Willawaw Journal Spring 2025 Issue 20

Postcard from Across the Room

You’re envious of my travels,
No doubt. That’s understandable—

The viny semiotics
Of exotic place names

Conjuring dreams
Of romance and adventure,

The rough signage
Of vagabond wanderings

Calling to you, from Kitschen
To Patio-gonia to Wet Bar-racoon

And back again. I just want to say
I’m thinking of you,

Old Friend, even here, in this remote
Outpost of civilization,

Companioned only by Gauguin’s TV,
His popcorn, sofa and slippers.

Edward Miller teaches writing at Madera Community College. Included among his areas of interest are outsider art, street photography, and the American vernacular. His work has lately appeared in Open Ceilings Magazine, New World Writing, and Discretionary Love.

Waves

–for Meridel Le Sueur

Midwest heat, so thick.
The night before we meet
thunder rolls and rain pours down.
The electricity goes out
at the JR Ranch Motel
where I sit on a screened porch
breathing fresh-washed earth.
Hudson, Wisconsin, 1988.
I’m here to interview a poet
old as the century, a storyteller,
a radical who roamed the country
all her life. Now a broken hip
keeps her in a wheelchair
in her daughter Rachel’s home.
I did not know the energy
could just pour out of you
like emptying a cup, she says.
I pose questions that she bats away
like blackflies. She has no patience
with chronology, how she “spent”
her time. That’s another
linear concept, she says.
With lovers, do you “spend” time?
It’s a bargaining phrase.
Do we spend time at all?
Rachel wanders through the room.
She’s asking about my marriages,
Meridel says. They roll their eyes.
Then she answers
questions I never asked
while waves of light
pour through her.

Penelope Moffet is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022). Her poems and essays appear in Eclectica, ONE ART, Citric Acid, Calyx and other literary journals. A full-length collection of her poetry will be published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in 2026. She lives in Southern California.

Reconciliation

Barely any sounds or light in the sky
just yet and there’s an uncommon
stillness as if the dull, dark whole
of the world has taken an indrawn
breath while a pregnant moon, in its
slow transit, spills its feeble light
across the brooding hills and the
water and I’m wondering why it is
that I sometimes feel better suited
to the world at an hour such as this
when silence takes hold, and, knowing
how memories become more elusive
as we age, I am somehow able to
more clearly recall those times I lost
what mattered most in this life while
watching days shamble into months
and months into years and you tell
yourself that all that goes missing
happens for a reason and that there’s
a valiant purpose to be found in grief
and anguish until that moment of
quiet retreat gives way to a bird
yearning haplessly to lift itself from
the surface of the water, the rhythmic
knocking of a loosely tethered boat,
the muffled unfurling of a flag
wakened by wind, and the louder
foment of the mid-summer tide
rising and rushing towards shore
and the brazen detritus of the living,
lifting and cleansing the heart
before it slowly settles back to body.

A resident of Connecticut, John Muro has published two volumes of poems — In the Lilac Hour and Pastoral Suite — in 2020 and 2022, respectively. His third book — A Bountiful Silence & Other Poems — will be published later this year. Since 2021, John has been thrice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, twice nominated for the Best of the Net Award and, in 2023, he was a Grantchester Award recipient. His poems have appeared in Acumen, Delmarva, Sky Island, Valparaiso, Willawaw Journal and elsewhere.

Meanwhile

These are the lives we’ve been given,
all these bright shining mornings
& dark starless nights, all these damned & beloved children
lost & found & found & lost,
all these tears.

Of course there’s no changing the past
no matter what color glasses
we look at it through, nor is there any confusion
about where we’re headed, only how we’ll get there
& when.

Till then, the world is harsh & cold
but for what we bring to it in our little rooms,
the cups of coffee we pour each other
& warm our hands with, the cream & the sugar,
the barely burnt crusts of bread.

Under the Hood

He was always there under the hood,
working on whatever piece-of-shit Ford or Chevy
we were stuck with that year. Peering at the dipstick,
splashing gasoline in the hacking carburetor,
fiddling with the hoses. The adjustable wrench
was always losing its grip, his knuckles skinned
& caked with blood, the bill of his baseball cap
smudged with carbon. Muttered curses streamed
from his mouth like fumes threatening to ignite,
one eye shut against the smoke drifting up
from the cigarette clenched in his teeth,
the ash flaring orange with each breath in.
Who knew when this engine might throw a rod
& self-combust, or was it just a worn-out muffler,
blowing smoke? Either way, my mother and I stayed
out of reach. We knew firsthand what sparks could fly
if you connected the battery cables the wrong way
& what could boil over when the radiator got hot,
when you had to sit for a while & let it cool down
before you took off its cap.

Kevin Nance is a poet, arts journalist, and photographer in Lexington, Kentucky. His two collections of photographs and haiku are Even If (University of Kentucky Arts in HealthCare, 2020) and Midnight (Act of Power Press, 2022). His free verse has appeared in The North American Review, Poet Lore, and Cumberland Poetry Review which awarded him the Robert Penn Warren Poetry Prize in 2003. His new poetry collection, Smoke, is forthcoming this summer from Accents Publishing.

Darkness Falls

I can’t ask you
to go into the deep territory with me—
watch the rose dawn light play

on the splayed pines
cold autumn morning
I depart for the desert

on foot, carry only water
and the memory of your humming
among prickly pear,

sagebrush, bitterbrush,
trickle of an ephemeral spring,
last splash on my face

rock faces, ochre pictographs,
faces of generations,
droughts and floods

darkness falls
astray in pervious shivering
I miss your warmth

only the call of a solo coyote
and mourning of doves
stars for guidance

grounding for the real
work of unknowing, of giving in
to some other morning.

Francis Opila is a rain-struck, sun-loving poet who lives in the Pacific Northwest. His work, recreation, and spirit have taken him into the woods, wetlands, rivers, mountains, and deserts. His poems have appeared in Cirque, Clackamas Literary Review, Wayfinding, Windfall, in addition to other journals. His poetry collection Conference of the Crows was published in 2023. He enjoys performing poetry, combining recitation and playing North American wooden flutes. More of his creative work can be found at https://francisopila.com.