Willawaw Journal Winter 2017 Issue 2

For Breakfast, a Sea Bream

Pieces of the red sea bream I carried in my belly across
A Tuesday gray before the day blinked, surprised.
The vastness of blue, the shocking after.
On my wall God had absolved with this morning: sizzled
Right up. I’d laid it there, in the pan, from the packed ice
It started the day on, in the market.
Its melting water dripped responsibility on my toes.
Now, fish flesh was gummed in my fingernails.
Silver-rose lattice as skin releasing.
Faintly the fin, nerved in the steam of it.
I absorbed these interweaving events as I examined the dark,
Cooked veins. I accepted all would be transformed, at last.

For now, my aunt has electricity again
Where she lives, these days alone, in Puerto Rico.
The neighbors applauded and cried she said.
My friends have given birth again, dear Marissa, old Torben,
And little Amelie. Their lives alight like a scented spyglass
With wet leaves of maple trees breaking free, rustling down
To ones in some mud already grounded from aspens, the high aspens,
Back door on my very childhood.

It was a day of good news,
Astonishing as on the end of my fork was that hot piece of white
Torn from wire for bone, or torn from the sea,
And no nautical chart shuddered so cold underwater as the map it made to me,
Trying to call back those friendly names I’d dreamed as I sat
In bed this morning, with sun shifted between the castle and port
To concentrate copper on the wall, and the bream
Not yet in me.

Matthew A. Jonassaint is from Utah, where he studied film history and has worked with at-risk youth. Locally published, his poetry has also appeared in glitterMOB. He is currently in Spain, working on a series called An American In Cádiz.

The Carob Will Come Around

It doesn’t matter if you send less carob
into the sky, how many parts per billion
enter the airstream and roll over the light rail.
Today is calling you to your janitor’s job
where you report to a man with
a shaved head and sunglasses that ride
the back of it. His lesson to you is
that garbage is a cousin to dirt,
soil deserves its hurried last rites.
But you know the rose bush cuttings
that once stood in a bucket of
water now live off the land.
And you learn from the brown spots
which are beginning to emerge on
the back of your hand that time
will ransom your ass for a chance
to appear malevolent and endless.
A crow will call out your name in
anger. A dog will greedily sniff at
your gamey crotch. It doesn’t matter
how much carob you plant in
the ground as long as you show a little
interest in keeping things real and sweet.
The weatherman will unleash another one
of his predictions: the carob will come around.

Tim Kahl  is the author of Possessing Yourself (CW Books, 2009), The Century of Travel (CW Books, 2012) and The String of Islands (Dink, 2015). His work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Drunken Boat, Mad Hatters’ Review,and many other literary journals. He edits Clade Song and is vice president and events coordinator of The Sacramento Poetry Center. Kahl currently teaches at California State University, Sacramento, where he sings lieder while walking on campus between classes.

Artist, poet, and freelance writer, J. I. Kleinberg is a Pushcart nominee and winner of the 2016 Ken Warfel Fellowship. Her found poems have appeared in Diagram, Heavy Feather Review, Rise Up Review, The Tishman Review, Hedgerow, Otoliths, and elsewhere. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, and blogs most days at thepoetrydepartment.wordpress.com.

Aristotle’s Lantern

Coughing, egging on a sneeze
my hand yanks the handle
of the upright vacuum cleaner.
Back and forth. Back and forth.
I detest this chore, am allergic to dust.
The music of the back and forth, the sucking,
speckling noise of tiny things tumbling
inside the mouth, into the machine’s belly
is like the feeding motion of a sea urchin.
I keep vacuuming underwater.
Flying out the back of my suction,
maybe sparks, then fire, a comet moving
back and forth through a cluttered heaven,
across the dirty rug, over the sea floor.

Joy McDowell is a poet from the southern end of the Willamette Valley. Her work is included in three chapbooks. Four of her poems appeared in the anthology New Poets of the American West, edited by Lowell Jaeger, who was recently named the Poet Laureate for Montana.

My Ex, the Surgeon

He pried the heart
from an artichoke, sliced
the softest part thin. Trimmed
rinds and stems,
bled oil from a bottle
to a clean pan. Dried
a thousand apricots curling
over their empty cores.
His fingers made a sound—
the smallest crack, like seeds
in a distant feeder. When he traced
my shoulder, my eyes, he made
the same hesitant spark
(audible or imagined),
then a calibrated press
of tip to receptor, a layer
pushed back to bare
the nervous tissue
underneath.

Balloon Payment

Very tiny people live here. We like
the green felt lawns,
the Barbie attachés we brought
with our entire wardrobe inside.
The mice domesticate us. Coins
roll shut across the doorways.
Our neighbor rigged his sailboat
with a single dollar bill.
Not cheap—that’s the people
the next block down. Every time
we see them coming, we hammer
a few more toothpicks in the fence.

Amy Miller’s writing has appeared in Gulf Coast, Rattle, Willow Springs, and ZYZZYVA. Her full-length poetry collection The Trouble with New England Girls won the Louis Award from Concrete Wolf Press and will be published in 2018. http://writers-island.blogspot.com.