Category Archives: mortality

Judith Skillman

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Death of Pan

 

We were only playing in the pasture,
wearing a patchwork of sun and sky,
ragged with the coming autumn.
That is to say we didn’t mean
to drown out the sound of his flute—
our piper, nor meddle with the conch shell
that caused our fathers to panic.

And his Arcadia—
how we adored her. We made wreaths
of wildflowers, twined tendrils of her hair
around our stubby hands as we brought
her one more gift: a leaf bloodied with color,
a spare sapling, an agate choked in quartz.

Until the river-god,
happy as ever to be plunged in cold,
took him from our arms and flung
his instrument against the rocky shore.
The syrinx shattered into seven reeds or nine,
and we, still infatuated with the echoes
our voices made in that valley, called out
to one another, not so much from loneliness
as the excitement of recitation.

Light breezes
dog us as we go forward in reconnaissance,
teaching one another how to suffer
being schooled by lechers. Our appetite
for the one called Pitys—another nymph
loved by him, who turned into a pine tree
to escape his overtures,
runs nil to none.

 

“Death of Pan” previously appeared in The Never (Dream Horse Press, 2010)..

Judith Skillman is the author of twelve books of poems, including The Never (Dream Horse Press, 2010), and Heat Lightning: New and Selected Poems (Silverfish Review Press, 2006), and two which were finalists for the Washington State Book Award. Her most recent collection, The White Cypress (Cervéna Barva Press, 2011) was reviewed favorably in The Pedestal Magazine and The Iowa Review and has a review forthcoming The Raven Chronicles. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets,  the King County Arts Commission (KCAC) Publication Prize, a KCAC Public Arts grant, and a Washington State Arts Commission Writer’s Fellowship. Her poems and translations have appeared in Poetry, FIELD, The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, Midwest Quarterly Review, Northwest Review, Prairie Schooner, Seneca Review, and other journals and anthologies. She’s been writer in residence at the Centrum Foundation in Port Townsend, Washington, The Hedgebrook Foundation, and the Jack Straw Foundation. Skillman resides in Kennydale, Washington, and teaches for The Yellow Wood Academy, Mercer Island, Washington.

Jared Leising

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THE SLOWEST DANCE

 

Last night you raised your hand
to speak about the speed of things

in the film—amazed at how she
takes the time to make tea, iron

a shirt—because you can’t even
take the time to make a sandwich

without forgetting to put something
else, anything, between the bread.

You also spoke of this rush as doing
violence to the self, just a day after

getting word of your cousin’s suicide.
She was a happy woman, you said,

and that you could not reconcile. This
is what I’m trying to reconcile, a thing

slower than domesticity or death: our
embrace at the end of a day—swaying

in the dark exhaust of a parking garage,
like a Muybridge flipbook—still still

still still stillstillstillstillstill still still
still still still.

 

Jared Leising is the author of a chapbook of poems-The Widows and Orphans of Winesburg, Ohio–and in 2010, Jared curated the Jack Straw Writers Program.  He’s served as president of the Washington Community College Humanities Association and on the Board of Directors for 826 Seattle.  Before moving to Seattle, Jared received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Currently, he’s teaching English at Cascadia Community College and coordinating 826 Seattle’s 2012 adult writing workshop series: “How to Write Like I Do.”

 

Jacob Uitti

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Sarah

 

I saw a bird in the grass
small and brown
its round body partially hidden in the long blades

around its throat was a ring of purple dried blood
and its yellow beak was open and a black tongue
hung out

one of its wings was broken and all the brown feathers had been torn off
the other wing was folded closely to its body

the feet were untouched

it was in the middle of the front yard, which was very small, about the size of a
Volkswagen with just the grass, and a single dogwood

I wanted to name her Sarah after an ex-girlfriend I’d
had—

and so I picked up Sarah and wrapped her in the newspaper
and put her under the tree in the corner where no one would see her.

 

 

Jacob Uitti was born and raised in Princeton, NJ, and moved to Seattle in 2007. Since, he has co-founded the Seattle-based literary and arts journal The Monarch Review. He is also a co-founding member of the bands The Glass Notes and The Great Um. He has half a fake Master’s Degree from The University of Washington due to the number of classes he’s audited. Jacob also works tending bar and co-managing the PopUp restaurant Mo’Fun. Often, poetry can best express the idea with passion and a smirk unknown anywhere else.

Nancy Dickeman

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Nuclear Reservation

 

Driving past security my father tipped
his hat at the guard
who waved him on. The badge
on my father’s chest worn
not to name authority but
to measure exposure, the point
at which his daily risk

might trip him up. When he drove the hills
toward home the desert turned
under him, sage and sand
ground to dust, rocks overtaken by a violet glow.
All the while minerals
touched us, particulates
combing the air and marking us

invisibly changed. In the dust storm
the desert stuck to me like silt, a line
drawn around my mouth and nose.
His back to me, his face
pressed into the receiver
my father said the guards had orders
to shoot to kill. What they held

behind them was a question
of life and death:
the rods delicately working
at the purist’s calculations and the tower
casting itself clean across the river, ore
reduced to powder, a golden substance
diffusible as breath.

“Nuclear Reservation” originally appeared in Particles on the Wall.  

Nancy Dickeman grew up in Richland and is a co-founder and co-curator of Particles on the Wall, a multidisciplinary exhibit exploring Hanford history and nuclear issues. Nancy’s poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, The Seattle Review, River City, the anthology March Hares: The Best of Fine Madness, and in other publications. Her essays appear in The Seattle PI, Common Dreams and OCEAN Magazine. She has recently completed her first novel manuscript, Green Run, White Train. Nancy holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington.

 

Kathryn Smith

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After the Funeral

We pushed our bicycles up to Halstaad’s Field, fallow
for years now, overrun with brambles and thistle.
Sweat soaked our clothes, too black for August amid weeks
without rain. At the hill’s crest, the farmhouse faded from view—mother
at a window somewhere, inconsolably repeating the scripture’s refrain—
and we cut across to the narrow trail we’d worked three summers carving.

It took longer than it should have to catch my breath, but when Eddie said,
“I dare you,” I mounted my bicycle and let fly. The kingdom of heaven
is like a cloudless summer sky, earth beneath it parched

and aching. I could feel Eddie gaining on me, and I pedaled
harder, veins thrumming my temples, reveling in the dust storm
we had created, coating our clothes and our faces. The kingdom is like
the forgotten field, rocks heaved to the surface by centuries of frost.
Then, the scree-strewn clearing a hairsbreadth away, which,
at the point of overtaking, the slightest clip of the handlebars
sends you toward, and over, chain sprung from its wheel, pedals
spinning a windmill fury. The kingdom of heaven is like—look, Eddie,
no hands!—rising from the saddle as though lifted, weightless, close
as I’ve been to birds when their wings are stretched in flight.

When we returned, mother wouldn’t know us, transformed
as we were by sweat and dust, beaming like children who’d never
lost a thing, who’d tasted the kingdom’s salt moments before
the yawning sky lets go to gravity, before the tumble
and burn, the elusive wisp of freedom snatched by the sear
of gravel as it enters, irrevocably, the flesh.
 

Kathryn Smith received her MFA from the Inland Northwest Center for Writers at Eastern Washington University, where she helped edit Willow Springs.  She is a copy editor for The Spokesman-Review, a master gardener in training, and a community volunteer.  Her poems have appeared in Rock and Sling, Redactions, and Third Coast.  She lives in Spokane, Washington.

 

Ted McMahon

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Prosector

 
This morning, on our walk between rain squalls
we circled the lake at the head of the Cayou valley.
There, amidst an insistence of flickers, a burble
of robins, the rusty scrape of the red-wing blackbird,
we happened upon a black-feathered shape, which flew up
at our approach, into the trees. Where it had been,
what had seemed a rumpled blanket,
was a doe, no more than two days dead.
Ribs furled around a thorax
empty of lungs, empty of heart, open
to the thin mist of rain. And the ribs themselves,
pink and clean of meat, a lesson in anatomy taught
by that bald scavenger waiting above, waiting
to resume his lecture on our shared fate.

 

“Prosector” previously appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Ted McMahon’s poetry has appeared in Seattle Review, Convolvulus, Manzanita Quarterly, Rosebud, and the Journal of the American Medical Association, and on The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. His full-length collection is The Uses of Imperfection, published in 2003. He published a chapbook, First Fire, in 1996. Ted received the 1999 Carlin Aden Award for formal verse from the Washington Poets Association, and a 2004 Artist Trust GAP Grant. He was finalist for the Ruth Stone Prize in Poetry in 2005. Ted was a co-editor at Floating Bridge Press in Seattle from 1999-2006. He currently practices Pediatrics half time in the Seattle neighborhood of Ballard and devotes the other half to writing and leading river journeys.  He lives in the Seattle neighborhood of Wallingford with his wife, photographer Rosanne Olson, and their two Maine Coon cats, Zoe and Maxx.

 

 

 

Jed Myers

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Leveled

 

The pocket of chaos in my father’s head,
so far, has left him unable
to walk, find words, lift food on a fork,
or know what day it is. It makes him
emotional—he weeps as I enter
the room in which he reclines for hours
a day on his hospital bed. He speaks
with a new stutter, says Help me
whenever he comes to a hole in the ground
of his memory. Yes, it was
Connie Mack Stadium, Dad—I knew
what he was getting at. I see it too,
as it was, out past Strawberry Mansion
in the summer evening light. It was leveled
decades ago, when he never wept.

 

“Leveled” first appeared in Summerset Review.

 

Jed Myers lives in Seattle. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod International Journal, Golden Handcuffs Review, qarrtsiluni, Atlanta Review, Drash, Quiddity, The Monarch Review, Palooka, Fugue, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Rose Alley Press anthology Many Trails to the Summit, and elsewhere. He hosts the long-running open-mic cabaret NorthEndForum, and is a member of the ensemble Band of Poets. He is a psychiatrist with a therapy practice, and teaches at the University of Washington.

Shin Yu Pai

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Search & Recovery
for James Kim (1971 – 2006)


it could have
happened to any
of us

a wrong turn
down a logging road
tires tunneled
into snow

a man’s undying
love for his children

moves satellites
maps aerial images

eighteen care packages
dropped over sixteen
miles of the Siskiyou,

bearing handwritten
notes from a father
to his son

the signs
you left for those
who came after you

a red t-shirt
a wool sock,
a child’s blue skirt

layers of a life,
stripped down to
a family’s fate –

the weight of being
unseen – to travel
a path back to

what you knew
at birth, the warmth
of being held close

brought home

 

“Search & Recovery” originally appeared in Adamantine (White Pine, 2010).

Shin Yu Pai is the author of Hybrid Land (Filter Press), Adamantine (White Pine), Haiku Not Bombs (Booklyn), Works on Paper (Convivio Bookworks), Sightings: Selected Works (1913 Press), The Love Hotel Poems (Press Lorentz), Unnecessary Roughness (xPress(ed)), Equivalence (La Alameda), and Ten Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers (Third Ear Books). She is the former poet-in-residence for the Seattle Art Museum and has been the recipient of individual artist and heritage awards from 4Culture, as well as a SmArt Ventures grant from the City of Seattle’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. She is recently returned to Seattle.

 

 

Lana Hechtman Ayers

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The Toe

Despite how mystically moonlight snakes a path across the lake tonight, and because love is the property solely of country music, and since Plath’s bell jar of pain runneth over for all eternity, I will write only of a toe—a plain enough thing—the fourth toe on my mother’s right foot and how each day, despite my bathing it, my application of greasy salve, the wrapping and rewrapping to apply just enough pressure, it continued to blacken, the toe like a banana past sweetness to the other side of neglect, or salt beef dried to jerky, tenderness abandoned to gristle, so I write this about my mother’s toe, how the doctor tells us it must go as if speaking of an ingrown hair or a splinter, as if it were nothing important, nothing a person spent her whole life walking on, on grass, over damp-mopped kitchen linoleum, dancing backwards in high heels over slick-waxed ballrooms floors, or in babyhood grabbed for all googley-eyed and occasionally even sucked, this dried-up toe that oddly causes mother no pain, and yet when the doctor says the toe must go, this woman who was a marble column at father’s bedside during his failed chemo, who later presided over father’s grave, stolid as a granite headstone, and not long after, this woman who sat composed as Rodin’s “Bather” as another doctor spoke the word mastectomy to her, and all through radiation wore a Mona Lisa smile, this woman does a thing I’d never seen her do, my mother cries, sobs, weeps, exhausts all the tissues in the doctor’s stainless dispenser, and keeps crying over this very small rotten toe, this calamity of losing what one least expected to lose.

 
 

“The Toe” appears in the e-book anthology Fire on Her Tongue (Two Sylvias Press, 2012).

Lana Hechtman Ayers, originally from New York, lives in Kingston, Washington after a seventeen year sojourn in New England. She has been writing poetry since she could hold a crayon and is now working on her first novel. Her two most recent poetry collections, What Big Teeth (chapbook) and A New Red (full-length), are concerned with the real adult life of Red Riding Hood and associates. Lana runs two poetry chapbook presses, Concrete Wolf (national) and MoonPath Press (dedicated to Pacific Northwest Poets). Ice cream is Lana’s favorite food group.

 Lana will be reading new work at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle on Friday, July 27, at 7:00, along with poets Raul Sanchez and John Burgess.

 

David Wagoner

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Mother’s Night

 

She’s celebrating it for me. She’s coming back
from the place where she was scattered, from the place
where she was introduced to medical students
and their teachers and was slowly taken apart,
back from where she lost herself among nurses,
from what was left of her house, from her single bed,
from her sink and her kitchen window where she could see
the dead stalks in her garden. She’s coming back,
her arms full of the flowers I gave her once
a year in April, and she’s asking me
to put them back on the stems in the greenhouses
they came from, to let them shrink away from the light.

 

“Mother’s Night” is reprinted from “After the Point of No Return” (Copper Canyon Press, 2012).

David Wagoner was born in Ohio and raised in Indiana. Before moving to Washington in 1954, Wagoner attended Pennsylvania State University where he was a member of the Naval ROTC and received an M.A. in English from Indiana University. Wagoner was selected to serve as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1978, replacing Robert Lowell, and he served as the editor of the original Poetry Northwest until its last issue in 2002. Known for his dedication to teaching, he was named a professor emeritus at the University of Washington. Wagoner has been compared stylistically to his longtime teacher and friend, Theodore Roethke. He is the author of ten novels (including The Escape Artist) and 24 books of poetry, most recently Good Morning and Good Night (University of Illinois, 2005), A Map of the Night (University of Illinois, 2008), and After the Point of No Return (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). He also collected and edited Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke (1972). He lives with his family in Lynnwood.