Category Archives: Uncategorized

Ana Karina Luna

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If You Had Seen Them

I saw two Foxes naked in the water
in the alpine lake named Dorothy.
Who knows who those two giggly Butterflies were,
blue dragonflies smooching their wet hairs, their hands,
maybe they were Dorothies?
But placid so quiet
Dorothy floated them luscious,
held their soft bare bottoms
pushing to the sky their adorable triangles
their buoyant romantic hearts
beneath those two pairs of adventurous beast breasts—
alive, flesh and soul, they palavered by a slippery drowned trunk-phallus.
Then, they disappeared;
clothes ate them.
Today, I saw the Fox-Lioness
still rag-eaten, wandering in the city;
in her wishful eyes drifted my alpine image reflected in the lake of her longings,
and there I saw the Fox-Capra, the other Dorothy:
was she also still eaten by her clothes? Where? And doing what?

 

Ana Karina Luna is a freelancer Art Director and Graphic Designer living in Seattle for 14 years. She is originally from the Northeast of Brasil, where she studied Architecture & Urban Planning. In 2008, craving more art in her existence, she [inherited and] started a letterpress shop in the heart of Central District, called Miss Cline Press. Besides printmaking and poetry, she also experiments with wire sculptures and mixed-media drawings. SheI also loves dancing salsa and samba, and dreams of being a better Flamenco bailaora.

Caleb Thompson

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Apartment Music Box

If, in the evening’s lull of twilight thoughts,
one takes to resignations, turns inward,
lets go the world its hints of suppler form,
it’s no surprise to find sublime the dots
upon the ceiling, or the line along the floor,
or, that across the room is far too far—
and that, in a fact of feeling, distance grows
of infinite measure everywhere,
and in all things, and to itself is sworn,
in silent oath—how melodies disclose:
the heart impaled upon a star, the ear.

 

 

Caleb Thompson is a founding editor of The Monarch Review. He lives in Seattle.

Steve Potter

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“Forcing twentieth-century America into a sonnet — gosh, how I hate sonnets — is like putting a crab into a square box. You’ve got to cut his legs off to make him fit. When you get through, you don’t have a crab any more.”           

 –William Carlos Williams

Boxed Crab

Dear Doctor Williams, with all due respect
For worlds of pleasure I’ve found in your verse,
On this account I feel I must defect.
I love your offhand lines — “so much for the hearse”
From “Tract” for one — and how you defied the norm,
Filled your poems with ordinary speech
And escaped the strictures of long-standing form
Extending by great lengths the poet’s reach.

But, gosh, the twentieth-century whole?
A crab so large should be delegged, declawed!
Who, dredging such a creature from the shoal,
Would not pull back in horror overawed?
A crab of such size must be cut to fit
Boiled, dipped in butter, eaten bit by bit.

 

“Boxed Crab” is reprinted from Able Muse.

 

Steve Potter was active in Seattle’s literary scene as board member and frequent emcee for Red Sky Poetry Theater in the ’90s. He performed at events such as Seattle Poetry Festival, Subtext, Rendezvous Reading Series and Cheap Wine & Poetry sometimes accompanied by guitarist Bill Horist or the sitar/tablas duo Bakshish. He edited an eclectic but short-lived literary magazine called The Wandering Hermit Review. While he keeps a lower profile these days, Potter is writing as much as ever. His work has appeared in journals such as; Able Muse, Blazevox, Drunken Boat, Galatea Resurrects, Knock, Marginalia, Raven Chronicles and Stringtown.

Stephen Wallenfels

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The Very Last Time I Shot a Gun

 

I don’t recall whose idea it was the two of us
swishing through knee-high clover while
grasshoppers launched in frenzied flight as if they
knew our purpose before we did.

The gun lead-heavy in my hands and BBs rattling
in my Skittle box and his short legs churning
behind me while I watch for poison oak and gopher
holes and the silken weave of milk snakes big
as submarines.

We reach the water’s edge misty-still where our
quarry basks in memories of a lust-filled
night drunk on the endless possibilities
of a pond beneath the stars.

They slip into mud between the reeds but
we wait for their unblinking eyes to
surface then shoot and shoot and shoot until
all bubbles stop rising and the first belly
floats up a creamy pillow of unexpired air.

Later with windows open we listen to mayflies
bounce against the screen and the belly-growl of
far-off thunder and father popping the top off
yet another Bud my while brother whispers
I can’t hear them and he’s right

the baritone call for love is gone and that
aching note of silence is
emptiness defined.

 

 

Stephen Wallenfels launched his writing career with a short story about a lucky chicken’s foot in National Racquetball Magazine in 1985. That developed into ten years of publishing over 100 feature articles, columns and humorous essays for fitness trade journals. During that time he continued to develop his fiction skills and published several short stories for kids and adults. In 2012 he published his debut novel, POD, with Ace, the SciFi imprint of Penguin USA. While writing fiction receives the bulk of his attention, Stephen’s first love of the written word was, (and still is) poetry. He looks forward to courting that relationship again. He lives in Richland.

Laurel Rust

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CALLING MY MOTHER

 

My mother answers, tells me
she is putting the phone
in her skirt pocket
so she can sit on the couch
in the living room,
put her feet up.
It is evening, after all, the time
when her legs give out.

After so many years in the chill
of her distance, I am carried
in the warm dark of her pocket. I ride
her hip, surrounded
by the muffle of fabric, the squeak
and scrape of her walker
across wood floors,
her labor, the long journey
from kitchen to living room,
and finally the whoosh
of the couch cushions as she sits down,
folds her walker.

Then she lifts us both
out of darkness. When finally
she catches her breath, she holds me
to her cheek. My mother gives me
her voice. She gives me
my name.

 

Laurel Rust is a Washington native. She graduated in English from the UW and was fortunate to take part in Nelson Bentley’s incredible poetry classes. She is the single mother of a now grown son and lives on Orcas Island. In 1998, Brooding Heron Press of Waldron Island, WA, published a chapbook of her work, What Is Given. She has self-published a number of hand bound, small edition chapbooks since then. Her work (stories, poems, and essays) has appeared in Fine Madness, Pandora, Faire, Calyx, Spindrift, Clover, Prune Alley, and Trivia: A Journal of Ideas.

 

Jeremiah Webster

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Other Space

By the glass, by the portal,
by the water’s window, by the pane
is my boy, having positioned his stroller
by the aquatic gate, I stand and watch
his eyes mimic the walleye,
his mouth become the bass mouth,
his body go still as the scales that hang
in the care of Pisces before us.
He breaks his gaze
to look at me, seeking
assurances I cannot give, the reason
we reside in this space
and not the other.

 

“Other Space” is reprinted from Crab Creek Review.

Jeremiah Webster‘s poems have appeared in Crab Creek Review, North American Review, Rock & Sling, and Beloit Poetry Journal. His unpublished collection, Crux, was a finalist in this year’s Crab Orchard Review prize.  He has written the introduction for a new edition of T. S. Eliot: Paradise in the Waste Land: Early Works (Wiseblood Classics).  He lives in Kirkland.

 

Heather McHugh

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Not to Be Dwelled On

 

Self-interest cropped up even there,
the day I hoisted three, instead
of the ceremonially called-for two,
spadefuls of loam on top
of the coffin of my friend.

Why shovel more than anybody else?
Why did I think I’d prove? More love
(mud in her eye)? More will to work?
(Her father what, a shirker?) Christ,
what wouldn’t anybody give
to get that gesture back?

She cannot die again; and I
do nothing but re-live.

 

Reprinted from Upgraded to Serious (Copper Canyon).

 

Heather McHugh, recipient of a 2009 MacArthur Fellowship, is the author of thirteen books of poetry, translation, and literary essays, including Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968 – 1993 (Wesleyan) and The Father of the Predicaments (Wesleyan). Her prize-winning translations include a Griffin International Poetry Prize and her volumes have been finalists for both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. McHugh has taught literature and writing for over three decades, most regularly at the University of Washington in Seattle and in the low residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. From 1999 to 2005 she served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 2000 she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2012 she started a non-profit organization called CAREGIFTED.

 

 

John Olson

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Inventing Emotions

 

Sometimes I invent emotions. I make them out of neon and punctuation. Semi-colons, for instance, are seminal to an understanding of linen.
Commas are drops of hesitation. Colons are bold.
Somewhere at the end of a sentence, I rub the night. Sparks fly. I follow a pain to the end of time. I live in a palace of thought. Everything is composed of butter, chlorophyll, and the ancient molecules of midnight.
I have a Cubist tongue and a Dada nose. My haircut used to be a garage. Next time you see a ghost at the supermarket it might be me. Then again, it might also be Thomas Paine, or Pablo Picasso.
I define pain by its weight. Paintings hanging crookedly on walls.
I watch The Kinks on YouTube, and redeploy them as a proposition.
Each day I run past the house of the symphony conductor I see him holding a glass brain with a fugue in it.
Music does this to people. Makes them wonderful and cogent, like the smell of dirt in front of the radio station just after the pansies have been watered.
Do you see the way the earth grips a tree? It is actually a tree gripping the earth.
I do not yet have a name for this emotion. The emotion itself is incomplete. But what emotion is ever whole and self-contained? Ask that woman over there, laughing and eating popcorn. She will tell you that the caliber of all emotions depends on the diameter of Tucson. But that’s only because she is from Tuba City, and is watching a movie about blank-eyed underwear-clad zombies.
I hate the fourth of July.
I prefer Halloween.
Which is why I’ve never been to Texas.
But I ask you: what are your specific needs? Say anything you want. I can always use a little ambiguity. I love ambiguity.
Emotions are difficult to pin down because each word has different properties. In the Museum of Invisible Injuries, for instance, the word ‘cook’ actually means ‘combination.’ And if you say the word ‘bone,’ an Iranian woman appears from the shadows with a huge gem on her finger, a ring that symbolizes the disembodiment of gherkins.
An emotion is thick and puzzling like a forest. It takes a long time to fully feel it. What is the point of becoming president if all you feel is power? Even lawn mowers feel power. Power is not where it’s at. Where it’s at is infinity. The exhilaration of light amid the pornography of black.

 

“Inventing Emotions” is reprinted from Larynx Galaxy (Black Widow Press, 2012).

 

John Olson is that author of eight books of poetry, the most recent of which is Larynx Galaxy, which Black Widow Press published in 2012. He published Backscatter: New and Selected Poems in 2008. He is also the author of three novels, including Souls of Wind (Quale Press), The Nothing That Is (Ravenna Press), and The Seeing Machine (Quale Press). He is the recipient of The Stranger’s genius award for literature in 2004 and three Fund for Poetry awards. In 2008 Souls of Wind was shortlisted for a Believer Book of the Year Award, and in 2012 he was one of eight finalists for the Artist Trust 2012 Innovator Award. He is currently at work on another novel tentatively titled My Other Car Is A Bed In Paris. His blog, Tillalala Chronicles, may be accessed at www.tillalala.blogspot.com.

 

 

 

Kim Loomis-Bennett

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Marnie Clark

1.

Every time he got to me, every time he lay on me,
I wore a path to a thistle-choked ravine.

Past the garden, past father’s grave,
when step-father got his hands up my skirt,

prodded into me—Marnie, my darling, my dove—
his calluses against my raw thighs, my neck when I struggled.

I’d stare across the ravine—blue hills like frozen waves.
A stern breeze scrubbed his stench from my skin.

2.

He was awfully quiet; how Mother knew I couldn’t say.
After he left, I saw her sharp face peering in the shed window.

I slid off an old bench, yanked my dress into place.
She stared in like I was a stranger—I stared back.

Mother ranted at my gaunt figure when I couldn’t eat,
lost my job at Hoyt’s café—mostly she missed my pay.

I paced my room at night, always a book in hand,
always a lantern glowing low, softly reading Bible lore.

Her face soft, my little sister Helen
hugged her ragdoll, lulled to sleep by my footfall.

3.

Mother gave me pills to start my monthlies,
banished her husband to a cellar room—Marnie, my dove.

Helen asked why her daddy slept down with the spiders;
I said they caught his bad ideas, wrapped them in webs.

4.

I was sent to work at an all-woman’s hotel, west of us in Seattle,
rode the train out, ready for liberty, even if only as a Lincoln Hotel maid.

I found amusement in foreign travelers’ voices,
odd curios in waterfront shops, the long shadows of tall buildings,

even a tinge of contentment in polishing mahogany furniture,
making up brass beds with horsehair mattresses.

The mist off Elliot Bay washed my mind. Mt Rainer’s white peak
oversaw my dreams. Outside my window in the worker’s quarters,

fog leaned against the heavy green of the cedar trees,
mellowed wagon and car traffic, held the slight light of the lilacs.

5.

I counted how many rooms I’d clean before Helen could be safe,
counted on getting a little house—away from him.

I turned calendar pages, the days adding up so slowly.
Poured my savings onto my bed, the money measly in my hands.

6.

Another maid showed me the new Hillside Brothel
on Tenth Avenue South—I listened in the hall,

heard the man’s moans, the short time he was in and out,
saw the cash, knew I could do that.

At first I spent the extra on a white silk wrap,
rouges, perfumes and creams, trinkets and toys for Helen.

Later, I found my way into gambling parties, lost
track of my Hillside wages, worked extra to make it back.

7.

Mother wrote: Helen moved away for a bit,
I threw away the coat you sent. Stay away.

Making beds by day, lying on them all night,
the counted-on money never amounted to much.

The dark over the city, the dark over the ocean—
my hopes tangled up in linen.

 

 

Kim Loomis-Bennett is a life-long resident of Washington State, besides a detour into Oregon where she met her husband. Her poems and book reviews have appeared in The November 3rd Club, The Copperfield Review, Poet’s Quarterly, and Hippocampus Magazine. Her most recent work is included in The Prose-Poem Project.  She teaches at Centralia College. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University and will graduate with her MFA, January 2014. She lives in Lewis County with her family. Her work, Soiled Doves: A Poetic Sequence, published in 2011, is available as an ebook.

 

Bill Mawhinney

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Don’t Laugh at My Library

 

When you sift through my office after I die
you’ll confront a wall of poetry books.

I hope you won’t snicker like I did
when I dismantled my boyhood home

and found forty pairs of black socks
in Dad’s dresser drawer. Why so many?

If you wonder that about my books,
just know I couldn’t part with steady companions,

summoned round my heart to hold at bay the howling roar
of the bullshit train that clanged past my door.

The wall studs buzzed with honeyed hives
of language stored on these shelves.

Before they go to Goodwill, riffle their pages,
glance at my underlines.

There’s where my soul snagged, where
shards of reflected majesty

sang their fierce clarity
through lines of inert ink.

These shelves bulge with poems
that gave me the gumption to pull up my socks

and stride through the turning world.
So, for pity’s sake, don’t scoff too harshly.

With each passing year and each passionate purchase
this library was the brightest utterance

I had at my disposal. When I read them,
I was their audience. When I didn’t,

they became mine.

 

“Don’t Laugh at My Library” is reprinted from Cairns Along The Road (2009).

 

BILL MAWHINNEY lives with his wife Wanda, an abstract painter, and two cats in Port Ludlow.  He organizes and hosts Northwind Reading Series in Port Townsend, performs poetry in local retirement homes, tends his Japanese garden and talks with herons while combing the Olympic Peninsula beaches.