Willawaw Journal

Lost (2)

I like to spend just a few hours
once in awhile
not knowing where I am,
off the path
in the forest I walk every week,
slipping through a wall of Huckleberry,
into this profound density
of stunted understorey:
dead fall, invasive Willow, Tan Oak,
Poison Oak, over a mycological
treasury, and I become aware
I am a sex,
momentarily relieved of subject
or object, not recognized exactly,
but feeling flirted at,
seduced, by color and shape,
entertaining a slow, draped,
or webbed peep-show
of Wild Rose, Honeysuckle,
reclining Irish Moss, Dwarf Maple,
tripping through a proletariat of Bracken,
in my inner chamber music
of creaking knees, borne along —
in a sympathetic sigh of bones,
through thriving veils of languid decay —
leave it here, it grows, I say,
where on-board loss to aching hips
and shrinking muscles
is re-vivified beside this fallen Fir,
lounging and sloughing
a bent sideshow of side-slipping shingles,
dreaming down toward soil,
where my up-step soft-shatters
the black confection into a year’s worth
of worm and weevil work.
It spills under a skirt
of Dimpled Speckelwort,
as if welcoming a thing like me,
who’s slow apocalypse is nothing
in the face of one night’s wind.
I must wind around
impenetrable thickets losing
the way, from a way already
lost, trying to see how this twisty
lurching-way will look
when returning.
I believe I am staying within screaming
distance of the main path,
from which a person might smell
a corpse once
every few life-times or –
but the swivel of my ankle,
the kink of neck, carries me
on a strange azimuth of body –
my mild ambition
and the focus required
for a non-teetery weight-shift carries me
where vegetable archways appear.
What do I know that will ever
be so different? I will
be lost if I let myself believe so
for a minute.
The Cardinal Directions
dissolving in my rotating skull
about as useful as a passage from
Finnegan’s Wake,
as I dally over
Maidenhair, Spleenwort,
while a fallen Redwood in its frugality
of imitation death busily arabesques
its squirrel-scarred limbs
into children reaching
skyward.

Terry Adams  lives on the bank of San Gregorio creek, in a Redwood forest in La Honda,
California, where he rescued the former home of Ken Kesey. His collection, Adam’s Ribs, is
available from Off The Grid Press. He’s had poems in Catamaran, California Fragile, and
Midnight Chem. His website is terryadamspoetry.net

Portrait of Emily

She sits in the bedroom window like curtains,
whitely gazing down at the garden,
a row of pink hollyhocks
standing with a lean, listening, like people,
to her secrets. They promise not to tell.

Cobwebs in the corner of the room
catch the dust and residue of the world
before they swallow her, leaving clarity
to shine behind her eyes onto the parchment.

Tall flowers, what do you know
that the Belle of Amherst saw from her window?
What do you know about her secrets,
the ones never penned?

To tell one thing and know another,
entirely one’s prerogative.

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.

Underground Gardens

Legend was,
After a quarrel with his father,
He left Sicily behind
And immigrated to America.
That he left a woman in Filari
To whom he vowed to return and marry.
No one knew but he,
Of his experience tunneling.
In Boston he worked as a tunnel-digger.
New York City, he excavated
For the subway leading to New Jersey.
His secretly held a dream
Of growing his own citrus,
Orange, lemon and grapefruit trees.
Seeking a Mediterranean climate
He came to Fresno, California.
Working as a farm laborer
In local vineyards
He saved his money,
Buying a parcel of land
Sight unseen.
Under a veneer of dirt
Was impervious sedimentary rock,
Ill-suited for farming.
In scorching Fresno heat
As high as 120-degree afternoons,
He dug a cellar to escape.
Then carved out adjacent rooms
In the hardpan sediment,
Inspired by ancient catacombs
He marveled in Filari, Sicily.
His subterranean villa,
A far-reaching underground world
Nearly one-hundred chambers,
Passages, courts, and patios
Dug with instinct and memory.
He worked at night,
Labored with a hand-pick,
Shovel, wheelbarrow,
And Fresno-scraper
Pulled by a single mule.
There was a kitchen, bath,
Bedchamber, library, and chapel,
And masonry archways he built.
Fruit-bearing trees were planted
below ground, extending above
The terrain through openings.
The woman he left in Filari?
She refused to live
In the world of his making,
Underground in hole.
He became a recluse,
Completely alone thereafter.

Stephen Barile, a Fresno, California native, attended Fresno City College, Fresno Pacific University, and California State University, Fresno. He is a long-time member of the Fresno Poet’s Association. Stephen Barile lives and writes in Fresno. His poems have been published extensively.

Their fair share

We turn at the band stand because you say it’s getting dark.
It’s still grey in the sky when we’re one road away from your house,
me walking a little behind you with the dog as we laugh about something from work,
proof to me that we share memories of life,
that events are connected.
I smile at your voice and then a twig from a bush tugs through my hair,
And I see my corpse pulled apart by the foxes, and moss is as much my flesh
as the muscle is.
I see everyone taking their fair share, the birds making party favours of my eyes,
the earth wrapping me warmly for the worms to squirm through one into the other,
a little less of me
each time their tender pink bodies double back on themselves.
I see the burning light of whatever part of me is able to see this, laughing now
with you,
unmeshed from my body and bounding across the ground into some other thing
born blind in its burrow.
As we turn round the last road, your dog scurries forward in excitement for home.

Llewynn Brown is a writer living by the sea in Cornwall, England. They write a large amount of personal experiences given an artistic tinge, or led off completely into fantasy.

Graveyard Shift

A drought all of April,
I’d left the windows open,
but overnight, May thunderstorms
wettened the toile curtains
and made them limp, and left stains
on half-rolled window shades
I knew I’d never get out,
old, yellowed, and crinkly
hard paper that they were.

I found comfort when children
wailed their first morning cries
and dying newspapers slapped
driveways of houses down the street.
Swallows that used an old
irrigation pipe to raise their young
circled looking for insects.
Ravens that the day before
raised one foot at a time
on the asphalt now danced
in four-four time and lolled
in puddles formed in potholes.

As I look from the driveway, I know
someday you and I will dance like this,
when pumps are tapped but dry.
You will greet me from the graveyard shift
and we will pour my remaining water
still cool in the steel-clad thermos
into the tin metal basin on the porch
and rinse our feet while the ravens soar.

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, spending the seasons dodging fires, floods, earth-shaking, and all the other scrambling life-initiatives. He has contributed to Heartwood, Tiny Seeds Journal, Vita Poetica, and Willows Wept Review. He has a chapbook for free download at Red Wolf Editions and a second chapbook available from Red Bird Chapbooks.