Willawaw Journal Spring 2024 Issue 18

Desert Tableau, Fort Rock, Oregon

Spray of feathers.
Last flight flown.
Bird no more.

Rodent skull bleached to chalk,
with tiny teeth, still sharp.
No more gnawing.
No more scurrying
under sage and stone.

Half of a red fox, back leg broken
under the ledge where it crawled to die.
Tail intact, white-tipped
fur waving in the gray wind.

Rain and wind scour rock;
freeze and thaw shatter, break, crumble.
Stone. Pebble. Sand. Dust.

Don’t we all lay our bones down
eventually
and not always gently?

Like when I
moved diagonally
down that rocky slope
to mitigate the steep angle of it
to keep myself upright
and my left foot
‌‌                            slipped?
Whirling around, I caught myself
but bent and touched the ground
with both hands.
It was a reminder.
In a moment, a slip became a bow
of reverence and recognition
of the inevitable.

In good time, we all slip, fall, return.
Gravity has its way
and winter does its wild work.

Jennifer Rood is enjoying life in Southern Oregon, where she recently retired from 30 years of teaching high school English, art, and social studies. She has served as a Board Member of the Oregon Poetry Association (including a year as President in 2020-21), and last fall, she spent five weeks as the Oregon Caves National Monument’s Artist in Residence. Her most recently published individual poems appear in The Literary Hatchet and Verseweavers. Present and Speaking Everywhere (Not a Pipe Publishing, 2024) is her newest collection of found poetry and art.

Iowa Scenes

 . . . to glorify things, just because they are.
‌                                 –Czeslaw Milosz

I.
Beginnings
(Iowa City)
This is Grant Wood country,
his painted idylls of lollipop trees
and ribbon-candy country roads.

A century on, no farmer
hulks behind a horse-drawn plow,
no housewife hangs hand-stitched
quilts on a backyard clothesline.

But wind-lashed hills and coffee-brown
fields ripple green every spring.
A blue tendril of river curls
around the University buildings,
bending southeast until it
surrenders to the Mississippi.

And the prairie flowers,
the wild bees—

I am a coastal woman from a big city.
I have a grandchild, Philly-born, just past infancy.
His parents will raise him here, in Iowa City, for a while.

From their back porch I look out,
past a border of honey locust and cedar
to a sky of fat-bellied clouds,
gravid with rain, ready to calve.

There are fates worse
than starting out in this place.
For now, it will be good.
As sure as season follows season,
it will be very good.

II.
Flyover Country
(Wilson’s Orchard)

One of earth’s great beauties—
a turquoise blue morning in early summer,
the eastern hills dozing in sun-lathered air.
A father and his little son bending
over rows of strawberry bushes.
Speaking softly, cooing with praise,
he shows the child how to separate
ripe fruits from their stems, how to pluck
the sweetest without crushing them.
One by one by one by one by one—
father and son lift the fragile globes into a basket.
For this is slow and deliberate work requiring a fine hand.
High overhead, a long-haul jet streaks northwest.
The boy looks up, tugs at his father’s jeans,
pointing to the jet’s feathery contrail,
twin-tailed like a tree swallow’s.
In that instant, from the very field where they stand,
a meadowlark flings itself into the wind.

III.
Goosetown
(what a grandchild will come to tell his own children
about the early years on Reno Street)

Come evening, we lined our winter boots
along the mud room wall, like tidy children ready for bed.
Coats and car keys hung from steel hooks.
Umbrellas by their straps. Hats and gloves
filled a wicker basket on the floor.

The mud room door opened to the side-yard and the concrete pad
where the black Volkswagen hunkered all night,
square and squat as a sleepy bull in the Iowa snow.
Saturday mornings, we’d climb in for the ride to
the ten o’clock Story Time at the children’s library.

Mama fussed over the belts and buckles until she was sure
I was safely harnessed on my padded throne.
Only then did Papa fire up the engine, and we three
rolled slowly down the driveway, braking at the sidewalk,
scanning this way and that for cars and kids on bikes.
Neighbors jogging past us toward the park
turned their heads and waved, Hi! when my father
pumped lightly on the horn with the heel of his hand.

Then we pushed into the street, made a quick cut left and right,
past a goose and her three goslings forged in steel and welded
to the top of a weather-flayed street sign, corner of Reno and Church.

How I loved that metal mama bird!
Every time I looked up at her and her brood in tow,
I wondered, Where are they going? Long necks urging forward,
one splayed foot flopped in front of the other— I liked to pretend
some important place was waiting for them to arrive.
Just like us.

(note: Goosetown is the name of a neighborhood in Iowa City, indicated by
its logo: the stamped metal geese affixed to all the street signs of that precinct)

Maria Rouphail is Poetry Editor of Main Street Rag literary magazine. Her third poetry collection, All the Way to China (2022), was a finalist in both the University of Wisconsin Brittingham Poetry and the Blue Light Press competitions. Her earlier collections are Apertures and Second Skin. She is the 2024 NCPS Distinguished Poet for central North Carolina. A six-time Pushcart nominee, she lives in Raleigh.

Mornings in Melancholia

–-after Freud’s 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia”

I.
A strange country to walk into at ten A.M.
when the dark descends on photoshopped,
coffeeshopped bodies cantilevered over steam,

beans and screen. Practiced in the importance
of looking earnest, they have yet to master
the melancholy in their eyes, or re-patriate

the exiled brightening glance they left behind
at the borders of employment.

II.
Colonizing café tables, their comfort is
wrapped in poor posture and pale misery,
set to sipping on solitude. Pretending to see

no one but still carefully seen all the same,
discrete citizens and squatters admire one another,
speak a syntax of gestures laced with spaced sighs

and tongues laid on lips in a mime of thought.
Some days, I catch myself in the mirror of their eyes.

III.
This daily masque, as poised as a play on a stage,
side-lit in blue, stands dressed with brown-stained
saucers placed beside papers marked with

antiquarian, thin black ink. From the corners,
a trio of baristas, unguarded, unbarded,
recites the chorus, and we raise cups till

our fingers, bent by an angry light, uncurl and
cave to the city’s long day of rude demands.

Joel Savishinsky is a retired anthropologist and gerontologist. His books include The Ends of Time: Life and Work in A Nursing Home and Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America, both of which won the Gerontological Society of America’s annual book prize. In 2023, The Poetry Box published his collection Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts: Poems on Aging. He lives in Seattle, helping to raise five grandchildren, and considers himself a recovering academic and unrepentant activist. savishin@gmail.com

Unstitched

I am held together
by tiny stitches
on small scraps of feed sack,
snatches of wool, snips of gingham.
A patchwork of pastels—
a slipshod collage of cotton.
I’ve been silk, satin, taffeta;
I’ve been flowers, polka-dots, and plaid.

Thin white thread
‌                           ‌zig-zags
‌                across
‌                           the decades
‌                hemming me in, keeping me
from ripping.

I’ve been zipped.
‌                Buttoned.
‌                           Unsnapped.
I’ve been bumblebunched, twisted,
and straightened. Held pins in my mouth,
pricked fingers, and calloused
my thimble-less thumbs.

I am done.
Unravel me now:
Rip out the seams
one by one, untwist strings
and untangle knots. Fold me gently.
What I haven’t finished—
take now.
Begin again.

Life Cycle

September’s cicadas are in a frenzy of crescendo
and diminuendo, their sound boxes like kettle drums,

tymbals flexing in celebration and lament, buckling
and unbuckling, ridges rubbing faster and faster, drumstick

clicks on washboard: We’ve done it, they cry! We’ve met
and married; mating’s done; our progeny buried in bark

to emerge next summer or maybe in seventeen, tiny nymphs
that slept through our deaths, never knew how the song

rose and fell one last time that late summer day. How fast
it all transpired once we fed and left our old skins behind.

Sarah Cummins Small lives outside Knoxville, TN. She taught creative writing, literature, and composition for over 20 years to students at all levels, from elementary to college. Her poetry has appeared in Yalobusha Review, Willow Review, Appalachia Bare, Free the Verse, among others. She holds an MA in English/creative writing from Iowa State University.

Li Bai on His Way to Meng Haoran’s Grave

The anger of a gathering storm
stirs the sullen sky with dark
clouds fringed with first rain.
The boatman will be impatient
to get ahead of the bad weather.

But I will pay him well to take
this journey slow. I am in no
hurry to stand beside your grave.
I’ll ride the river’s rough currents
and add my voice to the howling wind.

I want to embrace the rage of nature
that knows how much I’ve lost.
After I allow myself to say goodbye,
I’ll walk away from your grave
into the waiting arms of sorrow.

Northwest’s Mind of Winter

December shoulders into our lives
dragging with it, November’s dark rain
to help ignite the Northwest’s mind of winter.
As our thoughts turn to the holidays, rain
raps on our windows whispering, “I am here.”
Leafless trees mourn summer’s memory, their
voices all rattle and clash, but December’s song
is already in firs fattened with wind and rain,
their verdant voices, a choir praising the months
of dark skies coming. They sing a rich, green
celebration of a season shimmering in a glaze
of incessant rain that shakes the earth awake
and begins to quench her thirst for winter.

Doug Stone lives in Albany, Oregon. He has written two chapbooks, The Season of Distress and Clarity (Finishing Line), The Moon’s Soul Shimmering on the Water (KDP), and a full length poetry collection, Sitting in Powell’s Watching Burnside Dissolve in Rain (The Poetry Box). His poems have been published in numerous journals and in the anthology, A Ritual To Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford.