Willawaw Journal Spring 2024 Issue 18

The Cinderblock Duplex in the Sixties

Newly wed with rented furniture.
We’d roll to the middle
of the lumpy bed where I
became pregnant right away,
The smell of coffee
which I loved made me sick.
When I wasn’t nauseated,
I was starving.
We were invited to Rabbit’s trailer
where he served us Chef Boyardee
which I thought delicious.

Did he make it back from Vietnam?

I’d never lived alone and lit a candle at night
until I started feeling sleepy.
I can’t remember what I did all week,
waiting for your weekend pass—
there was no money and I didn’t drive.
You were halfway through OCS
and destined for Vietnam.

Holding you seemed more secure
than I’d ever been, there among
the useless silver flatware—
why did I ever choose a pattern?
On the end table, a candy dish
we received as a wedding present,
which I kept full.

Gail Peck holds an M.F.A. from The Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and is the author of nine books of poetry. Her first full-length book, Drop Zone, won the Texas Review Breakthrough Contest; Poems and essays have appeared in The Southern Review, Nimrod, Greensboro Review, Brevity, Cimarron, Comstock Review, Consequence and elsewhere. Her full-length In the Shadow of Beauty will be out in 2025. She lives in Charlotte, NC.

Daughter

I write about her in poems,
thinking she can be
brought back by songs.

In dreams, she floats around me.
Dreaming, I write poems,
knowing where my child belongs.

Awake, I make coffee, It seems
humming is all around me as if
she can be brought back by song.

During the day, I wander
around, lost, not
knowing where my child belongs.

At night, I hum in my sleep,
searching for my daughter, hoping
to find her in song.

Dreaming or awake, I try to find where
I belong. Maybe in her laughter, a music
to bring her back in song.
I know where my child belongs.

The Minnows and The Woman

We slip across the sand, in and out of the sea.
The waves wash us back with other minnows,

all of us swirling our bodies, swimming
back and forth. We never tire. We do not wish

to be caught in a bucket and used as bait
to catch our sisters and brothers, the bigger

fish. The woman who comes here is filled
with longing. She comes to be with the sea.

We know she will not harm anyone.
Not woman, man, child or fish. She comes

to put her feet in the the surf’s edge, to be
with us, to feel the push, the pull of the ocean

 

Diana Pinckney, Charlotte, NC, has six collections of poetry, including Hummingbirds & Wine. She is the Winner of the 2010 Ekphrasis Prize, Atlanta Review’s 2012 International Prize and Press 53 Prime Number’s 2018 Award. Her work has appeared in Cave Wall, Arroyo, RHINO, Emrys Journal, The Pedestal Magazine, Green Mountains Review, Willawaw Journal and other magazines and anthologies. Pinckney admits to being very interested in writing persona, and ekphrastic poems, and has led workshops on both forms for the Charlotte Center for the Literary Arts. She is now working again on poems about her daughter.

I Told the Rain

‌                                        -after Tarfia Faizullah’s I Told the Water

I told the rain ‌               you’re wise
‌            to fall upon ‌                     rich and poor
‌                         alike.
Told it ‌                            your sleek silvery lines
‌            streak the sky ‌                caress
‌                        our faces ‌            ‌if only we’d look up.
You only exist ‌               because of our thirst
‌            we think. But ‌                beneath your touch
‌                        we are all ‌                          one.
The first time ‌                I was soaked to the skin
‌            I peeled off ‌        my clothes and stood
‌                        under your sheath, ‌        your sluice,
‌                                     your flow. ‌                        My flesh
became fish, ‌                         holding its shape
‌            in your cool ‌                          embrace. ‌     I knew then
‌                         how love ‌                            was possible:

The urge to be ‌                      subsumed within
‌             the steady pulse ‌                    of the beloved.
‌                            I knew then‌                         we’d search
all our lives to find ‌                            your likeness
‌             you ‌      silver-haired ensign ‌           you ‌     flag of pearl
‌                           of gray ‌              of argent.

Vivienne Popperl lives in Portland, Oregon. Her poems have appeared in Clackamas Literary Review, Timberline Review, Cirque, Willawaw, About Place Journal, and other publications. She was poetry co-editor for the Fall 2017 edition of VoiceCatcher. She received both second place and an honorable mention in the 2021 Kay Snow awards poetry category by Willamette Writers and second place in the Oregon Poetry Association’s Spring 2022 contest “Members Only” category. Her first collection, A Nest in the Heart, was published by The Poetry Box in April, 2022.

La Spezia

Instead, he flicks a royal wave towards La Spezia Gulf,
exhales for emphasis and plunges the quartered lime down

the bottleneck and dams the foam-gush with his thumb.
I prod clotted lobes of candle wax, pick at slick buds of local olives.

We could be snapped by the waiter’s irritant winks for a postcard:
scratch and sniff for tussling scents: cardamom spray vs. coconut balm.

Felicity is a new music discovered in each other, minds dialled in
to the same station, confidants abroad, divested of our regular fronts.

Spinning the table-umbrella’s stem in turns, two bare soles touch,
but it goes without saying — some static fails to crackle —

when he asserts that all that matters is the immediate twenty metres.
What’s beyond can wait. Another word to topple what’s domino-delicate

between us, while behind is the sun’s smoky-mustard midriff,
slow-blushing, reverse easing into a bath, faintly gracing our napes.

Samuel Prince‘s debut collection, Ulterior Atmospheres, was published in 2020 by Live Canon. His work has more recently appeared in Apricot Press, Fauxmoir, Red Door and Thimble Literary Magazine. He lives in Norfolk (UK). More information can be found at www.samuelprince.co.uk

The Anchovy of Melancholy

In my vision along the bookshelf
Anchovy becomes Anatomy
of Melancholy
where Burton accuses fish of slimy nutrients
leading to excessive black bile,
as does most everything the mind eats.

The simple anatomy of an anchovy
differs from other fish where the snout
overhangs a lower jaw which, opening
for plankton, gapes wider
than the entire fish
under black eyes like holes.

The shape is as streamlined as a fountain pen
and, you know, as slippery as a fish
and your knowledge of self,
reflecting silver, then a dubious
blue-green in a graceful turn,
and finally a distant black dot.

An anchovy is never alone,
its thousands pressed together for oil
or paste beaten into dressing.
Even the salty grey-brown strip on your pizza
lies with the many.

And when attacked by shark or pelican
they’re a roiling ball of fish caught
in the frenzy of togetherness
of a political rally, a mega-church
where everyone screams away
the melancholy burden of self.

Sherry Mossafer Rind is the author of six collections of poetry. She has received grants
and awards from Anhinga Press, the Seattle and King County Arts Commissions,
National Endowment for the Arts, and Artist Trust. Her most recent books are Between
States of Matter, Poetry Box Select, 2020, and The Store-House of Wonder and
Astonishment, winner of an Eyelands International award, published by Pleasure Boat
Studio, 2022. https://sherryrind.wixsite.com/writer
Sherry lives on the ancestral land of the Coastal Salish nation, now Lynnwood, Washington.