Category Archives: animal

Ted McMahon

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Prosector

 
This morning, on our walk between rain squalls
we circled the lake at the head of the Cayou valley.
There, amidst an insistence of flickers, a burble
of robins, the rusty scrape of the red-wing blackbird,
we happened upon a black-feathered shape, which flew up
at our approach, into the trees. Where it had been,
what had seemed a rumpled blanket,
was a doe, no more than two days dead.
Ribs furled around a thorax
empty of lungs, empty of heart, open
to the thin mist of rain. And the ribs themselves,
pink and clean of meat, a lesson in anatomy taught
by that bald scavenger waiting above, waiting
to resume his lecture on our shared fate.

 

“Prosector” previously appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Ted McMahon’s poetry has appeared in Seattle Review, Convolvulus, Manzanita Quarterly, Rosebud, and the Journal of the American Medical Association, and on The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. His full-length collection is The Uses of Imperfection, published in 2003. He published a chapbook, First Fire, in 1996. Ted received the 1999 Carlin Aden Award for formal verse from the Washington Poets Association, and a 2004 Artist Trust GAP Grant. He was finalist for the Ruth Stone Prize in Poetry in 2005. Ted was a co-editor at Floating Bridge Press in Seattle from 1999-2006. He currently practices Pediatrics half time in the Seattle neighborhood of Ballard and devotes the other half to writing and leading river journeys.  He lives in the Seattle neighborhood of Wallingford with his wife, photographer Rosanne Olson, and their two Maine Coon cats, Zoe and Maxx.

 

 

 

Lucia Perillo

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Domestic

 

Here the coyote lives in shadows between houses,
feeds by running west to raid the trash behind the store
where they sell food that comes in cans
yesterday expired. Think of it
perching on the dumpster, a corrugated
sheet of metal welded to the straight, its haunch
accruing the imprint of the edge until it pounces,
skittering on the cans. Its attempts
to gnaw them open have broken all its teeth.

Bald-flanked, rheumy-eyed, sniffing the wheels
of our big plastic trash carts but too pigeon-
chested to knock them down, scat full of eggshells
from the compost pile. “I am like that, starved,
with dreams of rutting in a culvert’s narrow light—”
we mumble our affinities as we vacate into sleep.
Because we occupy the wrong animal—don’t you too feel it?
Haven’t you stood in the driveway, utterly confused?
Maybe you were taking out the garbage, twisting your robe
into a noose-knot at your throat, when you stopped
fighting the urge to howl, and howled—
and did you find relief, my friend, however self-deceiving?

 

“Domestic” appears in  On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon Press, 2012).

Lucia Perillo has published six books of poetry, including Luck Is Luck, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, a book of short stories, Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain, and a memoir, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature. Her most recent poetry collections are Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, and her newly released collection, On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). Perillo, a MacArthur Fellow, has taught at Syracuse University, Saint Martin’s University, and Southern Illinois University. She lives in Olympia, Washington.

 

Marvin Bell

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The Book of the Dead Man (Rhino)

Live as if you were already dead.
Zen admonition

1. About the Dead Man and the Rhino

The dead man rode a rhino into Congress.
An odd-toed ungulate in the Congress, and no one blinked.
It was the lobbyist from Hell, the rhino that ate Tokyo, a lightning strike in their dark                     dreams.
A ton of megafauna, and nowhere for a senator to hide.
I’m gonna get you, says the momentum of a rhino.
The rhino has been said to stamp out fires, and the dead man hopes it is true.
He steered the beast to the hotheaded, the flaming racist, the fiery pork-barreler, the                  sweating vestiges of white power.
The dead man’s revolutionary rhino trampled the many well-heeled lawmakers who stood           in the way.
He flattens the cardboard tigers, he crushes the inflated blowhards, he squashes the                cupcakes of warfare.
Oh, he makes them into blocks of bone like those of compacted BMWs.

 

2. More About the Dead Man and the Rhino

The dead man’s rhino was not overkill, don’t think it.
He was, and is, the rough beast whose hour had come round at last.
The dead man’s rhino did not slouch, but impaled the hardest cases among the                            incumbents.
The committee chair who thought a rhino horn an aphrodisiac found out.
The dead man’s rhino came sans his guards, the oxpeckers.
He was ridden willingly, bareback, he did not expect to survive, he would live to be a                    martyr.
The rhino’s horn, known to overcome fevers and convulsions, cleared, for a time, the halls          of Congress.
The senators who send other people’s children into battle fled.
They reassembled in the cloakroom, they went on with their deal-making.
They agreed it takes a tough skin to be a rhino.

 

“The Book of the Dead Man (Rhino)” appears in Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems, published by Copper Canyon Press.

 

Three books by Marvin Bell were released in 2011: Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems (Copper Canyon); Whiteout,a collaboration with photographer Nathan Lyons, (Lodima); and a children’s picture book, based on the poem, “A Primer about the Flag”  (Candlewick). Since 1985, he has split the year between Port Townsend and Iowa City. For many years Flannery O’Connor Professor of Letters at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he teaches now for the brief-residency MFA based in Oregon at Pacific University, One can see a brief interview with him about writing in the literary video series  “On the Fly,”  and others at Drunken Boat,  Arch Literary Journal, and Poetry Kit.
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Anne McDuffie

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A Thought in the Shape of a Bird

 
A thought in the shape of a bird
unfolds its subtle origami in three beats:
leaf / wren / leaf.

 

A gesture in the shape of habit
worrying the pavement for seeds,
its tail tipped straight up.

 

Calder’s “Eagle,” fades red
into the chestnuts beside the museum.
The great, hooked beak, the cocked tail

 

distinctly flanged and wren-like, though I’m not sure
it is a tail. There’s no body here—
only line and curve, weld and bolt,

 

the scattershot lines of something
I’ve seen before. Tail, brow, beak.
Or glide, spread, crouch.

 

I can’t account for the piece that stands
straight up—

 

until a crow alights on top
and casts a languid eye on this poor human
scrabbling over the wet grass below,

 

and I feel a jot of pity for the wren
who spasms into flight at my approach,
stitching escape across each retina.

 

This wren
squats in my path, with the gravity
of a dead thing. Only a leaf

 

I’ve overtaken now, passed by
while the mind keeps circling,
watching for movement, some flash or flicker under the surface.

 

That’s the meat calling. And the mind,
with its inquisitive talons, will answer. Will tip itself over
into the pure line of its sight

 

and fall.

 

 

 

“A Thought in the Shape of a Bird” originally appeared in Crab Creek Review.

 

 

Anne McDuffie writes essays, poetry and book reviews. Her work has appeared in Colorado Review, Crab Creek Review, A River and Sound Review, Rattle, American Book Review and the anthology, Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction (Norton, 2005). She received her MFA in 2007 from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University, and lives in Seattle, WA.

 

Kevin Craft

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Pigeon Guillemots

 

Dangle bright red legs
Floating and diving
Like simple sentences
By the ferry terminal—

So close, and closing in—
Their glidepaths trimming
Acrobatic pilings,
Rounding off the long division

Of the tide. Spring: Saturday
opens a beer and passes it
Around. Dear sunlight,
We missed your clean throw rugs

Beating on the bay.
There’s no place to get to
But we’re going anyway.
Guillemot—like guile,

Only less so, a bon-mot
Waiting to lodge itself
In your bailiwick.
Compact. Glossy.

The world still has a thing
Or two to show us,
Much of which passes
For guillemots today.

 

Kevin Craft is the editor of Poetry Northwest. He lives in Seattle, and directs both the Written Arts Program at Everett Community College and the University of Washington’s Creative Writing in Rome Program. His books include Solar Prominence (Cloudbank Books, 2005) and five volumes of the anthology Mare Nostrum, an annual collection of Italian translation and Mediterranean-inspired writing (Writ in Water Press). He has been awarded fellowships by the MacDowell Colony, Bogliasco Foundation, Camargo Foundation, 4Culture, and Artist Trust. His poems, reviews, and essays have appeared widely in such places as Poetry, AGNI, Verse, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Stranger, Poetry Daily, and Kenyon Review.

Frances McCue

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The Other One Waits At Home

 

I’ve let the dog down.
Late with meals and walks,
I’m dog-deep in woeful starts
to make things better.
Not easy, this life–
the way it swings along:
Sore dog. Happy dog.
Folly of my needs.
“Love us,” we say.
“We command you.”
Her head nuzzles into
the corner of my arm.
She shivers along
shanks and withers
and sings far below
our frequency,
pinging along:
“dog-dog-dog,”
all muzzle and chop,
click click, chomp.

But please, Dog, sleep.
I’m tired too. Fetch
the dream life that tilts
any past askew.
Forgive me through
all these lacks and
I’ll forgive you
your drool and shits and
other indignities
of the expressionless.
Give me time to set it right.
I’ll roam the yards, flip
the cans, turn
woman-howler
through the bark-less,
hot twilight.
You rest.

 

Frances McCue is a writer and poet living in Seattle, where she is writer-in-residence at the University of Washington’s Undergraduate Honors Program. She was the founding director of Richard Hugo House from 1996 to 2006. McCue is the author of The Stenographer’s Breakfast, winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize, The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs:  Revisiting the Northwest Towns of Richard Hugo, with photographer Mary Randlett (University of Washington Press), and The Bled (Factory Hollow Press), winner of the 2011 Washington State Book Award and the2011 Grub Street Book Prize.