Willawaw Journal Spring 2019 Issue 6

Inspired by Peggy Shumaker’s Parenthood, Unplanned, the Spring 2019 issue of Willawaw invited poets and artists to give voice to those who did not have one. This call drew responses from around the world, including South Africa, New Zealand/Tasmania, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Wales, and multiple states in the US. Some of the poems are touching and insightful (Doug Stone’s In Memory of Peter Sears, Louise Barden’s In Search of Simplicity) while others unearth dark secrets (Marietta McGregor’s Dirty Linen, Saoirse Love’s Mother I Feast, Kathleen Hellen’s You said You Dreamed You had a Sister). Thankfully, some of the poems celebrate either the richness of the past or the richness of the present (Laura Lee Washburn’s Then, Hugh Anderson’s Grandson at One, Penelope Schott’s Trying to Show You, Thomas Cannon’s Of Music and Dancing, Elaine Sorrentino’s The Last Gift).

Abigail George is with us again with another love poem, For You I Would be Insane and Lovely at the Same Time, which starts with aging and disintegration and then ends on a high note with “how I went up in smoke that day…the paradise that was Johannesburg.” Lynn White goes Too Far Out her whole life but doesn’t wave. Marjorie Power writes in the shadow and privacy of her blue spruce, then glimpses through an unshaded window the neighbor’s catastrophe and rescue, Poem with No Clouds. Wait until you read Moth Snowstorm (Yvonne Higgins Leach)! I have provided a glimpse into only a fraction of the wonderful poems you will find on these pages.

Darrell Urban Black, a veteran living in Germany, is the featured visual artist. His work is high-chroma and whimsical, bordering on the fantastic, or as he would put it, phantasmal. The titles help to anchor his imaginative expressions. You can read more about him on the Back Page.

It is always an honor to receive the work of the Willawaw contributors. I am very grateful to be able to manage, curate, and edit in conversation with the artists. In addition, I am especially grateful that a handful of Willawaw readers and artists have found the “Support Willawaw Journal” button at the end of the Home Page—thank you! Your support enables me to continue to bring these creations to light!

With great appreciation,
Rachel Barton, Editor

 

Grandson at one

Still, the words pile up, unuttered; the world trips on, only slightly aware the sun will swallow it 5 billion years from now.  The dawn will come in the east every one of those days, sunsets will flare in all but the most occluded evenings.  I will not be there.

You smile, busy with discovering, right now the sounds of a toy screwdriver struck against china, a moment ago, the squeak of a foam block against your teeth.  You will notice the sun rising one day.

 You will have your own evening.  I will not be there

 You burn with wonder and delight; you pull me laughing from my shaded age.  You circumnavigate the room on pattering feet and I follow the orbit of your laughter.  I could easily always walk this way with you, but I have my own sunset to attend.

 

Hugh Anderson is a Vancouver Islander. Sometimes an actor, sometimes a teacher, once even a bus driver, but always a poet, his poems have appeared most recently in 3 Elements Review, Praxis Magazine Online, Grain, Vallum  and Right Hand Pointing.  He has one Pushcart Prize nomination.

In Search of Simplicity

Once in Concord, a brash young man took axe
and hammer to trees beside a pond. He used
his degree from Harvard to build a cabin
where he would live two years. Some days
he walked to town to work beside his father
at the family pencil factory.

On the way, he noticed fish bones beside the water
and the shade of blue a sunny day might bring. He noted
when the first leaf flared crimson in September
and when the last fell from the maple. Evenings
he scribbled down everything – memories
of a river adventure with his dead brother, the thunk
of acorns falling on his roof, the day two laughing boys
passed, clinging to the bare back of a farm horse. He noted
the date ice sheeted his pond. He wrote speeches
declaring his right to withhold taxes
that would pay for a foreign war.

The trees around his cabin grew so thick
he could not glimpse an alizarin sunset
without a walk to Walden’s shore. The branches,
outside the window blocked his view of nearby
rounded hills while he wrote about climbing
Katahdin. Every Sunday he came and went three miles
round-trip along the nearby railroad track
to eat his mother’s chicken stew and leave her
his dirty laundry. We do not know
what she thought while he sat dreaming up
great thoughts beside her well-stoked fire.

 

Louise Cary Barden’s poems, which frequently draw their imagery from the natural world, have appeared inTimberline Review, Greensboro Review, Chattahoochee Review, Crucible, and others. Recognition for her work includes the Calyx 2018 Lois Cranston Prize and the North Carolina Writers’ Network chapbook award (for Tea Leaves). She recently left her long-time home in North Carolina to become an Oregonian.

Edelweiss

Mother was always the oldest of mothers.
The gray chignon, the lace-up Oxfords, the little metal cart she pushed back and forth
to the Blue Goose Market because she never learned to drive.
The other mothers kept their hair short, so practical for playing tennis,
riding in convertibles, quick showers after a swim.

Mother, as the oldest of mothers, was a bath person.
The hard-milled soaps, imported from France, the shrimp-colored girdle dropped
onto the tile floor. Sometimes she’d let me sit, as a little girl, on the edge of the tub,
and I’d stare at the flat crepes of her breasts, the two or three hairs growing on her
shins like thistle. Did I come from that body? I would ask.
Yes, she would say, you were a bloom in the desert.

Mother was always the oldest of mothers.
Not frail exactly, but the old country was in her bones.Something slightly brittle.
Given to fretting: wet socks, drafts, sniffles, prunes. Frugal, too, she was, because
there had been a war. She knew people who had eaten shoe leather, put sawdust
in their bread. She could not bear to watch me toss a half-eaten apple into the trash.
So much waste in America, she would scoff.

Mother, as the oldest of mothers, didn’t like surprises.
The questionable report card, the note from the teacher. It was best to prepare her.
She had already suffered the ultimate shock, the one that turned her auburn hair
the color of ash. Once she told me how she thought the doctor had been joking.
But then you appeared, she said, the edelweiss in my winter.

 

The Nest

She was the grandmother, after all, so she had little choice. But they were a handful,
those two brothers, sullen as sin, given to the surreptitious pinch, the bully stare.

She had brought them home from out West, two little disruptions to her cozy
retirement. One was eight, with scrawny limbs like a toddler.The other was six,
with cheeks pale as chalk.

Their mother was long gone. Some said a half-way house, she was messed up,
that girl. Others thought Las Vegas, a so-called ranch, the legal kind with doctors.

The grandmother said little, except, perhaps, a prayer under her breath. Neighbors
whispered that she, herself, had once been a nun, or a yogini. Who else would have
such patience?

She must have known that nothing would change overnight. Doors would still be
kicked in from time to time, rocks thrown. The kitten would be tortured, its paws
bound with rubber bands.

First came Cleanliness, a nightly bath, the banishment of lice. Godliness would have
to wait while she cured the scarlet scabs of impetigo and taught them how to wash
their necks.

For afternoon snacks, she insisted on apples, cut into fourths, or whole-wheat cookies
that tasted like dust, but she was not above a little bag of M&M’s for chores well done.

That first summer, she pointed out Venus rising in the evening sky, The Pleiades
falling above their heads, the velvet bats flapping around the street lamps, the
natural rhythms.

All her efforts. They won’t make any difference to those kids, said the neighbors.

In the spring,she took them to see the nest, waking the boys each day at dawn,
showing them how to focus the field glasses on the wisps of straw,the fragile eggs.

One morning two little birds, barely feathered, cracked through the shells. The boys
watched as the mother bird chewed the worms herself before dropping them into
the gaping baby mouths.

In time the boys would understand about hunger and nests and the natural order
of things. For now, all she could give them was the safety of the morning meadow,
and the future hope of flight.

 

Gabriella Brand’s work has appeared in over fifty publications, including Room Magazine, Citron Review and The Blue Line. She is a Pushcart Prize Nominee. Gabriella divides her time between Connecticut, where she teaches foreign languages, and Quebec, where she volunteers with Middle Eastern refugees and paddles her red canoe. Her latest work ‘Socks: Then and Now” appeared the Fall 2018 issue of Gyroscope Review.

 

Common Ancestral Denominator