Online Poetry & Art
Our third issue includes the prompt by Poet Laureate Paulann Petersen and offers a wealth of visual art. The poets are listed in (nearly) alphabetical order with the artwork interspersed:
Cover Art: Leslie Green's "Sunrise," 24 x 30, acrylic on board
Editor's Notes
Page 1: Jude Brigley Elizabeth Cohen Jim Zola Laura Dinovis
Page 2: Katherine Edgren Judith Sander Erric Emerson Vincent Francone Abigail George John Grey
Page 3: Frances Van Wert Marc Janssen Kathy Jederlinich Karen Jones Gary Lark Frances Van Wert Anna Leahy
Page 4: Joana Lutzen McCutcheon Layla Lenhardt Judith Sander Sherri Levine Sue Fagalde Lick Gargi Mehra
Page 5: Leslie Green Megan Munson Paulann Petersen Gail Peck Marjorie Power Frank Rossini
Page 6: Kathy Jederlinich Lauren Scharhag Judy Shepps Battle Jim Zola Penelope Scambly Schott Sheila Sondik
Page 7: Leslie Green Dorothy Swoope Vivian Wagner Frances Van Wert Linda Wimberly Matthew Woodman
Page 8: Back Page with Judith Sander
“Permian,” 18 x 24,acrylic on canvas
Leslie Green’s work reflects her love of nature, animals and geologic forms and forces. She has recently returned to painting from clay to find the free expression in color, line and movement that 2-dimensional work allows. See LeslieGreenart.com for more information.
You have started running again
and I can’t help but remember how you told me
the way you hate the heat that fills your lungs
the pressure in your knees
even the sound of your feet against the pavement.
Has she crawled back inside
of your pale protruding ribs?
I know how you dwindle
how your mass rises and falls
as you hear the scream of the scale summon you
back into your wretched ways.
You are a mathematician in your own right —
you could write theses
on the calculus of calories.
There is something disgusting in the way
we regard 130 as excessive.
Some days are not meant for eating,
you argue
as you substitute liquid for lunch
(and breakfast)
(and dinner)
You crave visible crevices
crisscrossing your shoulder blades and stomach.
You want only to see your collarbones
to feel the weight of the world directly on your skeleton.
You have started running again.
You are losing the race.
Megan Munson is a seventeen year old living in Washington and writing as much as possible.
Those who sing by the sea
draw a breeze
that lifts white wings
of foam from the deep.
When Evangelia sings—
sitting at the pier, her office hairdo
smoothed just so, breasts and belly
in a swimsuit’s silky cling—
her voice is a riffle of doves
flown down from chalky cliffs
it’s the white and white
of wings above
saltwater’s wimpled hue,
it’s the poet’s covey of words
streaming along
this blue, green, blue
Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate from 2010 to 2014, is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University whose poems have appeared in many publications including Poetry, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, and Wilderness Magazine. For more information, go to the poet laureate prompt page or to Paulann Peterson: Home.
—after a photograph by Dorothea Lange
She stands before a shelter of patched tin,
in a sack-like sleeveless dress
tied at one shoulder. The dress is soiled,
mere covering. All that she’s seen
caught in her stare, lips pursed
as if defying the camera. Her hair is short
and parted and pushed behind
her ears so that none falls on her face.
The only casual thing about her is how loosely
her hands slide halfway into her pockets.
A hint of breasts. When she begins to menstruate,
her mother will tear cloth for pads, and warn her
of all that can happen living in such a place,
men coming and going. The mother’s worries,
now more than food and medicine.
Days are long, there’s nothing beautiful here
except the sunset.
What is this child’s name?
Perhaps Lillian or Margaret,
something suited to her stance.
In another photograph, she is barefoot.
When winter comes there might be a pair of boots
already pinching her toes, but she will not cry.
She will not.
Gail Peck is the author of eight books of poetry. The Braided Light won the Leana Shull Contest for 2015. Poems and essays have appeared in Southern Review, Nimrod, Greensboro Review, Brevity, Connotation Press, and elsewhere. Her essay “Child Waiting” was cited as a notable for Best American Essays, 2013.
Join me here on top of Cape Perpetua.
If we have patience, these clouds will relent.
Here, on fresh moss among sword ferns and maidenhair
spread through a forest of shore pines and spruce, let’s listen
to the ocean surge and hiss, watch foam curl over black lava rock
through the glisten of greens and grays.
See the group of small buildings
that seem to have washed in
like a rope of seaweed
or chunks of glass?
Yachats, gem of the Oregon coast.
So says a license plate holder in one of the gift shops.
Logging’s gone under, motels hang on, restaurants come and go
with the tides.
I came and went too.
But I’ve kept two friends
one beach north in a slightly longer town.
Like Yachats, it holds routine tsunami drills.
My friends are very old. Each lives alone. These two remain
pledged to the soft salty mist that caresses their cheeks
the way nuns persist through the loss of many sisters.
Marjorie Power’s newest poetry collection, Oncoming Halos, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books. Her Seven Parts Woman appeared in 2016 from WordTech Editions where you may find sample poems and blurbs. Power lives with her husband in Denver, Colorado after many years in the Northwest.
four days I watched wide vistas
change in minutes from blind
rain to tearing sun
to brawling clouds
& lightning
illuminating the big
stone prophets lining the mesa walls
but today I walked
with my head
down
studied the pores
in the red/black grains of sand the lizard
& bear intricately woven into iridescent
lichen on a solitary boulder
I ignored the approaching
thunder listened
to the chanting
rattle in a cricket’s early
evening prayer
& tonight I abandon the big-
voiced writers read
haiku
from a monk’s ancestral
brush of small soft
hairs plucked from an elephant’s
inner ear hear
him whisper from the end
of Heaven’s River
Frank Rossini grew up in New York City & moved to Eugene, Oregon in 1972. Over the course of fifty years, he has published poems in various journals including The Seattle Review, Chiron Review, Raven Chronicles, & Clackamas Literary Review. Silverfish Review Press & sight | for | sight books have published his books of poems.
