Category Archives: place

John Davis

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Frango

Today I’m lonely for light brown rain clouds
layered like frango mint ice cream, a flavor
gone the way of downtown department stores—
boarded up or sold. Saturdays I rode the bus
through Industrial Seattle, pulled the bell-cord
at Frederick & Nelson’s, beelined
past perfume counters, ran down brass-railed
stairs, quick right into the Paul Bunyan Room,
spun in my own orbit on a metal stool
until a waitress wearing a black and white

maid dress, hairnet, pencil tucked behind her ear
wiped a rhapsody of handprints and perfect
circles of plates and cups, scribbled frango mint
milk shake on her pad. How I spun,
thrumming, kicking the leg of the stool—
a young John Glenn circling the Earth.
Heaven arrived in a metal container,
condensation sliding down the chalice like angel
blessings. In that first moment of pouring
and swallowing, I was the ice cream, the milk,
the frango, the body and bread of Christ and life

everlasting, Judgment Day, the place
where questions about angels were answered,
sugar traveling to invisible bouffants in my body.
I was every rivet of the metal, was sugar
melting ice, was Marilyn Monroe’s eyes.
Every vessel in my body whispered frango,
frango. On the wall Paul Bunyan ran
in brown and green earth tones. On the stool
I spooned chunks of heaven with my straw,
swallowed, toasted the first day of the universe.

 

“Frango” is reprinted from Jeopardy.

 

John Davis is the author of Gigs (Sol Books) and The Reservist (Pudding House Press.) His work has appeared in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Cider Press Review, Crab Creek Review, Cream City Review, Cutbank, Iron Horse Literary Review, The North American Review, Poetry Northwest, Rio Grande Review, Sycamore Review, and many others. He lives on Bainbridge Island where he teaches high school and performs in rock and roll bands.

Joseph Powell

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MRS. OSBORNE’S CATS

 

Even her porch was lined with boxes,
and cats, rheumy-eyed or clear, lay on shelves
above the washer and dryer, on cupboards and chairs,
or scratched in plastic dishpans filled with sand
spread like pots to catch a leak.

Her dentures didn’t fit, red lipstick
wobbled over wrinkled lips, a thin grime at her temples,
but her sheets were laundered every week.
When she invited me in, the laundryman,
she sat in a rocker and wrote a check
in a slow tottery script, stopping to tell little stories.
I watched the pen pause, hair float in window light.

Her cats were small-town legendary.
And though she had over fifty,
people kept dropping off more.
They walked away without ever going inside
where crusty saucers spotted the floors,
cats ate from the frying pan and dishes on the stove,
and the smell like an animal larger than all the cats together
moved everywhere at once on brown toes.

I didn’t know the inside of her life—
what love had done, the paths ridicule
made through whatever garden she was prone
to dream of, the pathos that seemed an answer,
that nugget of loathing required to love this much
the things others abandoned.

 

Joseph Powell has published five collections of poetry.  The first book, Counting the Change, won the Quarterly Review of Literature’s Book Award in 1986.  The most recent books, Hard Earth (2010) and Preamble to the Afterlife (2013),  were published by March Street.  His book of short stories called Fish Grooming & Other Stories  was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, 2008.  He has also co-written a book on poetic meter called Accent on Meter published by the NCTE in 2004. For his poetry Joseph Powell has won a National Endowment for the Arts Award (2009), an Artist Trust award (2005), and the Tom Pier Award (2006). He has been Central Washington University’s Phi Beta Kappa Scholar of the Year (2004), and was awarded Distinguished University Professor in Artistic Accomplishment (2009). He has taught in the English department at Central Washington University for the last twenty-nine years.

Mark Halperin

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ON THE STEPS OF TEMPLE SHALOM

 

Inside the old, gray stone house,
its eaves trimmed in the flat-board,
Midwest style of the neighborhood,
… the children are learning Hebrew
… and history and to be Jewish
as best they can where Jews are few.

Maybe they are learning to be rare
while old snow melts from the roof
and the sun, absent recently, proves
… it can shine in the blue
… and white sky. These are colors
the children would be sure to notice, who

are learning the flag of Israel
and their ties to all that history.
Recognize them? They’d rather be
… screaming and chasing each other
… under them like other children.
And they will soon, but must wait. More

than one of my uncles would have said
Jews can’t live in Yakima or
the town we drove from. One would be sure
… we’d never be American
… enough, another terrified
we just might, all of them come

too far not to understand
only the shadow of the past
grows, but thinner, more odorless.
… The children sit in a room
… waiting for their parents
to rescue them from Temple Shalom.

They are further away all the time,
as Temple Shalom is, under its blue
and white skullcap. It weathers the distance
… carried even here, the Jew’s
… childlike refusal whose name,
if there is one, like God’s, we must not use.

 

“On the Steps of Temple Shalom” is reprinted from Time as Distance (New Issues/Western Michigan U Press).

 

Mark Halperin’s fifth volume of poetry, Falling Through the Music, was published by University of Notre Dame Press (2007).  He is co-author of Accent on Meter (NCTE), and co-translator of A Million Premonitions, poems from the Russian of Victor Sosnora (Zephyr Press).  Halperin lives near Washington’s Yakima River and fishes avidly.

Lisa Fusch Krause

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Leather

 

We wandered through streets of houses,
each a different possibility;
the black cat curled up on the front mat
could have been mine,
looked like mine

As we walked in the door,
I imagined our clothes in the closet,
our dishes in the sink;
thought where we’d put your TV,
where I’d place my speakers

I imagined the counters cluttered,
the newspaper spread out
across our kitchen table;
waking up to you
standing at the stained-glass window

We tried the house on like new shoes,
walked around—
our toes already beginning
to stretch the leather

 

Originally published in Cascadia Review.

 

Lisa Fusch Krause resides in Seattle, Washington, with her husband, teenage daughter, and two black cats. As a long-time professional editor, she is immersed in words for a living. Lisa has published both poetry and prose in journals such as Respuestas: the Neruda Project,  Artsmith, Cahoodaloodaling, Cascadia Review, and Scissors and Spackle. She thinks of her writing in terms of “snapshots,” capturing images and moments of time.

Charlotte Gould Warren

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THERE WERE DEER BARKING IN THE HILLS

 

When was it—
in between the bridge’s planks—

the river winked at me from below?
Not that blue

I’d seen from the porch,
but a sharpening of knives,

the way, stealth-footed,
dawn opens the doors.

*

Whistling, stropping your razor,
you were the father.

Mother slept late.
Star-flowered jasmine

spilled over the tile roof,
bougainvillea, trumpet vine.

Soon the light
would come.

*

Kishan served us
early breakfast—toast and tea

and half a grapefruit picked
from a tree in our garden.

Oh, it was sweet!
Just the two of us

on the porch at the wicker table
set with knives and sugar.

*

Still in bathrobes, sandals flapping,
we walked across the Jumna, the bridge

not yet crowded, the river far below us,
Allahabad, City of God,

creaking awake on its wooden wheels:
bullock carts, hoof clops, dark leather blinders,

the slow bells of oxen.
I skip-hopped beside you.

Soon the sun would rise,
crinkling the river to a maze of gold,

hiding deeper currents
where snapping turtles scavenged the dead.

*

Mother planted blousey sweet peas, marigolds,
larkspur bruised and iridescent,

colors she cut and carried indoors.
I wanted her to hold me.

*

Mahatma, intransitive verbs,
Mark Twain—

the students adored you.
Their saris and homespun

tied at the waist, you pitched them
basketballs, ran with the javelin,

its shaft shuddering
upright in earth.

I climbed the leathery limbs of the banyan
or watched from the game field, munching chunna.

*

Afternoons, I found you
at home at your desk, scribbling notes

on student papers, coaxing
sermons onto the page.

You lit a hand-rolled cigarette, pet crow
on your shoulder, mongoose

asleep in your tucked-in shirt.
Under the ceiling fan’s

paddle of flies and sun motes,
I climbed into your lap.

*

When was it, you found me, still asleep,
slipped into my pajamas, insistent,

the way the deer’s short barks,
hunted, came breathless?

Always, the day began again,
as if nothing had happened—

insects probing
the ghostly netting,

the hard wooden bed frame
I climbed over to the floor.

The way the sun bore down.

 

“There Were Deer Barking in the Hills” is reprinted from Ghandi’s Lap (The Word Works).

 

Charlotte Warren’s poetry collection, Gandhi’s Lap, won the Washington Prize and publication by Word Works in Washington, D.C.  Her second poetry manuscript was a finalist in both the Phillip Levine and Ashland national contests. Warren’s poems have appeared on Seattle buses as well as in journals such as Orion, Calyx, The Hawai’i Review, The Louisville Review, and Kansas Quarterly. Warren’s recently published memoir, Jumna:  Sacred River, chronicles her childhood in India during its fight for independence from Great Britain in 1947, and her coming of age in the United States as it entered the turbulent sixties. She received her MFA in Writing from Vermont College, and taught part time at Peninsula College in Washington State.  She and her husband have called the Olympic Peninsula home for over forty years, have two grown sons and two grandchildren.

Kevin Minh Allen

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Down Here

 

The thick of it,
the strange of it,
the crux of it.

Everything around here
glows red, even the faces
on brick window ledges.

Old women smile and look ahead.

Bubble tea,
drop-tops
and noodle shops,
one on every corner.

The trash bins are full of people looking for work.

The alleyways echo with the clatter of sudsy dishes,
coughing fits and gobs of spit.

 

Kevin Minh Allen was born Nguyễn Đức Minh on December 5, 1973 near Sài Gòn, Vietnam to a Vietnamese mother and American father who remain unknown to him. He was adopted by a couple from Rochester, NY and grew up in Webster, NY with his two younger sisters. In 2000, he moved to Seattle, WA to pursue a life less ordinary. Kevin has had his poetry published in numerous print and online publications, such as Aileron, Lantern Review, HazMat Literary Review, Chrysanthemum and, most recently, Eye To The Telescope.

 

Richard Wakefield

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At the River

 

From Mary’s Peak the valley’s slow descent

to southward gave our river sweeping wide

meanders. Six or seven miles it went

to cover two or three, from side to side.

Around the stones and over fallen trees

I heard it breathe a languid vowel that fell

from snowfields, sounds suspended through the freeze

of winter, whispered now as if to tell

the secret cold to every lowland field.

Along the banks the trees in colonnade

traced out the vein of water they concealed.

On August evenings families sought the shade

to picnic there, and on the hottest nights

brought cots and strung their tents from lines between

the trees. I lay and watched their lantern lights

blink out upstream and down, then from unseen

encampments heard their voices droning low,

inhaled the scents of cattle, cedar, hay.

Beneath it all I heard the river flow,

forever saying what it had to say.

The farms where all the people lived are gone,

the people gone to graves – or town. The land

lies fallow. Yet the river murmurs on,

some days in words I almost understand.

 

Richard Wakefield has been a reviewer and critic for the Seattle Times since 1985 and has taught writing and American literature at various colleges in the Seattle area since 1979.  His first collection of poems, East of Early Winters, was published by the University of Evansville Press and won the Richard Wilbur Award in 2006.  His collection A Vertical Mile was published by Able Muse Press in 2012.  He and his wife, Catherine, live in Federal Way and have two grown daughters.

 

 

Steven Quig

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Going to the Coast

 

begins with a crush
of drivers not going to the coast,
the crisp, fall evening rushing by your windows,
the warmth from the heater,

darkness of the front seat.
Her hand rests across your thigh.
The damp motel waits quietly for you to arrive
where the manager will greet you

like a favorite nephew, happy
you’re here and press the key to your palm.
“Rm 8” it will say, allowing entrance
to knotty pine and mold,

but you’re not quite there.
You make that turn off the highway
at the red neon—a vacancy for you.
She gently squeezes the back

of your neck, moves her hand
into your hair as the car rolls to a stop,
checks her face in the visor mirror.
You switch off the motor and turn to her,

and the engine ticks as it cools.
Out beyond the beach grass
and the feeble porch lights, the ocean
that you know must be there roars.

 

Steven Quig’s first experience with writing poetry came as a member of Nelson Bentley’s evening poetry workshop at the University of Washington during the early 1980s.   He now teaches English at North Seattle Community College, and his work has appeared in a number of journals including Poetry Northwest, The Seattle Review, The Climbing Arts, The Memphis State Review, Spitball: The Literary Magazine of Baseball, Pontoon, and others, including Metro’s Poetry on the Buses anthology.

Cindy Claplanhoo

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My House-My Place

February 5th: I walk into my place. The one that I trust has been lying
to me. Dinner is burning away in the oven. He is lounging on his sofa
enjoying a bowl of Goodness knows what.

Friday: My Friends and I clean everything. Cobwebs thick with grease
and dust–even the poor spider is mummified in a cocktail of wood
smoke and greasy meals.

Eight truckloads of junk later…

The roof and tarps fall in and blow playfully towards the ocean; free as
a ship loose from its moorings.

The ceilings in the bedrooms crumble. I am upset. I just mopped those
floors. Now it holds a memory of the ceiling.

The wiring begins to pop. The breakers groan. The furnace comes to
life at 2:00 in the silly morning. I watch the sparks fly; as shooting
stars in the grey morning light.

By now my Friends are running for cover. Smiles replaced with
concerned frowns.

The shed door falls off. Someone forgot to prop it up with the stump.

The fridge holds a promise of neglected leftovers. “Sniff it! If it
smells good, eat it.”

No fresh yummy cookies.

No Roast Beast on Sunday.

Chewy Pizza.

Oven won’t work now.

Seven people worked on the hot water tank. It worked for three days.
Monday the main pipes cracked in the cold. It was like a sauna.

“I am so cold! Do you think more blankets around the doors and
windows might help?”

(I am asking my Brother)

“No! Get some leftover Tribal Campaign signs-plywood. Nail ‘em up.
Then you can use your Rez curtains on your bed.” So he laughs….

“What about the ceilings? It’s all messy on the floor.”

(I am asking again)

“Sweep it up! Throw it in the woodstove. You said you were cold.” And
he laughs harder.

And…”Do you think I should try to stay here?”

“Why? Waiting for the other door to fall?”

(Where’s Jack?)

Everyone laughs now.

My Place…

Where’s my motel key?

 

Cindy Lee Claplanhoo is part of an Indian writing group in Port Angeles called “Blood Quantum.” She is from the Makah Reservation, located at the beginning of the United States–Neah Bay. Her given name is Tia–from her Aunt Tan’te. It is Spanish and yes–she is Aunty to fifty-six nieces and nephews and has four beautiful grandbabies too. Cindy works at Makah Forestry and volunteers at MCRC–“The Museum.”  Her project preserving Coastal Native news articles from 1899 to the Present Day inspires her poetry and artwork.  “Wait for me, Grandpa. I am following in your Footsteps.”

 

Ann Spiers

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Bunker Trail, Vashon Island

 

……..New Year’s Eve (8 p.m.)
His body is well dressed
in wool coat and heavy gloves.
His body rides the currents
from the Narrows
north up Colvos Straits,
passes our iced windows
to beach on Dolphin Point.

His body is covered
with care in wool and knit.

……..New Year’s Eve (Midnight)
Sandbags are a mesh of smell,
dormant in stacks of dozens.

Each beach has a load of sand
that migrates back and forth.
We shovel load after load
into bellies of sandbags
in the night and north wind.

Sandbags have a rough stink,
hemp, creosote, and sea mire.

……..New Year (3 a.m.)
For decades, I did this dream,
waking deeper, blacker into its hole.

The cabin splinters, waves work
dark rafters and pilings akimbo,
exposing chairs, children’s bunks.
The fire settles to a fizzle.
Elated to get the task over,

I lean in, pulling our sons
up and up, by the wrists.

 

“Bunker Trail, Vashon Island” is reprinted from 13th Moon, then Nature of an Island, and is forthcoming in Bunker Trail (Finishing Line Press).

 

A Washington native, Ann Spiers is the current Vashon Island Poet Laureate. Her recent chapbooks are Bunker Trail (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming), What Rain Does (Egress Studio Press, Bellingham), A Wild Taste (May Day Press, Shelton), and Long Climb into Grace (FootHills Publ., New York). She leads workshops developing poem cycles for chapbooks.