Category Archives: place

Janet Norman Knox

Posted on by
Reply

Wyckoff Superfund Site Sheetpile Wall
After Matthea Harvey

 

Consider the wall, its forced embrace,
holding back, holding arm’s length.

Consider the salt, its corrosive face,
trading electrons for rust,

turning iron to ore to dust
to its mantle-fed home.

Home to the wall
to consider its inside, faced

with floating
oil, sinking blebs—

like canola, molasses, caramel
to coat a face

of wood against sea—home
of many eating things.

Consider your face, its flush
of bacteria coating,

trace the line of your cheek,
one finger trading

a trail of cells
mine to yours, yours

on my fingertip holding
an armful of home.

 

 

Seven-time Pushcart nominee and finalist for the Discovery/The Nation Award, Janet Norman Knox’s poems have appeared in Los Angeles Review, 5 AM, Crab Creek Review, Rhino, Diner, Seattle Review, Adirondack Review, Poetry Southeast, Red Mountain Review, and Diagram. Her chapbook, Eastlake Cleaners When Quality & Price Count [a romance] received the Editor’s Award (Concrete Wolf, 2007). She received the Ruskin Poetry Prize (Red Hen Press) in 2008. The Los Angeles Review nominated her for 2010 Best New Poets. Her poetry was used by composer Paul Lewis for his 2006 opera, Last Poem on Earth. She participated in a 2011 Jack Straw Foundation Grant in collaboration with artist Syracuse University Professor Anne Beffel. Janet Norman Knox is also an owner of 25-year old Pacific Groundwater Group, an environmental and water resource consulting firm. She is an Environmental Geochemist specializing in contaminant investigations and cleanup like a doctor of the land.

Janet will be giving a Pocket Concert at the Seattle Repertory Theatre on September 28, 2012.

UPDATE:  Janet Knox’s poem, “Carbon Shining on our Faces” is worked into bars of glycerin soap available from the Brightwater Environmental Education Center for a limited time.  (September 30, 2013)

Sarah Zale

Posted on by
1

 

Diego Rivera: Industrial Detroit Murals
a pecha kucha

 

[Baby in the Bulb]

If a child, fetal in the womb
of a daffodil, growing heart and brain
and petals that protect with careless poison,
what will we say of spring—the world in bloom?

[Fruits and Vegetables]

During the first revolution of the human journey,
we cultivated einkorn, barley, and figs. The second
revolution: steam, gas, and combustion engines.
Now, it is coming, a great turning—a new way
of listening, of creating. Of understanding seed.

[Four Races]

It is hard work. They call themselves Fire or Air,
Earth, Water. They answer to North, South, East
or West. One says Call me Coal or Iron, Limestone,
Sand. It does not matter to the heart, the volcano,
the furnace. As they work, they are steel.

[Self-Portrait]

He cannot fool himself. The eyes of the Other stare
back like a mirror. He picks up his palette and brush
and paints his own face into the crowd. There he is,
the man with a hat and brown eyes.

[Conveyer Belt]

On my left you rise, I pull then lean and lift
into the wait of the pull to my right. Some hear
music. Some say machine, some say dance.
Every line of your life crosses your face.

[Manager and Worker]

I am the sound of steam and sweat.
You are ear. When I smoke after dinner,
you hear me exhale. When I make love
to my wife and she calls out my name,
you sigh.

[Poison Gas]

Workers put gas in a bomb. They put pyrethroids in a can.
Wilfred cannot pronounce it. He says dulce, he says
hissss. He says a spider will jump, run, do flips
to its back, roll back to its feet. Repeat till it dies.

[Hands]
It is an old story. Hands rise, fingers empty
and craggy as talons. Some formed as fists.
Others are molten and alive, and of the earth.
They fold around augite, quartz, mica, feldspar.

[Airplanes]

A manager in the aviation capital of America
hires a worker to build a plane. A woman flies
to Chicago to see her daughter. An army pilot learns
to drive a “tin goose.” A dove enters the open eye
of the engine fan, beneath the center blades.

[Half Face, Half Skull]

Sometimes, in the dark, I look
into the mirror and see my death.
I am not afraid. I offer my hand and we go
back to bed.

[Stamping Machine]

No longer listen to wind through tall grass
nor ride the pull of ripples across water.
So says this god, our creation. We miss
Coatlicue. She with her head of snakes
only asked for human blood.

[People on Tour]

People enjoy the zoo. They say
the animals act almost human. Men in fedoras
talk to their watches. The Katzenjammer kids
pull another prank. Foolish, say the monkeys,
and never laugh.

[Engine Dog]

The ancients used a guide for passage
to the next world. Charon ferried the dead
across the River Styx. Pre-Columbians chose
a Colima dog. My brother plans to drive himself
behind the wheel of a 4-valve, V-8 engine.

[Predella Panels]

During the Hunger March, he saw
even blood in shades of grey. One day
someone will paint his story. The world
will know more than the grisade of his life.

[Spindle Machine]

My job is about boring holes
in engine blocks. After work, I go out for beers
with Quetzalcoatl, Muhammad, Krishna,
Siddhartha, and the new guy, Jésus.

[La Raza Cósmica]

The Census Bureau does not list
el espiritu as a race, yet here we are,
working side by side, of one blood.
Por mi raza hablará el espiritu.

[Vaccination]

Whether a child is the son of God
or the son of a scientist, aviator, inventor,
we look at him with hope. We are sure we have time
to do good things. We are sure we are forgiven.

[River to Fordlandia]

Some men like to tame the land, some like
to tame other men. They forget they are only men
and others are not clay. On the third day, he created land,
and a river from Detroit to Brazil.

[Night Foreman]

I am 45th on the assembly line of 84 steps.
The guy next to me places an engine. I add a bolt.
It is a game of interchangeable parts. Bricker says
93 minutes is too long to build a Tin Lizzie.

[Miller Street Bridge]

It is the end of March and bitterly cold. I count
the stairs to the bridge: one, two, three–Joe,
Joe, another Joe. Four, Cole. Shot and buried
with union on their lips. Black Curtis, five.
His ashes like snow dot the cemetery soil.

 

“Diego Rivera: Industrial Detroit Murals” is reprinted from Sometimes You Do Things (Aquarius Press; March 2013).

View the murals.

 

Sarah Zale teaches writing and poetry in Seattle. She holds an MFA in poetry from Goddard College. The Art of Folding: Poems was inspired by her travels to Israel and Palestine. Sometimes You Do Things: Poems will be published March 2013 (Aquarius Press, Living Detroit Series). The title poem appears in Floating Bridge Review 3. Naomi Shihab Nye awarded “September 24, 1930: The Last Hanging in Michigan” as a finalist in the 2011 Split This Rock Poetry Contest. Zale’s work is in the anthology Come Together, Imagine Peace, a finalist for the 2009 Eric Hoffer Award. She lives in Port Townsend.

Muriel Nelson

Posted on by
Reply

The Widow Kramer
Ritzville, Washington, 1918

 

In billowing black, her pitchfork raised, she
chased a coyote out into her wheat.

Behind her: children,
horses, milk cow, chickens, geese,
ghost of a man,

sagebrush, mountain
range, width of a country, an ocean,
a sea, length of the Volga, a war,

ghost of the town
she called home.

 


“The Widow Kramer” previously appeared in Part Song (Bear Star Press).

Muriel Nelson has two collections of poems: Part Song, winner of the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Book Prize (Bear Star Press, 1999), and Most Wanted, winner of the ByLine Chapbook Award (ByLine Press, 2003).  Nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, her work has appeared in The New Republic, Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Seattle Review, and several anthologies, and on Verse Daily and Poetry Daily.  She holds master’s degrees from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the University of Illinois School of Music, and lives in Federal Way.

 

 

Hannah Faith Notess

Posted on by
Reply

Meditation on the Divine Blueness with Two Pop Songs
Rishikesh, India

 

It’s just that in “My Sweet Lord” George Harrison
sounds so Jesusy, with his platoon of earnest handclappers
and strummers on backup, transparent

like the Maranatha choruses of my childhood
slapped verse by verse onto the overhead projector.
And so I start to think it’s really still 1968 here.

I got the song’s joke the first time, but here
I hear it for myself—in the Rishikesh German Indian
Chinese Israeli Continental Bakery—Hare Krishna

is just two syllables away from Hallelujah
and “My Sweet Lord” is not even two notes away
from “He’s So Fine” (doo lang doo lang doo lang)

and Jesus is just two notes away from Krishna
but in flesh-colored makeup, too shy to show us
his true blue skin. It’s 1968, and the Beatles

are decked in saffron garlands,
posing in a row around the Maharishi,
this gleaming green river behind them,

under a god’s skin blue February sky. It’s 1968
and I’m staring at the same green February water, wishing
the Australians upstairs would just

put the damn sitars away. Any minute now
it’ll be 1971, and George’s new backup singers
will get out their tambourines and start clapping

like some scruffy kids picked up at a beachside revival, squinting
at the transliterated mantras Rama Rama Hare Hare.
It’s 1971 and—really, I’m not stoned—the Chiffons

are suing George Harrison for royalties
(doo lang doo lang doo lang) and incidentally, Krishna
is suing Jesus because he thought of incarnation first.

Jesus swears it was an accident; he didn’t mean to copy,
but the court doesn’t care. And anyway, it’s 1975 now and my dad,
long-haired, is sitting cross legged in a work shirt

and bell bottoms with a guitar
on somebody’s living room floor in Virginia,
strumming the same chords, a mimeographed

scripture song. I really wanna see you Lord, but it takes
so long my Lord. It’s 1975 and the Chiffons are recording
My Sweet Lord (doo lang doo lang doo lang)

as a joke: the magic’s over. We missed the real thing.
I know there are so many Indias, but this is one
of mine. It’s 1975 and night is falling

on the hill above the bakery, where the hostel
owner—just a girl—leads us into a room
the color of Krishna, the color of Shiva’s throat

when he swallowed the poison. There we lay down
our bags. The posters on the wall—a parade
of Krishnas, the fat baby stealing the milk,

him posing on a lotus with His blue rolls of baby fat,
then Radha and her blue boyfriend
wrapped in two versions of the same green sari

so close, so fine you couldn’t call them anything
but Radhakrishna (doo lang doo lang doo lang)
taped to the ceiling, the way the world’s teenage girls

taped the Beatles to their ceilings, till the corners yellowed
and peeled, till the magic faded. We’ll sleep there, safe under
Krishna’s gaze, so peaceful in God’s blue belly.

 

 

 

Hannah Faith Notess is managing editor of Seattle Pacific University’s Response magazine and the editor of Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical, a collection of personal essays. She earned an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University, where she served as poetry editor for Indiana Review. Her poems have appeared in Slate, Rattle, Crab Orchard Review, Los Angeles Review, Poet Lore, So To Speak, The Christian Century, and Floating Bridge Review, among other journals. She lives in Seattle.

 

Christianne Balk

Posted on by
1

John Muir in the Sequoias
August, 1870

 

Enough of the winds tearing through Merced
Canyon’s boulder-choked gorge, enough
of the stampedes muddying Moss Creek.
Enough hoofed catastrophes. I’ll ride them

all out in these root-caves, framed
with the purple-tinged bark of buttressed
trunks in an unnamed grove. Too tired
of tales of the ground’s cataclysmic quakes –

valleys bottomed out, pine trees tossed,
cedar, oak, gusts snapping massive limbs,
and the sudden rush of flame –
to even imagine fire grazing these old,

close-packed leaves. Spinning, zigzagging,
burning back, surging, scorching every living
thing. Roaring updrafts filling branches filled
with cones. Ashes settling, smoking litter cooling

slowly. The air dark with incense, charred
stumps. Blackened hollows like the one I sit in.
From this loud storm drifts
chestnut snow, down from the quiet

canopy, each fleck smaller than a grain
of flax, a cloud of hope released from tight
cone scales opened by the heat,
flurries of small, flat-winged seeds.

 

“John Muir in the Sequoias” first appeared in Words and Pictures Magazine.
Christianne Balk’s books include Bindweed and Desiring Flight. After majoring in biology at Grinnell College, she studied English at The University of Iowa. Her poems have appeared in The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Alhambra Poetry Calendar, The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and other anthologies and journals. She lives in Seattle with her husband and daughter.

Richard Brugger

Posted on by
Reply

381 E. Cordova Street

 

There’s a bleak whiteness
on Cordova Street mixed
with rain and battleship gray.
Smiles are sad, even laughter has an eerie clang.
Whispers prevail and a fog off Burrard Inlet
settles in at four o’clock as the Sisters’ Sandwich Line wraps
itself halfway around the block to the back alley
where wine, urine, vanilla extract and after-shave commingle
into sickly stench. Men and women in their twenties, thirties
forties and fifties have a sameness of pallor and age,
share needles, jugs and sex.

A half-crazed, rheumy-eyed woman
knocks on my parish door insisting I exorcise her.
I protest with words she can’t comprehend
like, “needing the archbishop’s permission,” and “needing the holiness I do not have.”
Nothing I say matters. In frustration I give her my blessing….
the one I’d bestow on a child, a rosary, a holy card.
She thanks me. I watch her step out of my door,
walk down the steps to the sidewalk
belt across Cordova Street, not looking east or west,
oblivious to swirling traffic. She makes it. I wonder how.

 

 

In 2012, Dick Brugger was named City of Auburn’s First Poet Laureate. He served as executive director of Auburn Youth Resources for twenty-one years prior to his retirement in 1997. In 1983 he was named Auburn Area Citizen of the Year. For another twenty-one prior years, Brugger was a Franciscan Friar and Roman Catholic priest. His poetry has appeared in PAWA Quarterly, Do Something & Other Poems, and PoetsWest Literary Journal. His prose has appeared in Heart of the Matter.  In 2009, the main Auburn Youth Resources building was named The Brugger Building.

“381 E. Cordova Street” was made into an animated video by Dick Brugger’s daughter,  artist Jessie Brugger:

Peter Ludwin

Posted on by
1

Notes from a Sodbuster’s Wife, Kansas, 1868

 

What really got us in the end—
we women who didn’t make it,
who withered and blew away in the open—
was the wind. Space, yes, and distance,
too, from neighbors, a piano back in Boston.

But above all, the wind.

In our letters it shrieks hysteria from sod huts,
vomits women prematurely undone by loneliness,
boils up off the horizon to suck dry
their desire as it flattened the stubborn grasses.
Not convinced? Scan the photographs,
grainy and sepia-toned, like old leather.
Study our bony forms in plain black dresses,
our mouths drawn tight as a saddle cinch,
accusation leaking from rudderless eyes, betrayed.

I tried. Lord knows I tried.
Survived the locusts and even snakes
that fell from the ceiling at night,
slithering between us in bed.
I dreamed of water, chiffon, the smell
of dead leaves banked against a rotting log.
I heard opera, carriage wheels on cobblestone.
Cried and beat my fists raw into those earthen walls.

The wind. Even as it scoured
the skin it flayed the soul,
that raked, pitted shell.
And how like the Cheyenne,
appearing, disappearing,
no fixed location,

not even a purpose one could name.

 

 

Peter Ludwin lives in Kent, Washington.  He is the recipient of a Literary Fellowship from Artist Trust.  His first book, A Guest in All Your Houses, was published in 2009 by Word Walker Press. His second, Rumors of Fallible Gods, was a finalist for the 2010 Gival Press Poetry Award, and will be published this summer by Presa Press.  For eleven years Ludwin has been a participant in the San Miguel Poetry Week in Mexico. He works as an art show manager, and loves to travel, having most recently visited the Tibetan region of Sichuan Province,China.

 

Sheryl Clough

Posted on by
Reply

Exit Glacier

 

Harding Icefield’s chilled womb pushes
the infant glacier toward the terminal
moraine sprawled on Resurrection River.
As other infants’ skull bones knit together,
Exit’s crack and cleave, blue fissures thrust in thunder.
She flings herself down from the nunataks
past heather, avalanche lilies and beargrass.
She crushes hillsides into plains,
hundred-year Sitka spruces to toothpicks,
boulders to glacial flour,
the power in her weight a blue statement
on the way to the grave.

 

“Exit Glacier” originally appeared in Spindrift. 

Sheryl Clough received her MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where she designed and taught UAF’s first writing course linked to environmental literature.  Her writing appears in Spindrift, Explorations, Storyboard, Sierra, Travelers Tales, Soundings Reviewand others.  Sheryl’s kayak adventure story “Icebergs in My Dreams” was published in the Seal Press anthology Solo: On Her Own Adventure.   Sheryl edited the new poetry anthology, Surrounded:  Living With Islands, available through Write Wing Publishing.

Joanne M. Clarkson

Posted on by
1

Sky of Four Sisters

 

Four firs marked the northern edge
of our acres. Our welcome, we
watched them for miles calling us
home. Our warriors, they shielded us
from the worst of winter storms, moss
cushioning our ice. In summer we
camped beneath their feathered
shade, lazy with evergreen breezes.

“We live at Four Sisters,” we would say
and everyone knew our place.

So that after a lightning strike took down
the eastern-most tree, we didn’t change
our address, still seeing her sway
like a Kirlian print, pinnacle home to falcon
and crow, needles a mist of cocoon spin.

‘Four Sisters’ on a mailbox;
how memory continues a sacred name.
How some bonds have such deep
roots, that even the wind
honors their space.

 

“Sky of Four Sisters” was previously published in Caesura.

 

Joanne M. Clarkson is the author of two books of poems: Pacing the Moon (Chantry Press) and Crossing Without Daughters (March Street Press). Her work has appeared recently in Hospital Row, Amoskeag Review, Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease, and Shadow and Light: A Literary Anthology on Memory. She has a Master’s Degree in English and has taught but currently works as a Registered Nurse specializing in Hospice and Community Nursing in Olympia.

Sibyl James

Posted on by
1

Twisp, Washington

 

Back east, they’d call these foothills mountain,
but you learn to map a different scale here
where the road west of you keeps rising
into a pass closed Thanksgiving to April,
where yards of rusted Ford bodies
and wringer washers aren’t lack of pride
but history to people that don’t read books,
a comfort of real things to talk
and tinker about, drawing off the restlessness
that comes between Saturday nights.

You could live a good winter here,
rent rooms in any grey weathered house
and watch the snow shift on porch chairs
left out ready for spring. Eat venison
and brown gravy at the Branding Iron
every Sunday, and walk it off
on the ridge behind the old copper mine
with that pack of scavenger horses and mules
snorting at your heels, and your own breath clouds
frozen at your lips like cartoon speech.
You won’t need much talk here
where the names of things get crystal
and definite as that frozen air, something to exchange
hand to mittened hand on the morning bridge.
“Neighbor” is the guy who takes your shift
the day the baby’s born. “Love”’s the years
of Saturday nights she’s held your head above the john.

When the sawmill shuts down, the quiet
goes sharp and ebony behind a fine mesh of stars.
The creek runs louder than the road then, a sound
drawing you out to walk until the frost patterns your eyes,
and the cold burns in your blood like a hunger
for coffee and wood smoke, turning you back to town.

In one good winter, you could get so solitary here
that you’d forget the name for lonely,
until the spring came, surprised you
like the sound of ice breaking under the bridge.
It would be the day you swept the snow from porch chairs,
the night you stayed past closing in the Branding Iron
while the waitress shared Wild Turkey on the house,
let you talk until she turned the empty bottle over,
smiling, handing you the news the pass was open,
like a word she’d dusted off that morning
and knew you’d just turned foreign enough to use.

 

 

Sibyl James has published nine books, including The Adventures of Stout Mama (fiction), China Beats (poetry) and, most recently, The Last Woro Woro to Treichville: A West African Memoir. She has taught in the US, China, Mexico, and–as Fulbright professor–Tunisia and Cote d’Ivoire.