Category Archives: history and events

Kim-An Lieberman

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Harvest

 

My daughter is a collector of fragments:
single beads, stray buttons, broken twigs.
She trolls the garden, catching seedpods
and pebbles in her pocket. This is not to sing
a strange-eyed child, some oracular pure
who sees what we have lost. She is not knowing,
just doing. A small thing jealous of the world,
snatching her share from the groundfall.

After the first wave crested and cleared,
the beach was littered with golden fish
staring upward, still flapping as if to swim.
They say the children came running to gather,
filling skirts and shirtsleeves, crowing, gleeful,
brown feet flashing salt. Only then did the sky
open its sudden true hand, the second wave
reaching forward to sweep them all away.

 

“Harvest” first appeared in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.

Kim-An Lieberman is an almost-lifelong Seattlelite. Her collection of poetry, Breaking the Map, won a first-book prize from Blue Begonia Press in 2008. Her work also appears in journals and anthologies including Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Lantern Review, CALYX, New Poets of the American West, and My Viet: Vietnamese American Literature in English. A recipient of awards from the Jack Straw Writers Program and the Mellon Foundation for the Humanities, Kim-An has been a featured reader at venues including the Skagit River Poetry Festival, the San Francisco International Poetry Festival, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley and has spent many years in the classroom, teaching kindergarteners through college students.

Michael Daley

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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.

Georgia Stewart McDade

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The Way Some of Us Are

 

Carver’s knife found shut, said The Times.
No exclamation necessary.
A period is all there is.
No one knows how not surprised
many folks are.
A human being shot, killed another human
being.
That’s the truth, the fact.
That one human being is white and the other a
Native American is a fact and often a
problem.
The former is a policeman; the latter a carver.
Too often that is a problem.
I submit that if both had looked at each other as
human beings there would’ve been no
killing.
I submit that the white policeman saw red long
before he saw human being.
I submit that many policemen often see a color
before they see a person.
I submit much of the policeman’s culture says
beware of people of color, the darker they,
the more careful you.
I submit the policeman believed he was in
danger though he with his gun was
not close enough to see a closed knife.

And I submit, diminished mental state
notwithstanding, Mr. Williams knew much
of this and chose to risk being himself.

No doubt there is sorrow; there should be.
But absolutely no amount of sorrow nor
anything else, nothing will bring back Mr.
John T. Williams.

Of course, policemen do not want to be killed.
Of course, they must protect themselves.
But as long as they serve a populace they fear,
we can count on too many of them
stomping, beating, and shooting, killing
too—acting and then asking questions.
The cold-blooded killings of their comrades
doubtlessly makes them more guarded.
Until policemen know more of the folks they are
guarding we can expect them to feel justified
in their actions despite being deadly wrong.

 

 

Georgia Stewart McDade, a Louisiana native who’s lived in Seattle more than half her life, loves reading and writing. Most of her career was spent teaching. The African-American Writers’ Alliance member has been reading her stories and poetry in public since 1991. McDade conducts writing workshops usually emphasizing theorizing, organizing, analyzing, and synthesizing. Her works are in anthologies I Wonder as I Wander, Gifted Voices, Words? Words! Words, and Threads. Travel Tips for Dream Trips, questions and answers about her six-month, solo trip around the world and Outside the Cave, poetry, are major components of her portfolio.

Bill Yake

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Mouth of the Columbia

 

Two hundred years have washed ten thousand to the sea:

millennia of snow, bones of otters, mammoths, nets, bird arrows and feathers of birds. Ice-bound boulders larger than the grand hotels. Whole trade routes washed away. Skilled women gone, children dead. A few eyes left to carry the smattered genes of the Chinook – lost tribe, old photos, hand-written books. Tidal seeps, rain and slick water standing in the side channels. Eye sockets stacked in heaps, the white island – Memaloose, the piles of skeletons, the eyes of birds, the fish, the salmon, the grandmothers, the restless ghosts of men – they carry stones called strength from place to place.

 

How little has filtered through these epidemics, thefts, the endless killings:

a handful of painted rocks – The Spedis Owl, wild goats with back-curved horns, the counting marks, and She-Who-Watches the now-ponded river atHorsethiefPark. Petrogyphs lying drowned behind the dam that drownedthe Dalles, the spider-work of fish scaffolds. Stones that weighed the old nets down. Spear points. Bones. Our short, uneasy sleep.

 

Everything goes pouring through the Gorge – cornucopia, mouth and throat of the Columbia:

fresh and smoked salmon, spawners, smolts, whitefish eggs, furs, hides, blankets, travelers, language, tuberculosis, knives, wives, dentialia shells, dollars, smallpox, words, horses, dogs, feathers from Mexico, September Monarchs swinging to the south, water, grey sand worn from the stone plateau, storms, months of rain, iron, seals, smelt, paddles with pointed blades, brown flood water, whitecaps, huge waves smashing at the bar, medals. The rum and oarlocks of English sailors. Coppers from the Haida. Beaver hats, smelly uniforms, potions, poisons, spells and powers. Sturgeons – 20 feet long, 200 years old, a ton heavy – condors, buzzards, terns, and gulls.

 


 

Bill Yake has worked lookouts, monitored Olympic mountain butterflies, run a sub-three hour marathon, and authored the Washington State Dioxin Source Assessment. His poems are published in several chapbooks and two full collections from Radiolarian Press (Astoria OR): This Old Riddle: Cormorants and Rain (2004) and Unfurl, Kite and Veer (2010), as well as in numerous magazines serving the literary and environmental communities. Bill lives near Olympia, on a small ravine tributary to the Salish Sea.


Jourdan Keith

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Consider the Waters

 

Her water broke
just before the levees

the warning signals trickling down her thighs
had exceeded her expectations, although

this was the second time, and she had
damned the passage with sanitary napkins,

created a wall that made her waddle,
thighs chaffed and burning

the dipsy-doodle flesh bulging
around her panty lines.

The cotton boundaries were no match
the synthetic walls did not hold back

this nation’s birthing again
Her water broke

just before the levees
so she took a shopping cart

ride from the brother she’d sometimes
been afraid of

He put down the TV he was hauling
sayin’

I guess I’ll watch the sky
to see what news is comin’

He asked her to hold on,
hold on, hold on ‘cause

He’d already seen too much
too many gray water memories

hold on
and he started running, humming

Grandmother, he started singing daddy
He told her to breathe

that he knew about babies comin’
and they do all right without

water
Her water broke

just before the levees
before the sound of betrayal and fear

exploded across memory
He told her
hold on

 

Jourdan Keith is a VONA, Hedgebrook and Jack Straw alum. Voted 2007 Seattle’s Poet Populist, her awards include Seattle’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, 2004 for the writing and solo performance of the play “The Uterine Files” and 2010 for her memoir Coyote Autumn which is included in the anthology Something to Declare. A student of Sonia Sanchez, she is a playwright, storyteller and Seattle Public Library’s first Naturalist-in-Residence.