Willawaw Journal Spring 2025 Issue 20

‌           The Scarlet Ribbon (1906)
by Théo (Théophile) van Rysselberghe

Blundering through a door
I saw my daughter naked
startling us both
She so lovely
so angry
with perfect hair
dirty feet
I so shamed
so proud

Joe Cottonwood has repaired hundreds of houses to support his writing habit in the
Santa Cruz Mountains of California. His books of poetry are Son of a Poet, Foggy Dog,
and Random Saints. His website is joecottonwood.com

Presidents Day 2025

Three days after the big storm
the robins come brass-bellied
over languishing shrubs
and snowbound fields
to gather in flocks on a holly
still bright with berries.

They flutter and chitter, hide briefly
in its thorny leaves
only to reappear and soar to rooftops and trees
across the white fields,
swooping back to start again
in this icy noon of armored cloud.

Soon black-headed juncos
sweep in, too, peppering the ground with urgency,
tails flicking and rising at any sound
as towhees scratch calmly for seeds
under shadowy laurels.

And so spring’s harbingers feed and flit
as freezing storms rage to the east
and wave imperial shadow across the land,
one Anna’s hummingbird hovering at my window
in its blur of hope, pausing for a moment,
and whirring away.

Swimmer

Sun glimmers in bands across the water.
Hummingbirds hover over late afternoon.
I enter the water as an angled mirror,
the old metamorphosis of limb and brain
learned in adolescent pools. I barely breathe
in this slipstream of memory, the simple strokes
of weightlessness in an uncorrupted soup,
arms and legs lengthening eel-like out of a body
planar and slim, not finned nor scaled,
but at home again. There is no touching ground
after gliding back to this sea, the arch of shoulders
remaking the pliable, remembered membrane
of a beginning, seaweed waving again
toward antediluvian fish.

Steve Dieffenbacher’s full-length book of poems, The Sky Is a Bird of Sorrow, was published by Wordcraft of Oregon in 2012, winning a ForeWord Reviews Bronze Award for poetry. A poem in the book, “Night Singer, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico,” was named a 2013 Spur Award poetry finalist by the Western Writers of America, and his poem, “Emptiness,” won the 2010 Cloudbank magazine poetry prize. He also has three chapbooks, Intimations (2018), Universe of the Unsaid (2009), and At the Boundary (2001). He lives in Medford, Oregon, with his wife and their inscrutable cat Wild Thing.

Late Winter /Último Invierno

camina en la blanca tarde
on these white trails
la nieve abre paso, because it is her
the snow that opens her step
and everything dissolves
and no longer lingers like a burla
an imitation of how, it js al otro lado
yes, this is how it is on the other side
tantas copos de día y noche
could you count the flurries?
and if you catch one
just one symmetrical flake
plena alegría en la mano
= plain happiness in hand
and songs from the soft
winded hum of a spider web
let that araña wake
and make you make haste

Amelia Díaz Ettinger is a Latinx BIPOC poet and writer. Amelia’s poetry and short stories have been published in anthologies, literary magazines, and periodicals. She has an MS in Biology and MFA in creative writing. Her literary work is a marriage of science and her experience as an immigrant. Presently, she resides in Eastern Oregon.

When Life Comes

—after Mary Oliver’s, When Death Comes

When life comes I will be
the hungry bear after the thaw,
crawling from a cave of cold and dark

as snow and ice retreat
and color creeps back bit by bit,
you will find me in full feast–

first snow drops, then crocus,
yellow and purple, daffodils
in gilded gowns, and tulips!

You will find me prone, mouth
agape, greedy in my want, time
hovering in dewy curiosity.

I look on everything up close,
consider each petal possibility, no matter
how common, all fragrant

and filling, a sensory symphony.
Spring reborn! Baby-fist buds burst,
yellow-green leaves unfurl.

How is it possible all this
has returned, more full
it seems, than the year before?

By the time field daisies
bloom in profusion along the roadway,
I will have shed my bear ways,

no longer hungering with want
but on my back, satiated,
sniffing and sighing

into the wind, watching clouds
roll away, waiting for a sweep of violet
to usher in the stars.

Ann Farley is happiest outdoors, preferably at the beach. Her poems have appeared in Timberline Review, Third Wednesday, Peregrine, Verseweavers, KOSMOS, and others. Her first chapbook, Tell Her Yes, was published by The Poetry Box in April, 2022. She lives in Beaverton, OR.

The Poet, Murdered Twice, Survives

—To Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861)
‌          When Russian troops were forced out of the town of Borodianka
‌          in the spring of 2022, one left a bullet hole in the bust of this beloved
‌          Ukrainian poet, painter, and supporter of independence from Russia.

The bullet fired at the back
of the statue’s head exited

above the dead poet’s brow
leaving a hole through which

you might see the sky,
the exit wound in the copper

leaving flaps like sunflower petals
blooming in spite of war.

The poems live on.
On its pedestal still sits the bust

through which we see
blue sky, yellow blooms of hope.

Tim Gillespie is a veteran public school teacher in Portland, Oregon, who learned much of what he knows about writing from fearless student writers. He co-founded the Oregon Writing Festival that gathers hundreds of aspiring young authors every spring for a day of workshops and craftwork, and for many summers he co-directed the Oregon Writing Project at Lewis & Clark College. Recent poems and essays have found readers in Passager, Abandoned Mine, Timberline Review, and the late Windfall. His poetry collection Old Stories, Some Not True, was published by MoonPath Press during the last pandemic.