Willawaw Journal Spring 2025 Issue 20

The Sword in the Lake

What makes a grown man swallow a fish whole, fresh from the hook, take it down like an oyster, three-inch bluegill with spines along the back that slide down the pink throat, that raise up when the fish is coughed back? July 25 at Klineline Park in Hazel Dell, Sheriff Beiber found a fishing line with leader in the water, a carton of worms, backpack, wallet, shoes, two empty beer cans. No sign of struggle. Todd Lawer had fished with his father since he was a boy. Todd would have known about those spines, died of asphyxiation a short distance from the trail. Paramedics had to clear the obstruction with pliers, goring the throat. How does a father swallow such news? Another bluegill floating in the water, fifteen feet from shore.

Carol Barrett began writing poetry to support the widowed women she was counseling. She has published three volumes of poetry, most recently Reading Wind, and one of creative nonfiction, Pansies. An NEA Fellow in Poetry, Carol has taught the craft to students ranging from kindergartners to doctoral candidates. Her creative work appears in over sixty anthologies, and in venues in nine countries. Carol currently lives in Bend, OR.

After Purple Hills, Ghost Ranch (1934)
–Georgia O’Keefe

I look intensely for the Ghost Ranch
but it’s not in her painting—
it is in her perspective, where her eyes
and feet resided while her brush worked,
the ghosts alongside her,

and perhaps given up on love for a person,
she included herself as a ghost,
an afterlife haunting of a landscape
neither friendly nor desolate,

a tired purple, not majestically purple,
not the purple of sage,
but earthen purple, of old iron red
that caught some touch of blue sky
and held it. 1934—the year named,
perhaps to recall the exact haunting.

When I step back,
as I stare at the canvas,
I feel the lost loved ones of my life
pressing around me,
I feel my hands weaken, their clutch
like a raptor’s talons released,
and I no longer need to wish those loved
into my world any longer,
I have a need perhaps
to inhabit the world of the ghost ranch,
to just view, no longer insert myself
into the image I make.
1973, friend Phil dead
upside-down in a ditch,

I watched the winch crank
the car toward the road,
the frail purple of clover
lining the ditch.
Sometimes there is no hope
and one needs to move on,
but spaces enter a person,
spaces reside in a person
no less than a person
resides in a space.
Ghosts of who we have been linger
within us–she moved from hills to skulls,
the intimacies of flowers,
mingling death and life,
art no longer distant, she a part.
And so I move.

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, spending the seasons dodging fires, floods, earth-shaking, and all the other scrambling life-initiatives. He has contributed previously to Williwaw Journal, Heartwood, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Willows Wept Review. He has a chapbook for free download at Red Wolf Editions and a second chapbook available from Red Bird Chapbooks.

Sex in Suburbia

—after Eavan Boland “Ode to Suburbia”

Five o’clock and the man-of-the-house
‌  pulls into the drive, slumped
‌  behind the wheel—dinner in the oven
‌  or thawing on the kitchen counter.
You are housebound, a stay-at home mom,
a suburban Cinderella, aware of your boobs starting
‌  to sag, your thighs on the verge of wobbling,
‌  the strong pull of boredom.

You feel used up before your fortieth birthday,
‌  upscale, upsize, outmoded, open concept mood-lit.
‌  Nothing a conga drum, or ho-hum chum, a dose of pot—
‌  out in a parking lot wouldn’t sanctify or rectify.
Your clothes are tatty, your housecoat’s ratty,
‌  your six-year-old’s bratty.

Even your mother warned you to get a job, set up
‌  your own bank account. Take a page from her playbook—
brighten your outlook. Remember how she chain smoked,
pottered about in the garden, charged choice cuts of meat
‌  at the butchers, complained about her varicose veins
‌  neglected you kids. Brighten your day. Take a hike, ride a bike,

‌  toss your toddler in a basket, pull your six-year-old
behind you on his own set of wheels.
‌  Get a dog, or a sled. Don’t get out of bed.
You’re only human after all. Buy a vibrator, put money down
‌  on a Miata, tootle off to the beach—anywhere out of reach.
‌  Trade your silver slipper for flip-flops, your garden
‌  for a deck, find some deck chairs at Goodwill.

Shake a martini to swill. Greet you husband
‌  in your altogethers, demand he orders takeout.
While you’re waiting, why don’t you make out?
Disarm him and disrobe him, swell him, cast a spell
‌  on him, pinch yourself awake and aware, spin him
‌  like a spinnaker. Polish him like mirror, gaze
‌  into your own reflection, arouse him
‌  before the stroke of midnight.

Dale Champlin is an Oregon poet and artist. Many of her poems have appeared in The Opiate, Timberline, Willawaw, Cirque, Triggerfish, and elsewhere. Dale’s poetry collections are: The Barbie Diaries, Callie Comes of Age, Isadora, Andromina: A Stranger in America, and Medusa.

Bone Window

Mornings, Georgia O’Keeffe walked
the high desert until she found
her frame, white and weathered,
the famous pelvis. Kneeling,
holding it up, heavy, the beast
re-created her blue.

Once I hiked inland dunes
and found a tiny white fossil.
The guide warned I couldn’t keep it.
I knew it was a shell.
I grew up by the sea.
It took me home in wind song.

Mornings, Georgia wandered the wide
canvas of mesa and dunes until she
found her window. Angle of vision
to make the world her own.

Evenings, I comb the beach
where sand, horizon and sky
might be my shadow
through the arc of a crescent moon.

Joanne Clarkson‘s sixth poetry collection, Hospice House, was released by MoonPath Press in 2023. Her poems have been published in such journals as Poetry Northwest, Nimrod and Alaska Quarterly Review. Clarkson has Masters Degrees in English and Library Science, has taught and worked for many years as a professional librarian. After caring for her mother through a long illness, she re-careered as a Hospice RN. She lives in Port Townsend, WA.

Flying for Nana

…remember the lush cologne of pollen & the garnet bees
buzzing their cargo routes…– Gerry LaFemina

There was no rain the summer I was nine.
Our orchard withered. My younger brother lingered
in an iron-windowed children’s ward. I forgot
Bruce’s face, his voice. But on weekends, Nana came.

She was the scent of lilacs, the glow of a garnet stickpin
shaped like a bee. She was cardboard boxes of coconut cake
and thick squares of Sicilian pizza. She was mine as I perched
atop our fence beneath the dying McIntoshes, perfecting

my angles of flight. That was the summer I taught myself to fly.
Back against the fence, hands behind me clutching wooden rail,
I released one, then the other, leapt with arms outstretched like
Wendy Darling. Week after week, while I sought flight,

my brother stayed gone. Nana applauded my small miracles.
She kissed my wounds when splinters pricked my palms,
worked deep and festered. I loved and dreaded her visits,
knowing I’d soar for her, that afterwards she’d uncap

her garnet pin, ignite its tip with a safety match. She found
every sliver. Between each prick she pressed her lips
against my skin. Nana cradled my hand, hovered her pin,
landed it with small flicks. I hardly felt its sting.

Gail Braune Comorat is a founding member of Rehoboth Beach Writers’ Guild and is a co-author of Walking the Sunken Boards. She served as an editor for Quartet, an online poetry journal by women fifty and over. Her work has appeared in Gargoyle, Grist, and The Widows’ Handbook. She lives in Lewes, Delaware.