Willawaw Journal Winter 2019 Issue 8

Fickle as You

The pendulum swings over us–
unsettling, unsure as you.
One moment a woven fabric for us to nestle in,
warm and a comfort.
Another, shadows darken vegetable fried rice and our conversation.
Ice cream melts as you are taken
from me for one day, two.

I read book after book, waiting for the spell
to break and your voice to come through the line clear.
I want the sun to rise, mist clearing with
the night, fog departing as quickly as it came.
Never an apology, never a memory.
You wake from the dream born new
for a temporary visit before leaving me again.

 

Tag

I sit across the table from your pregnant sister
at your favorite restaurant.
My hands are shaking more than they have
in 7 years since my first poetry slam.
My menu sits unopened at the lip of our table
as a storm urges my stomach to release.
I start with the first dogeared page and begin,
surrendering to the inevitable splintering betrayal.
I tell her about the time you clasped a hand
around my neck
in our tiny kitchen in that second apartment,
telling me you could hurt me and not feel a thing.
I tell her about the voices that told you to walk over to the window,
open it, pick up the dog, and jump from three stories
onto the concrete pathway.
I tell her about the constant begging for a suicide pact,
almost like you are asking for permission.
Christmas Eve, Thanksgiving, my birthday,
no day is immune to your persistence.
I tell her that you don’t eat until 7 p.m.,
can no longer remember simple tasks,
and cry out in bursts without warning.
I tell her that maybe I didn’t do everything right,
but I cared about you.

 

Aimee Nicole is a queer poet currently residing in Rhode Island. She holds a BFA in Creative Writing from Roger Williams University and has been published by the Red Booth Review, Borrowed Solace, and Voice of Eve, among others. For fun, she enjoys attending roller derby bouts and trying desperately to win at drag bingo. 

What Becomes of Our Sadness

We diagnose ourselves flowers. We look on the internet for an antidote or
gardening tips, but we rarely seek a doctor. Doctors medicate. We’d rather
self-medicate or not medicate at all. We’d rather seek gardeners. We’d
rather not be depressed.

We want to be rose bushes blooming in the yard. We don’t like that we
are the barren bushes of winter. We’re scared of becoming bouquets the
most. We’d wilt beyond repair and only be good for potpourri. We don’t
want to sit in a jar on someone’s coffee table. We want to be outside in
the sun. Instead, we are depressed anxious grieving scared scarred victims
survivors surviving making ends meet or meeting our ends.

We wish we had forgotten happy. Then, maybe sad wouldn’t seem so stale.
Some of us have forgotten happy, and it makes the rest of us mourn for
them. We’re always mourning—for ourselves, for lost petals, for a couple
of days before we have to return to work to make ends meet, but the only
way that works is with a rope, not a ruler.

We dread our beds, because they are comfortable coffins, vases for our
stems to dry. When will we see the lives we watch from those beds on
tiny T.V.s or through arching windows or on windowsills?

We read books or watch T.V. or plant something living to live  to distract
to discover  to cover.

We decide to tell a doctor. They prescribe us medication. We decide not
to take it and nothing changes. We decide to take it, and we wonder if
we should make bouquets of ourselves. Maybe in that last moment
someone would hold us and call us beautiful and our lives would be worth
something.

But would we be able to feel with cut stems? Or would we just have one
more thing to mourn on our way out—ghost roots. The scent of death,
floral to us. We watch others’ petals fall. We pluck a few ourselves. Do I
love myself? Do I not?

We are weary. We are worn. We are wilted.

 

Calida Osti is a poet and writer from Georgia, currently writing in Indiana. She has an MFA from Lindenwood University and has served as an editorial assistant for The Lindenwood Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Better Than Starbucks, The Midwest Quarterly, Misfit Magazine, Sugared Water, WINK, Willawaw Journal, and Writers Resist. Say hello on Twitter @rawr_lida or by visiting her website. 

Puccini

‌          My mother waited all week
‌          for Wagner and Verdi on the radio.

She was a regular at the New York Philharmonic –
joked annually about having to abandon
strains of Vienna for the maternity ward.
1947, my birth year. A belly out-to-here
was rare in Carnegie Hall.

‌          She had a bright orange quality
‌          that frightened me as a child.

Westminster Abbey, the Louvre,
Versailles, an opera outdoors in Rome.
Occasional trips and not long and always alone.
Decades later, after my father left this world:
Mumbai, Saint Petersburg, Istanbul, Reykjavik,
African cities whose names I didn’t track. She rode
a camel and then an elephant. Did loop-de-loops
in a plane in Australia in her late ‘70’s.

‌          Home again she’d walk for hours,
‌          window shop, keep walking.

No amount of foreign adventure satisfies
a woman whose bones are bright orange
whose husband tried to settle her with pearls
who lost a son she was sure would be a diplomat
traveling everywhere, unimaginably important.

I dreaded opera – its darkness, its fires,
its grip – until a phrase of Puccini
caught me off guard not long ago

‌          and broke my heart.

 

Marjorie Power’s newest chapbook, REFUSES TO SUFFOCATE, was released in October by Blue Lyra Press. Her newest full length collection is ONCOMING HALOS, Kelsay Books, 2018. Journals and magazines which have recently taken her work include SOUTHERN POETRY REVIEW, MUDFISH, and COMMONWEAL. She lives in Denver, Colorado and can be found at marjoriepowerpoet.com.

Mania or Ex-Uncle

“The perceptual present: the short duration of which we are immediately and incessantly sensible.”–William James.

The year that my grandfather died was the year that my mother and her sister (my aunt) both got divorced. Some glue that had been holding the appearances of our extended family in place suddenly melted away. Marx: All that is solid melts into air. Marx was referring to the tendency of capital to produce abstractions that tend to confuse the connection between symbols and objects. For example, gold is just a rock, but it means “money”, and then dollars are just green paper, but they mean “money” and now streams of LED-glowing numbers on the New York Stock Exchange are just glow-dots, but they mean “money”. Depression is the psychological equivalence with this basic, metaphysical operation of capital: to lose one’s connection to the world. My mother and her sister, my aunt, our families: the intense feeling of everything melting into air. My ex-uncle worked on Wall Street, private equity, a real abstraction man. He was a man of the type most frequently produced in New England, a prep school and squash man, the red-boned granite of his jaw set into an athletic cow catcher, always extremely ready. My aunt would not become my ex-aunt after the divorce because she is my mom’s sister. My uncle, however, is now my ex-uncle. In Michigan I paced the porch, feeling the past peeling off the underside of my mind in the sound of dial tones, static. Maybe I talked about it, maybe I drank about it. Thunderstorms lit up the great prairie underclouds, swerve, swerve down Grand River and down out on the Michigan 10. All that moonburnt light. When I get manic it is as if the radiance of the entire universe is being etched into mind from above. My voice gets louder and louder, as if I am trying to do violence to the air. The vaporous gold zooms deep into every object’s seams and vanishing points. The top of my skull lifts off and my mind unspools outwards in every direction. This is what mania feels like, expansiveness, bigger than bigness, explosiveness, eruption of a delicious feeling beyond language: infinition, to become the infinitive tense of every verb, to purify the activity of incessant and immediate sensation. The world of distant appearances conceals this gorgeousness of the act of fundamental negation, a melting, an ex-uncle, a dissociation that underlies what we have been taught to call conscious reality.

 

Elizeya Quate is a string of syllables written in San Francisco. Quate’s chapbook of poems cra-que-lure (Finishing Line Press, 2019) is available here: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/cra-que-lure-by-elizeya-quate/

Purification                                                

                           Mama scrubs the dirty sheets
                           Mama scrubs the toilet seats
                           Mama scrubs the dirty floors
                           Mama scrubs the dresser drawers

And when you told, almost seventy years after,
about your mother dragging you by the hair to the kitchen sink
and her fist shoving the bar of soap into your four-year-old mouth,
all because you’d licked a sick girl’s lollipop,
your friend looked up from her latte and leaning in said,
I believe she was trying to purify you.

And when you considered, for some hours later,
the baby bibs your mother bleached day after day, and the bed
linens whipping and snapping like flags on the clothesline,
and the little girls’ underpants, the ladies’ bra, and Papa’s boxer
shorts wrung hard with her bare hands, how she curved her back
and shoulders over the tub (or hunched her hip against the kitchen sink)
and twisted the cotton bath towels and flannel pajamas like screws,
then pinned them to the rope that sagged in the January wind—

remembering, too, your First Communion day (as if you could ever forget)
and the spring cloudburst and gusts of wind, your tulle veil in the plastic
bag flying out the window of the blue Ford into the rushing river of mud,
and your mother jumping from the passenger seat to pluck it from the flood—
how she dirtied her own hands to save it from the storm sewer,
then held before the O’s of your wide eyes and open mouth,
the dripping bag with the spotless veil, saying This veil is YOU (you’re hearing
her words as though she were just now speaking them), and this filth is the world
from which she was hell-bent on preserving you,

you can see as clear as a cloudless day
the sign of your unsullied self she offered
from her soap-cracked hands with dried blood in the knuckle folds.
Like the body of Christ you received on your tongue that morning
from the hands of the priest.

And though it has taken so long, you know at last
that this was the way she loved you, the way she wanted you to stay.
Just like Jesus.  How else can you explain it?

Maria Rouphail is the author of two poetry collections, Apertures and Second Skin. She is completing her third book of poems, All the Way to China. Rouphail lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.