Emily Van Kley

Posted on December 16, 2012 by Kathleen Flenniken

My Dead Grandfather

My dead grandfather no longer lives in his apartment

though his last dishes are clean in the dishwasher,

though his leather gym bag lies unzipped in a grimace

behind the bedroom closet door. My dead grandfather

does not sit at his desk and write checks

to black civic organizations with his pen anchored

in agate. My dead white grandfather, whose skin

will not retain its significance, does not underline

scores at the tops of prisoners’ Christian curricula.

He neither shambles across the hall for one ex-wife’s pot roast

nor drives ten minutes over state lines to make claims

on morning coffee with his first ex-wife. When I open

the cabinets and every drawer in his apartment,

my dead grandfather does not prevent me from considering

the hand-held vacuum cleaner, the two small wineglasses,

the elegant hammer and book seal with his initials, also mine.

My dead grandfather stays at the church where he is boxed

in a manly crate of brass and satin. I am not afraid,

when we arrive, of his withered mouth sewn straight

over ceramic teeth, of the drill-row forehead unable

to imply a thing from temper to concentration, the hands

improbably folded one over the other, the knuckles

wax-museum pale. I am not afraid of the body

which has been through the busted-brick labor

of dying, not of its shrunkeness, its itness, its pall.

And yet a grandfather is a notion that does not ash away

like a last cigarette ground into pavement. My dead

grandfather, laid out in a fine blue suit at the altar

of Lansing First Reformed. Myself a child

who has touched his things.

“My Dead Grandfather” previously appeared in The Iowa Review.

Emily Van Kley’s poetry has won the Iowa Review and Florida Review awards, and is forthcoming in The Way North: Upper Michigan New Works, from Wayne State University Press. Though she grew up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, she now lives in Olympia, Washington, where she works at the local food co-op. Her work is included in Godiva Speaks: A Celebration of Olympia Area Women Poets.

Joan Moritz

Posted on December 10, 2012 by Kathleen Flenniken

In My Kitchen

As I put away the butter dish,
I see my grandmother buried
in the plastic pleats
of a bread wrapper.

She often comes to me unbidden,
hidden in a flour tin, caught
in a curl of kitchen string, again
some unexpected place,

again her dark hair with its sifting
of ash, braided and twisted into a bun,
the lace collar like a benediction
on her old crepe dress, each

appearance a surprise, each ending
the same: she lifts unleavened eyes
to mine, rises from her hiding place,
and slowly steps into the oven.

“In My Kitchen” previously appeared in Drash: Northwest Mosaic.

Joan Moritz has published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Born in New York City, Seattle has been her adopted home for nearly 40 years. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tilt-a-Whirl, Blue Lyra, and Drash: Northwest Mosaic.

Brian Culhane

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Kathleen Flenniken

The King’s Question

Before he put his important question to an oracle,
Croesus planned to test all the famous soothsayers,
Sending runners half around the world, to Delphi,
Dodona, Amphiarius, Branchidae, and Ammon,
So as to determine the accuracy of their words;
His challenge: not to say anything of his future

But rather what he was doing in his capital Sardis,
(Eating an unlikely meal of lamb and tortoise,
Exactly one hundred days after messengers had set out).
This posed a challenge, then, of far space not of time:
Of seeing past dunes and rock fortresses; of flying,
Freighted, above caravans and seas; of sightedness,

As it were, in the present construed as a darkened room.
Croesus of Lydia sought by this means to gauge
The unplumbed limits of what each oracle knew,
Hesitant to entrust his fate to any unable to divine
Lamb and tortoise stewing in a bronze pot.
When only the Pythia of Apollo at Delphi correctly

Answered from her cleft, her tripod just the lens
For seeing into the royal ego, she put his mind to rest,
But not before speaking in her smoke-stung voice:
I count the grains of sand on the beach and the sea’s depth;
I know the speech of the dumb and I hear those without voice.
We know this because those present wrote it down.

Of the King’s crucial question, however, there is nothing.
We have no word. The histories are silent. My analyst,
Whose office on Madison was narrow as an anchorite’s cave,
Would sit behind me as I stared up at her impassive ceiling,
As the uptown buses slushed all the way to Harlem,
And I would recount, with many hesitations and asides,

The play that I was starring in, whose Acts were as yet
Fluid, though the whole loomed tragically enough.
She would listen, bent over knitting, or occasionally note
Some fact made less random by my tremulous soliloquy.
When much later I heard of her death after long cancer,
I walked across town and stood, in front of her building,

Trying to resurrect those afternoons that became the years
We labored together toward a time without neurosis,
When I might work and raise a family and find peace.
Find, if not happiness exactly, some surcease from pain.
What question had I failed to ask, when the chance was mine?
When she, who knew me so well, could have answered?

Let just one of those quicksilver hours be returned to me,
With my knowledge now of the world, and not a boy’s,
With all that I have become a lighted room. One hour
To ask the question that burned, once, in a King’s throat:
The question of all questions, the true source and center,
Without which a soul must make do, clap hands and sing.

(After Herodotus, Histories, 1:46–86)

“The King’s Question” is reprinted from The King’s Question (Graywolf, 2008) and originally appeared in The Hudson Review.

Brian Culhane was born and raised in New York City, the son of a legendary Disney animator. He attended the City University of New York (BA), Columbia University’s Writing Program (MFA), and the University of Washington (PhD), where he studied epic literature and the history of criticism. His poetry has appeared widely in such journals as The New Republic, The Hudson Review, and The Paris Review. He has been an Inquiring Mind speaker, lecturing on Frost and Thoreau for Humanities Washington. In 2007, he was awarded the Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson First Book Prize; his winning manuscript, The King’s Question, was published by Graywolf Press in 2008. Also in 2008, he received an Artist Trust / Washington State Arts Commission fellowship in literature. He received a MacDowell Colony fellowship in 2009. He currently teaches film studies and English at Lakeside School in Seattle, WA.

Lillias Bever

Posted on September 19, 2012 by Kathleen Flenniken

Cesarean

There was an opera playing—
I remember that—
so beautiful, a modern piece sung by a woman
whose name I would never remember,
although the surgeon spoke it once, softly,
through his mask, and I strained to hear
past the clatter of implements on silver trays,
the bustle of the scrub nurses,
the murmurs of the anesthesiologist holding my head,
his tray of gauze strips fluttering like prayer rags—

II.

They’d pinned my arms down
like a butterfly’s wings;
I had no feeling from the waist down;
a dreaminess took hold:
and the woman’s voice kept wandering
in and out of the minutes, pulling
my mind after it, the notes
stretched so far the words had become
unintelligible—

The light was as bright as the sun
over an excavation site;
they were cleaning the area,
taking up their tools—

III.

Down and down through a slit
in the world, earth
falling away on both sides, past
history, botched experiments, sepsis,
Jacob the pig-gelder begging permission
to cut open his wife
in labor for three days; past
legend, Caesar cut whole
from his mother;
and deeper still, myth: Bacchus
slit from Zeus’ thigh,
Athena bursting fully-armed from his head,

as whatever is unmothered, torn
from its context, becomes
holy—

IV.

Jars, funeral urns, broken pieces
of pottery still glazed with their lovely enamels,
necklaces of lapis and ivory, gold
crowns encrusted with dirt, the mound

of the ancient city, and the mind,
sharp as the pig-gelder’s knife—

There was something in me;
I’d felt it for such a long time,
and now they were digging to find it,
but not like the archaeologist finding
the glint of something precious
in the earth, no, not as gentle
as that freeing, with its brushes
and soft cloths, more like
a robin tugging at a worm
stuck fast in the earth,

pulling with all its weight—

VI.

On the plain, the tumulus
swollen with artifacts; in the distance
men bending and cutting, digging
then pausing to lean on their shovels
in the hot sun, sweat pouring down their backs;

from where I was, it did not look
like delicate work, more like
hard labor: burnt grass, a broken wall
or two, goats grazing
casually in the shade, and high up in the trees

that ceaseless singing—

VII.

At last they found what they were looking for.
I heard a voice ask, What is it? What is it?
They were cleaning something, holding it up to the light—

“Cesarean” is reprinted from Bellini in Istanbul (Tupelo, 2005).

Lillias Bever‘s first collection of poems, Bellini in Istanbul (Tupelo, 2005), won the Tupelo Press First Book Competition, and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Pleiades, and Shenandoah, among others, and has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from Artist Trust, the Seattle Arts Commission, and 4Culture. She lives in Seattle.

Christine Deavel

Posted on September 11, 2012 by Kathleen Flenniken

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.

Merna Ann Hecht

Posted on August 21, 2012 by Kathleen Flenniken

Farmers Market at the Autumn Equinox

wanting to nest
in the yellow-leafed wind,
inside this basket
heaped with late saucers
of summer squash,
bunched arugula,
lipstick and gypsy peppers,

we know the news of the day,
wars against children,
tax cuts for the rich,
environmental assault,
it doesn’t stop,

but this morning
if I must think of what’s gone bad,
let it be a bruised eggplant,
an apple with a worm,
let me hear the tambourine
of the moon
as it lights the way for the corn
to rise up,

among this bounty
the memory of my grandfather
travels in me
as if from the thin roots
of carrots, to the leafy tops,
and I am with him in his garden
as he listens to the small song
of a seed before planting it,

kneeling to earth
he asks the seed, how it wants to flower.
Tonight, I will dream of him,
dream he has cupped his hands
around mine, and between us we hold
a luminous sliver of prayer
for what the world could still become.

Merna Ann Hecht, storyteller, poet, and essayist teaches creative writing and humanities at the University of Washington Tacoma. For the past nine years she was a teaching artist with the Seattle WITS program. Merna also directs a poetry project with immigrant and refugee youth. She has been a teaching artist in hospitals, detention facilities for homeless and adjudicated youth and at BRIDGES: A Center for Grieving Children in Tacoma. Merna received a 2008 Jack Straw Writers award, a National Storytelling Community Service Award and a National Storytelling Network Brimstone Award for Applied Storytelling. Her essays and poems have appeared in Kaleidoscope, Out of Line, The National Storytelling Journal, The Storyteller’s Classroom; Chosen Tales: One Generation Tells Another; the Teachers & Writers Collaborative Magazine;Drash: Northwest Mosaic and other books and journals.

Nancy Dickeman

Posted on August 14, 2012 by Kathleen Flenniken

Nuclear Reservation

Driving past security my father tipped
his hat at the guard
who waved him on. The badge
on my father’s chest worn
not to name authority but
to measure exposure, the point
at which his daily risk

might trip him up. When he drove the hills
toward home the desert turned
under him, sage and sand
ground to dust, rocks overtaken by a violet glow.
All the while minerals
touched us, particulates
combing the air and marking us

invisibly changed. In the dust storm
the desert stuck to me like silt, a line
drawn around my mouth and nose.
His back to me, his face
pressed into the receiver
my father said the guards had orders
to shoot to kill. What they held

behind them was a question
of life and death:
the rods delicately working
at the purist’s calculations and the tower
casting itself clean across the river, ore
reduced to powder, a golden substance
diffusible as breath.

“Nuclear Reservation” originally appeared in Particles on the Wall.

Nancy Dickeman grew up in Richland and is a co-founder and co-curator of Particles on the Wall, a multidisciplinary exhibit exploring Hanford history and nuclear issues. Nancy’s poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, The Seattle Review, River City, the anthology March Hares: The Best of Fine Madness, and in other publications. Her essays appear in The Seattle PI, Common Dreams and OCEAN Magazine. She has recently completed her first novel manuscript, Green Run, White Train. Nancy holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington.

Kathryn Smith

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Kathleen Flenniken

After the Funeral

We pushed our bicycles up to Halstaad’s Field, fallow
for years now, overrun with brambles and thistle.
Sweat soaked our clothes, too black for August amid weeks
without rain. At the hill’s crest, the farmhouse faded from view—mother
at a window somewhere, inconsolably repeating the scripture’s refrain—
and we cut across to the narrow trail we’d worked three summers carving.

It took longer than it should have to catch my breath, but when Eddie said,
“I dare you,” I mounted my bicycle and let fly. The kingdom of heaven
is like a cloudless summer sky, earth beneath it parched

and aching. I could feel Eddie gaining on me, and I pedaled
harder, veins thrumming my temples, reveling in the dust storm
we had created, coating our clothes and our faces. The kingdom is like
the forgotten field, rocks heaved to the surface by centuries of frost.
Then, the scree-strewn clearing a hairsbreadth away, which,
at the point of overtaking, the slightest clip of the handlebars
sends you toward, and over, chain sprung from its wheel, pedals
spinning a windmill fury. The kingdom of heaven is like—look, Eddie,
no hands!—rising from the saddle as though lifted, weightless, close
as I’ve been to birds when their wings are stretched in flight.

When we returned, mother wouldn’t know us, transformed
as we were by sweat and dust, beaming like children who’d never
lost a thing, who’d tasted the kingdom’s salt moments before
the yawning sky lets go to gravity, before the tumble
and burn, the elusive wisp of freedom snatched by the sear
of gravel as it enters, irrevocably, the flesh.

Kathryn Smith received her MFA from the Inland Northwest Center for Writers at Eastern Washington University, where she helped edit Willow Springs. She is a copy editor for The Spokesman-Review, a master gardener in training, and a community volunteer. Her poems have appeared in Rock and Sling, Redactions, and Third Coast. She lives in Spokane, Washington.

Peter Aaron

Posted on August 8, 2012 by Kathleen Flenniken

Senior Prom

What if I had sauntered
tuxedoed and carnationed
into the gymnasium
with an Albright twin
on each arm— they
draped to bedazzle
in identical organza
of palest empyrean
and wristletted
with orchids
their azure eyes aglitter
and prominent almost rodent-
esque front teeth
gleaming in the dance-
floor lights— what
sweet revision wrought
of the frightened creature
he was then— now
whistling benignly back
from the gray unfamiliar
prospect the present

Peter Aaron operates an independent bookstore in Seattle.

Jed Myers

Posted on July 30, 2012 by Kathleen Flenniken

Leveled

The pocket of chaos in my father’s head,
so far, has left him unable
to walk, find words, lift food on a fork,
or know what day it is. It makes him
emotional—he weeps as I enter
the room in which he reclines for hours
a day on his hospital bed. He speaks
with a new stutter, says Help me
whenever he comes to a hole in the ground
of his memory. Yes, it was
Connie Mack Stadium, Dad—I knew
what he was getting at. I see it too,
as it was, out past Strawberry Mansion
in the summer evening light. It was leveled
decades ago, when he never wept.

“Leveled” first appeared in Summerset Review.

Jed Myers lives in Seattle. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod International Journal, Golden Handcuffs Review, qarrtsiluni, Atlanta Review, Drash, Quiddity, The Monarch Review, Palooka, Fugue, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Rose Alley Press anthology Many Trails to the Summit, and elsewhere. He hosts the long-running open-mic cabaret NorthEndForum, and is a member of the ensemble Band of Poets. He is a psychiatrist with a therapy practice, and teaches at the University of Washington.

The Far Field

The Washington State Poet Laureate Presents…

Category Archives: memory