Category Archives: form

Julie Larios

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Woman with the Beak of an Octopus

 

She has become almost human, having been a creature
of the sea, multi-armed, dependent on saltwater,
and on certain tidal patterns and marine behavior.

Though she has become almost human, her skeleton is new,
inflexible and strange to her. What she still doesn’t know
about air she is trying hard to learn, with neurons

numbering in the billions now, gills gone, her new brain
localized and voluminous. For years, her arms had been
conscious entities, self-directed. That was before the bones

began to grow and the outer mantle to thin, before
the siphon closed. By choice, she left the shallow floor
of the ocean and began to move closer in to shore,

pulled by a changeable sky and the marvel of human sound.
The idea of seasons charmed her, as did the sun and moon,
and her desire for non-attachment trumped the art of suction.

All that is left is to form a human mouth from her beak.
Soon now, she will forget the ink sac, forget how to breathe
underwater, how to forage below the surface, how not to speak.

In form, she will be human, though whenever she passes
a large window, believing it to be liquid, her heart will race
and her hands will be drawn, inexplicably, toward the glass.

 

“Woman with the Beak of an Octopus” originally appeared in The Indiana Review in a slightly different form. You might enjoy comparing the effect of the prose-poem structure to the lineated version, above.

 

Julie Larios has published poems in many reviews including Field, Threepenny Review, The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and The Atlantic. She also publishes books for children (two of them illustrated by Seattle artist Julie Paschkis) and recently wrote the libretto for a penny opera titled “Three Acts of a Sad Play Performed Entirely in Bed” with music by composer Dag Gabrielson as part of the New York City Opera’s VOX Festival. She is the winner of a Pushcart Prize and Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Award and has been published twice in The Best American Poetry.

 

Marvin Bell

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The Book of the Dead Man (Rhino)

Live as if you were already dead.
Zen admonition

1. About the Dead Man and the Rhino

The dead man rode a rhino into Congress.
An odd-toed ungulate in the Congress, and no one blinked.
It was the lobbyist from Hell, the rhino that ate Tokyo, a lightning strike in their dark                     dreams.
A ton of megafauna, and nowhere for a senator to hide.
I’m gonna get you, says the momentum of a rhino.
The rhino has been said to stamp out fires, and the dead man hopes it is true.
He steered the beast to the hotheaded, the flaming racist, the fiery pork-barreler, the                  sweating vestiges of white power.
The dead man’s revolutionary rhino trampled the many well-heeled lawmakers who stood           in the way.
He flattens the cardboard tigers, he crushes the inflated blowhards, he squashes the                cupcakes of warfare.
Oh, he makes them into blocks of bone like those of compacted BMWs.

 

2. More About the Dead Man and the Rhino

The dead man’s rhino was not overkill, don’t think it.
He was, and is, the rough beast whose hour had come round at last.
The dead man’s rhino did not slouch, but impaled the hardest cases among the                            incumbents.
The committee chair who thought a rhino horn an aphrodisiac found out.
The dead man’s rhino came sans his guards, the oxpeckers.
He was ridden willingly, bareback, he did not expect to survive, he would live to be a                    martyr.
The rhino’s horn, known to overcome fevers and convulsions, cleared, for a time, the halls          of Congress.
The senators who send other people’s children into battle fled.
They reassembled in the cloakroom, they went on with their deal-making.
They agreed it takes a tough skin to be a rhino.

 

“The Book of the Dead Man (Rhino)” appears in Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems, published by Copper Canyon Press.

 

Three books by Marvin Bell were released in 2011: Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems (Copper Canyon); Whiteout,a collaboration with photographer Nathan Lyons, (Lodima); and a children’s picture book, based on the poem, “A Primer about the Flag”  (Candlewick). Since 1985, he has split the year between Port Townsend and Iowa City. For many years Flannery O’Connor Professor of Letters at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he teaches now for the brief-residency MFA based in Oregon at Pacific University, One can see a brief interview with him about writing in the literary video series  “On the Fly,”  and others at Drunken Boat,  Arch Literary Journal, and Poetry Kit.
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Jeff Crandall

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I Am Your Winged Torso of Eros

“Everything breakable in you has been broken . . .”
— Daniel Hall

Archival air belies the dirt they drew me from.
My wings lie crumbled in that ground still.
(Fingers marked unknown in a Reykjavik museum,
one ear completes a French recruiter’s stall.)
Fluorescence pours its green on all of us.
Why then return to face this embarrassment
of cracks and absence, blind luck and loss?

You’ve got it wrong (in sneakers and jeans, the docent’s
sneeze, the guidebook’s backward fold): Let me go
into the world: part saffron-dusted swallowtail,
part fountain jazz, wine and laughlines. The stone
heart erodes, forgotten as a pearl in its fossil shell.
Take, instead, the light sighs . . . I am broken,
yes, but broken like bread — a piece for everyone.

 

Jeff Crandall is a poet and artist living in Seattle.

Derek Sheffield

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Mosses, Slugs, and Mount Rainier

Roethke’s last words to me: “Beefeater all right?”
–Nelson Bentley (1918 – 1990)

 

Leaning forward, cupping an ear
For every student reader, he loved a great refrain
Tinctured with mosses, slugs, and Mount Rainier.

When critics passed over his vision of rapture,
He licked a pencil and penned “Letter to Robert Hayden.”
Leaning forward, cupping an ear,

Students in the back row heard him swear
Roethke’s song could match the mind of Auden.
Tinctured with mosses, slugs, and Mount Rainier,

His classes spilled to the Blue Moon’s bar
For Bud and Blake and windows mottled with rain.
Leaning forward, cupping an ear,

He mouthed words like smoke, dusk, and cincture.
As the Denny clock rang another noon
Tinctured with mosses, slugs, and Mount Rainier,

He gave us our sonnets with circled clutter:
Omit? O, in every concise beauty, Nelson
Leans forward and cups a wakeful ear
Tinctured with mosses, slugs, and Mount Rainier.

 

 

“Mosses, Slugs, and Mount Rainier” is for Professor Nelson Bentley who taught at the University of Washington from 1952 to 1989. This poem was published in Limbs of the Pine, Peaks of the Range: Poems by Twenty-Six Pacific Northwest Poets (Rose Alley, 2007).

Derek Sheffield’s A Revised Account of the West won the Hazel Lipa Environmental Chapbook Award judged by Debra Marquart. His full-length collection was runner-up for the 2012 Emily Dickinson First Book Award. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Orion, The Southern Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review,  Terrain, and Wilderness, and he is the recent winner of an Artist Trust Literary Fellowship. He lives with his family outside Leavenworth, WA, and teaches poetry and nature writing at Wenatchee Valley College.

Christopher Herold

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somewhere
within

the
roar
of
the
falls

birdsong

 

 

Christopher Herold has been writing haiku for more than forty years. He is co-founder and former managing editor of The Heron’s Nest. Six collections of his work have been published. A Path in the Garden received a Haiku Society of America Merit Book Award. In the Margins of the Sea was a winner in Great Britain’s Snapshot Press manuscript competition. Inside Out, was runner-up for a Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. He has received two Museum of Haiku Literature awards. His work has been published worldwide in more than twelve languages. He lives with his family in Port Townsend, Washington.