Willawaw Journal Spring 2025 Issue 20

 

 

 

“Grace”

If a meal begins without a prayer
but no one is around

to condemn the silence
can I repent and chew my way

to a cleaner conscience?
Father, with his mouthful of faith

said that saints never dined alone
that’s why I always wait for company

for the bluegill and the birds
for the vulpine prowlers

as they navigate the woods
for the echoes of prayers

returned to sender
for the subtle twitch

of another lover
and only once

the stillness breaks
do I press my lips

to anything.

A. Michael Schultz is a writer and educator living in Northern Appalachia. He is Assistant Professor of English at Belmont College.

Conversation among the Ruins, 1927

–after the painting by Giorgio de Chirico

The sky is clearing now.
but it was their storm with
her slashes of lightening
answered by his roaring
voice of thunder that tore
their fragile world apart.

Still, she tries to explain who
she is bt he’ll have none of it.
“You’re no daughter of mine,”
he growls. “I am who I am,”
her voice flickering like a bulb
that has lost the will to light.

Then the years become the
silent distance of their lives,
each looking at a different ocean,
yet each wondering: if those doors
were still open, could they go back
into the wreckage of that room and talk.

Doug Stone lives in Albany, Oregon. He has written two chapbooks, The Season of Distress and Clarity (Finishing Line), The Moon’s Soul Shimmering on the Water (CreateSpace), and a poetry collection, Sitting in Powell’s Watching Burnside Dissolve in Rain (The Poetry Box).

At the Bench

She unhooks her helmet
and set it down level with the black bird’s knee.

The bird does not fly, but sidles
along the back of the familiar bench.

Insulated by gloves,  her fingers
absently flicker and poke

across her bicycle’s handlebars,
in mute apology for her lack of caws and croaks.

Their unspoken words wax and wane, mock,
‌             evoke, ignite,

Locking eyes with the bird
‌                       she feels herself pulled in

by a light paralysis she neigher fears
nor yet, quite cherishes.

Anita Sullivan is a poet and essayist working in Western Oregon’s Willamette Valley for 40 years. She has published a Greek travel book, two full length poetry collections, and a fantasy novel. She is a founding member of the Portland, OR poetry publishing collective, Airlie Press.

Still Life of a Still Life

The fruited bowl adorns the table
just so, slanted by a sunbeam:
a frozen avalanche of grapes,
‌        shiny faces
turned towards the unseen window;
fulsome apples tantalize in half-light;
over them all loom daisies ensconced
in glass vase, nodding their approval.
A pixelated masterpiece painted
in 1s and 0s, convincing verisimilitude of
‌        a simulacrum
of boredom: honestly, who the hell cares
about the secret lives of orchids or figs?
Still-life galleries are the flyover states
of art museums, disinteresting fields
separating the coasts of medieval passions
and modern anxieties, everybody knows.
Does any docent doze more than there?

So how does my rendition differ
from a Monet or Renoir? Digital art
can look as adeptly realized to even
savvy eyes. Are these fruits not
just as dappled and paralyzed? But
look closely and its matte sameness
appears flat as the screen. Approach
a canvas by Cézanne and you can see
the ridges of paint, each risen like mountains
from collision of brush to cloth; fine stray lines
‌        of uncertainty
or tremor, move in even further, and you
might with microscope view particles of
the man himself, now embedded in dry oil,
the briefest kiss of his genetics and genius,
and the dust of Aix-en-Provence affixed
within a green tree that grows in the mind
like a seed long after being seen, still verdant,
‌        still life.

A Pushcart Prize nominee, M. Benjamin Thorne is an Associate Professor of Modern European History at Wingate University. Possessed of a lifelong love of history and poetry, he is interested in exploring the synergy between the two. His poems appear or are forthcoming in Feral, Gyroscope Review, Red Eft Review, San Antonio Review, Thimble Lit Mag, and Last Syllable Lit. He lives and sometimes sleeps in Charlotte, NC.

A Walk in Winter

The snow sets the trees apart
Black trunks rising from the white
Midwinter, these pines are sleeping
The business of growth, of pollen and seed, suspended
But I know that within the frozen ground
Their roots still entwine
Like the fingers of sleeping lovers
Unwilling to surrender touch

Only the smallest and largest birds break the silence
Tiny kinglets, invisible in the tall frosted crowns
Let their calls drift down, high and sparkling
As the snow shaken loose by their foraging
And great ravens, rowing restless above the canopy
Croak and garble, a language of dark poetry
Resonant of blood, thievery, and brutal humor
Searching always to fill their appetites, to occupy their minds

I walk onward, breaking the trail I must follow
Back to the beginning, finding here what I want
The grip of cold, the satisfaction of solitude
But not the reasons for that desire, my wish
To be apart, to be asked no questions but my own
A mystery, whether taught or inborn
An inheritance or a lesson
This comfort found only among the trees

Pepper Trail‘s poems have appeared in Willawaw, Rattle, Atlanta Review, Catamaran, Ascent and other publications, and have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net Awards. His collection, Cascade-Siskiyou: Poems, was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry. He writes and explores the world from his home in Ashland, Oregon.