Willawaw Journal Spring 2022 Issue 14

Stranded In Alaska, 1889

–with a nod to Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise
by Nancy Anderson and Linda Ferber

At dawn the Tlingit canoes arrived
to fetch us from the grounded steamer.
Cold rain lashed and waves banged the dugouts
into the drum of the pitched hull, but
in the end all was saved but the ship.
We stood there in the mush and gravel
with our boots soaked and nowhere to go
but into the stinking cannery
and the Chinese huts greasy with smoke.

Five days I breathed chum and gagged chowder,
watched eagles fight above the fish-pens,
shrieking and stealing despite the rain.
In the factory Tlingit women
severed fins, heads, and tails in the blade
of a second; insides spilled and scales
gleamed like flakes of rainbow. Reeking vats
drove me out to my umbrella’s drip
and patter. I sketched dull scrapwood shacks
with tin roofs weighted by stones, plotted
islands no bigger than scuffs of moss.

The Ancon lay close to shore, her length
receding into fog. From the stern
I marked the fatal tilt of the stack
against the offset beam, the yellow
paddleboxes useless and absurd.

I came for a different Alaska,
one that would pay in grand commissions,
the one exalted in tourbooks—where
the captain scouts for orca and names
the passing glaciers. I had wanted
to see their palatial facades crack
and hear them plunge among littered floes
with crushing surge, to see boreal
forests deploying from the coasts for
mile upon impenetrable mile
sweeping up to mountains and ranges
so august the Sierras seem mocked
as pencil stubs.
‌‌                        But there was only
drench and drab skies, nothing that would pay,
nothing that would pique a nation so
inured to majesty they reject
their own. As I claimed the derelict’s
foreshortened view, a Chinese man toiled
his way to my stump. Grinning wide and
jabbering, he raised a pot of tea
and a chipped bowl of pink fish and rice.

 

Wreck Of The “Ancon” In Loring Bay, Alaska

–after the painting by Albert Bierstadt

A hawser cast too early, slack fire
in the boiler—and all is riven.
Ebb tide pulls and the Ancon
breaks her keel on a hidden reef, listing
so steeply her starboard sidewheel
is nearly dry, shrugged like a shoulder
to the chill gray sameness of sea and fog.

Fast between two worlds of hope
she leans toward a lightening sky
and the headland she will never round,
yet so close to shore a loud hail
should right her. Knifing out from dark bushes,
a fallen trunk and shoreline merge
to suggest a prow, ghost of a ruined hull
and a long forgotten ore.

Kenneth Chamlee lives in the mountains of western North Carolina. His poems have appeared in The North Carolina Literary Review, Worcester Review, Naugatuck River Review, and many others. Ken has written A Measureless Land, a poetic biography of 19th century American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, and a new collection of his poems, If Not These Things, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in 2022. Check him out at www.kennethchamlee.com.

Links to painting: https://collections.mfa.org/objects/33120/wreck-of-the-ancon-in-loring-bay-alaska;jsessionid=A2FDAAA23C38D39525E067B650E7B7AE
https://www.wikiart.org/en/albert-bierstadt/fishing-and-hunting-camp-loring-alaska-1889

In the Dammed Body

This stagnant water. I watch
as a green shroud
spreads across the surface. Still,

I cannot move—cannot
will myself to return
to rivers I once touched, to quench

the parched plains with wet tongue.
I remember
when we feasted and drank by mouthfuls, gulping

air and water, nakedness
tangling in daylight
reflecting bird and bloom in our bodies.

Now earth wheezes
for life—cracks opening
like gills on her long neck, within

the memory of breath
below water. Still—death
transforms—even this motionless
place is a passing through.

Natalie Callum is a writer and poet living between St. Louis, Missouri and Wyoming. When she is not writing, she can be found outside free climbing and exploring with her much beloved husband. Her work has been published in Willawaw Journal and is forthcoming in North Dakota Quarterly.

Winter Solstice

i.

I am better blind my grandmother declares,
squints to seal off what shortened light
remains of autumn, the solstice
both the omen of winter
and long days to return.
Her hands pour through the grain
pulling hardened mutated heads
finding the malformed hairs,
pinches them aside.
Join me, she says, your hands
can find what your eyes may miss.
Even with singed kernels,
her fingers feel scars
of heat inside the chaff.

ii.

My oldest daughter edits text with fingers
tracing over words, as if her mind
created Braille bumps of the whorled
letters, detecting overused adverbs
and clunking nouns, the jejune adjective.
Her lips synch in whispers as she reads
aloud, in the manner we chastise children
to not do, to keep their lips from motion
while the alphabets parade in noisy wonder,
at first a straightforward declarative sentence,
then paragraph sculpted out of the wet clay of words.

iii

My son locates by bird’s eye view,
sees blocks, buildings, streets like a hawk,
veers from the selected routes,
has a nose for the uncongested,
the shortcut on the county road
or raceway by the river
that others forego, loves the grit
of the backside of buildings,
the walls tattooed with sprayed paint,
the unobstructed way.
In his room late at night
his fingertips trace county maps
for contours, watersheds,
absorbing routes, paths.
After a new storm obliterates trails
my horizontal reckoning of place
and space fails, but like one with wings,
my son knows which way to wander.
I trust him for the way.

iv.

My youngest climbs to perch on the limb
of my shoulders to play with my hair,
first curling with her finger
then taking a strand to make it stand
like a magician might with a rope
into the dark envelope of the stage.
She tells me she knows everything about me
now that she sits taller than me,
can mess my hair or make my face
as she wishes, that she is now the giant
in control, and all my fatherhood
comes into question, guilt
and fear swell in my chest,
this day has so little light
and I feel I have stolen what little it had,
so I let her play.
I will be gentle, she says, like you,
and for a while I am the child
learning from a greater power.

v.

In thought we do not fear the solstice
yet my wife believes our cells
grow anxious, sleep on the turn
and wake in the toss of the light’s deprivation.
We bed in darkness, rise in darkness,
work in darkness. At night I squint,
search to find the doorway to our bedroom.
Better she says, to close your eyes,
to run your hands over hallway walls
and let your body guide you.
Here, she says, taking hand to hip,
begin with this.

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, with his wife, and his friends drought, fire, flood, and earthquake. He has contributed to Heartwood, ucity review, Red Wolf Journal, Monterey Poetry Review, and Tiny Seed Journal.

shadow correspondence

the light cuts a white circle
from the poem as one boy sleeps
nearby I read by flashlight

a door shuts somewhere
distant the older boy settles
I reread the lines in the dim glow

seeking to decipher the code
hidden in plain speak
like a wartime intelligence officer

with his ear pressed to the radio
knowing there are secrets
hiding in the banal chatter

the darkness around me
like the bead of a sight
drawn on the riddle, rising

falling, as shadow
speaks its own agendas
my children are in the darkness

the text once disassembled
spells out the dawn

Corbett Buchly’s poetry has appeared in Barrow Street, The Interpreter’s House, North Dakota Quarterly, and Dream Catcher. He received a Masters in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California. He and his wife currently reside in Northeast Texas with their two perfectly unusual sons. You can find him online at buchly.com.

Taking Stock

There — a tiny you in your best Sunday dress
standing before Mama’s bright orange beds
of unrestrained nasturtiums and marigolds tilting
in a breeze that made tall pines whisper overhead.

Sun-split days at Grandma’s, her pink and yellow
roses tended gently until buds spread
into circling layers of velvet petals to be clipped
and artfully arranged in vases beside her rose-silk couch.

The first soil of your own, perched on a country hillside
behind a tiny house, rows lush with green beans
and tomatoes, squash and strawberries, ears of corn
tasseling to sweetness in their strong tight husks.

Later, flowering hedges around a bigger house outside a city,
beds of daffodils and crocus, shady edges green with hellebores,
and hostas, Solomon’s seal. And at the center a sunny spot
of basil, cucumbers, and tomatoes golden as ripe plums.

Until a cottage surrounded by tall penstemons and daisies,
lilac bellflowers, white lilies, purple salvia, ruby roses
and a pear tree’s branches drooping with the weight of ripening
fruit, and a row of raspberry clusters glowing in the sun.

And you, bringing in bouquets of red and yellow dahlias
with buckets of pears to peel and slice and boil, calculating how many jars
it’s possible to load with jam and pickles, and asking how much more
you can still gather up before the last warm days of summer end.

Of Fog and Lions

Cold morning fog outside the window while I stand in the kitchen
making tamales. Lions sleep in a dark corner.

Outside, a blower’s roar, a lawnmower growling, no room safe
from the din or perhaps it’s only the snore of tawny bodies.

I beat the shortening, the broth, the harina; spread masa on husks;
listen to the stillness, see a grey day spread out before me, watch the lions stir.

I vacuum the floor, tidy the living room, read a book, answer a letter
until fog lifts into low clouds as lions peer out the glass.

In coat and gloves I pull grass from dark mulch where daffodils rise
to spear the sky. The lions sit nearby, surveying the garden.

Inside again, and tamales on the table, an apple crunch desert,
dishes cleared and washed. The lions pace the hall.

To bed and sleep. I walk in golden grass beside a river,
sun warm on my back, a wide plain ahead. The lions pad beside me,

softly brush my side until the sun moves west, and we turn back
to a wood house.  I climb the steps. The lions push through a cat door
in the basement window, growling low, wanting to be fed.

Louise Cary Barden is a self-avowed tree-hugger who moved to Oregon from North Carolina. She has been a university English instructor and a marketing-advertising executive. Her poetry has appeared in multiple journals and has won awards from Calyx, Oregon Poetry Association, North Carolina Writers Network (chapbook) and others.

The Tuesday Crew

Before we can begin, we must coddle the old truck,
tighten down the terminal clamps, then jump it.
Groaning like most of us do before easing out of bed,
it starts reluctantly.  Twenty minutes to scrape away
the ice, even inside, while the crew stomps boots
and tosses banter in the steam of breath.

We are to gather branches along the roadways
littered by this winter’s storms and keep the diesel idling
while the alternator does its job.  The windows keep re-frosting
and I drop them just to see the edges of the road.
No matter–there is no heater coil, no fan, but soon
the sun will rise just high enough to warm the glass
and I can use the grease-stained towel in the cab.

We drift along the track, the four of us, wondering
that the trees have any branches left– we almost have
a forest in the bed before we reach the fork.
First trip to the burn pile, the others walk, but coming back
they clamber in the seatless cab and reminisce
about the old cars that we owned when we were young.

We are all old, the truck, this crew, even the trees.
But the sun and the sap are rising, the truck still runs
and we will all be young by coffee time.

Hugh Anderson started writing in longhand, graduated to a Remington Manual, then an IBM Selectric. At some point he discovered Microsoft Office and has never looked back. Recent publications for the Vancouver Island native include Cold Mountain Review, Sin Fronteras, Panoplyzine and Sea and Cedar with work upcoming in The Poeming Pigeon. He has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize.