Willawaw Journal Winter 2018 Issue 5

In the Winter 2018 Issue 5, Elizabeth Woody’s stone-heavy  haunting of a poem, My Brother, and the series of puzzling prompts that  is a Cebu, have drawn from Willawaw contributors a wide range of responses, taking us in or up or to distant isles. Some brave souls even combined the two prompts with startling and effective results (beginning with Carolyn Adams and later, with Susan Morse). Add the serendipity of Pollard’s and Chisholm’s collages which, by nature, invite the reader to make connections, and you find another version of making meaning out of disparate elements.

These poems are filled with grief and loss of brothers or family. Marjorie Power’s absent brother is “a pulsing silence.” In  Laura LeHew’s  “After the Eulogy,” we are numbed with “cheese slices, potato salad, salad salad, and baked beans.” Some of the Cebu also explore loss and invite the poets to leap down the page with daring, adventure, peril, escape, and the fantastic—as if striving to harness a cataclysmic energy. The poets’ explorations resonate profoundly with the sense of peril and cataclysm in “real time.”  These are the poets’ voices, as Catherine McGuire has put it, in her poem Response, “who kept writing amid the turmoil and sorrow.” This fierceness demands our attention.

Interspersed, you will find small oases of calm such as Isa Jennings’ Beyond Belief, Gyl Gita Elliott’s The Fifth Element, Vincent Wixon’s Surface Tension, and Dale Champlin’s Coming Home. John Van Dreal also offers a rich landscape of the Willamette Valley. I hope that you enjoy reading this issue and that you will share what you like with your friends.

From the depths of the Winter Solstice,

Rachel Barton

Red Poppies

Once in the pit of a late afternoon,
my father lay in a room, alone.
A small machine,
its tubes and cables delicate as fish bones,
encircled his failing body.
Its hum could be called
a comfort.

Now I’m with my father.
Amber glyphs shimmer on a black screen.
Women in white shoes
hush in and out of the room,
sweep the long blue curtain closed,
remove a table.
A man with a kind face
turns and hands me a clipboard
with a paper on it I can’t read.
I’m given a pen.

In the hallway, two boys laugh softly
as they ride their wheeled shoes
to the vending machine
in a further wing.

My brother sits quietly beside me.
We’re in large chairs
at a small desk
in a corner office.
My mother is nearby, immobile.
The three of us are
a broken triangle.
Sunset splashes from a window
to coat all the surfaces
in the room,
and I am about to sign
my name on the paper.
I don’t want to,
because it is a mountain
I don’t want to climb.
But I do it.

A slow retreat of needles,
switches closed, circuitry shut down.

As we leave, a receptionist
hands me a fistful of
red poppies. I hand them back.
I don’t want to claim the stain
of their bloody fire.

Make Believe

Three Peaks on Kilimanjaro

Once on the border between a dream and the Indian Ocean
my father had turned into a fish. I carried his bones in a pail.
The water was warm as a bath and blue as paint
but I would only go knee-deep.

My brother and his friend were riding giant mantas
through the surf, shouting and laughing. Already taller
than I would ever be.

Sunset kindled the glaciers on the three peaks of Kilimanjaro
to the briefest of glories. Twilight lasted seconds. Then
there were flies—no, beetles—
cold green specks of dancing fire.

Tiel Aisha Ansari is a Sufi warrior poet. Her work has been featured by Fault Lines Poetry, Windfall, KBOO and Prairie Home Companion among others. Her books include Knocking from Inside and High-Voltage Lines. She works as a data analyst for the Portland Public School district and is president emerita of the Oregon Poetry Association. Visit her online at knockingfrominside.blogspot.com .

Delores Pollard has returned to collage in her 7th decade after a lengthy hiatus. For more about her, see the Back Page of this issue of Willawaw.