m only outside of Eugene.
But the shy light distracts, no one in front or behind,
a good country tune on the AM station. Then,
as if choreographed, elk enter from each side
of the highway, seven of them—and I’m following,
as if without hands on the wheel, and they’re
pulling me, as if they knew I needed this ride—
the chance to breathe deep, in control of nothing.
And we travel like that for miles, smooth and steady,
and we travel like that until Oakridge approaches
around the final bend in the road—until the elk part,
as gracefully as they’d come—like the Red Sea,
only kind and silent.

 

Marilyn Johnston is an Oregon writer and filmmaker. She received a fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts, a Robert Penn Warren prize, and selection as a Fishtrap Fellow for her poetry. She is the author of a chapbook, Red Dust Rising, and a recent full collection, Before Igniting (2020, Rippling Brook Press).  Her work has appeared widely, in such publications as Natural Bridge, Poetica Magazine, and Rough Places Plain:  Poems of the Mountains.  She teaches creative writing as part of the Artists-in-the-Schools program.

Kim Stafford, Oregon’s Ninth Poet Laureate

Some say he followed in footsteps,
wore hand-me-down boots or learned
to pull up his bootstraps at breakfast.
When you let him teach you to sew up
tiny notebooks to carry in a pocket
so you never forget one good word,
when he searches for the power words
in a student’s just-birthed poem, or
you’ve heard him recite his poems by heart
through tears that he says don’t
make sense to him that day,
or you’ve heard his family stories
as words never said, tales that take
a fourth or fifth telling to make sense
even to him. And you’ve followed
his accounts of camping in the rain
or pitching a tent where ghosts
wander out of the coast fog.
You’ve witnessed grace a foot,
kindness in slippers,
humility in a leather sole,
you know the rightness
of following this man
on his singular and ambling
walk of love.

 

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet, formerly of Oregon. She considers Kim Stafford one of her greatest teachers. Her poetry appears widely in journals and anthologies. Two of her poetry collections focus on poetry of place in the Pacific Northwest: Broadfork Farm about a small organic farm in Trout Lake, Washington and Ocean’s Laughter about change over time in Manzanita, Oregon. Website: triciaknoll.com 

Grief

Something has nested
above my heart

Its musical notes
rise up like sighs

then fall like fledglings
trying too early to fly

I broke the bird
out of my ribcage

but it refused to leave

 

Dana Knott’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, Bitter Oleander, Emrys Journal, and Parhelion. Currently, she is the Library Director at Antioch University in Yellow Springs, Ohio.