Willawaw Journal Spring 2024 Issue 18

Hello Readers,

You know how it is when you focus on something like maybe your sister gets pregnant and suddenly you see so many pregnant women around you? Or when you decide to buy a new red Subaru and find a couple “cousins” in your own neighborhood? Well, that’s how it’s been with the sestina for me this month. I read a sestina in submissions, then wrote one, challenged a friend to write one, then found a few very artfully written in my latest book order, Ghost Man on Second by Erica Reid (Bravo to Erica!) Sestinas abound!

The sestina is a French form that accommodates many styles, topics, and a diversity of voices. Easy to google (Poetry Foundation or Academy of American Poets, for starters) but not so easy to write. You need six durable words, whether you select them first or find them as you go, to carry you through six 6-line stanzas and the 3-line envoi. These words are used at the end of each line and in a prescribed order per stanza (after you manage the first). The lines can be the length of your choosing but should be close to the same throughout. Easy-peasy, right? You could give it a try.

Meanwhile, I am confounded at the power of form to trick the mind into creating a fine poem. A little distraction, a little constraint, and pow! –you have unleashed something hidden and made it manifest! My inner editor is telling me to stop with the exclamation points but Spring is in the offing (see Neal Ostman’s “Sprang!”) which is an explosion of a kind. Consistent with emphatic punctuation, don’t you think?

Spring >Explosions >Play: Let’s play Cento and see where it takes us using the titles from this issue of Willawaw:

The Raining was a Rash on Spring

‌Morning in Melancholia
Graveyard Shift
When the Dead Visit
Underground Gardens
Dreaming of Eucalyptus
The Canoe
The Anchovy of Melancholy

Link
France, 1990
Where the Train Tracks Meet the Sun
Just One More
Portrait of Emily
Lost
Bowing to No God: Family Liturgy

Return to the Chatooga River
Iowa Scenes
La Spezia
Desert Tableau, Fort Rock, Oregon
Bridge Over 15 Mile Creek
The Cinderblock Duplex in the 60’s
The Front Porch Sitters
Rapping Richmond Village

She Watches
The Lost Boys
Daughter, Minnows and the Woman
Li Bai on his way to Meng Haoran’s Grave
If This was a Gateway to Heaven
I can’t unknow any knowing of a death grip
Unstitched, Life Cycle
The Dazzle of Fireflies on a Sticky Jersey Night

Last Night It Started Raining
Change in the Weather
Through the Morning
Atmospheric River
Northwest’s Mind of Winter
Hells Canyon Revival
I Told the Rain
Beau Soir

The Old Carpenter Does Happy Hour
Hunnered
Baby Demerol Gets Set Adrift
It’s Come to This with Every Breath
How to Get to the Sky
Their Fair Share
Shared Bounty
Audit of my Bee Heart

Sunday Afternoon, Early September
Let Me Count the Ways
The World is Lost to Me
Paper
Smoke Signals
Interstices
Woods Walking
Final Cut of the Season, Eulogy

OK, that’s your preview of the issue. All the authors are listed in the table of contents at the top of each page. You can make it your quest to match them to their title. My thanks to the very many contributors who grace the pages of our 18^th issue, with a shout-out to J.I. Kleinberg for her minimalist found poetry, tickling an idea, and egging us on. Oh, the many faces of poetry, diverse in style, form, and voice. Enjoy your reading and happy Spring Equinox!

Yours in poetry,

Rachel Barton

Lost (2)

I like to spend just a few hours
once in awhile
not knowing where I am,
off the path
in the forest I walk every week,
slipping through a wall of Huckleberry,
into this profound density
of stunted understorey:
dead fall, invasive Willow, Tan Oak,
Poison Oak, over a mycological
treasury, and I become aware
I am a sex,
momentarily relieved of subject
or object, not recognized exactly,
but feeling flirted at,
seduced, by color and shape,
entertaining a slow, draped,
or webbed peep-show
of Wild Rose, Honeysuckle,
reclining Irish Moss, Dwarf Maple,
tripping through a proletariat of Bracken,
in my inner chamber music
of creaking knees, borne along —
in a sympathetic sigh of bones,
through thriving veils of languid decay —
leave it here, it grows, I say,
where on-board loss to aching hips
and shrinking muscles
is re-vivified beside this fallen Fir,
lounging and sloughing
a bent sideshow of side-slipping shingles,
dreaming down toward soil,
where my up-step soft-shatters
the black confection into a year’s worth
of worm and weevil work.
It spills under a skirt
of Dimpled Speckelwort,
as if welcoming a thing like me,
who’s slow apocalypse is nothing
in the face of one night’s wind.
I must wind around
impenetrable thickets losing
the way, from a way already
lost, trying to see how this twisty
lurching-way will look
when returning.
I believe I am staying within screaming
distance of the main path,
from which a person might smell
a corpse once
every few life-times or –
but the swivel of my ankle,
the kink of neck, carries me
on a strange azimuth of body –
my mild ambition
and the focus required
for a non-teetery weight-shift carries me
where vegetable archways appear.
What do I know that will ever
be so different? I will
be lost if I let myself believe so
for a minute.
The Cardinal Directions
dissolving in my rotating skull
about as useful as a passage from
Finnegan’s Wake,
as I dally over
Maidenhair, Spleenwort,
while a fallen Redwood in its frugality
of imitation death busily arabesques
its squirrel-scarred limbs
into children reaching
skyward.

Terry Adams  lives on the bank of San Gregorio creek, in a Redwood forest in La Honda,
California, where he rescued the former home of Ken Kesey. His collection, Adam’s Ribs, is
available from Off The Grid Press. He’s had poems in Catamaran, California Fragile, and
Midnight Chem. His website is terryadamspoetry.net

Portrait of Emily

She sits in the bedroom window like curtains,
whitely gazing down at the garden,
a row of pink hollyhocks
standing with a lean, listening, like people,
to her secrets. They promise not to tell.

Cobwebs in the corner of the room
catch the dust and residue of the world
before they swallow her, leaving clarity
to shine behind her eyes onto the parchment.

Tall flowers, what do you know
that the Belle of Amherst saw from her window?
What do you know about her secrets,
the ones never penned?

To tell one thing and know another,
entirely one’s prerogative.

Frank Babcock lives in Corvallis, Oregon and is a retired Albany middle school teacher and owner of a bamboo nursery. He writes poetry to share the strange thoughts that rattle around in his head and to get them off his mind. He started with an interest in the beatnik poets, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. He has a long way to go and much to write before he sleeps. Poems published in the local Advocate, Willawaw Journal, and Panoplyzine.

Underground Gardens

Legend was,
After a quarrel with his father,
He left Sicily behind
And immigrated to America.
That he left a woman in Filari
To whom he vowed to return and marry.
No one knew but he,
Of his experience tunneling.
In Boston he worked as a tunnel-digger.
New York City, he excavated
For the subway leading to New Jersey.
His secretly held a dream
Of growing his own citrus,
Orange, lemon and grapefruit trees.
Seeking a Mediterranean climate
He came to Fresno, California.
Working as a farm laborer
In local vineyards
He saved his money,
Buying a parcel of land
Sight unseen.
Under a veneer of dirt
Was impervious sedimentary rock,
Ill-suited for farming.
In scorching Fresno heat
As high as 120-degree afternoons,
He dug a cellar to escape.
Then carved out adjacent rooms
In the hardpan sediment,
Inspired by ancient catacombs
He marveled in Filari, Sicily.
His subterranean villa,
A far-reaching underground world
Nearly one-hundred chambers,
Passages, courts, and patios
Dug with instinct and memory.
He worked at night,
Labored with a hand-pick,
Shovel, wheelbarrow,
And Fresno-scraper
Pulled by a single mule.
There was a kitchen, bath,
Bedchamber, library, and chapel,
And masonry archways he built.
Fruit-bearing trees were planted
below ground, extending above
The terrain through openings.
The woman he left in Filari?
She refused to live
In the world of his making,
Underground in hole.
He became a recluse,
Completely alone thereafter.

Stephen Barile, a Fresno, California native, attended Fresno City College, Fresno Pacific University, and California State University, Fresno. He is a long-time member of the Fresno Poet’s Association. Stephen Barile lives and writes in Fresno. His poems have been published extensively.

Their fair share

We turn at the band stand because you say it’s getting dark.
It’s still grey in the sky when we’re one road away from your house,
me walking a little behind you with the dog as we laugh about something from work,
proof to me that we share memories of life,
that events are connected.
I smile at your voice and then a twig from a bush tugs through my hair,
And I see my corpse pulled apart by the foxes, and moss is as much my flesh
as the muscle is.
I see everyone taking their fair share, the birds making party favours of my eyes,
the earth wrapping me warmly for the worms to squirm through one into the other,
a little less of me
each time their tender pink bodies double back on themselves.
I see the burning light of whatever part of me is able to see this, laughing now
with you,
unmeshed from my body and bounding across the ground into some other thing
born blind in its burrow.
As we turn round the last road, your dog scurries forward in excitement for home.

Llewynn Brown is a writer living by the sea in Cornwall, England. They write a large amount of personal experiences given an artistic tinge, or led off completely into fantasy.