Journal

How Are You Doing?

You always jerry-rigged your life, just made
it work, never worried how it looked or if the fix
would last, just made it work until it didn’t.

You married her in the moment, knowing
if it wasn’t right, you’d cobble it together
if you could or walk away. You never dreamed
you’d come to love her more than life itself.

Does the distance from this place
make your days any easier now?
You always knew you couldn’t fix
the sadness and would have to leave.
The trick was knowing when.

You said if your grief ever made you hate
those low-slung October clouds
scudding over the Coast Range,
you’d walk away, head for California
where people die in sunshine not in rain.
At least you’d have a shadow. Maybe get a dog.
So, how are you doing?

Doug Stone lives in Albany, Oregon. He has written two chapbooks, The Season of Distress
and Clarity (Finishing Line), The Moon’s Soul Shimmering on the Water (CreateSpace), and a
full length poetry collection, Sitting in Powell’s Watching Burnside Dissolve in Rain (The
Poetry Box). His poems have been published in numerous journals and in the anthology,
A Ritual To Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford.

Meeting a Cottonmouth

My camera lens coils to cricket frogs
pouncing on the river. Somewhere,
cave salamanders, blind as soap
slap dripping rocks. On the trail

a fattened boomerang wriggles his tail,
his throat jammed by a rat, swallowing
prey in a glacial, reverse birth. My photo
shows the rodent’s back feet plunging

through the snake. I imagine
Appalachian churchgoers shaking
armfuls of rattlers, crooning halleluiah,
the woman cradling her Gaboon viper

before the landlord finds her dead.
I love the cottonmouth, his eyes
two berries of lava, his ebony crescent
fanged white. Few friends cared for my frog,

barred owl and damselfly pictures,
but praised the water moccasin
like a soft, venomous cane, stirring
our fate mortal as the rat.

In Genesis, the serpent slid bellying
on earth, accursed by heaven,
yet his mouth’s sweet canker
sends people to God.

Eric Fisher Stone is a poet from Fort Worth, Texas where he now lives. He received his MFA in creative writing and the environment from Iowa State University. His first full length poetry collection, “The Providence of Grass” was published by Chatter House Press in 2018, and his second collection, “Animal Joy” is forthcoming from WordTech Editions in 2021.

Snips With Knives

Did you like the movie
Running with Scissors?
I ask mom about recent movies.

I am watching my 14 year old niece
grab a sharp kitchen knife for snipping
a long loose thread from her fitted cotton
purple and pink flowery blouse.
I sit across the dinette counter from mom’s kitchen sink.

Whoa, says my mom
taking in hand her household
scissors. Mom says
she liked the movie.

This scene isn’t as extreme as
running through the house with
open scissors. I love those
dysfunctional family movies
and remember relatives yelling,
swearing and pushing.

Nicole Taylor lives in Eugene, Oregon. She has been an artist, a dancer, a hiker, a poetry note taker, a sketcher, a volunteer and a dancer. Her poems have been published in  Boneshaker: A Bicycling Almanac; Cirque Journal; Clackamas Literary Review; Just Another Art Movement Journal – dance poems to New Zealand; West Wind Review and others. You can read her poetry at oregonpoeticvoices.org/poet/312/.

Corvidian

— for Brian Doyle, who made the word

Oh Lord, make me corvidian
Crow-like, ravenesque
Feathered (pterygial), flighted (alate)
Beaked, booted
Black as spilled ink
Free to rise and fall
Fluent in every laugh and cry
Take away these useless hands
And give me wings

 

Pepper Trail‘s work has previously appeared in Willawaw, as well as in Rattle, Ascent, Windfall, Atlanta Review, and other publications.  He has published three poetry collections, Flight Time, Cascade-Siskiyou: Poems (a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award), and An Empty Bowl.  Pepper lives in Ashland, Oregon, where he works for the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

 

Artist Statement:

I have drawn as long as I can remember. One early memory—I used a needle to
incise crisp white lines in the black finish of my mother’s prized antique ebonized
desk. I remember being punished as well! Practicing drawing ladies’ high heels
perfected my analytical abilities. In third grade I won a trip to the Nutcracker with
my rendition of ballerinas.

The first of four daughters of an artist mother and minister father, we spent our
childhood out in nature. Summers meant swimming in an Upstate New York
glacial lake surrounded by shale pebble beaches. As a free-range seven-year-old
in South Dakota my adventures included rodeos, the circus, swash-buckling
movies—my grandmother in tow—and hiking mica-flecked paths in the Black Hills.

Many years later I received a BFA in printmaking from Syracuse University, followed
by an MFA in mixed media from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. To support
myself in graduate school, I taught drawing.

As an adult, my artist husband and I moved to the Pacific Northwest, entranced
by arid canyons and indigenous rain forests. During my years of graphic design,
first as an exhibit designer at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry and
then as the head of my own design firm, I taught myself computer skills.

Today collage informs my work in both art and poetry. The juxtaposition of color
and imagery are much the same in both mediums.

My inspirations and the focus of my artwork include family, reading, sewing,
mythology, science, biology, astronomy, and geology—all lifelong passions.

 

Oregon poet and artist Dale Champlin has published in Willawaw Journal, Cathexis, Pif, The Opiate, and elsewhere. In 2019 she published The Barbie Diaries. Two collections are forthcoming: Isadora, and Callie.