Willawaw Journal Spring 2018 Issue 3

The Poem of the Planck Constant

The littlest we do
A morning smile
Reassuring hand on the shoulder
Resisting the urge to roll your eyes
Multiply.

It is difficult to generate good will in the middle of entropy. Everyone flying in their own elliptical alignments. It’s funny the way people talk sometimes. Like words don’t have energy. Don’t deliver flames. Simply misplacing the comma can level a town.

The littlest things we do:
Thoughts
Motions
Sounds
Sometimes lever the world.

 

Marc Janssen has been unkind to his muse. Being a copywriter with pressure, deadlines, and criticism will make a person like that.  But she has been nice and you can find his work haphazardly scattered around the internet, in printed journals and anthologies such as Off the Coast, Cirque Journal, Penumbra, The Ottawa Arts Review and Manifest West.

 

Kathy Jederlinich is a very prolific  semi-retired art teacher. She uses many art techniques and a variety of materials. Right now, she is working on images with toile, a translucent linen or cotton fabric, and using that as a communication. She loves French wallpaper and tapestries, too, as part of her Italian heritage. Regarding story telling—hmm, maybe poetry telling-–she says, “I am all thumbs with the written word –but I soar with visuals and eye candy.” She is in the midst of finding funding for a large community tile mural for the fairgrounds in Corvallis. See her Facebook page for more details.

We’ll be Coming

Mama, us three kids and a suitcase in tow, ran back and forth beside the depot
trying to find where we were supposed to be, panicked, as were we, and the long
whistle blew and she screamed and we cried and a black porter beckoned from an
open door.  We jumped in and Mama, out of breath in her butterfly dress, collapsed
on the scratchy seat as the train started its glide.  She dug around in her big purse
for cans of Mandarin oranges, Vienna sausages, hardboiled eggs.  I stuffed my yolk
between the seat cushions when she wasn’t looking, drank paper cones of cold
water from the fountain down the aisle until I peed on the humming floor and Mama
had to find me some dry clothes.  It was hot and she told us open the slider but don’t
stick out our heads or they’ll get knocked off.  We saw telephone poles roll past,
smelled  stockyard stink, drove our six white horses past barns, spinning windmills,
drylands, open skies, all round the mountains.

 

Karen Jones is a retired high school teacher from Corvallis, Oregon.  She finds she is able to observe and experience the world in greater depth through reading and writing poetry, and she hopes readers will enjoy her poems’ pictures, rhythms, and sounds.

Louie

Most of us had arrived
on some late wave
of westward expansion:
Scotch-Irish, Scandinavian,
German and mongrel pup,
coming by way of Oklahoma
or Arkansas, in Mormon dust,
through Humbolt dreams,
Idaho mines and Wyoming sheep,
praying for rain on some dryland farm
where you were lucky to get a chokecherry crop.
But here we were, offspring holding our own
against each other and these nomadic feet.
Except for Louie. It’s like he arrived last year.
Italian. His papa ran a corner grocery
where salami swung on the garlic air
and cheeses sat like fat Buddhas
on the crowded counter.
At home his mama kept a pot of spaghetti sauce
on the back of the stove.
When Louie and I came home from hunting
or fishing or rummaging the wild hills
we’d drop a squirrel or rabbit or salmon cheeks
into the red mire. On a starving Thursday
I would sit down to their noodles,
listen to their chatter and taste
a wonder I never got at home.

 

Gary Lark’s most recent works include: River of Solace, Editor’s Choice Chapbook Award from Turtle Island Quarterly (Flowstone Press, 2016), and In the House of Memory, (BatCat Press, 2016). Ordinary Gravity, is forthcoming from Airlie Press, 2019.

 

Proof (1)

Men who’ve proved themselves grab her attention, and she seizes theirs. One is married, one is almost divorced, another lives with his lover for years and even still. She’s calculating. She doesn’t mind the second hand.

She situates herself, then imagines: around her, the circle drawn with a protractor, extending her strange reach. Geometry is a question of shape, size, and position. She angles for what she wants. Her ratio of self to other is fractured.

She hates some things, and the men know this equilaterally. She pretends that she likes what they like, and they pretend too. She assumes they find her obtuse appreciation of these things charming, and they want to be charmed. The silence is golden.

 

Anna Leahy has authored the books of poetry Aperture, Constituents of Matter, and Tumor and co-authored others. Her essays and poetry have appeared in the Atlantic, Crab Orchard Review, and The Southern Review. She directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at Chapman University, edits the international journal TAB, and curates the Tabula Poetica reading series. See more at amleahy.com.