Category Archives: animal

Mary Elizabeth Gillilan

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DRUNK LIKE THAT

 

1
A cloudburst over the bird yard
turkeys gone to church—mouths agape
heads up

Grandma shakes her head, rheumy eyes
stare past something
I cannot see

She pours me Boston coffee, milk
and Folgers equal parts, I blow circles
across the top of the cup

Drown—they’d as soon drown
mean too—Grandma with her cane
shooed the cloud devotees back
to the barn. Her red Irish head soaked
and black round eye glasses smeared
with dust and rain.

2
Bare-footed and wrapped in Mama’s
hot pink shawl, tonight I crane my head
upwards and gawk at a moon
too large for consumption
but I drink until moon drunk

every bit as bright
as a turkey in the rain.

 

 

Mary Elizabeth Gillilan is the editor-in-chief of Clover, A Literary Rag. She leads writers groups at the Independent Writers’ Studio in Bellingham, Washington. Her novel, Tibet, A Writer’s Journal was published in 2007. Her greatest achievements are her two wonderful daughters. She lives in a hundred year old house in Bellingham with three rescue dogs and a cat.

Aaron Silverberg

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The Genius of Moths

 

before there were incandescent bulbs
burning the night air
what did moths do for amusement?

sure, there were a few fires about,
but that wasn’t much fun
as their tinder wings would burst
instantly to flames.

no, they must’ve dreamed up electricity,
put it into the fluttering head of Thomas Edison
as he slept fitfully
in his Menlo Park single bed.

 

Aaron Silverberg lives and writes in Seattle. He is a personal life coach and the author of several poetry collections, including Thoreau’s Chair and Diamonds Only Water Can Wear.

Bethany Reid

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Hunger

 

February’s false spring
brings to the farm a spate of new calves
and a lone coyote

tired of hunger. My mother
calls the coyote “he,”
as in, “You’d think he’d be satisfied

with one.” But he takes all
plus one cow in labor. It’s our version
of tragedy, the small herd, the lost

calves dramatic as Shakespeare
though I don’t know who’s the hero
of this piece, maybe my brother’s stepdaughter,

thirteen, carrying her 22-rifle
and stalking our coyote
over the brown winter fields,

marshes seeping to her boot tops
and the scree of a red-tailed hawk
falling over the deep woods. Our coyote

is nowhere to be found, curled
in her den, I suspect, with wet pups,
her dugs so swollen

she can’t hunt. Then one new calf
turns up at feeding time
with its mother

and, in the orchard,
blossoms curl against black boughs
like hands waiting to unfold.

 

“Hunger” is reprinted from Sparrow, now available from Writers & Books.

 

Bethany Reid teaches American literature and creative nonfiction at Everett Community College — and the inevitable college composition. She and her husband live in Edmonds with their three teenaged daughters, and their three cats.  Her first full-length collection, Sparrow, is just released from Writers & Books.

 

 

Kathleen Smith

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Crows

 

Our dreams are like crows:
messengers from the other side.
They get about as much respect.
We’re not pleased with their harsh voices
or the carrion they strew.

I have heard crows mock a dozen other birds.
The shadows, it seems, do not speak directly.
And just so, dreams. Their dark lightning gashes
the rounded landscapes of our well-kept souls.
Their wild voices mock our measured tones.

 

 

Early on, Kathleen Smith had the good fortune to encounter a wide variety of working poets. Influenced most by the Montana poets, Kathleen has been writing since 1965. Recent retirement in Roslyn has freed up more time for writing.

Jeanine Walker

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I Become a Nest

 

One must have a mind heavy in thought
to gather shadows like eggs in an apron.

Captured, they yield: I move to quash
their gloomy nature. Slatted cupboards,

mouse holes, knots in trees, vineyard arches
now pull in light like a poem.

But no––it’s just fantasy––shadows
secure a propensity to multiply, whether

I wrap them up or not.

One must have a mind heavy in thought
to keep shadows like eggs in an apron. 

Shadows wet the ground they walk on;
anguish makes an apron damp.

But for me, I find true,
when I shoo dark shapes into my folds

like children beneath an attic’s eves
I become a nest for the resting shadows.

They crack; they birth in me; they fly away.

 

Jeanine Walker holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing & Literature from the University of Houston. She has been the recipient of a Donald Barthelme Memorial Fellowship and an Inprint Brown Fellowship. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Cream City Review, Gulf Coast, Narrative, and Web Conjunctions. She has worked as the Writers in the Schools Program Manager at Seattle Arts & Lectures since 2009, has been a member of the Seattle performance poetry groups The Four Horsemen and Re Drum Machine, and she writes, sings, and plays trumpet for the country music duo The Drop Shadows. Jeanine also teaches poetry classes at the Richard Hugo House and serves as the emcee for the Cheap Wine & Poetry reading series.

 

Bruce Beasley

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Self-Portrait in Ink

 

As the gone-
translucent

octopus
jet-blasts into evasion, vanishing

while its ink-sac spurts
a cloud of defensive

mucus & coagulant
azure-black pigment,

self-shaped
octopus imago in ink, so the shark

gnashes at that blobbed
sepia phantom,

pseudomorph
that disperses into black

nebulae & shreds
with each shark-strike

& the escaped
octopus throbs

beyond, see-through
in the see-through water, untouched—:

so, go
little poem, little

ink-smudge-on-fingertip
& -print, mimicker

& camouflage,
self-getaway, cloud-

scribble, write
out my dissipating

name on the water,
emptied sac of self-illusive ink . . .

 

“Self-Portrait in Ink” is reprinted from Theophobia (BOA, 2012).

 

Bruce Beasley is a professor of English at Western Washington University and the author of seven collections of poems, most recently Theophobia (BOA Editions, 2012) and The Corpse Flower: New and Selected Poems (University of Washington Press, 2007).  He won the Ohio State University Press/Journal Award for The Creation, the Colorado Prize in Poetry (selected by Charles Wright) for Summer Mystagogia, and the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series Award for Lord Brain, a poetic meditation on neuroscience and cosmology.  Wesleyan University Press published his books Spirituals (1988) and Signs and Abominations (2000).  Beasley has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Artist Trust, and three Pushcart prizes.  His work appears in the Pushcart Book of Poetry: The Best Poems from the First Thirty Years of the Pushcart Prize and other anthologies.

 

 

Carol Levin

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Contagious Ecstasy of Bravado

 

Have you never heard of King, the musher
up in Nome? Or Salem, his lead dog
who fortified the Iditarod team
past twenty-four village checkpoints,
over two mountain ranges, along the wide
Yukon River, up the stretch sliding
on the iced-in coast of the Bering Sea,
down into town, into

the winners circle under flashbulbs and feast lights
and Northern lights, and the beam
of a full moon corona?
Front page photo flash of light yellow roses
in a garland around his neck. This dog’s

the one who ran King’s team loose, after King,
on the coldest night
toppled off the sled. He fell into fatigue’s
deep snow, struggling to stand, watching
his rig vanish like a candle guttering in the winter air,
his life and his victory running away.

Redeeming the space between his lips and teeth King
shrilled across the frozen lay.
Who knows what goes through dogs’ minds?
Surprisingly Salem acquiesced, turned the team.

King re-mounted. Have you
never once broken free helter-skelter hard
on the lip of oblivion? Have you, thrashed
ticking off your debts unable
to sleep or bellowed
alone out loud on the freeway?
Have you rehearsed, down

to the exact pitch of your voice your
goodbye but then backed out at a wisp of her cologne?
Who knows what goes through your mind turning
to your morning toast, folding the newspaper,
assuring her–We’ll come out ahead next time

 

“Contagious Ecstasy of Bravado” is reprinted from Gander Press Review (Spring 2009)

 

Carol Levin’s full volume, Stunned By the Velocity, appeared 2012 from Pecan Grove Press. Pecan Grove Press also published Carol Levin’s chapbook, Red Rooms and Others  (2009).  Her chapbook Sea Lions Sing Scat came out with Finishing Line Press in 2007.  Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Louisville Review, The New York Quarterly, Verse Wisconsin, The Massachusetts Review, Third Coast, OVS Magazine,The Pedestal Magazine, Fire On Her Tongue, Two Sylvias Press, Raven Chronicles, The Mom Egg and many others. Levin is an Editorial Assistant for the Crab Creek Review. She teaches the The Breathing Lab /Alexander Technique, in Seattle.

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.

 

 

Jacob Uitti

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Sarah

 

I saw a bird in the grass
small and brown
its round body partially hidden in the long blades

around its throat was a ring of purple dried blood
and its yellow beak was open and a black tongue
hung out

one of its wings was broken and all the brown feathers had been torn off
the other wing was folded closely to its body

the feet were untouched

it was in the middle of the front yard, which was very small, about the size of a
Volkswagen with just the grass, and a single dogwood

I wanted to name her Sarah after an ex-girlfriend I’d
had—

and so I picked up Sarah and wrapped her in the newspaper
and put her under the tree in the corner where no one would see her.

 

 

Jacob Uitti was born and raised in Princeton, NJ, and moved to Seattle in 2007. Since, he has co-founded the Seattle-based literary and arts journal The Monarch Review. He is also a co-founding member of the bands The Glass Notes and The Great Um. He has half a fake Master’s Degree from The University of Washington due to the number of classes he’s audited. Jacob also works tending bar and co-managing the PopUp restaurant Mo’Fun. Often, poetry can best express the idea with passion and a smirk unknown anywhere else.

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.