Willawaw Journal

Dear Reader,

Who knew that a can-can dancer from the posters of Toulouse Lautrec would pull a poet to Montmartre more than a century later? Would you expect not one but two poets to seize on O’Keefe’s view as seen through a cow’s pelvis? What of Wassily Kandinsky’s gallloping horse? Or Bruce King’s horses in the rain? The murals of William Cummings and Judith Baca? Paula Modersohn-Becker’s Poppies? Add Turner, Hopper, Hassam, Ossawa, and de Chirico. Théo Rysselberghe and Taras Shevchenko.

Each poet took a moment to step into the shoes of an artist, to try on another lens onto the world. We reap the benefits of their curiosity and creativity in the pages of this issue.

And don’t forget the inspiration of selected poets: Mary Oliver, Yusef Komunyakaa, Margaret Atwood, Eavan Boland, Erica Goss, Gerry LaFemina, Meridel Le Sueur, and musician Jacque Derrida.

What a glorious community! Our ranks do swell when we reach out. The forty contributing poets comprise a blend of new and familiar voices, the sum wrapped in the Wisdom Cloaks of artist Helen Geglio, with an intensity of hand-stitching-like-mapping, enough to bring you center.

This is the twentieth issue of Willawaw and may be the last, at least for a while. I’m feeling a pull to move on, to cross an horizon not yet visible. It is with great joy that I offer this most recent anthology with the hope that it will help to sustain you though these interesting times. We are so much more than the chaos currently fomenting. Keep the faith.

Yours in poetry,

Rachel Barton

Eternal Return

A crocus from the rotting flesh
of a hedgehog, placed with the pansies
from a rusted Ford carcass
and the hyacinths plucked
from steaming dung
emerging from melting snow.
I lay my bouquet on the bonfire
built for the goddess
who strides through brutal storms,
vowing in her nicotine rasp
to lead the way to the sacral plane.
Another lie of spring.

In the cloying scent
of a spring breeze, the sky
cluttered with portents, I find
a patch of nearly dry grass
and drift off into daggered sleep.
Dream I’m trapped in a room
filled with mirrors distorting seductively,
the soundtrack a soft sigh
breaking through non-stop weeping.
Perhaps my own.
I wake clutching a return ticket
to a place I’ve never been.

Rick Adang was born in Buffalo, New York and graduated from Indiana University with a BA in English and a Creative Writing Honors thesis. He taught English as a foreign language for many years and is currently living in Estonia. He has had poems published in Willawaw Journal, Eclectica, Panoplyzine, Avalon Literary Review, Hamilton Stone Review and other literary magazines.

Full Moon at Montmartre

Claudette’s a can-can girl high-kickin’ it
under the red windmill. She slide-glides her
fishnets with her pointed toe, up to a
Toulouse-Lautrec sky. A quick turn and a
bibbity-bop bow for the boys in the back row.
Betcha can-can. Betcha can’t. Betcha I can
can kiss that girl tonight. What a sight, her
ruffly skirt swirly-swishing to a ragtime tune.
She turns to toss ‘em a kiss and a shoulder
shimmy, before her chassez away off the
stage. N’allez pas vous! Don’t go, there’s
more! The applause roars for the Quadrille
encore.

‌            her rouge rubbed away
‌                 dark alleyway
‌             me too, mon amie

Shawn Aveningo-Sanders’ poetry has appeared in journals worldwide, including Calyx, OneArt, Quartet, About Place Journal, Timberline Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, and many others. Author of What She Was Wearing (2019), her manuscript, Pockets, was a finalist in the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Contest (2024) and is forthcoming from MoonPath Press in late 2025. Shawn is two-time Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. A proud mom and Nana, she shares the creative life with her husband in Oregon.

In the Light of Peace

–-painting by Bruce King of the Oneida Nation

The travelers are cold and wet
mounted on Appaloosas.
The constellations on the horse’s rumps
recall numerous ancestors.
The riders hunch under blankets
of elk and buffalo skins sewn together
with bone and horsehair rosettes;
on their heads, bunches of eagle feathers
and buffalo-horn war bonnets.

Not many words pass between the riders.
They think about the future–
the hunt tomorrow
or all the wagons coming west.
But the horses are excited,
snorting, shifting their weight north and south,
letting colorful clouds
slip under their hooves
to join their reflections
on the wet ground.

The colors shiver in the sky and clouds,
run down the rivers and hills together,
painting the moment strong.

Frank Babcock lives in Corvallis, Oregon and is a retired Albany middle school teacher and owner of a bamboo nursery. He writes poetry to share the strange thoughts that rattle around in his head and to get them off his mind. He started with an interest in the beatnik poets, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. He has a long way to go and much to write before he sleeps. Poems published in the local Advocate, Willawaw Journal, and Panoplyzine.

A Quad of Golden Shovels

Internal Conversation at the beginning of Winter

Wet and beautiful I am thinking (“Forty Years” by Mary Oliver)

Overnight the garden has turned wet
after months without rain or cloud, and
I try to convince myself it is beautiful,
this beginning of winter. I want to believe that I
will be fine for the next five months, that I am
fine now, but that’s not what I’m thinking.

Before I understood

They looked like stones you find (“Mangoes” by Mary Oliver)

Boys were a mystery when I was sixteen. They
seemed alien, to be judged by how they looked,
handsome and distant, powerful like
gods with hearts hard as stones.
They could decide whether you
were important, whether you were a rare find.

In Prayer

Say something about pomegranates (“Safe Subjects” byYusef Komunyakaa)

No matter what incantations you may say
to God it’s hard to make them about something
of value. Even your sincerest petition seems to be about
the size of your bank account or just a bowl of pomegranates.

Lost on the Map

There is no center (“A Place: Fragments” by Margaret Atwood)

Even when you look, when you know you are there–
the neighborhood, the street, the blue house is
unfamiliar when you arrive, a place in a dream with no
welcome, no familiar face, no center.

Louise Cary Barden (lbarden.com) used to be a National Park Ranger’s wife and then college professor’s wife, wilderness camper, university English instructor, magazine writer, advertising copywriter and marketing executive. Now she is retired with two award-winning poetry chapbooks and uncounted poems in an assortment of poetry journals from coast to coast. Almost ten years ago she moved from North Carolina to Oregon to be near her grandchildren. The grandkids are grown and she is still learning to love the rain.