Willawaw Journal

Online Poetry & Art

Journal

Lesley Williams

On Depression

Each dark thought a block
that builds higher walls.
Damp, dirty and crumbling
but nonetheless impenetrable.
This thing has many names
like the Blue Plague or Black Dog.
Mine has no colour but grey.
It is not anger turned in, it’s nothing.
There are no ups or peaks.
Just a flat unending bleakness,
an unchanging dull landscape
marked only by my exhaustion.
Outside, if I wash and comb my hair
I appear the same as I always have.
You cannot see my shriveled insides,
or a  kernel where my heart once beat.
Will this dread thing ever leave me?
It surely is a most miserable companion.
This jealous lover that tries to isolate me,
I know will not have the final word.

 

Lesley Williams worked in mental health services for more than thirty years, firstly as a psychiatric nurse and then as a social services worker.  Like many of us, Lesley has also witnessed mental health problems within her own family.  Since Lesley retired from work she has been involved in a small writing group and has recently had one of her poems called The Lake published in the BlackBough online poetry magazine.  Lesley lives in Swansea, South Wales with her long time partner, Ray, and with Toby, their much loved canine companion.

Back Page with Lisa Ni Bhraonain

#3/3–“Fabergé Egg”–5″x 6″ oil pastels, gold leaf ink, lacquer varnish, and Conté crayon on cardboard

Artist Statement: The egg piece is the last of three–snake, apple, and egg–that are drawn from a single composition set vertically with the egg on top. Dostoyevsky wrote that consciousness is a disease. I apply this idea to the surface by choosing deep, jewel tone colors, gold leaf ink, and a varnished patina in depicting a work that, by its thematic layout, lifts the eyes of the viewer upwards but shows no quietude. Instead, I use a frenzy of pen and ink cross-hatching, slabs of color, a collage of jumbled shapes, and the slap-dash use of torn cardboard to surround and frame the three images.

Lisa Ni Bhraonain is a writer and closet painter with an MFA from OSU, originally from the east coast and now living in Corvallis, Oregon, with her extended family. Former translator of the Russian language, Ni Bhraonain does her best to lose herself in her stories, poems, and images as a respite from the reality of our times.

Notes from the Editor

Issue 7, Fall 2019, offers a cornucopia of beauty, diversity, insight, and depth of feeling–from all over the world, poets are sharing a wealth of spirit. Never have I felt the poet’s work to be more timely. These artists have tapped into the collective consciousness and subconscious, drawing forth to the reader a knowing that transcends the boundaries of our complacency.

Joanna Townsend’s “Somewhere near Odessa, 1900s” inspired response poems about Russia :  Buff Whitman-Bradley writes about “Looking for Chekov”; Maria Muzdybaeva, “Another One for the White Nights”. Other poets wrote to the theme of departure: Lynda Tavakoli‘s “Reach”; Maria Rouphail‘s “Heading West”; Vivienne Popperl‘s “First Winter in Kopjes”; Lavinia Kumar’s “Not Voyaging to Brooklyn”; Tricia Knoll‘s “Why Would You Want to Move 3003 Miles to Vermont?” and Lisa Hase-Jackson’s “You Find Yourself in Kansas City”. Still other poets wrote to the departure of loved ones.

Enjoy these and several other poems in this issue. Doug Stone and Diana Pinckney offer some stunning ekphrastic poems. Also, find the first Willawaw Folio at the end of the journal which focuses on the artwork of Hokusai. Martin Willitts Jr. takes us through a handful of the artist’s “stations” around Mt. Fuji, writing in Haibun and assuming the persona of the artist.

I have found the work in this issue to be a great companion as I turn inward, with the equinox, toward the “dark time” of these increasingly shorter days. I hope you find some of the same resonance and satisfaction.

Warmly,
Rachel Barton

Shannon Wolf

silphium

They found the seventy six statues
left at Cyrene, and were there coins
scattered at their feet, bearing the signs
of the herb? Did the shapes reveal that
something like love might be there still?

I would whisper to the hedgerows
of the days when I would leave home
and though I knew nothing of that ancient land
or the smell of silphium, I knew
I was coming here, to this city,
where they sell Christmas trees from concrete lots,
where the burnt-neon buses run through the night,
where there are smaller cities inside the big city,
made of tents and trolleys and trash.

I knew I was headed your way,
that to make that perfect ideograph
our valves would be made ready
to be coerced from us and combined.
Carthage and Alexandria drove Cyrene to ruin
and Cyrene harvested silphium until there was no more
but with a doodle of your initials I capture the shape
and there is love still, here, on the other side of the world.

Shannon Wolf is a British writer living in Lafayette, Louisiana, who earned her MA in Creative Writing at Lancaster University and is currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at McNeese State University. Her poetry, short fiction and non-fiction, which can also be found under the name Shannon Bushby, have appeared in, or is forthcoming from Gravel, The Forge Lit Mag, and Great Weather for Media, among others.

Erin Wilson

Raft

It’s almost like it’s not my own memory
but borrowed from someone else, who in turn
had to rent it. We were maybe twelve,
my best friend and me, tied into our seat belts,
jostling along together in the backseat of her parents’
wood panelled Ford station wagon. The gravel road,
because we were not familiar with it, went on for hours,
and is still vibrating a part of me that remains tethered.

The road, as we travelled, narrowed,
and the overhanging fringe of the Boreal Forest
gently drew closed her jowls around us.
Her mouth was damp and smelled exquisitely of moss.
We snuggled into what remained familiar of our old selves,
and peered forward through the bug-splattered windshield,
with fear and curiosity.

To one last dying crunch of gravel
they parked the car in a rudimentary clearing
which, for the week, housed our slightly derelict wooden cabin.
As though the cabin were only cursory, beside that
the larger expanse, Lake Manitou, shone in the sun,
a vast, dented and fire-stained aluminum pan,
the small black raft floating upon the hackled shining waters
beckoning us to it, the flat floating conveyance pupil-like,
hovering densely and loosely over depths,
beneath depths.

Erin Wilson‘s poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Review, Envoi, Kestrel, A Journal of Literature and Art, On the Seawall, The Honest Ulsterman, The Adirondack Review, Natural Bridge, and elsewhere. For a while, she and her husband, also a writer, owned a farmhouse in Wabash, Indiana. They now live and write in a small town in northern Ontario, Canada.