Willawaw Journal Spring 2025 Issue 20

 

Mangled

In my early years, Äiti had a mangle
she used to squeeze water from clothing
before hanging it on the line. These froze
in the frost-bound winter into flapping ghosts.

Wewere residue of an abandoned land, then
residents of French Canada, its confounding
language of s’il vous plaît’s and mais-oui’s
tinkling bell-like on the streets of Montreal,
even as my Isä’s dictate to assimilate meant
we trudged through drifts of English.

Mymother wrangled with her new English
words, squeezing meaning out drop by drop,
her phrases jangling. My friends stared at me
blankly when she confused she and he.
Myheart dangled apart in the frigid air.

Her new-fangled dryer arrived at the same time
her he’s and she’s became less tangled, the mangle
dismantled and discarded from the humid laundry
room like a clothesline from that other world.

Later, I dreamt my way back into her language
of melody, its lack: of prepositions, articles,
gendered pronouns, a future tense, that instead
of strangling with uncertainties, freed my dreams
to flow untrampled, ample, unbound.

Louhi Pohjola was born in Montreal, Canada, to Finnish immigrant parents. She was a cell and molecular biologist before teaching sciences and humanities in a small high school in southern Oregon. She is an avid fly-fisherwoman and river rock connoisseur and is obsessed with black holes and octopi. Louhi lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and her temperamental terrier. The latter thinks that he is a cat.

Dark Room

When I was 24, we lived in a one-bedroom
second-floor walk-up in a small French town–
our first time living together just the two of us.

The apartment’s kitchen and living room
overlooked the street. The bedroom window
opened onto an airshaft–– no natural light.

Darkness suffused the bedroom, sank
into the brown velvet bedspread. Color
and light played in the front rooms,

electric light caressed the pink-tiled
bathroom with its deep sit-in tub, abundant hot water.
Daytimes we basked in color and light. Nights––

we found each other in the deep darkness.
When my parents visited we said he lived
in the dark back room, I in the bright living room.

They didn’t believe us. For one thing,
his royal-blue leather jacket, draped on the back
of a living room chair, caught the sunlight.

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.

After Being Away

I ease into this place as into water.
Some aches relax. Still others quirk, alert.
My body has leaned home so hard it hurts,
but I am not home yet. Life hasn’t stopped here,

& I wait to hear if I will be allowed
to claim this place again. Or, no—be claimed.
The rabbitbrush bends, hushed. I hear my name
in river whispers. Bees converse out loud

with jays. White sprays of poppy prattle where
old monarchs twitch, low ponds itch pink with foam.
So much has changed since I called this place home.
Blasé, vultures recuse themselves midair.

Three seasons paint the trail with foreign inks.
Come here, the wild-eyed helianthus blinks.

Velvet

You are velvet with seeds. You shake, shed,
& never know what comes of it. The world
has its own business, an electric night market,
each doe’s eye a brass coin, & you meet it where
you can. Wind pulls at all you carry, hurries you
to let go. When the moment is right, you
always know. You are heavy with questions,
but tonight the river is high enough to float
your handmade boat. You are the answer
to another’s question. For now, the night says eat
& rest. Some future kicks within your largesse.

Erica Reid is the author of Ghost Man on Second, winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize (Autumn House Press, 2024). Erica’s poems appear in Rattle, Cherry Tree, Colorado Review, and more. Erica lives in Fort Collins, Colorado. ericareidpoet.com

A Few Stops Away

–after Early Sunday Morning (1930) by Edward Hopper

Alone, I wait for #3030
as the wind makes a mockery of my puffy jacket,
I feel its muscular push slide me across the sidewalk—
a reluctant figure skater on uneven ice.

I fight her forces, waiting for reprieve
that should only be a few stops away by now.
The rubber heel of my boot catches in a crack,
and for a moment, I stand still,
but my confidence erodes…
a mountain lost to time.

What am I really waiting for?
I wait for a ride that doesn’t wait for me,
a driver who never knows my name,
a stranger meeting me for the first time…
every morning.

I wait for them:
Bus #3030 with the crying rear wheel.
Seat G5, sea foam green with raised red petals.
Marcus with the purple scarf and crooked tooth.
Winnie, named after a Wonderful Year, not a bear.

But who is waiting for me?
Days have become a rhythm
of routines and reflections.

Meetings that begin without me,
my nempty chair just another
unclaimed saddle in the herd.

I wait for friends to call,
but my phone screen stays dark,
a quiet forest that refuses
to sway with the wind of their voices.

Love is the bus that never slows for me—
I watch it blur past,
tires whining like a call
I couldn’t answer in time.

Patrick G. Roland is a writer and educator. He explores life’s experiences through poetry and storytelling, attempting to inspire others both in the classroom and through writing. He lives near Pittsburgh with his wife, who is his thoughtful critic, and their two children, who are his muse. His poetry can be found in the Eunoia Review and Neologism Poetry Journal.

Offering

–a golden shovel poem after Sand Dunes at Sunset, Atlantic City, 1885 by Erica Goss

When I
love myself, when I offer
myself to myself,
when I fly, as free as
birds do against the raw
naked blue of sky, I weave myself into material
so strong, so tensile, that a
torrent of bad days can’t unravel me; I last
and last, and I don’t disappear. I’ll tell you this: what chance
you have for assuming your most true shape, take. At
every moment, it is arriving, and transformation
is only just surrender to currents already carrying you. So before
you tell me how late the
day is, and how pale
your resolve, and how the setting sun offers only half-disc
hopes of
waning possibility, consider that the sun
teaches other lessons, too. Notice how it sets
and also how it rises and rotates and
floats and circles and shines, and let that
remind you how perfect the sun is, as it is, just as a cloud
is perfectly a cloud and nothing else. So when life spreads
its thousand shapeless threads across
your intended ways, see this as the true offering, take the
gifts, and weave yourself into your own resplendent beauty fringed with endless sky.

Answering the Call

–after Childe Hassam’s Nude in Sunlit Woods, 1905

In the river, her lover beckons—
Apollo: sun-soaked perfection.
Arms open wide, he
invites her with his smile
and his smooth, warm skin
to step into a world of light
from the silky-cool shadows where
‌             she hesitates, still.

She is a young tree, rooted on the edge.
Resisting. But the water pulls until
she bends, slipping her toes
into the tugging swirl.
‌            She hesitates, still.

So much to consider. So much to lose.
But to fail to live? for fear? She concludes:
I am no Daphne, and no laurel tree! Then
‌            hesitating no more

she steadily strides
‌            away from the bank
‌                        into the stream
‌                                    into his arms, and
‌                                                  into the glorious,
‌                                                                glorious light.

Sapsucker

A poem should always have birds in it.
—after Mary Oliver’s Singapore

Or maybe just this one bird, I think.
This sapsucker on this big leaf maple tree
on this mountainside, on this day
when the sun is shining just so.
This sapsucker, regarding me warily
then shifting to the back of the tree
where I can no longer see it,
although I hear its pounding work,
making the tree seep sweet sap
that the squirrel comes to lap up
and the fritillaries dip their curled tongues into.
Maybe just this one is enough.

Jennifer Rood (she/her) is an Oregon poet and author of Present and Speaking Everywhere: A Collection of Found Poetry and Art (Not a Pipe Publishing, 2024). She served as the Artist in Residence for the Oregon Caves National Monument in fall 2023, and also served as President of the Oregon Poetry Association during 2020 – 2021. Her more traditional poems have appeared in  Willawaw Journal, The Literary Hatchet, Big Wing Review, Dipity, Encore, and others. You can see some of her found poetry/art on Instagram @jennrood100.