Category Archives: memory

Heather Curtis

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Trees of my Childhood

Returning to home of my youth
I walk the yard –
Lingering among the trees
I climbed and knew as a child.

They gave me pause
and entreated me to
embrace them.
Shoulders swooning
and heart willing
I nearly did –

I longed to engage them
in conversation,
like the days when they were
the greatest actors
in my most masterful plays;
We performed daily while I lay
in their arms and played at their feet.

But I stopped short
under the gaze
that I assumed was
judging from the window.

I was ashamed then,
and again, more fervently,
later.

Heather Curtis grew up in Wisconsin and earned an English degree at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, before migrating to Washington. She currently resides in Anacortes where she writes, enjoys nature, and is actively pursuing publication for her poems. This is her first.

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.

Esther Altshul Helfgott

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Letter to Abe

– after Izumi Shikibu, a woman of ancient Japan
with thanks to Jane Hirshfield and The Ink Dark Moon

I’ve written
the story of our years
together, Abe
They still hold me
All of them.

At Thornton Creek
I saw a cormorant sunning
on a rock
I looked for you
but you weren’t there.

I wonder
which galaxy you’re in
now.
Are we still
under the same moon?

I wish I knew
where you were tonight.
I would visit you.
Will you send me a message
soon? I’ll wait.

I don’t remember
yesterday. It’s the same as today.
The only difference is
the planet moved
slightly –

How lucky I
am to have
this chair,
the one you used
to sit in.

It took
you eight years to die.
All that time
I waited for you to get better.
Why didn’t you?

Listening
to Mozart , I see
us holding hands,
snuggling in the movies
watching Amadeus.

Sometimes
when I look in the mirror
I see you.
Even our hair is the same—
— curly and mussed.

I
no longer
wear
a mourner’s
frock.

There is
no sorrow in my missing you
only gratefulness
that we have
been.

But on some days
like today
the third anniversary
of your death
my heart longs.

 

Esther Altshul Helfgott is a nonfiction writer and poet with a PhD in history from the University of Washington. Her work appears in Blue Lyra Review, Journal of Poetry Therapy, Maggid, American Imago, Raven Chronicles, Floating Bridge Review, Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease, HistoryLink, The Seattle PI blog pages, and elsewhere. She’s a longtime literary activist, a 2010 Jack Straw poet, and the founder of Seattle’s “It’s About Time Writer’s Reading Series,” now in its 23nd year. Esther’s book, Dear Alzheimer’s: A Caregiver’s Diary & Poems, is forthcoming from Cave Moon Press in 2013. The poem presented here is from her next manuscript, “After Alzheimer’s: Poems & Diary.”

 

David Stallings

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Leaving Nashville, 1952

 

I’m packed between suitcases and boxes
into the back seat of a Buick Dynaflow. The view

blocked, the air thick with Dick’s Camels
and my mother’s Herbert Tareytons.

I try to filter my breath
with Kleenex—

the asthma isn’t fooled.
How will I make it all the way to Alaska?

On the way out of town, Dick swings into a gas station.
The trailer we’re towing slows us down,

and another car slips in front.
Asshole! my new stepfather roars, and grabs

for his .45 automatic in the glove box.
All I see is his arm

and my pleading mother’s grip
on his wrist.

I can barely breathe.

 

“Leaving Nashville, 1952” is reprinted from Boston Literary Magazine.

David Stallings was born in the U.S. South, raised in Alaska and Colorado before settling in Washington State. Once an academic geographer, he has spent many years promoting public transportation in the Puget Sound area. His poems have appeared in several North American and U.K. literary journals and anthologies.

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.

Patrick Dixon

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Boat Puller
…..for Jim


We were alone on the boat –
a green deckhand and a middle-aged Norwegian
riding emerald rollers sprinkled with drops of gold
in the late afternoon sun.
And though you were teaching me
how to get a salmon out of the bag
without popping the mesh,
…..I was somewhere else:

…..off the stern I saw myself
neck deep in Indiana, floundering in all those years
of not knowing who I was. or how to escape
who I had become; drowning in aching nights
spent hoping for the moment I might know
a way to set my feet upon a path of my own.

While I was picking fish with you,
stunned at the sight of the sea so near
and the mountains filling the western sky,
I thought of dry midwestern cornfields,
and of lost, empty days filled with a wish to leave
…..but nowhere to go.

You bent over a red to show me how to use a fish pick,
never realizing what was happening to me,
how you were stripping away the web of my past life,
pulling me through to solid ground.

 

“Boat Puller” originally appeared in Oberon Poetry Magazine.

 

A retired educator, Patrick Dixon moved to Alaska in 1975 where he
taught for 23 years. He commercial fished for salmon on Cook Inlet
from 1977-1997. His writings and photography have been published by
The Smithsonian, Oregon Coast, Cirque Literary Journal, The Oberon
Poetry Magazine, The Waterman’s Gazette, The Alaska Fisherman’s
Journal and Pacific Fishing Magazine, among others. Now living in
Olympia, Washington, he reads his work and shows his photographs
throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Gloria Piper Roberson

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Clifton’s Cafeteria, LA, CA 1940’s

 

We ate there every evening
after our late night Vaudeville performance
at the Hippodrome Theatre on Main Street.

We chose from an uncountable variety of foods–
peas, peas and carrots, string beans, lima beans,
pickled beets or plain, creamed corn, and spinach.

Mashed potatoes with gravy pools or if you preferred
a pat of butter. Sliced and diced or whole peaches, pears,
and apricots, stewed purple plums with cinnamon.

Hot baked or fried chicken, crisp hash, and pork chops
wearing their green feathered parsley. There was Jell-O plain,
fruited, and marshmellowed. Pies for every tastebud

that bloomed. Two-layer carrot cake that oozed cream cheese
frosting and chocolate cake freckled with walnuts
and always the menacing, unforgiving, staring fish-eyes

of tapioca pudding. You could wear scruffy overalls, empty pockets,
mink coats, or Crowns and fill a tray with any plate that huddled
and waited—five or 10 cents each. Then pick the Rain Room

with its tin roof, Jungle Room with chattering, screeching monkeys
and an occasional roar that ducked your head in fear or
the Waterfall Room with its misty, tumbling water that collided

with lily pads, the Polynesian Room where leis and hula skirts
swayed on the walls as if at a luau—then sat and became part
of the cacophony of glee. Father fended for himself at home

those nights with a pot of beans, and his own cornbread,
and a quart of beer from Ward’s Grocery Store around the corner
on Hadley street. If he wished, he could wipe his lips clean

with one of the initialed Clifton’s napkins
Mother always inserted covertly
into her purse beside several swabbed, white dishes.

 

 

Gloria Piper Roberson is a wife of 62 years, a mother of four, grandmother of six and great-grandmother of twin boys and their younger sister.  She has taken 12 quarters of Creative Writing at Wenatchee Valley College since 2002, eight with Derek Sheffield.  Her work has appeared in Mirror Northwest (2006-2007) as well as Whitman Community College’s The Noisy Water Review (2006-2007) and she authored the book Winning Hearts…Winning Wings, The Story of the First Nonstop Transpacific Flight (Wenatchee Valley Museum Cultural Center, 2003) which has been translated into Japanese. She lives in Wenatchee.

Gerry McFarland

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Skipping Stones

 

I remember the sway of her forearm gentle
as she stepped small by my side up the hill
to the dam at the end of the steep boulevard.

The man-made lake. Summers then were loose,
sunny, long as the warm sidewalk uphill
from her yellow house. We didn’t know the dam

would burst when the fingers of the old fault
worked loose the bound water onto
the evacuated neighborhood. We were

thirteen. We didn’t know she would be thrown
from a horse in Denver, restrained in the brilliant room
while they set the bone, scrubbed the wounds.

We knew the words to Unchained Melody
and all the names of the Beach Boys. We were the small
flesh of the world. We didn’t know the imminence

of her father’s death. I didn’t know
what it meant when my forearm brushed against hers.
The stone has to look like this, I told her.

She showed a girl’s disinterest, wandered, mute
down the shore, touching the hair she had spent an hour
setting while I demonstrated how

to fit the stone in the knuckle, bend close
to the water, swing the arm parallel
the earth. I threw my heart out the end of my fingers.

 

“Skipping Stones” is reprinted from Sanskrit.  

 

Gerry McFarland graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from Rainier Writer’s Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. He is a co-editor at Floating Bridge Press. His work has appeared in Zyzzyva, Crab Creek Review, Pontoon 8, Sanskrit, Crucible, Berkeley Poetry Review, Bayou and many others. He was awarded the 2005 Sam Ragan Prize and was a finalist in the 2003 WinningWriters.comWar Poetry Contest.

Brian McGuigan

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Blood Brothers

 

I loved Run-DMC and my fake gold two-finger ring
a dollar sign stretched over white, dry knuckles.
I spun on old cardboard boxes in your basement
until I vomited pork fried rice on your mother’s
chancletas. I broke your brother’s favorite Ice-T record,
“Cop Killer.” I kissed your sister when you were at summer
school, and we had nothing else to do but curse
and throw cockroaches on each other. I stole strawberries
from the Korean market because you weren’t allowed
in after the owner, a little m__erf__er with a mustache,
caught you—that was when you’d first taught me m__erf__er.
I was “Rocky” until I got my front teeth busted.
Your brother was “Scarface” until he was arrested
and sent upstate. You were “Do the Right Thing”
until you didn’t. There was that kid who got hit
by a car each spring. The old lady with her hair
in rollers except on Sundays. That was when we’d play
sponge ball off the cement wall. You spray-painted
the box—our strike zone—while I would electrical tape
around the stick. There was a sick obsession
with “Street Fighter II” and Chung Li’s spinning leg kick.
There was a two-liter of Coke that we shared
like second-hand smoke. There was the time your mother,
drunk, stuck her hands in our shorts to see how we’d grown.
You showed me how to keep my Jordans clean
with hot water and a stiff toothbrush. You told me
girls were cold as booths at McDonalds when one
broke my heart like a bottle rocket that won’t burn.
I remember when you and I slept in the same bed,
when your sheets were G.I. Joe until your mother
turned the light off, and the gunfire ceased.

 

“Blood Brothers” previously appeared in City Arts Magazine.

 

Born in Queens, NY, Brian McGuigan currently writes in Seattle, WA. He is the curator of the popular reading series, “Cheap Wine and Poetry” and “Cheap Beer and Prose,” and the Program Director at Richard Hugo House. In 2010, McGuigan was shortlisted for The Stranger’s Genius Award in Literature, and in 2008, he was a fellow in the Jack Straw Writers Program. Spankstra Press published his chapbook of poetry, “More Than I Left Behind,” in 2006. His poetry and writing have appeared in City Arts, Seattle Magazine, Rivet Magazine, Filter Literary Journal, Slipstream and others.