Willawaw Journal Summer 2017 Issue 1

Louise

We were in Manila. I was five, or maybe six.
There was a hurricane, a slate gray sky
and a howling wind
tearing at everything in its path,
breaking the world into pieces
and tossing the fragments to earth and air.

I stood at the screen door of the kitchen,
listening to everyone yell at my mother,
Louise! come inside! Come inside!
But she refused.

She lay down on a cot
in the big tent out there behind the house
and there she stayed.
The wind bore down, fierce, wild, relentless.
It ripped away the bricks
from the wall beside the tent,
but Louise would not move
from her chosen spot.

And the bricks
the wind
nothing
dared
touch her.

Cristina Luisa White is the author of Sex and Soul:  A Memoir of Salvation. Her essays, poems, and stories have apeared in various publications including Orion Magazine, Voice Catcher, and Gay Flash Fiction. See excerpts of her work at www.cristinalwhite.com/work.

Wind in Things

Flutes at the edges, pries at these.
Instructs trees on suppleness, branching.
Once–when I was young–sent
me sailing.
Afterward, I stayed young a while
and remembered that.
Buoyancy, the way it frothed over.
Clouds. Air. Spume.

Nancy Christopherson lives and writes in Eastern Oregon. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Leaf, Hawaii Pacific Review, Helen, Peregrine, Third Wednesday, Verseweavers, and Xanadu. Visit nancychristophersonpoetry.com.

Uninvited

Every night, an old woman
crawls into bed with me
though I don’t remember
inviting her.

I deny her resemblance
to someone I used to know.

She wraps ropey arms
around my pillow and
wakes me at midnight
to help her stumble
down the hall to pee.

She prods in provocative ways,
kindles lusty longings
then mocks my fantasy
of liaisons with lovers
from my long ago.

I struggle to shake her grip–
a finger-bending battle
that twists my thumbs
into grotesque shapes.

She presses cross-stitch on my cheek,
weaves silver through my hair,
tucks pads around my waist,
reshapes me as I sleep.

In dim morning light
she inspects her work,
gives me a wink.
I smile…and she’s gone.

Lee Darling is a retired computer programmer. In 2011, she published a novel, Just Out of Reach. She’s a member of the Red Couch Poetry group in Eugene, Oregon. For more information, go to scatteredbumps.blogspot.com.

Distance

—Lake County, Oregon

All day, wind beats the edges of dying lakes,
old shorelines heaped with sage.
Locals tell us these distances go on forever,
an unnamed breadth we’ll wish to cross
when the miles begin their hunger,
calling from barnyards and fields,
arid and atmospheric over the grasses.

Time scours the playas into dry contours
while hunters who tracked camels drift
as phantoms through cattle moving to higher ground.
In caves, their alkali-caked bones molder,
and we decay with them, imagining years of plenty,
while ravens in nests hoard broken eggs,
a warning against any awakening.

Steve Dieffenbacher’s full-length book of poems, The Sky is a Bird of Sorrow (2012), won the ForeWord Reviews 2013 Bronze Award for poetry. He lives in Medford, Oregon.