Category Archives: place

Tom I. Davis

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Grocery Cart in Hangman Creek
For Ozzie

 

There must have been a whistling
of the stainless webs of steel
as it twisted through the dark
and a scraping of the cart

on the parapet as it was lifted
and cast off to drop 250 feet
from Highway 2 traffic-less
in the quiet night.

How it comes to be my joy
in seeing that cart midstream,
spinning the churning water.
I picture the lonely man

full of good humor, angry,
wheeling the wobbly cart
from where it had rested
in the gutter up the hill to haul

his rolled up bedding and his pack,
till at mid-bridge he stopped, lifted
it all over. Heard the whistling
in the dark and strolled off

toward town,
nodding, nonchalant.
Saying “hah” a couple times or so.
That’s the way it was for me.

 

Tom I. Davis was born in the town of Milan on the Little Spokane River in eastern Washington State, has lived in the San Juan Islands and worked in the North Cascade Mountains for the Forest Service. He has worked on fishing boats in Alaska and has taught writing at the college level and aboard Navy vessels in the Western Pacific. Author of 4 books of poetry, Davis’s most recent collection, Soldier of the Afterlife, was published by Gribble Press in October 2012. He lives in Seattle.

 

Brooke Matson

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Twilight

 

The cold brass of sun slides

the evening leaves.

 

Star magnolias spin

on the surface of the pond

 

like a tattered gown.

The moon slips

 

from night’s fingers

as a broad-winged crane descending—

 

no more reason to hold herself

so far above the world.

 

“Twilight” is reprinted from The Moons (Blue Begonia Press, 2012).

Brooke Matson was born and raised on the rural side of Yakima, Washington. She attended Gonzaga University, where she received her B.A. in English and her M.A. in Educational Leadership. Her work has been published in the Blue Begonia Press anthology, Weathered Pages, in 2005. Her first book is The Moons (Blue Begonia Press, 2012). Matson lives in Spokane where she teaches at a small experiential high school.

Clark Crouch

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Goose Creek

 

The creek meanders listlessly
amidst the hills of sand…
a shallow, slender thread of life
feeding the fragile land.

It brings water to our cattle
and makes the meadows green
with grasses as tall as a man
as far as can be seen,

Willow branches droop o’er the stream,
shading the water’s flow,
creating quiet, cool retreats
where man is wont to go.

This little creek flows steadily
as seasons rise and wane,
grandly fulfilling its purpose,
in this prairie domain.

 

“Goose Creek” originally appeared in Thirteenth, a chapbook published by Allied Arts of Yakima Valley for the 13th Annual Juried Poetry Reading and Coffeehouse, April 2007.

 

Clark Crouch was born in Nebraska and was on his own working his way through school as a youthful cowboy from the time he was 12 until he was nearly 18. A veteran of WWII and Korea, he was a government administrator for 32 years, a management consultant for 25 years, and is currently a western and cowboy poet, author and performer. The author of eight books of poetry, he is a two time winner of the Will Rogers Medallion Award for Cowboy Poetry and a four time finalist in annual book competitions of the Western Music Association.

Linda Strever

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Watching a Gull at Cannon Beach

 

You stick your beak into everything:
wave-darkened pebbles, grayed scraps
of litter, drying carcasses, just in case

there’s a soft spot, an organ you can pluck
and swallow down your narrow throat,
something, anything to make a dent

in your hunger. You peck everywhere
along the beach, among things that defy
naming, among your own feathers

until you draw blood. But look,
there’s a pool of sunlight on the sand,
yours for the having, no need to poke

anywhere, just move your craggy feet,
your ruffled wings, lift your head
and draw the sunlight in. It’s a different

kind of emptiness than the one you fear,
a place to rest, to feel warmth on your
back, no need to tuck your wings close

to your body. Instead, spread them
a little. There’s no one here to begrudge
you, to list all your failings. Here

there is only you and sunlight, blinding
and beckoning, a spot of heat
on a stormy beach. You’d be crazy

not to give up the hope of some stagnant
morsel in favor of fullness that cuts
like grace through the clouds. You’d be

crazy not to take your scaly feet and
lopsided wings, your empty belly, your
sharp beak and step into that circle of light.

 

“Watching a Gull at Cannon Beach” is reprinted from Crab Creek Review.

 

Linda Strever’s poetry credits include Crab Creek Review; Spoon River Poetry Review; CALYX, a Journal of Art and Literature by Women; Beloit Poetry Journal; Nimrod, Floating Bridge Review, and others. Winner of the Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize from CALYX Journal, her work has been a finalist for the Spoon River Poetry Review Editors’ Prize, the Crab Creek Review Poetry Award, the Levis Poetry Prize, the Ohio State University Press Award in Poetry, the A. E. Coppard Prize for Fiction, and the William Van Wert Fiction Competition. She has an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and lives in Olympia, Washington.

 

 

Mercedes Lawry

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Whatever the loneliness, drawing closer

 

The French teacher remains unemployed
and yet committed to a daily excursion,
able to walk past any shop, open or closed,
carrying linens or sleek shoes or pears.
Reading the encyclopedia in dim light,
a kind of swimming or prayer. No pets,
no children either and no regrets.
The neighbor notices much of this
but fails to muster compassion,
turning back to the long howl of the blues
and his own preoccupation with philately.
No one is traveling in the corporal sense.
Thin trees cast shadows on the avenue,
suggesting incarceration or clever design
or even a cast of pencils about to scribble
the ultimate piece of fiction, where everyone
is saved, the teacher given gainful
employment and the neighbor, a valuable stamp.
Eradicating loneliness as a sweet rain
begins to fall, amid echoes of the dead, passports
clutched in their shivery hands.

 

“Whatever the loneliness, drawing closer” is reprinted from Happy Darkness (Finishing Line Press, 2011) and originally appeared in Seattle Review.

 

Mercedes Lawry has published poetry in such journals as Poetry, Rhino, Nimrod, Poetry East, Seattle Review, Bellingham Review, and others.  She’s also published fiction and humor as well as stories and poems for children.  Among the honors she’s received are awards from the Seattle Arts Commission, Hugo House, and Artist Trust.  She’s been a Jack Straw Writer, held a residency at Hedgebrook and is a Pushcart Prize nominee.  Her chapbook, There are Crows in My Blood, was published by Pudding House Press in 2007 and another chapbook, Happy Darkness, was released by Finishing Line Press in 2011.  She lives in Seattle.

 

Boyd W. Benson

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The Department of Licensing

 

The large woman who squints up
from behind her desk, her coffee and computer,
and the photos of the smiling family,
asks if I’m an organ donor
and then if I’m a registered voter.
Behind me, across the disinfected
waiting room, a child coughs
whose mother once had someone needle
into the upper, fleshy part
of her breast the name “Mark,” now
yellowed like an old newspaper headline,
who would not vote for me, or me her,
neither of us desiring anything
of the other’s organs.

For a moment, in this glow
from the large window (that should be
a wall) overlooking the parking lot
and my old truck — the light
spilling in upon the polished floor,
the white stucco walls — and for all of us
resigned to the strange need
to license ourselves,
to squint at one another
and cover our coughing mouths
for the betterment of the general public,
this is how it is.

 

Boyd W. Benson spent his youth in Everett and Whidbey Island.  A semi-professional musician, he moved to Idaho in his early twenties and ended up in Clarkston, Washington, where he spent over two decades.  He has recently moved back to Everett.  He’s most comfortable as a cook, but he’s dabbled at many roles.  He taught writing at Washington State University for a decade.  He’s currently trying his hand at freelance writing and, likewise, playing music in Everett, and looking for employment.  All in all, the game of poetry has been very good to him, enabling him to meet and converse with poets and writers he’s always admired, and he would like to thank the various editors and committees that have supported his work.  Since poetry has little or no economic value in a capitalist society, he believes in it highly, and remains humbled by all the poets of Washington.

 

Christopher Luna

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Things to Do in Ghost Town

After Ted Berrigan

 

hide under an awning

dodge killer cars

watch out for skeletal

raccoon-eyed tweakers

wear flip flops in January

begin drinking at noon

take a class

attend an open mic poetry reading

have a crepe

look at some art

laugh at Juggaloes

make a visit to the courthouse

document freight train graffiti

talk to crows, bluebirds, red-breated robins

hunt mushrooms

marvel at hundreds of geese

as they fly by

making Toni cry

pray for sunlight

(never) get used to passive aggressive communication

not knowing where you stand

try not to explode at every unreturned email and phone call

watch a toddler crack her head open

on the jagged edges of the rocks

in the fountain at Esther Short Park

try to forget how you got here

miss friends and family

take walks to the Land Bridge

avoid ghosts along the way

hurtle over tumbling tumbleweeds

start anew

 

 

Christopher Luna is the co-founder, with Toni Partington, of Printed Matter Vancouver, whose books include Ghost Town Poetry, an anthology of poems from the popular Vancouver, WA open mic reading he founded in 2004, and Serenity in the Brutal Garden, the debut collection by Vancouver poet Jenney Pauer. His books include GHOST TOWN, USA  and The Flame Is Ours: The Letters of Stan Brakhage and Michael McClure 1961-1978, an important piece of film and literary history that Luna edited at Brakhage’s request, available on Michael Rothenberg’s BigBridge.org.

 

Elizabeth J. Colen

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EPISODIC TREMOR AND SLIP

 

1.

It’s an active volcano, the mountain: Shuksan. We live in an earthquake zone, calm north on the ring of fire. The house is on stilts for the waves, and rats eat tea biscuits and leave on suggestion. “We will live forever,” you say, meaning them. And the water looks brilliant from here.

Silver, pellucid, much like the sky.

2.

None of us will notice the sunbathers, the tourists trying to surf, the tourists trying to sail. We won’t see the parade of push-pop wrappers scattered in wet sand, we won’t see the cops or the dog watching,

or the kelp strangling posts of the pier.

3.

“It’s a metaphor,” you say. Sun low, wet rocks roll. Your father never hit you. It was the neighborhood kids who cracked eggs in your hair, it was they who brought rocks, had quick fists. Bullets of blood on your forehead, how the scalp will leech into a collar.

But then this, too, is no longer true.

4.

From one window I can see the water and from the other I can see the mountains. These are not real mountains, this is not real water, these are not real windows. I hold your hand and our upstairs disappears.

I think of particles exploding, coming back together like some physics experiment I don’t know the name for. “Large Hadron Collider,” you say.

But that’s not what I mean.

5.

For a long time when you were a child you thought you didn’t exist if your mother wasn’t with you. What was this called? You were invisible and no one spoke to you and the silence supported the theory, except for the bells ringing in doorways and the tap of your loose shoelace. “But did you pass through walls?” I ask and you say this has nothing to do with perte de vue. You lay under chairs while weight creaked the springs. Your mother’s hand came into the frame—

and you were real again, visible, whole.

 

 

Elizabeth J. Colen is the author of poetry collections Money for Sunsets (Steel Toe Books, 2010) and Waiting Up for the End of the World: Conspiracies (forthcoming from Jaded Ibis Press, October 2012, and launching at Hugo House on October 25 at 7:00 pm), as well as flash fiction collection Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake  (Rose Metal Press, 2011). She lives in Seattle and occasionally blogs at elizabethjcolen.blogspot.com.

Ed Skoog

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from MISTER SKYLIGHT

 

Big shot walks up his hat atilt,

a knife fight in his instep, starts laying it on.
The sky falters into the gutters, lobs a few

grenades against the barn, flash and pop,
and the air smells like cat. Am I a cop?
The thought had sprung up. The DJ is half man

and the floor looks like meowing. The idiot sweats.

It chews his haunch. For years now.
Where are the tigers to replace him?

Outside the Long Beach Airport,
pigeons have shat white the loudspeakers
deplaning locals roll suitcases by,

and always someone wears a pink
cowboy hat, or a fur from another climate.
Beside the boy with interlocking skulls

raining on his hoodie, the house sparrow
goes for crumbs of stale bagel.
The pilot’s gold epaulets catch on the cab door.

*

I then am Portuguese, spying through a glass,

leafing through maps up sort of the Nile,
or am returning, my knapsack
a jumble of unbearably small jade statues.

In this pane the gray cloud
is my mother in her housecoat.

Not all craft sink. Moored in a meadow,
the yacht rose above the valley. I found it
after a long time walking alone.

The mountains had battened it down,
scratched out its name.

Any fool could see it was the ark,
sign of some survival, quiet as Ash Wednesday.
I knocked on its ribs and no one answered.

Why should I think of this now?
The park’s closed. She locks the gate,

the carnival attendant, and drives home
to wash her convertible before the sun goes down.

Bring some beers over, she says.

*

Rain trick-or-treats the couple’s door,

but it is their red sedan that has been candied.
The hood glistens like licked cinnamon.

Perhaps I am riding an ox-drawn cart
on the western dip of Cuba’s green moustache.
The oxen are pulling their white thighs

across the water the rice field pours in.
The pepper-trees are turned up to the highest degree.
There is a sunset, finally.

Something is over again. Unbundle the curtain,
hang it on the bar, raise it into the dusky fly.

I dig my beat, sweating. I hold out. I get taken,
who never understands my hunger, its

terrible comfort.

*

A hole as if Skylab has fallen

through the clouds into my disarray,
a precise pouch, precise and utter

removal, force an eye from some dark animal
all pupil, with no center. The alley

tortures.
There is a pavement to her comedy.

Mincemeat dragged through a wet glacier.
A dagger slipping across the continent’s ribcage.
I am one long hear. Put your hand in my mouth,

let me taste, and in return, feel all my orbits.
You think time flies? It falls to earth.

But sometimes evenings after dinner,
the news, the pipe he knocks against the railing,
my father spoke about the time their Buick

tumbled down the hill and she was pregnant
with the first boy, how their comfort spun.

He is still surprised, each moment, how
they rose and dusted themselves off,

and, feeling the baby kick, and, the tires
having landed right, just drove home.

*

The late-night menu mumbles something (inaudible).

Fat roils the smoked turkey in the black skillet,
as I chop mint from Strawberry Creek,
and I am parsing onions, carving peppers,
segmenting celery and measuring flour.

Mister Skylight shines down, full,
engorged, shining on all ships from the gorilla sky.

A lazy brown settles over the dogs and foxes.

Get Skoog with the whale ballet in his head.
Listen, the first alarm. Man the lifeboats.
Then, as neighbors move around their house

at night, shuffling and washing,
help a man who falls in, over and over.
Now all the horses are
poplars waving across the immense field.

Jesus in my nightmare
comes down the gravel driveway,
a teenager in sportswear
go home I say
he says give me your home.

*

This is it, spaceman: life on Earth.

It starts when she turns off the lamp
and points to the city’s orange crown.

Schoolchildren hold up candles
for Mister Skylight’s midnight ride.

By now I could hold it in my palm
or sip from it. From some porches,
the night is more. Get ready

for the all-skate, the group swim.
My hand falls to her lap, our teeth click.

My soul steps outside. Down boulevards
hot rods abduct the day. Saudade

in car wash dust; wind along a post office;
a sprinkler reflected in the windows.
The pool’s open; why aren’t we swimming?

*

On the garbage truck, the runners hang

half-out, undefined. Shouting they lift
lug, tug, huff, drag, and push
up the bright defecations, Chinese take-out

and new Sonys, the granola salad of litter boxes,
acres of bubble wrap, ripped tissues,

fish gone bad like plague, blood clots,
suppositories, diapers, the vomit
of the cancer patient wiped up with Brawny,

rum vomit of the bright girl,

the sheet music to Clair de Lune,
cuttings from a holly, oyster shells
on top, round mirrors of the dawn.

 

“Mister Sky Light” is reprinted from Mister Skylight (Copper Canyon Press, 2009). Most of the book was written in New Orleans prior to 2005, and revised heavily in the aftermath of the engineering failure that flooded the city following Hurricane Katrina.

 

Ed Skoog’s second book of poems, Rough Day, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2013. His first book, Mister Skylight, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2009. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Paris Review, The New Republic, Poetry, Narrative, Ploughshares, Tin House, and elsewhere. He has been a Bread Loaf Fellow, Writer-in-Residence at the Richard Hugo House, and the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Residence at George Washington University. His work has received awards from, among others, the Lannan Foundation and the Poetry Society of America. He is a visiting writer at the University of Montana for 2012-2013. He lives in Seattle.

Christine Deavel

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from Hometown (Over and Over)

The starchy yarn of spring came
and knitted itself into a blue hyacinth
then unraveled that
and tatted itself into a columbine
then snipped it up
coated it in paste
and spread itself out to make a sky
but cut a small patch
to suggest a doorway
and gave the tiny remnant
to a little girl who
walked about the town below
opening and closing
the little blue door.

* * *

Remind me,
what was our tithe?                                                                                                                         The peony flowers.
What were our jewels?                                                                                                                   The peony buds.
What was our relief?                                                                                                                       The peony shoots.
Who kept watch for us?                                                                                                                 The peony roots,                                                                                                                       set so shallow                                                                                                                           the eyes could nearly see.

 

“Hometown (Over and Over)” is reprinted from Woodnote (Bear Star Press, 2011).

 

Christine Deavel is co-owner of Open Books, a poetry-only bookstore in Seattle, and has worked as a bookseller for over two decades. Her collection Woodnote received the Dorothy Brunsman Prize from Bear Star Press in 2011 and the Washington State Book Award for Poetry in 2012.