Willawaw Journal

Gratitude

After we’ve set the book down,
it’s all right if we only
remember the paper cuts.

It’s all right if Eliot stands under
a bare bulb for days
writing two lines.

We should thank our suffering—
Chopin coughed up blood
composing his last mazurka.

We come from an ancient family
of weepers—A certain grief
gave birth to us all.

A flash of agony stokes the coals
in the heart’s furnace. We burn
like the scrolls of Alexandria.

It’s OK to break down before
the poem is over. Everything we’ve lost
carries us on the wind.

Alexander Etheridge has been developing his poems and translations since 1998.
His poems have been featured in The Potomac Review, Museum of Americana, Ink
Sac, Welter Journal, The Cafe Review, The Madrigal, Abridged Magazine, Susurrus
Magazine, The Journal, Roi Faineant Press, and many others. He was the winner of
the Struck Match Poetry Prize in 1999, and a finalist for the Kingdoms in the Wild
Poetry Prize in 2022. He is the author of, God Said Fire, and, Snowfire and Home.

June in the Garden

The bamboo shoots are tossing their slim stalks
higher than the neighbor’s rented roof.
I don’t know the names of the birds that are singing,
but I know the hummingbird at the nectar flute,
sipping crystal with her snake’s tongue. Her wings
spin a tilde between frazzled sentences of Spanish moss.
Grape vines poke fingers over a fence sand-washed
with sunshine. Now the trees begin their breath-work.
In the frog-pond, lily pads hob-knob with chuckling water
while nearby a honeybee mumbles to itself,
stinger-deep in a Rose of Sharon. The gate is swung wide,
settled in dirt. Cicadas are singing sex tunes.
I can feel the garden’s heartbeat against my skin,
its pulse in the faded curtains on the porch,
its kiss on the dimple in Taylor’s cheek. The cat’s tail
twitches as he watches through the screen
the hanging basket by the porch umbrella. Ian says
only a wren would nest in such a silly place, but I know better.
The wren and I, we build our nests where we are loved.

Unburial

My mother had warned us away
from the dump behind the barn,
but in November she put on Daddy’s jean jacket,
rubber boots,
gardening gloves.
My mother said, “Watch for snakes and
broken glass.”
We dragged mildewed carpets from beneath
damp forest loam, uncovering
the rotted corpses of dish mops,
bathmats, sponges, crockery,
a decrepit Hoover,
a TV with rabbit ears.
Because I begged her, my mother said
I could keep the salad plate.
I scrubbed it at the pump until it shone:
red and green chickens
in a field of wheat.
The salad plate held pride of place in the treehouse
where I served plastic food,
orphaned and resourceful
in battered, fuchsia-colored Crocs.
Other girls dressed their Barbies,
watched Wizards of Waverly Place,
played soccer and learned ballet.
By the hour I considered the salad plate,
dreaming parentless dreams.

Years later, on a miserable family trip,
I locked eyes with the salad plate
in an antique shop
in Boone. I had started grad school.
I had lost a lot of weight.
I was trying to say I was gay, but
my mother did not want to hear that.
I was trying to say, I’m afraid of you,
but she did not want to hear that either.
I locked eyes
with the salad plate.
We recognized each other.
We didn’t speak.
The salad plate wore the same green polka dots,
the scarlet rooster’s feathers,
the sheaf of grain. It sported a price tag
for $3.99 inked in ball-point pen.
I wore the same frightened face
behind my smile.
I felt like I was going to cry,
but I swallowed it down.
For a long moment,
we held each other’s gaze.
Then my mother called me.
I walked away.

Sophie Farthing (she/her) is a queer poet and artist living in South Carolina in the USA. Her work has appeared in outlets including Right Hand Pointing, Beyond Queer Words, Impossible Archetype, and Anti-Heroin Chic. Her poetry is also featured in the horror anthology it always finds me from Querencia Press. She is the 2024 recipient of the Elizabeth Boatwright Coker Fellowship in Poetry from the South Carolina Academy of Authors.

Feeding My Wanting

I’m hoping for healing, for the sun to slice its light
on the overcast world, I’m hoping this wind,
fierce enough to knock down a body,
can tornado the voice lying cold in the lungs.
I’m hoping the baby, looking in the mirror,
will smile at himself again, that his angry skin
might cool like a river, once we find the right salve.
I’m hoping for salves and salvation
and vacation and a murmuration
of starlings to remind me: yes, I have come home
to roost. I’m hoping for roosters crowing
like they once crowed that long-ago morning,
waking me from my roof in a ghetto in Mexico.
I’m hoping all the world’s rooftops can be safe
from snipers, vipers; I’m hoping for drumming.
Thrumming. Humming, for all these hem
and haw times to morph into shiny threads,
a needlepoint tapestry of calm. A psalm.

D. Dina Friedman has published in over a hundred literary journals and anthologies (including Rattle, Salamander, The Sun, The Ekphrastic Review, and Rhino) and received four Pushcart Prize nominations. She is the author of two young adult novels: Escaping Into the Night (Simon and Schuster) and Playing Dad’s Song (Farrar, Straus, Giroux), a short-story collection: Immigrants (Creators Press), and two chapbooks: Wolf in the Suitcase (Finishing Line Press) and Here in Sanctuary—Whirling (Querencia Press). Visit her website www.ddinafriedman.com or her blog on living creatively in a creatively challenged universe at https://ddinafriedman.substack.com.

Three Hidden Box Booklets. Shizen, stardream, lokta with agate closures. Each 6”x 4”.

 

Domestic Opera

Through the glass pane I catch bird song
while longing to receive your call.

The exertions of joggers passing by
exhaust me as I note their strain.

For a moment I block out all noise and focus
on enchanted memories of your solo voice.

Gas-powered blowers interrupt my train of thought
and foul the transparent air.

Nearby workmen whistle as blades and leaves
lumber across the lawn. Their melody now an earworm…

Boring through my brain, an overwrought
glum “Everybody Hurts” Top 40 tune.

In dismissal my new-found love ghosts me
not even feigning to recall my number.

Worry, mounting panic usurp all other distractions.
Other than drinking and weeping, I refrain.

I still can’t move far from my phone’s doubtful chirp
while my wristwatch hand sweeps time away.

David A. Goodrum is the author of the collection Vitals and Other Signs of Life (The Poetry Box) and the chapbook Sparse Poetica (Audience Askew). Recent and upcoming publications include Tar River Poetry, San Antonio Review, Triggerfish Critical Review, among others. Born and educated in Indiana, David now lives in Corvallis, Oregon. Find out more about this poet/photographer at www.davidgoodrum.com.

Princess of Pain

~for Jahan Malek Khatun (1324-1393)

A Persian princess’s family, murdered, brought the pain
and she continued writing through her grief and pain.

She longed for her creativity to help her blossom
into another version of herself, one without so much pain.

Her verse transported her feelings, showed her crystals
pregnant with meaning and energy, relief from pain.

The abyss was familiar to her, waiting on the other side of her door
promising a nothingness but no end to unendurable pain.

In fact, the emptiness promised more of the same
and never pretended to be anything but her recognizable pain.

She removed spoons from a drawer one by one
replacing them with Grace and teardrops shed in pain.

I Got You Babe

I wore out one of the first Sonny & Cher albums, Babe,
with deep needle grooves in I Got You Babe.

At the end of every show, holding their son Chaz,
they sang as if they were there alone, telling him, we’re here Babe.

I soon tired of the song, listening to the skips that pointed
to my adolescent pining, my obsession with I Got You Babe.

My sisters mocked my fanatic fandom, my scrapbook of photos,
articles, and lyrics saved long after they recorded, I Got You Babe.

Part of the culture, it showed up long after Sonny’s death, and after
Gregg Allman’s, who sang on their show a song much raunchier than I Got You Babe.

Years after their split, their careers and love lives splayed open,
late night Letterman made Sonny & Cher sing I Got You Babe.

Iconic as the couple, it shows up at regular intervals, and inevitably
every morning the clock radio in Groundhog Day plays I Got You Babe.

I wonder if Cher finds herself humming it absentmindedly as she goes
through her days. Who’s to know? Save her and those she’s called Babe.

Anne Graue (she/her) is the author of Full and Plum-Colored Velvet, (Woodley Press) and Fig Tree in Winter (Dancing Girl Press). Her work has appeared in Gargoyle, Verse Daily, Poet Lore, Kenyon Review, and Glass Poetry Journal. She is a poetry editor for The Westchester Review and lives in Mahopac, New York.