Online Poetry & Art
Kathleen Flenniken served as Washington State Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014. She won the Washington State Book Award for her poetry collection Plume. Her first book, Famous, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association. Flenniken’s other awards include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust. Her third collection, Post Romantic, was released in October 2020.
The one we’ve fished to death,
that tosses ships till they sink,
so deep the fish at the fissures
squiggle instead of swim, glow
instead of gaze.
The one inside a conch shell
that sweeps us from the couch
to its shore—our first metaphor.
The sea of ones and zeros
with tributaries pressing Send,
where our secrets glitter
in the data gyre.
The sea of refugees, turned away, turned away, turned away,
crashing the razor-wire fence.
The sea of cash, thick
with trawlers’ tangling nets, green
with the drowned and drowning.
The sea of regret
that surges and retreats
and sucks at our feet,
a tide that takes us nowhere.
And the final sea of liquid light
we’ll only know from below.
from Post Romantic (University of Washington Press, 2020)
A stranger walks beside you
casting seeds into the wind
See how they fly helter-skelter like
a sheet of starlings or the swirling
chaff of years past like so many minnows
schooling or dispersing
Maybe a stranger casts you off from shore–
a slipped stitch in a sea of pearls–
the dinghy small in a great slough
the craft’s chine inclined to narrow
and you a bit wobbly
until you settle on the bare board
of a bench and begin to row
It won’t be a stranger casts you out
–ne’er-do-well pub crawler
or even worse some demon spawn–
but your own kin sick of your stink
–bad habits like fish gone off–
and no remedy for it but absence
‘til a stranger comes again to lift you up
from the cold cobbles of despair and self-loathing
Casting about for a purchase you seize
on her robe and all becomes light
You see the crystalline web
that binds us–animal vegetable mineral—
and at that moment a silver cast to your hair
your bones home at last in weathered skin
a constellation of moles and liver spots
a small company of barnacles
(which do not seem strange to you at all)
O frabjous day–the journey begins
Wow! This was a difficult challenge–to use a word/concept in a variety of contexts. This is my draft, so far, which may evolve as the month proceeds.
