Kevin Miller

Chrome and Oranges

 

Some days I drag what I have done
like a sack of wet laundry,
the more I lug the heavier it gets,
and if I don’t tend to it, it sours.
Tub of guts, we said as kids—
it had nothing to do with towing,
still this knowing attracts flies.
Might as well add envy to the pile,
jealous as I am of those able to forget.
And while stench may be a trigger,
I cannot recall the name of the woman
at work who smelled like shower steam
on powdered skin every morning for ten
glorious years. Instead, something I said
to J.B. forty years ago appears like a bull
on the highway. It gives asphalt a lesson
on black, leaves me replaying a stupid beef
over a woman who left both of us.
The Christmas I was ten I rode my new bike
to Richard’s to show off all that chrome.
He showed me checkers and an orange.
Those handlebars rust at the bottom of the sack.
Bad days, I hang each item on a line.
They sag like wet squares of sheetrock.
From a distance, you might wonder how
one man could own so many white shirts.

 

“Chrome and Oranges” previously appeared in the Massachusetts Review.

Kevin Miller lives in Tacoma, WA. Pleasure Boat Studio published his third collection, Home & Away: The Old Town Poems in 2008. Miller taught in the public schools of Washington State for thirty-nine years. He received grants from Artist Trust and Tacoma Arts, and received the Bumbershoot/Weyerhaeuser Publication Award for his first collection, Light That Whispers Morning.

Jeremy Halinen

Afternoons above I-5

We used to drop acid
and sit on the overpass
to watch the dragon faces
the cars would make at us
as they raced
beneath our dangling legs.
Cars like it when you’re high enough
above them to notice
more than their surfaces.
It’s the story of their exhaust
they want you to care about,
not their paint jobs
or the treads
on their tires. They want you to lean down
and touch them.
I know what you’re thinking.
It’s dangerous,
what we used to do. But
the cars told us they’d catch us if we fell.
You say, So what if they did?
And you’re right.
There’s always a catch.

Jeremy Halinen is cofounder and editor-at-large of Knockout Literary Magazine. His first full-length collection of poems, What Other Choice, won the 2010 Exquisite Disarray First Book Poetry Contest. His poems appear or will in such journals as Cimarron Review, Court Green, Crab Creek Review, the Los Angeles Review, Poet Lore, and Sentence. He resides in Seattle.

Maya Jewell Zeller

Honesty

 

It’s true I drove an SUV once
through Fresno with a backseat full
of college boys to whom I found myself
having to explain you could still catch herpes
even while wearing a condom. One of them
in particular was incredulous, he was listening to his I-pod
and he removed his headphones and said he had
a few more questions. These were my husband’s
varsity runners, and I was a volunteer, so I was awarded
the new rental with only four miles on it when we left
the lot. I’m not going to lie—
I liked driving it. It was nothing
like riding coach or making love
with protection. There were so many buttons
to push, and they all did something satisfying,
like drop from the ceiling a DVD player
for passengers or warm the driver’s legs
in just the right places. The seats were leather,
the kind you feel guilty just sitting on,
the good kind of guilty when you can’t help
but imagine parking somewhere with someone
so you can watch the stars rise over the city,
take time to check out all the automatic features.
The boy you’re with will want to know
how things work, and you’ll end up showing him,
because he is young, because he has a bag of sour apple
or peach fruit rings he’s willing to share, because his face
can look so becoming in the streetlights.
But mostly it’s because you can no longer remember
where you were going. Was it to dinner?
Were you taking him back to his hotel, where
he’ll sleep, dream of winning?
Or maybe it was a nighttime snack
run. The SUV is black
and the night is blacker. You can feel it
closing, like a fist around a steering wheel.
You’re not the fist. You’re the wheel.

 

“Honesty” first appeared in Rattle.

 

Maya Jewell Zeller has spent most of her life in the Pacific Northwest. Her first book, Rust Fish, was released in April 2011 from Lost Horse Press. Individual poems have won awards from Sycamore Review, Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, and Dogwood, and appear in recent issues of Rattle, Rock & Sling, The Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. Maya lives in Spokane with her husband and daughter, and teaches English at Gonzaga University.

Alan Chong Lau

father’s bamboo grove

 

 

those mexican kids
clothes pins clamped on the ears
to make me squeal

as a tagalong
one had to earn
rites of passage

we sat on haunches
drawing secret parts
of women in the dirt

hidden away
in my father’s bamboo grove
that grew back
after each cut

even after gravel
delicate green shoots
defined stones

they’d laugh
break off hollow stems
cop hits of bamboo smoke
satisfied only after
i’d coughed myself
red

came end of harvest
they left
their mother dead
after making a tamale pie

the bamboo too
no more
trampled over
still under a parking lot

only leaf patterns
cast in tar

with my fathers’s chinese restaurant
we were the only ones
left in town

 

 

Alan Chong Lau wrote The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99 (Buddhahead Press) with poets Lawson Inada and Garrett Hongo. He is the author of Songs For Jadina (Greenfield Review Press) and Blues And Greens – A Produce Worker’s Journal (University of Hawai’i Press). As a visual artist he is represented by Francine Seders Gallery in Seattle. He continues to work in an Asian produce market in Seattle’s Chinatown/International District neighborhood. His poetry and art appear in a forthcoming book  this fall by his sister Linda Lau Anusasananan entitled The Hakka Cookbook – Chinese Soul Food From Around The World (University of California Press).

 

Marjorie Manwaring

Charm
The botanist’s magnifying glass is youth recaptured. It gives him back the enlarging gaze of a child.
–Gaston Bachelard

 

Automatic doors seal shut, the air artificial and cool. Thick with the smell of a deep fat fryer, freshly butchered meat, bananas just out of cold storage. Mom gets a cart. You linger in the alcove of news racks and gumball machines, one filled with Chiclets, another with jawbreakers big as golf balls, and this one, the one that dazzles you, its display card alive with trinkets and plastic charms . . . You align your dime into its special slot. Crank the metal handle. The mound of treasure shifts, a small upheaval, and you hear the plastic capsule rattle down the chute. Will it be a tiny bird whistle—yellow, orange, or baby blue—that when filled halfway with water and blown will chirp and warble? Or the salmon-pink Cupid with his sideways glance, bow drawn back, one leg flexed behind him? These would please you, held tightly in your hand or strung on a chain, but the miniature magnifying glass—something small that lets you see things even smaller, this is what you want, what you need and you already see yourself sliding it in and out of its little red sheath.

 

 

Marjorie Manwaring lives in Seattle, where she is a freelance writer/editor, co-editor of the online poetry and art journal the DMQ Review, and member of the Floating Bridge Press editorial board. Her chapbook What to Make of a Diminished Thing is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press in spring 2012, and a full-length poetry collection will be published by Mayapple Press in February 2013. “Charm” previously appeared in the 2010 Jack Straw Writers Anthology.

Michael Daley

The Two Young Men From Japan

To be in possession of an absolute truth is to have a net of
familiarity spread over the whole of eternity.
—Eric Hoffer

“Orb Weavers have hooped a white gauze across sixty acres,”
a winter’s worth snag of less patient species, a community,
the historic web by dawn radiant in the east
snares the setting sun.
I read it in the paper someone left at the cafeteria.
The door wheezes behind me as I step back into Poland,
to see the name “Oswiecim” is liberating
for its pure municipal indifference.

The two young men from Japan are still laughing at the bus shelter.
They know me by my trudge, mud falling away,
head bowed under the ice of Auschwitz;
my boots announce to the gravel
a reverent tourist unlike them, giggling in a storm.
They await the bus to Krakow.
I always remember them,
have often wished I’d shrugged off
a silence my mind found
in the hours since losing my guide
when I wandered the death camp,
acres of chimneys in the cold.
“Oh, you’re from Seattle?”
Strange to hear home sound so foreign.
“Ichiro!” We laugh. We talk a little baseball.
How happy we are safe beyond history.
We laugh at anything—
old shoes suitcases spectacles dolls in mounds
indignant faces on our zlotys bus fare—that’s funny.
Embarrassed by the length of an English sentence:
“We… Are…Touring … Camps, All the Camps.”
Modest laughter
More camps than mine, my list only this.
“Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka, Buchenau.” Wan smile.
They have traveled three months, both born in Nagasaki.

Parkas in cold Polish twilight,
we made our getaway from Auschwitz laughing.
My bus window black with February,
I scribbled in my notebook, grim and private.
They went on back there, they cackled all along the route,
their choppy map a line of stations on whose sleepers
they never slept, those intoxicated laughers
sprung from turf slabbed by monuments to the frisky dead.
I can’t forget them, how happy they were.
Perhaps it bothers me—why I write this now—
to hear them laugh again, to know
they never came to an end of camps,
I wasn’t the only pilgrim on the bus.

 

 

Michael Daley was born in Boston and lives in Anacortes. He is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts and has an MFA from the University of Washington. In 1983 he published his first collection of poetry, The Straits. His chapbooks include Angels, Original Sin, Horace: Eleven Odes, The Corn Maiden, and Rosehip Plum Cherry. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Hudson Review, Alaskan Quarterly Review, Raven Chronicles, Seattle Review, on the Writer’s Almanac and forthcoming in The North American Review. In 2007 he published Way Out There: Lyrical Essays. In 2008 To Curve came out and in early 2010 Moonlight in the Redemptive Forest with a CD of poems and music arranged and performed by Brad Killion. “The Two Young Men From Japan” is from Moonlight in the Redemptive Forest.

Matt Gano

 

Launching the Whale

 

My dad is a carpenter, sort of like Jesus,
but he doesn’t believe in God.

His holy space is drills and grinders,
roaring teeth spitting chips and dust.

When I was twelve we built a canoe
from strips of cedar, ripped boards for weeks.

The frame in the garage was scaled like an empty whale,
bones lurching from the shop floor.
We arced on its new skin with glue and heavy staples.

Dad wore a green down-vest like a tortoise shell,
he said it would comfort our shop-mammal
to be built by something familiar.

As the frame was full with hull and keel,
we plied out staples like final stitches
removed from a recovered experiment,
ran our hands down its sanded spine,
the work painting into our palms,
our pores absorbing the bonding.

When we rode the whale, we launched it from the shore
like pushing a dead cow back into the sea, boots in the shallows
filled with lake water.

It would take us to the middle where the big fish are,
where the casting rods bend like cottonwood over glass,
dance jigs, whippin’ back and forth. Dragon tongues.

This is how we sit, me, navigator bow-boy,
front paddle like the steam engine is tug boat, but little boat.
Dad is stern, rudder man, power in the deep dig,
he spanked the water good,
like it forgot to take the garbage out.

We pull the trash from the beaver dens
and replace them with good sticks,
he says they don’t know any better, the babies
will get the soda rings around their heads
like the Spanish inquisition and die slow.

We don’t want um to die slow.
“Keep rowing, hard on the left, watch out for the log!”

I see the log. The log looks like a floating dog.
Put my paddle in it, sank through like a fork in cat food.
It is/was a dog, belly stickin’ out like helium and rot.

See how the K9’s are chipped and peeled back?
Musta’ been eatin’ marmots.
Sometimes a stray dog will eat rocks
if it’s hungry enough.

My dad is a scientist. He doesn’t believe in god.
His holy space is lakes and bug guts,
they cell through him when we walk on the roots
and slipping path of the Yakima valley.

We Swiss-blade open the on pond, make ripples like loons,
hoot-hoot against the quarry for the echo.
Make campfire dance with pucker-mouth lip wind
and sizzle up the iron-pan washin’ in mountain water.

When the tent gots the squirts with dew
and the embers burn down crackin’
like mosquitoes on Dad’s neck
with his slappin’, and it’s dark as bears,
morning peeps over the ridge
and we are simple
heirloom pocketknives,
carving memory into the tree.

 

 

Matt Gano is an accomplished performance poet and creative writing instructor. In 2011, Matt Gano guest lectured at The Juilliard School in New York City, featured for “Page Meets Stage,” at the Bowery Poetry Club, and led writing workshops at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA. Matt has traveled internationally teaching creative writing and performance in Seoul, Korea, and in 2009 earned a three-month artist residency at the Lee Shau Kee, School of Creativity in Hong Kong. Matt has worked as a national slam team coach and workshop instructor for Youth Speaks Seattle and is now a senior Artist in Residence with Seattle Arts and Lectures, Writers in the Schools.

Samuel Green

 

My Mother, Fetching a Switch

 
By now she knows that just because it’s thin
doesn’t mean it won’t hurt, that green is better
than dead & dried. She needs to choose
between the hot sting of a wasp, or a dull
deep ache that lasts for days, bruises the color
of certain pears when they ripen. There are the canes
of big leaf maple, willow, alder, the straight suckers
from apple or plum in the orchard. She knows to peel
bark from the wand & shave the nodes flush
to the stem with whatever knife she’s given
from pocket or kitchen drawer. Her first switch
left her bloody, left a web of tiny white scars fine
as lace in the doilies her sisters sometimes helped her
make. Once she brought her father a long whip
of pussy willow with the soft toes of catkins
left on. He laughed so hard he let her off. A second try
made him madder. Once she split a thin strip of cedar
from a shake bolt, lighter than lath; her mother used the edge
like a dull blade. She knows to lift her dress waisthigh,
overalls unsnapped & dropped
to her ankles. Her father likes her
folded across a single knee & only strikes
the cheeks of her fanny. Her mother takes her
standing, feet apart, & whales at any skin
she sees: calves, her inner thighs. She knows
if she cries or squirms the blows come faster, last
longer, how anger travels into rage. She knows
exactly how long she has to find & shape
& fetch a switch to its waiting hand.
My grandparents think she’s learning
the wages of backsass, what happens
when you ride the stubborn donkey of disobedience,
but she is learning how short the pleasure is
when she flushes a rabbit from the brush,
that there isn’t quite time to wholly peel
& eat an apple before someone will come
looking for her, that no joy lasts long,
that—father, mother, lover—it is painful
to be alive. All she can do is choose
between one hurt or another.

 

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.

Joseph Green

 

Jesus, Charles Manson

 

That hair, he said. That hair
and that beard and that look
in your eye, he said. That hair
and that trash on your tongue
and that beard and those jeans,
he said. I wonder what you think
I see when I see you, he said,
with that hair and that beard
and that look in your eye and
those filthy jeans and that trash
on your tongue, and by now
he was shouting, that greasy hair
and that beard and those filthy jeans
I mean Jesus, he said, you look like
Charles Manson with that greasy hair
and that beard and that look in your eye
and those trashy jeans and that
filth on your tongue and that look
and that trash and that filth
and that hair and that beard
and those jeans I mean Jesus.
He said, I mean Jesus.

 

 

Many of Joseph Green’s poems have been collected in His Inadequate Vocabulary (1986), Deluxe Motel (1991), Greatest Hits 1975-2000 (2001), and The End of Forgiveness (2001). “Jesus, Charles Manson” is from his new collection, That Thread Still Connecting Us (2012). At the Peasandcues Press, he produces limited-edition, letterpress-printed poetry broadsides, using hand-set metal type; and at the C.C. Stern Type Foundry, in Portland, he is part of a team working to preserve the craft of casting the type itself. He lives in Longview, where he retired from teaching in his twenty-fifth year at Lower Columbia College.

Christopher Howell

Dinner Out

 

We went to either the Canton Grill
or the Chinese Village, both of them
on 82nd among the car lots
and discount stores and small nests
of people waiting hopelessly
for the bus. I preferred the Canton
for its black and bright red sign
with the dragon leaping out of it
sneezing little pillows of smoke.
And inside, the beautiful green
half-shell booths, glittery brass encrusted
lamps swinging above them.

What would I have?
Sweet and sour?
Chow mein with little wagon wheel shaped
slices of okra and those crinkly noodles
my father called deep fried worms?
Fried rice?

Among such succulence, what did it matter?
We could eat ‘til we were glad and full, the whole
family sighing with the pleasure of it.
And then the tea!
All of this for about six bucks, total,
my father, for that once-in-a-while, feeling
flush in the glow of our happy faces
and asking me, “How you doing, son?”

Fine, Dad. Great, really, in the light
of that place, almost tasting
the salt and bean paste and molasses, nearly
hearing the sound of the car door
opening before we climbed in together
and drove and drove
though we hadn’t far to go.

 

Christopher Howell has published ten collections of poems, most recently Gaze (Milkweed Editions, 2012), and Dreamless and Possible: poems New & Selected (University of Washington Press, 2010). He has received three Pushcart Prizes, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a fellowship from the Washington Artist Trust. He has also been honored with the Stanley W. Lindberg Award for Editorial Excellence, and has twice won the Washington State Book Award. Since 1996 he has taught at Eastern Washington University’s Inland NW Center for Writers. He lives in Spokane.