Willawaw Journal Spring 2024 Issue 18

It’s Come to This

In the neighbor’s back field, the adopted
wild Appaloosa whinnies, then kicks
the old Chestnut mare in the chest.

I cannot bear to turn my head to look,
so I maniacally weed and I rake
our ragged garden rows.

I cannot judge this wild horse, as he
holds a tempest of power. As he stomps,
as his clipped gallop shakes the ground.

Instead of a trail of untamed freedom,
all that’s now left of his Steens Mountain
home is a half-acre of the neighbor’s lot.

I feel a kinship with his untamed soul—
his spirit within, trapped.
That familiar wild, resounding, cry.

With Every Breath

That night, as we ran around like meshugunahs,
putting anything that could fit in a sack—
a few family scrapbooks, each grandkid’s
favorite doll, a cup and saucer my grandmother

brought with her on her seasick voyage
to Ellis Island—whatever we could gather,
if the Beachie Creek Fire that roared down
the Santiam Canyon reached us over the next hill.

Level Two: Be Set to Evacuate warnings
buzzed our phones, the sky at 3 PM,
a strange ochre glow I can still see
if I close my eyes, mid-sleep.

We had an exit plan we’d practiced,
those years when the children were young—
how we’d escape and find each other,
after crawling from the burning door.

We thought we could let it go one day,
all we could not carry— value only
what we cradled in our clenched hands,
as long as we still breathed, wild and free.

And in the morning, as the winds
shifted, we found all around us
all that still was, yet would never
be the same.

And I recall that morning, in the still-smokey half-light
of day, how that trickster crow, who returned each
year to nest in our Douglas Fir, feed in our yard,
seemed to beckon to us, as she cawed and cawed.

As we watched from the singed
deck, she landed on the garden
gate, then picked the lock
until it sprung open, wide—

and we needed to believe
she wanted us to follow her
somewhere to clearer air.
Or was this atonement?

For was it not the crows who first
brought fire from the sun
to the world on the end of a stick,
carried to us in their clever beaks?

Marilyn Johnston is an Oregon writer and filmmaker. She received a fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts and the Donna J. Stone National Literary Award for Poetry. She is the author of a chapbook, Red Dust Rising (Habit of Rainy Nights Press), and a full collection of poetry, Before Igniting (2020, Rippling Brook Press). Her work has appeared in such publications as CALYX, Timberline Review, The Poeming Pigeon, and Natural Bridge. She teaches creative writing as part of the Artists in the Schools program.

Rapping Richmond Village

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development HUD built Richmond
Village in 1962 to provide subsidized and low-income housing for the West End’s
African American community.

I arouse to memory sounds of beer bottles breaking
in alleyways accepted and constant where I grew up, now a project then a
progressive plan plopped apple core center of a Queen’s West End. Namesake
Richmond Street before I-75 progressed it away. The I’ve got a secret summer
nights’ whispering wind calming available ears. Ogling too young to play standing
room only card games trumped up slammed down on unstable tables, who’s right
who’s wrong true as spring rains family fights. Park Town apartments first place
rank, Park Town Café but a jazz note away.

I rap the soul out of blues billowing Rockwell moments, this favorite aunt, grandma,
this somebody’s sweet potato pie promises. Its three-story Lego like buildings.
Near death mops hanging from the red brick second and third story breezeways.
Yellowed brick road walkways intersecting about this working-class domicile a
place where a Day Worker’s honest pay; car fare amounted to the right to live there,
where clothes lines billboard a bounty of blue-collar shirts, where splinters herald
a playground swing seat’s duty. A place where folks talked about other folks like
everywhere else.

I pump a fist thinking of Leo Cardenas ML ball player cooked ate and slept there
same as us. Lenny Mo Soul and his daily proclamations about him being happy
about him being Black about him being proud and all. And Shock and Jimmy Lee’s
more beast than beauty unforgettable facades. And Big Louie’s hamburger joint
bragging a blues fed juke box. And the Regal Theatre bopping movies and Motown
stage shows seeping free music under the door. Who’s right who’s wrong true as
spring rains family fights. And wash tub barbecue pits’ tattooing smoked rib wafers
across the sky rapping about this neighborhood’s cultural identity.

Blanche Saffron Kabengele author of Conjugal Relations of Africans and African Americans and Quiet as It’s Kept, Me Too and Other Poetic Expressions of Life holds a doctorate in Educational Studies University of Cincinnati, and has published poetry in East Fork Journal, For A Better World, and W-POESIS. Blanche and husband Peter spent three summers in the DRC Congo, travelling Europe, and experiencing the uncomplicated existence down under where kangaroos outnumber people.

Let Me Count the Ways

The two truest things ever are that, first,
one day you’ll meet a certain someone
and you know from the very first moment
that you’ll want to spend the rest of your life
without them and, second, those cartoon figures
on bathroom doors just don’t make any sense:
there’s the one with the pants who’s supposed
to be a man and the other with that
triangle thing that’s supposed to be a skirt
but not a skirt of the type anyone has worn
in the last 75 years and besides, look around,
anybody can wear anything these days,
which is why I was relieved when the bar
where we have our poetry readings.
just changed its bathrooms to unisex.
Good idea, right? Just go in and do
your business. Who’s gonna barge over
and say, Wow—look at that !
or I feel sorry for you, man. Or miss,
or whoever you are. Besides, you get
better ideas for poems in unisex bathrooms:
the other night I stepped past two women
in a tipsy embrace next to the sinks,
closed the stall door behind me, and began
to address the purpose for which I’d come
in the first place only to hear one woman
say to the other, I think we have room
for him in our relationship, don’t you?
and the other say, Um, I’m not so sure.
Oh, love. You’re everywhere, aren’t you?
And you take so many forms. You have to:
dogs don’t chase parked cars, you can’t clap
with one hand, it takes two to tango, and actually
you can clap with one hand if the person
sitting alongside claps along with you.
My darling, I love you to death, also to pieces.
I love you the way garlic loves the knife
you use when you’re slicing garlic and then
decide you want an apple but forget
and slice it with the garlic knife
just as that certain someone walks into
the kitchen and says, Ooo, apple—
can I have some? and you say Yeah, sure
and they say, Thanks! and think,
Um, garlic. A friend told me she took
a walk in the park the other day with her
person/not yet boyfriend/thing/person
to which my response was Boy, that covers
a lot of ground and also That’s it in a nutshell,
seeing as how even after years we never
really know what the other person
is thinking but especially not at the start
of a relationship, and I mentioned this
the other day in a class consisting mainly
of young women who are trying to figure out
who they are to themselves but also
to other people, and when I told them about
my friend who was taking a walk with
her person/not yet boyfriend/thing/person,
they shrieked with joy and said, That’s it!
That’s it exactly! That’s them, though,
not us. I love you so matcha. I love you
the way pumpkin spice lattes love
sweatpants. My heart’s so full of emojis
when I’m around you! I love you the way
Adam loved Steve in the Garden
of Eden, the way Abraham loved Isaac.
I love that God tested Abraham,
though when I read my Bible these days,
I read it as texted him.

David Kirby teaches at Florida State University. His latest books are a poetry collection, Help Me, Information, and a textbook modestly entitled The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them. Kirby is also the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement described as “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” He is currently on the editorial board of Alice James Books.

The World is Lost to Me

Ghosts brood outside my house
under redwood trees surrounding my home
outside my home their fingers gather shadows
‌                                         for the sake of dark green

In a year of afternoons, fog tethers itself to my house
Dark porch brims with light in my home
‌                                          like a throatful of tears

My son hovers in the dark stars above my home
Walls echo moment and memory in my home
‌                                          where I roam in this rain-soaked wound

House raging with zigzag lightning house
‌                                          evening dark
‌                                          rhubarb and huckleberries

House shadowed with green rain and redwoods
‌              restore my heart to me
‌              restore my mind to me
‌              restore any starlight

I live in my home with Rhubarb Boy
I live in my home with Huckleberry Girl

I live in my home where ghosts unknit our bones
‌             Where I live under shadowed trees
‌             older than anyone I have ever known

‌                         Wo Ich bin der welt abhanden gekommen

 

Elizabeth Kirkpatrick-Vrenios‘ award-winning chapbook, Special Delivery, was published in 2016, her second, Empty the Ocean with a Thimble by Word Tech Communications, and her third, A Concerto for an Empty Frame: Music for Survival by Kelsay Books. Nominated three times for a pushcart prize, she has poems published in various anthologies and journals including Stories of Music, The Poeming Pigeon, The Blue Mountain Review, American Journal of Poetry, and The Inflectionist Review. She is editor of the Writers of the Mendocino Coast Anthology,and Professor Emerita from American University in Washington DC.

Sunday Afternoon in Early September

This afternoon we will have cleaning of spirits. Need brought on by the sight of myself
in the mirror. I look far gone. No dust mops, straw brooms, or old rag, and I scrub the
idea of dry martinis with three olives.

after leaf fall
on the frog pond
scum

Let’s start by sharing a picture of a cedar waxwing on a drying vine eating a raspberry
from the Audubon calendar. And sip green tea with lemon peel and ginger. No honey
in yours. I’ll tell the story of saving the life of a waxwing’s leg caught in the string on a
trellis in my garden. You may speak about short-life laptop batteries for a few minutes.
I will share predictions of rain after a morning of gloom. We will discuss drought that
is not apparent here. You may bring out your close-ups of azaleas and rhododendrons
taken during your walk to Lake Washington, the path that passes the park with the
beach for dogs that like to chase thrown-things into the water. I promise to admire the
bugs crawling in your blooms. Please tell again stories about how Newfoundlands love
to swim.

Solar output from the panels is minimal. Drizzle, not rain. I’ll talk about my mother.
The sky does not lift. The purple asters I planted yesterday in a pot seem grateful. One
hickory leaf fell with the swirl of a feather. Milkweed pods prepare to split wide open.

We sit side by side. I could not have foreseen that in this morning’s mirror. You ask if
you should read Mary Oliver out loud to me. I hold your hand. I ask for Gluck.

too early for vespers
another lamp must be lit
before solstice

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet thrilled to be coming out of this strange Vermont winter. She welcomes poetry collection #8 Wild Apples (Fernwood Press, released February 2024) about her 3,003 mile move from Oregon to Vermont along with downsizing and welcoming two grandsons. Collection #9 is The Unknown Daughter (Finishing Line Press, March 2024), a chapbook of 24 poems related to a fictional Tomb of the Unknown Daughter–each poem told by a different character who knows of the monument or the people involved. Part feminist history, part autobiography, and part fantasy. Website: triciaknoll.com