Willawaw Journal

Online Poetry & Art

Willawaw Journal

Jimmy Pappas

How To Fly Off a Twenty-Story Balcony Without Really Trying 

I grip the railing with my hands or I will climb over and fly.
I spread out my feet, keep them flat on the ground for fear
I will lift the right one and climb over. Afraid of heights, man?
You’re grabbing on like a race car driver at the finish line.

I tell him to fuck off. He could never fly. Men like him drive
the California coastal highway south to north to avoid the edge.
Not me. I drove towards LA with a two-hundred-foot drop
beckoning to me the whole way. I wanted to swerve over.

My passenger almost wet her pants. She could never fly either.
It takes a certain boldness to want to go over, to yearn for it,
to feel the pull of it, to appreciate the incredible beauty of it.
I have to push backwards now, like a man on a ship in choppy

waters. I steady myself as I stumble to the sliding door, squeeze
the panel, and pull. It’s stuck so I have to bang on it. Easy, Dude.
Just flip the latch, see? I throw it open and rush in to the farthest
point, my back to the balcony. It is better to not listen to its call.

I sit on a chair, slam my knees together with my hands between them.
I focus on my legs and ignore the others. None of them could ever fly.
I am the only one who knows how to do it right, how to enjoy it.
There are so many ways to fly.

 

Jimmy Pappas served during the Vietnam War as an English language instructor training South Vietnamese soldiers. His poem “Bobby’s Story” about the life of a Vietnam veteran won the Rattle 2018 Readers Choice Award. It is contained in his full-length book of war-related poems Scream Wounds (A15 Press, 2019). His chapbook Falling off the Empire State Building was selected as a winner of the Rattle Chapbook Contest and will be published in March 2020. 

Marjorie Power

Delicately

Once in river-strewn Zyxistan
in a hamlet whose name was a secret
entrusted to the eldest crone, a child woke

to find her father
laying out a skeleton
of fish bones on a blue cloth.
These two lived alone.
The child knew no other.

Once in a hamlet a pair of boys
climbed onto the back of a beast
they called a dragon. They rode
past many familiar huts, stopping
at one front window. Something fine
lay just inside, aglow on a sunlit cloth.
They’d ride back maybe next week when maybe
no one would be home. That glow would give them power.
The thought brought dark laughter.

Once in the doorway of her home a young child sat
present to the setting sun. If she counted
to three, the mountain would go dark.
She fingered fine bones
that lay beside her.
Touching them delicately
would make the old, old woman appear
and share the first letter of a secret name.
The child knew these things in her marrow
though her father hadn’t said them,
though he had prepared her in his way.

The boys did not succeed
with their intended theft. They may
have turned out not badly.
Their history was lost. Simply lost —
not to crossing-out or reckless fire.

 

Marjorie Power has work in the new issues of SOUTHERN POETRY REVIEW and ARTEMIS with more forthcoming soon in REFUSES TO SUFFOCATE, a chapbook of ekphrastic poetry from Blue Lyra Press. She lives in Denver, Colorado. For more information, go to her website.

Saorise Love

Mother I Feast

Mother I feast on you
Savouring the last shreds of flesh
On bones that have completed their journey
Brought you to the end of life itself
Intact for all to see
But my shadow
Hiding by your immortal soul
Whispers
All the things you’ve done to me
Into the cosmos
Scattering any illusion
Of a completed destiny
So back you go
Being evolution
A spider an ant a bee
Now just a gnat
I can hardly eat you at all
Anymore

 

Saoirse Love is a single mother of a teenage boy with Asperger’s syndrome. She suffers from Bipolar 1 and writes about this experience. A graduate of Trinity College Dublin, Saoirse worked and trained in Craft and Puppeteering until she became a full-time mother and Carer. During the past 2 years, she has concentrated on her writing. She writes both fiction and poetry in a modern style, slam writing. Saoirse lives in Dublin, Ireland, and draws from a rich Irish heritage of creativity and expression. She hopes through the medium of words to reach out and touch the experience of others, coming from the personal to the universal. 

Gyl Gita Elliott

The Fifth Element

Pratyahara,
withdrawal of
the senses,
is one of the eight limbs
of yoga–
the elusive fifth.

Consider the kiss of sun
on skin:
can it be undone?
Is common sense a sense?
When I lose feeling in my bum
am I sensing numb?

A taste of tepid coffee
on my tongue
sparks a reverie
of summer on the Seine,
the stench of sour beer…
How did I get here?

Look at your nose,
Listen to your breath,
Feel the depth,
the breadth,
the breast?
Now I’m thinking of sex.

Move on, detach,
undo, unlatch;
curl inside a world
within,
erase the boundary,
begin.

Gyl Gita Elliott spent many years teaching yoga and Japanese on the West Coast. She now writes poetry, sings songs, and enjoys her home in Eugene, Oregon.