Willawaw Journal Spring 2020 Issue 9

Portrait of a Kansas Wheat Harvest

This landscape is distance without mercy,
a heat-hammered flatness horizon to horizon,
where the sun scrapes across endless wheat stubble
like a wooden match striking in slow motion.

A naive breeze that thought it might make a difference
hangs, gutted and skinned, on a barbed wire fence.
The heat-stroked air sags down on hands and knees,
its tongue lolling like a dog begging for some water.

Combined to a bloody rag of stink, a skunk
rots in the sunbaked stubble. The once brilliant
cornflower blue sky bleeds out to milky white
and sweats a plague of vultures circling the scent.

Roads wander away from my squint in all directions.
Gravel, asphalt, it makes no difference, they’re all
mesmerized by horizons, mile after mile of the straight
and narrow, never disturbed by the thought of a curve.

Doug Stone lives in Albany, Oregon.  He has written two chapbooks, The Season of Distress and Clarity and The Moon’s Soul Shimmering on the Water. His new book of poems, Sitting in Powell’s Watching Burnside Dissolve in Rain (The Poetry Box) is coming out this summer (2020).

Invitations

from three bicycle tours

I    Central Idaho, July, 2010

Near the western edge of “God’s cathedral,”
the Sawtooths stretch north and south.
Cycling rhythms carry us:
Into the teeth of a wind, we pedal squares,
circles with wind at our backs.
We coast and quicken smooth descents,
ascend in each other’s steady tracks.

Forest and field, mist and sun,
frame the rocky profile:
Dinosaur backs and temple columns,
arrowheads and stairs to frozen air,
chain ring teeth and beacons that summon,
solitary minarets that invite prayer.

II     Trout Lake, Washington, July, 2011

From east to west across this wide valley
thunder echoes in the blue-black night.
Deep dreams of unresolved tensions cease.
Lightning flashes the sky to white.

On the illumined tent, pinging droplets
announce the pounding rain to come.
Kettle drums sound, and the pouring down
washes clean the slate of midnight dreams.

III      NW Montana, August, 2012

In early light, cold, speechless, we face
the Mission Mountains to the east,
ridge line trees like cloud cover.

At a southern bay of Flathead Lake,
whitecaps and shoreline cuffs and brushes
hint of freshwater fishers of the past.

Through aspen screens we discover
alpine summer on the backbone of the world,
raven shadows gliding glacial paths.

A glassy pond, back-lit by golden wheat grass,
reflects bleached stumps, a remote work house,
rolled bales of hay – and cyclists up ahead.

At Kootenai Falls we are stunned by their roar
and by the roiling pools that feed
the chaotic boil of tumbling, misting white.

The Milky Way, polished necklace of the night,
seems to hold the earth aloft, and we are steadied,
as if tethered to more distant stars.

Cielo

To Cielo Davila

I cry like an airplane, they say,
but I just love to sing. And I smile
at funny faces, and the green ocean.
I wear berets, I write in cursive,
and I love to bite my lip when
I’m thinking about the Greeks.
I’m never ever not thinking.
Someday I might love myself, but
I think I’ll be alone for a bit longer.

 

Samuel Swauger is a poet from Baltimore, MD. His writing appears in Tilde, Third Wednesday, and the Ghost City Review. His Twitter is @samuelswauger.

Bumper Car

The old farmer had lost his bearings
they said. They took away his truck.
He wired his house and widened the
doorways, threw out the boxes and
the piles of magazines, cleared the
hallways. He networked wires and
laid down tin, completed circuits
and brought the bumper car out of
the barn. He hosed it off at fifty
degrees, wiped it down and shined
the chrome. Turned it sideways to
wrestle it through the front doorway.
Tin sheets rattle as the farmer flies
from room to room, sparks follow
and at night the place looks, from
the road, like Tesla lives there, slam
bang bumpety bump the car races
down the hallway room to room
through the doorways circle about
the kitchen shoot back down the
narrow hall careening off the loose
and flapping baseboards, sizzling
through the bedroom back into the
hall whirling at the pantry then the
bathroom speeding down the hall
again banging through the parlor
farmer howling steering laughing
beard flies scarf-like over shoulder
then he glides up to the large knife
switch on the wall, throws it, cuts
the power, sighs and steps gingerly
to the floor. Salami, crust of bread
shared with the no longer cowering
hound, the gleaming turquoise and
white bumper car sits in the hall,
waits to whirl the farmer back, to
resurrect some boyhood dreams.

 

Guinotte Wise writes and welds steel sculpture on a farm in Resume Speed, Kansas. His short story collection (Night Train, Cold Beer) won publication by a university press and enough money to fix the soffits. Six more books since. A 5- time Pushcart nominee, his fiction and poetry have been published in numerous literary journals including Atticus, The MacGuffin, Southern Humanities Review,  Rattle and The American Journal of Poetry. His wife has an honest job in the city and drives 100 miles a day to keep it. Some work is at http://www.wisesculpture.com

Day of Diminishing Returns

Most pictures of today
have blue in them, a dusty blue
blue moss and winter ivy, blue fern,
blue branches and blue shadows,
crushed cans and Ramen cups and cheap
bubbly bottles caught in the blue arborvitae,
archaeological droppings from recent ruins,
and the ever blue homeless who push grocery carts
as dusk scatters blue light over their bodies.

Later, ambling home in the indigo night,
in a fine mist, giddy drunk
I lobbed a hello to a ragged woman
as, head-down, she clanked
her cart against the asphalt.
She broke into a radiant smile
swung her arm at the old devil moon.
Hello, she cawed I hope you have
a beautiful evening!
You too! I called back,
and because I could not think
of anything else to do,
I gave her two thumbs up
and wiggled them.
She raised her thumbs, too,
and we stood like that
four thumbs pointing to the moon
and stars and their ancient light.

Afterwards, I realized a radio
must nest in her cart, its wavering
crackling music
like a message from the past,
or the future,
or a galaxy yet unnamed.
After she rolled past,
a quietude blanketed me
and the diamonded street.
The mist had turned to rain,
and the rain was quiet rain.

Artist Statement:

In 2010, I went back to drawing after many years of sculptural inquiry. Drawing
was my primary medium in the Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing, Magdalen
College, Oxford University, in the U.K. Starting with observational sketches that
evolved into larger scale works, I select the natural world as my subject as I live
surrounded by nature in Southern Oregon. Observed at close range it contains
many strange, fascinating, and abstract forms.

My works aim to draw attention to the mysteries of the physical world. Wishing
to convey my understanding of the underlying balance and cycles of undisturbed
natural ecosystems, I have employed the pictorial device of interlocking circles
drawn beneath the forms. This conveys a sense of cohesion, and alludes to the
invisible intelligent matrix that enables the seeming chaos of nature to be held in
perfect balance; birth, death and rebirth all occurring at the same time. This also
imparts a formal quality to the drawings.

The marks are made up primarily of lines and pointillism; this seems fitting as our
physical world is made up of waves and particles, whether animate or inanimate.
Each drawing is a natural evolution from the last. I work for about a year, immersed
in a particular subject, watching it evolve through the seasons. Although I learn a lot
about the subjects of my drawings, the facts are not a dominant feature. These are
not strictly botanical illustrations. Through the handling and observing of the forms,
information reveals itself to me in wordless fashion.

My studio is now home to many dried fungi, lichens, dead insects, and bits of trees.
These all fascinate me as they continue to change through the process of decay. I am
particularly interested in small forms, like mushrooms, because they exemplify the
multiplicity and complexity of nature, hidden, as they are, beneath the earth for most
of the year. I strive to depict a vibrant universe, one that speaks of forms decaying,
from which new organisms emerge. See more at claireburbridgeart.com

Short Bio:

From Claire Burbridge‘s earliest memory, being anything other than an artist was never a consideration. One of twins born to seventies’ London—then raised between Scotland’s rugged west coast and the rolling hills of rural Somerset—Claire’s perspective, her flair, reflects her absorption and understanding of both the urban and the rustic environment.

Encounters with the wilderness—of vast open spaces—inspire Claire’s art. Norway, Oregon and Namibia in particular, where geographical grandeur vies with bold colors, has imprinted on the artist’s mind indelible memories; enthralling scenarios on which Claire has based much of her body of work.