Willawaw Journal Winter 2019 Issue 8

Sunday Mornings

My mother would drag the rugs out
of our red brick house, one-by-one
down the steps, in front of the neighbors.
She beats the rugs with her broom
as if they are flesh-eating aliens.
I want to scream, “No!” “Stop!”
but all I can do is cover my face
with my hands. I smell my breath—
maple syrup, challah, sour milk.
If only I had a stick of peppermint gum,
everything would be a lot better.

 

Sherri Levine is a poet and artist living in Portland, Oregon.  She is the author of In These Voices and is the recent recipient of the Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize. Her poetry and art have appeared in the Timberline Review, CALYX, Driftwood Press, Willawaw Journal, The Opiate. Visit her website for more information.

Here for the Long Ride

I am depression, blossomed from a seed
feeding off your need, spending the nights
turning off the lights, I am a coverlet of pain
It’s me gently whispering your name
holding your head against my chest
What beats beneath your breast
I am the one making you cry
even when you don’t know why
I’m always deep inside
Here for the long ride

 

Aurora M. Lewis is in her late sixties, having worked in finance for 40 years. In her fifties, she received a Certificate in Creative Writing General Studies with Honors from UCLA.  Her poems, short stories, and nonfiction have been accepted by The Literary Hatchet, Jerry Jazz Musician, Persimmon Tree Magazine, The Copperfield Review, Lucent Dreams, The Blue Nib, and others.  She was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and The Best of the Web.  

I Took A Stroll While Coming Down

 

Objects

I have yet to break
all my hand-thrown
bowls and pitchers.
They are clay heavy,
too much for aging hands.
I wonder how long until
my poems test mental acuity.
Things don’t always move in grace
when a body sheds its objects.
I once imagined my life boiled down
to a backpack, you know—binoculars,
bird book and laptop. But now there are
the pills and the need for a good
mattress and my fat address book
with too many names blacked out.

 

The Ocean of my Kitchen

Alone in the ocean
of my crowded kitchen, family
at the elbow, I stirred soup,
chopped vegetables and fed the mob.

My gorgeous, honey blonde niece from California
set a glass of chardonnay in front of me.
The drink helped keep me smooth,
but not really flying.

I worked as if I were
in a televised chef’s show,
at least that’s what my relatives said.
I kept going on love and fear.

Love for family and fear of
their adult reality—those sticky interiors
that seethed and bubbled
like the pot of turkey soup.

One wrong switch of the stove burner,
one wrong word from brother number three
to brother number four
and dinner would be on fire.

I didn’t realize my niece was going blotto,
totally drunk by eleven, sobbing out her
twenty-nine-year-old struggles. The whole damn
family reunion was a smashing success.

 

Joy McDowell is a poet with a foot in two boats, her hilltop home in the Willamette Valley and her estuary home beside Kentuck Inlet in Coos County, Oregon. Both of these settings slide into her poems about people.

#1/3 “Snake”–5″ x 6″ collage, oil pastels, and Conté crayon  on cardboard

See the Back Page of this issue for more about Lisa Ni Bhraonain.

Langsyne

The decision is made that I reread and resign my own intake
papers, carried out in such a way that no one person in the
room hands me the pen, and so I sign the papers by my own
hand, the shape and bones of which evoke my grandfather’s
translucent hands, and as we walk down unfamiliar hallways,
buzzers and the louder clanging of even larger metal bells
vibrate through my solar plexus, which evokes Planck Time

triggered further by attractive smells now emanating from behind
industrial doors, those of hotter metals and even hotter pressurized
vacuums punctuated by more fitful sounds drifting from behind
other doors, some ajar, those of the murmurings of administrative
beings conversing at whispered levels, and as we walk down other
corridors, a more subdued decibel of voices reaches me resonating
and dissipating like a linguistic chain as we pass by other doors,

the weakest links of the chain being the area between the doors
|where language fades but for an instant, and from where the top
layer of the spoken vernacular, presumably my own, is subtracted
and erased in this hushing, and the words themselves removed
and what remains are sounds and garbled patterns of speech in its
undraped timbre, which makes it possible for a native speaker to
hear the sounds of her English without the interference of words

but within this deconstruction, to also be able to distinguish from
which language group they speak, and by the guttural inflections,
that it is Germanic, but as I enter the living zone checkpoint, we
pause inside its gated and caged no-mans-land where keys and
pass-cards are handed off and where this inflection further fades as
the Germanic itself is stripped away like tiles blown from a roof

resulting in an even more pared-down nuance that barely
reaches my ears as we stop at the locked double-doors and
I stand in the soft sounds of a proto-language in uncluttered form
from by-gone days and by-gone continents where its perceptibly
audible babbling wafts in from all rooms and all corridors
rising up through floor vents and janitorial realms with this
melodiousness not as far removed as to be linked to the first
utterings of Homo erectus or any piece of any uttering of any
Great Ape, although I am not so sure some relics do not remain
behind in its syntax such as the beautifully haunting imperative,
and of course, at that exact moment before I am admitted
onto the communal floor, someone in white yells “HALT!”

as I unwittingly pass through the door in attempting to enter
the ward, and after backing up to receive my wrist bracelet,
the decibel of my own language begins to rise up again from all
groupings and crowds on the other side of the gate, donning
the glottology of its dialect, regaining the antique lilts of its
cadences, my mother tongue now rising back up through her
Saxon bones back into her present day modernity, that of
the Tri-State area, where bits and pieces of roots and suffixes
still cloak under their Silk Road petticoats, the much more archaic,
and in this aural wake as I step over and into the not so arcane
landscape that would be my foreseeable future, I decide to go
back and revisit my grandfather’s hands and old Max’s domain.

 

Lisa Ni Bhraonain is a writer with an MFA from OSU, originally from the East Coast, and now living in Corvallis, Oregon, with her extended family. Formerly a  translator of the Russian language, Ni Bhraonain spends her retirement drinking coffee and writing poetry and short stories, some of which threaten to become novellas; she loves a long sentence but then she is deeply familiar with Russian literature.