Category Archives: memory

David Wagoner

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Mother’s Night

 

She’s celebrating it for me. She’s coming back
from the place where she was scattered, from the place
where she was introduced to medical students
and their teachers and was slowly taken apart,
back from where she lost herself among nurses,
from what was left of her house, from her single bed,
from her sink and her kitchen window where she could see
the dead stalks in her garden. She’s coming back,
her arms full of the flowers I gave her once
a year in April, and she’s asking me
to put them back on the stems in the greenhouses
they came from, to let them shrink away from the light.

 

“Mother’s Night” is reprinted from “After the Point of No Return” (Copper Canyon Press, 2012).

David Wagoner was born in Ohio and raised in Indiana. Before moving to Washington in 1954, Wagoner attended Pennsylvania State University where he was a member of the Naval ROTC and received an M.A. in English from Indiana University. Wagoner was selected to serve as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1978, replacing Robert Lowell, and he served as the editor of the original Poetry Northwest until its last issue in 2002. Known for his dedication to teaching, he was named a professor emeritus at the University of Washington. Wagoner has been compared stylistically to his longtime teacher and friend, Theodore Roethke. He is the author of ten novels (including The Escape Artist) and 24 books of poetry, most recently Good Morning and Good Night (University of Illinois, 2005), A Map of the Night (University of Illinois, 2008), and After the Point of No Return (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). He also collected and edited Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke (1972). He lives with his family in Lynnwood.

 

Dana Guthrie Martin

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Our Story

 

I thought I knew what I wanted to say
about language, but all I can think of now
is my father on the lake, his rod bent,                                                                                                                                            our anticipation
of what would happen next — a fish

writhing in the boat near our feet
as my mother tried to lift it into the cooler,
one last look at its not-yet-clouding eye
before we slid the cooler’s lid into place.                                                                                                                          When the line went lax

and we lost one, we were suddenly not.
Not family, not unified, not defined                                                                                                                        against what could have been:
the thrill, the fear, the sadness of what we,
together, had done. We were not organized

around the words capture and gut and dinner
and sport. We were wordless — indistinct
from boat, lake, countryside, gravel roads.
How would we become us again,                                                                                                                                                  without the body

we gathered for? Without that single word —
fish — and all it held, holding us apart
as other, as separate from, as living?

 

“Our Story” originally appeared in Knockout Literary Magazine.

Dana Guthrie Martin’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Boxcar Poetry Review, Failbetter, Hobble Creek Review, Knockout Literary Magazine and Vinyl Poetry. Her chapbooks include In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press, forthcoming), Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books, 2012) and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press, 2009). She edits Cascadia Review, an online poetry journal that showcases work by poets in the Cascadia bioregion.

 

 

Judith Roche

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The Husbands

 

I married them for all the wrong reasons.
One for sex, another for a boat,
though the boat wasn’t for me
but for the son left behind
from the sex I married the first one for.
But it was the daughter I carried inside
when I married the first one.
There were others but they
didn’t quite count as husbands.

The third I didn’t even marry.
He read me poems in bed
and left little behind, nothing of any value.
But the pain turned out about the same.
And then there was my daughter,
steady, there through all of it,
watching me with blue owl eyes,
thinking, is this the way you do it?

We had boat enough to teach us
of the sea, the beauty of fish,
the son’s love for water.
The first left me my daughter and my son,
both, my dawn, noon, sunset, and night.

The husbands are all far away now,
two into that great good night–
strange to have outlived them.
The third, off in his own mysteries.
They surface in my dreams,
sometimes even the others join in,
as lions, as kings, as husbands.
They all blend together, vivid,
purring loudly and shape-shifting.
I love them – or him –
the one Great Husband,
for whom
I am still a wife.

 

Judith Roche is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Wisdom of the Body, an American Book Award winner, which was also nominated for a Pushcart. She has published widely in various journals and magazines, and has poems installed on several Seattle area public art projects, including  installations at the Brightwater Treatment Plant in King County. She has written extensively about our native salmon and edited First Fish, First People, Salmon Tales of the North Pacific and has salmon poems installed at the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks in Seattle. She has been Distinguished Northwest Writer-in-Residence at Seattle University, has taught at Cornish College of the Arts, and currently teaches at Richard Hugo House and around the state for the Humanities Washington Inquiring Mind series.

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Laura Read

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For the Bible Tells Me So

 

On the tape with his voice on it,
your father is asking if you think
your mother’s legs are pretty.

You were five, you didn’t know
what makes a leg pretty,
how it should curve out

and then taper down to the ankle,
how one should cross over the other,
the skirt slide up.

He laughs when you don’t answer
the way adults do.

I can hear your breath on the tape,
I can see you in the living room
with the gilt-framed faces of people

named Ludrick and Vida,
the turquoise chairs and the Zenith tv,
your mother with her eyebrows

drawn on and her dresses belted,
your father with his microphone
and innuendo.

You and your brother
wear robes over your cuffed pajamas,
you have crewcuts and long, thin bones.

This is the America
you were born into, where lines
were marker-thick

between Cowboy and Indian,
your mother and your father,
even you and your brother

who sings loud into the tape
but you they have to threaten
with going to bed early

if you won’t do it
so your voice comes at us mad
across the forty years—

Jesus loves me, this I know,
for the Bible tells me so.

This is your father, dead so long
you don’t remember his voice
even when you hear it.

All those years, your mom dusted him
like that empty vase
she kept up on the mantle

made of pink Depression glass.

 

 

“For the Bible Tells Me So” previously appeared in The Florida Review.

 

Laura Read has published poems in a variety of journals, most recently in Rattle, The Mississippi Review, and The Bellingham Review. Her chapbook, The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You, was the 2010 winner of the Floating Bridge Chapbook Award, and her collection, Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral, was the 2011 winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and will be published this fall by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She lives in Spokane, WA with her husband Brad and their two sons, Benjamin and Matthew.

Joanne M. Clarkson

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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.

Derek Sheffield

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Mosses, Slugs, and Mount Rainier

Roethke’s last words to me: “Beefeater all right?”
–Nelson Bentley (1918 – 1990)

 

Leaning forward, cupping an ear
For every student reader, he loved a great refrain
Tinctured with mosses, slugs, and Mount Rainier.

When critics passed over his vision of rapture,
He licked a pencil and penned “Letter to Robert Hayden.”
Leaning forward, cupping an ear,

Students in the back row heard him swear
Roethke’s song could match the mind of Auden.
Tinctured with mosses, slugs, and Mount Rainier,

His classes spilled to the Blue Moon’s bar
For Bud and Blake and windows mottled with rain.
Leaning forward, cupping an ear,

He mouthed words like smoke, dusk, and cincture.
As the Denny clock rang another noon
Tinctured with mosses, slugs, and Mount Rainier,

He gave us our sonnets with circled clutter:
Omit? O, in every concise beauty, Nelson
Leans forward and cups a wakeful ear
Tinctured with mosses, slugs, and Mount Rainier.

 

 

“Mosses, Slugs, and Mount Rainier” is for Professor Nelson Bentley who taught at the University of Washington from 1952 to 1989. This poem was published in Limbs of the Pine, Peaks of the Range: Poems by Twenty-Six Pacific Northwest Poets (Rose Alley, 2007).

Derek Sheffield’s A Revised Account of the West won the Hazel Lipa Environmental Chapbook Award judged by Debra Marquart. His full-length collection was runner-up for the 2012 Emily Dickinson First Book Award. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Orion, The Southern Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review,  Terrain, and Wilderness, and he is the recent winner of an Artist Trust Literary Fellowship. He lives with his family outside Leavenworth, WA, and teaches poetry and nature writing at Wenatchee Valley College.

Samuel Green

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CONSTELLATIONS

We knew he was different,
the one who called a pause
in our pasture baseball once,
the quiet, oldest son, still living
at home. He’d been to the store
& was taking a shortcut back. Stop,
he said, & we did, letting bats
& gloves dangle. From this angle
you could be . . . & he named
a constellation none of us knew
from school or Scouts. We were playing
work-up. I’d just hit an easy out
toward the cow flop we used for third,
a pop fly that rose like a soiled moon
before tumbling into the pocket
of Frankie’s Ted Williams mitt
with a wet plop. That’s when the man said
Stop, said we looked like stars in a field
of sky, said we should imagine each of us
a billion miles apart. For a moment
it scared us, so much sudden distance
from each flaring heart, & then
he shuffled away toward the sagging wire
fence, taking with him the Greek
name that for a moment helped him see
some sort of earthly sense.

 

“Constellations” is forthcoming in Clover 

Samuel Green was born in Sedro-Woolley, Washington, and raised in the nearby
fishing and mill town of Anacortes. After four years in the military, including service in
Antarctica and South Vietnam, he attended college under the Veterans Vocational
Rehabilitation Program, earning degrees from Highline Community College and
Western Washington University (B.A. & M.A.). A 36-year veteran as a Poet-in-the-
Schools, he has taught in literally hundreds of classrooms around Washington State. He
has also been a Visiting Professor at Southern Utah University, Western Wyoming
Community College, Colorado College, and served nine winter terms as Distinguished
Visiting Northwest Writer at Seattle University, as well as nine summers in Ireland.
Poems have appeared in hundreds of journals, including Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Poet &
Critic, Poetry East, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and Puerto del Sol. Among his ten collections of poems are Vertebrae: Poems 1972-1994 (Eastern Washington University Press) and The Grace of Necessity (Carnegie-Mellon University Press), which won the 2008 Washington State Book Award for Poetry. He has lived for 29 years off the grid on remote Waldron Island off the Washington coast in a log house he built himself after living in a tent for three years. He is, with his wife, Sally, Co-Editor of the award-winning Brooding Heron Press, which produces fine, letterpressed volumes. In December, 2007, he was named by Governor Christine Gregoire to a two-year term as the Inaugural Poet Laureate for the State of Washington. In January of 2009, he was awarded a National
Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and was a member of the NEA’s poetry
panel for the 2011 fellowships.

Erin Malone

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And Then

 

In the windows we were drawn:
I held my knobby baby
in dawn’s automotive light.
A fleet of cars sailed by
as school-kids stomped their boots
shook their shiny coats.
I put my baby in a basket.
We slept in fits & as the weather
turned we started to grow older.

I bounced him hobbledy-hoy, hobbledy-hoy!
I wound my wobbly bumpkin
& in the garden
let him go. We went in circles.
This is the way the farmers ride.
Another year. Another.
I lost count of worn-out shoes.
Bees came to the flowers of his ears.
His hair got long.

Around us red leaves
lettered to the ground &
I became a tree.
I swung my boy like a bell
by his knees. His mouth
made the shape of a song.
Where had he heard it?
I listened to the tune.
This was not a song I’d known.

 

Erin Malone’s poems have appeared in journals such as Field, Beloit Poetry Journal, POOL and online at Verse Daily. Her chapbook, What Sound Does It Make, won the Concrete Wolf Award in 2007. The recipient of grants from Washington’s Artist Trust, 4Culture and the Colorado Council of the Arts, she has taught writing at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, Richard Hugo House in Seattle, and at the University of Washington Rome Center in Italy. Currently she teaches poetry in Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools program.

 

Larry Matsuda

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Too Young to Remember

Minidoka, Idaho— War Relocation Center

I do not remember the Idaho winter winds,
knee deep mud that oppressed 10,000 souls
or the harsh summer heat and dust.

I do not remember miles of clotheslines,
mounds of soiled diapers, clatter of families crowded
into barracks, the greasy closeness
of canned Vienna sausage,
of pungent pork and sour brine
exuding from mess halls.

Floating in the amniotic fluid,
tethered in salt sea, odors
nourished by fear and sadness—
my Mother’s anxieties
enveloped and nurtured me.

Maybe it was the loss of her home,
the sudden evacuation,
being betrayed by her country.
Or maybe it was the stillborn child
she referred to as It,
sexless blob of malformed tissue,
a thing without a face that would have been
my older sibling.
My aunt described it as budo,
a cluster of grapes.

I recall what Barry, my psychiatrist friend,
said about parents emotionally distancing themselves
from children born immediately after a stillbirth.

Sixty years later on drizzly Seattle days,
when November skies are overcast,
and darkness begins at 4:00 p.m.,
I feel my mother’s sadness
sweep over me like a cold wind from Idaho.

I search for Minidoka,
unravel it from the memories of others.
Like a ruined sweater, I untwist the yarn,
strands to weave a tapestry
of pride and determination—
the “children of the rising sun” once banished
to desert prisons, return from exile
with tattered remnants, wave them overhead,
time-shorn banners salvaged from memories
woven in blood and anguish.

I wish I could remember
Minidoka. I would trade
those memories for the fear and sadness
imbedded in my genes.

 

 

Note:  The Minidoka War Relocation Center was one of ten U.S. World War II concentration camps that held120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans for approximately three years.

This poem appears in A Cold Wind from Idaho, Black Lawrence Press, New York, 2010

 

Larry Matsuda was born in the Minidoka, Idaho War Relocation Center during World War II. He and his family along with 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were held in ten concentration camps without committing a crime and without due process for approximately three years.

Matsuda has a Ph.D. in education and was recently a visiting professor at Seattle University. He was a junior high language arts teacher and Seattle School District administrator and principal for twenty-seven years.

He studied poetry under the late Professor Nelson Bentley at the University of Washington and has participated in the Castalia Poetry Reading Series there. He has read his poetry at numerous events in Washington, California, Oregon, and Idaho including the famous Kobo at Higo’s venue in Seattle’s International District with his mentor Tess Gallagher.

His poems appear in Poets Against the War website, The New Orleans Review, Floating Bridge Press, The Raven Chronicles, Ambush Review, Cerise Press, Black Lawrence Press website, and the International Examiner Newspaper. In 2005 he and two colleagues wrote and co-edited the book Community and difference: teaching, pluralism and social justice, Peter Lang Publishing, New York. The book won the 2006 National Association of Multicultural Education Phillip Chinn Book Award. In July of 2010 his book of poetry entitled, A Cold Wind from Idaho was published by Black Lawrence Press in New York.

He lives with his wife, Karen, and son, Matthew in Seattle and is a consultant presently helping to re-design schools as better physical learning environments.

Linda Andrews

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Asbury Park

 

Another day goes down
on the old house I am lucky
enough to live in. On the radio a voice
remembers a farm house and suddenly
I do too, a farm house where written words
had no taker, no easy place to pile in corners
or at the sides of beds. This was the place
of Russian grandparents who could neither
read nor write. How odd, now, to save
their house with words.

There’s the corner for the parakeet cage, hung tall
as from a floor lamp, fluttering racket, bird let loose
to flap in your hair. Long table for beer bottles,
pumpernickel bread, head cheese, duck’s blood
soup, horseradish. The kitchen burned with pepper.
Sun blaze of Michigan summer through
the tall windows. Beets from the garden,
bootlegger renter in the basement.

There’s the gas stove where my long hair caught fire.
First the burning smell, then the knowledge.
Hair singed, brittle, broken by the kitchen towel
my grandmother grabbed me with. Let loose
the bird. It never made a mess like this.

Or a mess like the day the bootlegger threw
the mash out in the yard where the ducks
found it, ate it, fell down drunk, were assumed
dead and plucked by my grandmother.
They woozed back to life about the time
grandpa came home, bleary from having
a few beers himself, and found the ducks naked,
curving through the yard.

Long before I came along, destined
to catch fire in the kitchen, my father shot
pheasants from the attic window, the same
attic where, on his way to being able
to fix anything, he took his mother’s sewing
machine apart, was spanked hard for his curiosity,
then he put it all back together and started
the treadle whirring for the next
twenty years. Out back along the tracks
in the tall weeds my 4’11” grandma once waited in the dark,
big stick in hand, waited for the man who said
her sons had stolen his apples. Watch him try
to get home, drunk as a duck, as she waylays him,
tells him don’t you ever say it again and he never does.

I have not abandoned this house, even after
I moved away, the grandparents died and the house
sold. It is mine, jealously, even after new people
bought it, burned it down for the insurance,
left it to become flame and fragment. It is mine,
obsessively. I’ll never let the bootlegger out of
the basement. I keep my grandmother always
climbing her footstool to reach the tall white cabinets.
My grandfather is forever walking home
along the railroad tracks that edge Asbury Park,
coal in his pockets, apples in his lunch pail,
suspenders carving an X into his back.

 

 

Linda Andrews’ poetry and stories have been featured in numerous journals and reviews including Calyx, Nimrod, Spindrift, Poetry Northwest, Crab Creek Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, CutBank, Willow Springs, Midwest Quarterly, Gadfly,and Seattle Review. A book of her poems, Escape of the Bird Women, was published by Blue Begonia Press in 1998 and received a Washington State Governor’s Writers Award the following year. She is the recipient of a Ucross Foundation Fellowship residency, an Artist Trust fellowship grant, a Vernon M. Spence Poetry Prize, and an Academy of American Poets Prize through the University of Washington. Andrews holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Michigan State University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Washington. For breadwinning purposes, she has worked as a speech writer, co-author and editor for non-profit health care executives in Seattle. In this capacity, she has been published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Health Care Resources, American Pharmacy and others. She is currently on the faculty of Walla Walla Community College and teaches writing and literature.