Willawaw Journal

Holiday Dazzlers

Since we grew up and left home,
Christmas has never been the same.

There’s that photo in the photo album,
Of the suburban pre-teen Texas years:

Four homeschooled kids, dressed as
Joseph and Mary (I’m holding a doll),

A shepherd swings a staff at my head,
I look demure. He misses the shot.

My baby sister is white as an angel,
Hair electrified by her own powerful

Presence, blonde rat’s naptime nest
Her only helmet against terror,

Her eyes full of otherworldly fire.
Mom rented sheep and a cow,

Took pictures of every kid in the
Sunday school dressed as a manger

Scene. Holly’s mom nearly stabbed
Me with bobby pins that day to keep

A veil over my hair. Mom, who never
Slept past 4 AM in those days, recorded

Our voices caroling in harmony,
“Sleep in heavenly peace,
Sleep in heavenly peace.”

 

Sarah Degner Riveros was born in Chicago and grew up in Texas; she studied at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Universitat de Barcelona, and Columbia University in New York where she earned a doctorate in Spanish literature. She teaches at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, Minnesota where she is currently working on an MFA in poetry and creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Brain; Child, Mothering, Bearings, New Beginnings, Murphy Square Quarterly, and forthcoming in Yes Poetry, Azahares, and Porridge. She is a single mother of five children.

At Klamath Marsh

Say it: Klamath… Klamath Marsh.
Can you feel the ooze, the muddy ease,
the seep and soft welcome and antiquity
of water? Can you follow the canoe trail

through grasses that part along a seam
your prow divides? Can you feel the tingle
of a thousand geese lifting off, beating
their wind-drum staccato hum of yearning?

Can you see how the sun layers color
up from the ripple skin into strata of the sky?
Can you apprehend through time’s mist how
the people heaped wocus root, dyed yellow

baskets with seed, lined pits with tule
to store a season of ripe survival? Can
you still hear the smoky story of children
leaving their spirit voices but burrowing

down through the fire to get away? Can
you stand by the water with a friend,
who tells what the tribe was, and will be?
Can you name the wocus, the cuicui,

lamprey, dace, the snubnose chub,
willow, cattail, tule, beaked sedge, spikerush,
diatomaceous earth, hemic, sapric, limnic,
the algae, the eagle tree, pelicans skimming

flat reflections stern as glass? So say it,
Klamath… Klamath Marsh, and sag
into muck, loyal to old ways, deep beliefs,
sturdy honor in concentric ooze, each

thud of your steps on hollow ground
learning from the wocus root how
to be home here, how to be woven in,
to be rooted deep in sacred mud.

 

This poem was first published in Terrain.org and in Kim’s little book, Reunion of the Rare: Oregon Poems, by Kim Stafford (Little Infinities, 2018).

Kim Stafford is the current Oregon Poet Laureate. You may find out more about him on the drop-down menu for poet laureate prompts (spring 2020) or use this direct link.

Portrait of a Kansas Wheat Harvest

This landscape is distance without mercy,
a heat-hammered flatness horizon to horizon,
where the sun scrapes across endless wheat stubble
like a wooden match striking in slow motion.

A naive breeze that thought it might make a difference
hangs, gutted and skinned, on a barbed wire fence.
The heat-stroked air sags down on hands and knees,
its tongue lolling like a dog begging for some water.

Combined to a bloody rag of stink, a skunk
rots in the sunbaked stubble. The once brilliant
cornflower blue sky bleeds out to milky white
and sweats a plague of vultures circling the scent.

Roads wander away from my squint in all directions.
Gravel, asphalt, it makes no difference, they’re all
mesmerized by horizons, mile after mile of the straight
and narrow, never disturbed by the thought of a curve.

Doug Stone lives in Albany, Oregon.  He has written two chapbooks, The Season of Distress and Clarity and The Moon’s Soul Shimmering on the Water. His new book of poems, Sitting in Powell’s Watching Burnside Dissolve in Rain (The Poetry Box) is coming out this summer (2020).

Invitations

from three bicycle tours

I    Central Idaho, July, 2010

Near the western edge of “God’s cathedral,”
the Sawtooths stretch north and south.
Cycling rhythms carry us:
Into the teeth of a wind, we pedal squares,
circles with wind at our backs.
We coast and quicken smooth descents,
ascend in each other’s steady tracks.

Forest and field, mist and sun,
frame the rocky profile:
Dinosaur backs and temple columns,
arrowheads and stairs to frozen air,
chain ring teeth and beacons that summon,
solitary minarets that invite prayer.

II     Trout Lake, Washington, July, 2011

From east to west across this wide valley
thunder echoes in the blue-black night.
Deep dreams of unresolved tensions cease.
Lightning flashes the sky to white.

On the illumined tent, pinging droplets
announce the pounding rain to come.
Kettle drums sound, and the pouring down
washes clean the slate of midnight dreams.

III      NW Montana, August, 2012

In early light, cold, speechless, we face
the Mission Mountains to the east,
ridge line trees like cloud cover.

At a southern bay of Flathead Lake,
whitecaps and shoreline cuffs and brushes
hint of freshwater fishers of the past.

Through aspen screens we discover
alpine summer on the backbone of the world,
raven shadows gliding glacial paths.

A glassy pond, back-lit by golden wheat grass,
reflects bleached stumps, a remote work house,
rolled bales of hay – and cyclists up ahead.

At Kootenai Falls we are stunned by their roar
and by the roiling pools that feed
the chaotic boil of tumbling, misting white.

The Milky Way, polished necklace of the night,
seems to hold the earth aloft, and we are steadied,
as if tethered to more distant stars.

Cielo

To Cielo Davila

I cry like an airplane, they say,
but I just love to sing. And I smile
at funny faces, and the green ocean.
I wear berets, I write in cursive,
and I love to bite my lip when
I’m thinking about the Greeks.
I’m never ever not thinking.
Someday I might love myself, but
I think I’ll be alone for a bit longer.

 

Samuel Swauger is a poet from Baltimore, MD. His writing appears in Tilde, Third Wednesday, and the Ghost City Review. His Twitter is @samuelswauger.

Bumper Car

The old farmer had lost his bearings
they said. They took away his truck.
He wired his house and widened the
doorways, threw out the boxes and
the piles of magazines, cleared the
hallways. He networked wires and
laid down tin, completed circuits
and brought the bumper car out of
the barn. He hosed it off at fifty
degrees, wiped it down and shined
the chrome. Turned it sideways to
wrestle it through the front doorway.
Tin sheets rattle as the farmer flies
from room to room, sparks follow
and at night the place looks, from
the road, like Tesla lives there, slam
bang bumpety bump the car races
down the hallway room to room
through the doorways circle about
the kitchen shoot back down the
narrow hall careening off the loose
and flapping baseboards, sizzling
through the bedroom back into the
hall whirling at the pantry then the
bathroom speeding down the hall
again banging through the parlor
farmer howling steering laughing
beard flies scarf-like over shoulder
then he glides up to the large knife
switch on the wall, throws it, cuts
the power, sighs and steps gingerly
to the floor. Salami, crust of bread
shared with the no longer cowering
hound, the gleaming turquoise and
white bumper car sits in the hall,
waits to whirl the farmer back, to
resurrect some boyhood dreams.

 

Guinotte Wise writes and welds steel sculpture on a farm in Resume Speed, Kansas. His short story collection (Night Train, Cold Beer) won publication by a university press and enough money to fix the soffits. Six more books since. A 5- time Pushcart nominee, his fiction and poetry have been published in numerous literary journals including Atticus, The MacGuffin, Southern Humanities Review,  Rattle and The American Journal of Poetry. His wife has an honest job in the city and drives 100 miles a day to keep it. Some work is at http://www.wisesculpture.com