Category Archives: place

Judith Yarrow

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The Immigrant

He came, an immigrant, my father’s father,
to these lush valleys, marshlands, streams,
the hills glacier-scraped to subsoil
glacier-covered with stones, gravel, and silt.
On land grown over with fir and alder, he found
timber for house and barn, wood for cooking
in the dark mornings and long, dark afternoons
of rainy winters, green and damp as any
Norwegian spring, a paradise.
………………………………………With work
and luck, a lot of work—and luck is what you make it—
a man could raise a family here, build
a farm to last through all the generations.
No more beatings at the hand of the sea, no more
renting land, no more logging for the bosses.
A wife, children, beds filling room
after room, and neighbors near
enough to help but not to crowd.

……………………………………..A man could live a life
and forget how things change beyond calculation:
children grown, and gone, the barn slowly
melting into the earth of its timbers,
family and farm both long altered,
his hard-shelled dreams now gone to weed,
though he’d find traces still of what he planted.

 

“The Immigrant” is reprinted from New to North America: Writings by Immigrants, Their Children and Grandchildren (1997).

 

Long-time Seattle resident, Judith Yarrow is a poet, artist, editor. She has published two poetry chapbooks, The Immigrant and Borderlands. Her poems have appeared in Cicada, Clear-cut: An Anthology of Seattle Writers, Duckabush Journal, Edge: International Arts Interface, Bellowing Ark, North Country Anvil, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband in Southeast Seattle.

D. C. Miller

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Keeping Bees Since the Eruption

 

Since you found the burst of fireweed
where the scorched bear plied the chomping brook,
saw crimson blooms squeeze through rent cedar,
told the ladies there are flowers
tasseling for the rest of their lives,
bore them up St. Helens’ spine,
faced their doors toward morning sun
where guard bees wing the gray mist fleeing,
felt the singe of venom in your veins, imagined
fresh comb full-capped, plugged with honey,
interred the dead in ash, and set
her white mansions where earth fell apart—
you can wait with them for the dawn.

Since you were stung in the night,
each sting union and requiem—
you feel the earth’s spin,
understand the dance of bees.
You sense in every Apis mellifera
renewal and matriarch,
and when you push your way
through cheek-high flowers, the bees,
a galaxy of copper stars with frail wings,
the swarm is ether, zuzzing a new skyline.

 

“Keeping Bees Since the Eruption” is reprinted from North American Review.

 

D.C. Miller stumbles up to alpine country regularly, guides ocean kayakers to the B.C. coast, and sorely tries to avoid the ER, from close encounters with the teeth of his Great Pyrenees dog.  Although his commercial beekeeping days are over, he continues to urge small females to fly into his heirloom apples to lick flowers. When not writing, you can find him tethered to “Barkley”, dragged to new heights in the Columbia Gorge &  North Cascades.  He lives in White Salmon.

Leigh Clifton Goodwin

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the home place

 

some folks say
it’s where
when you have to go there,
they have to take you.

So that’s not wrong
so far as it goes
but it’s a bit unkind, maybe —
unprodigal.

I say
it’s where
when you want to go there
so badly you’ll give up your easy
anonymous wallow,
pick up responsibility again
put it on like a clean shirt,
accept the recognition
of your place in the sweet slow
mechanics of family —

it’s where
when you want to go there
so much you’ll give up
lifting nothing,
to regain the quiet beating weight
that’s everything —

they’ll bear you joyously
over the familiar threshold,
and only say
we’re glad.

We’re glad you’re here at last.

 

Leigh Clifton Goodwin has put in time as a bartender, a maid, a shipwreck victim and a very reluctant banker.  She has had poems published in Crab Creek Review, Drash: Northwest Mosaic, and A Sense of Place: The Washington State Geospatial Poetry Anthology. In early 2011, Leigh accidentally began writing a poem-journal of the cycle of a Seattle year, and has been observing developments with interest.

Graham Isaac

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A Tool Breaks Its Promise

 

You tricked me, leafblower! out amongst
the lawns, admiring my own arms for

their usefulness, peeled bark, owned houses,
guidelines toward mulch. I wanted you

to be the wind, harnessed, I wanted
you to make me God. But like the firehose

or blender or hangglider before you, this is a
clumsy toy, a dignity steal for men in buttoned

shirts even on their day off. Listen: my home
is my castle and the lawn is my moat and the

leaves, they are alligators, even in the fall.
You’ve punchlined me, set me to the neighborhood

council in apology rags, contrition tie, shame loafers.
I drive back, my satnav malfunctioning, Joe,

over there, on his riding mower, grinning,
near asleep in his beer.

 

“A Tool Breaks Its Promise” is reprinted from Wonder And Risk. 

 

Graham Isaac is a writer and performer living in Seattle, Washington. Previously he lived in Swansea, Wales, where he attained a Masters of Arts in Creative and Media Writing from University of Wales Swansea, and co-founded The Crunch, an open mic for spoken word. He co-curates the Claustrophobia reading series and was one of the organizers behind the Greenwood Lit Crawl. His work has appeared in various journals, including Licton Springs Review, Your Hands Your Mouth, Hoarse, The Raconteur (UK), Beat the Dust and more. He is allergic to cats.

C. Albert

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Runaway

In a new city, I meet the arranged
apartment with green carpets in sad
basement light. When I take
my first walk, a dog rushes
at me and barks for a long while;

I become stone. In the Beacon Hill
market, I ask for a bottle of California
Riesling because already I miss
the terrain I left. The checker tells me
that every morning he thanks the saints
he is alive and eats seven eggs
for breakfast.

For a moment, I am loved
by his eyes. This isn’t home
but another place I will dream
of coming back to.

“Runaway” is reprinted from The View from Here.

 

 

C. Albert regularly publishes poetry and collage at ink sweat and tears where she is Artist in Residence. Other publications include Wicked Alice, Centrifugal Eye, The View from Here, Monarch Review. . . She is currently conducting experiments with photography and box art.

 

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.

Charles Leggett

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NOVEMBER STORM BREAK

So dense and swift these clouds, it’s the tanned olive
moon that seems to move;
as if into this wind your life will lean
susceptible to imagery, the inwrought
pull of all these metaphors we live
in. Now look—the mien
even of the drape is fraught

with it: coronas, eyes recoiling off
the ceiling; or a gaff
trickles the storm drain; or a stage’s curtain
murmur passing cars; the blowsy skein
of each second, frozen-framed, a tea leaf
scholium, a garden
in a cartoon hurricane.

 

“November Storm Break” is reprinted from Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry.

 

Charles Leggett is a professional actor based in Seattle, WA.  Recent publications include Bottle Rockets, The Centrifugal Eye, and Cirque.  Others include The Lyric and Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry; work is forthcoming in Big Pulp, GlassFire, Constellations and Graze Magazine.  His long poem “Premature Tombeau for John Ashbery” was an e-chapbook in the Barnwood Press “Great Find” series.

 

Thomas Hubbard

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Foggy Places

Funny thing about places, Tootsie, they’re everywhere. On the other hand, there’s only one place: everywhere. Still such a clear memory, your little cabin on Blanchard Mountain. Now that was a place.

The guy you rented it from found new tenants, somebody told me. I wonder, do our ghosts, yours and mine, still shower together in that tiny bathroom and wash one another? Did your oak table and stained glass lamp and all your candle holders leave shadows when you carted them away to wherever you live now? When new renters climb the stairs each night, do they feel warmth, passing that shelf where your mother’s photograph perched? She looked like a very interesting woman, an obsessive lover, perhaps. Sometimes I wished to have known her, but you always said she would have ruined me. Maybe so, enit? Anyhow, she was already dead, after going broke and crazy in her mansion. And some days I feel ruined.

Cold lurks outside this window where I stay now. The temperature isn’t remarkable, but it numbed my fingers just walking inside from the car. It came last evening and stayed over. Something in common with Blanchard Mountain, eh? And this winter fog seems sad, doesn’t it. Maybe the fog remembers all Blanchard Mountain’s lovers from time’s beginning? Maybe this fog weeps with their music, droplets clinging to those few leaves of last summer still unreleased, each reflecting this brand new, unfamiliar world.

 

 

Thomas Hubbard is a mixed-blood, of (probably) Cherokee, Miami, Irish and English ancestry who grew up among factory workers in the fifties midwest.  A teacher of writing and other subjects, he has worked also as a carpenter, blues musician and freelance writer. He won the Seattle’s Grand Slam in 1995, and since has written three chapbooks, Nail and Other Hardworking Poems, Junkyard Dogz, and Injunz.  He has also published an anthology including 32 spoken word performers, titled Children Remember Their Fathers.  His poetry, fiction and reviews have been published in numerous journals.  Hubbard has served as vice president of the board of directors for the Washington Poets Association, and currently serves on the editorial staff of two magazines: Raven Chronicles and Cartier Street Review.

Jeffrey Morgan

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The Rental

 

The stairs to the basement sound like an animal in another language.
I smell mold, but think about God and try to understand

His attention like a particle that might not exist.
Realtors have a way of speaking that means nothing

to me: proximity to transportation; square footage and usable space.
I step into the closet to be polite. I think it would be funny

to moan like a ghost, but don’t. I like the wastefulness of long hallways
on every floor, the new refrigerator’s virginal magnetism.

I feel obligated to flush each toilet.
She asks me what I do. She asks me if I have children.

I listen to water moving in the pipes and condense my face
in a way I hope conveys approval. She wonders what I’m holding together,

and I want to explain all the invisible forces.

 

 

“The Rental” is reprinted from Third Coast.

 

Jeffrey Morgan is the author of Crying Shame (Blazevox, 2011). Newer poems appear, or will soon, in Barrow Street, Bellevue Literary Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Pleiades, Diode, Third Coast, and West Branch, among others. He lives in Bellingham, WA and blogs very occasionally at Thinnimbus.tumblr.com.

Sean Bentley

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Cathedral

The cathedral was swathed in scrims
and scaffolding; sandblasters scoured
off the grime of the century.
We’d found the door like the loose
end of a bandage to begin the unraveling.

Now from the observation deck halfway up St. Paul’s,
from which London flowed
lava-like in all directions, sun-shot
and hazy, we spiraled down hardwood steps,
537, like maple seedlings toward terra firma,
past grafittoed names knifed into stucco
two, three hundred years ago,
stairs buffed, darkened, eroded
by generations of feet, the pious or curious.

Through occasional windows like arrow slits
the city revealed itself but we were encased
in the entrails of history. We continued
to the crypt, cool and oddly
bright to help us see the residents
beneath, behind, stone slabs incised
with names and dates like the walls,
with lore, with epitaphs. Henry Moore,
his plaque as angled and unMoore-like
as the rest, Samuel Johnson, Bulwer-
Lytton, the great Turner at our feet
and back, and back, to Blake,
bust black, globe-pated and pugnacious.

Until well warmed, parched, awed,
we gravitated to the crypt café
where across from the tea dispenser
a great placard served as tombstone
for those who’d lain here before the first
cathedral fell in the Great Fire.
Including–holy crow!–King Ethelred,
died 1016. It sank in
as we chewed our sandwiches, absorbing
the ancient holy space transmogrified

to museum. We bought our postcards
and replicas of Roman coins and exited
into the blast of summer London, the stink
of tourist buses. The priest intoned
as the door shut
about this week’s Iraqi deaths, the Sudanese,
the war, wars, never far despite the lessons
we should have learned since Ethelred ruled.

We wished for peace, change
as incremental, imperceptible as the bending
of all those sturdy stairs to the persistent
will of foot after foot after patient foot.

 

Sean Bentley is currently focusing on photography, as well as nonfiction. But it’s probably just a phase. He is the son of Nelson and Beth Bentley, and born in Seattle.  He was coeditor of Fine Madness magazine from 1984 to 2006, and is president 1998-2000 of Friends of Nelson Bentley. Visit the web site for a list of Sean Bentley’s publications, sample poetry and fiction, etc. He lives in Bellevue and works as a technical writer for Tyler Technology. Sean Bentley’s poetry collections include: Grace & Desolation: New Poems (Cune Press, 1996),  Instances: Poems (Confluence Press, 1979), and Into the Bright Oasis (Jawbone Press, 1976).