Category Archives: environment

Bill Carty

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Room

I’ve heard third-hand each stanza is a room.
In June, yard too means room. In June, yard
means the room where I cure my innards,
where I stew them in liquor. The crevasse

over the stream where the snow melts first
is a room and so is each tulip.
The nurse log becoming the forest floor
is a room with the promise of future rooms.

In bed with another, my hand seeks the knob
to the next room. The tattered couch makes
the porch a messy room and, says the landlord,
“has to go.” For a second I thought

my car a room, but it’s just traffic.
Asthma is an owl in the room
of my lungs. A tenderloin sliced yea thick
is a room with walls of burnt skin.

Each song is a room I leave blushing
when my singing’s done. All these rooms.
All the clouds drifting through their open doors.
No wonder I am always outside.

 

“Room” is reprinted from Sixth Finch.

Originally from a small town in coastal Maine, Bill Carty moved to Seattle after receiving a BA from Dartmouth College and an MFA from University of North Carolina-Wilmington. His poems are published in numerous local and national journals, including Sixth Finch, Diagram, Floating Bridge Review, Transom, and Page Boy. His chapbook “Refugium” was recently published by alice blue books. Bill’s first full-length manuscript, “Tomahawks,” has been named a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Four Way Books Intro Award and Saturnalia Books. In 2010, he participated in the Jack Straw Writers Program, and he is a Made at Hugo House fellow for 2012-13.

Bethany Reid

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Hunger

 

February’s false spring
brings to the farm a spate of new calves
and a lone coyote

tired of hunger. My mother
calls the coyote “he,”
as in, “You’d think he’d be satisfied

with one.” But he takes all
plus one cow in labor. It’s our version
of tragedy, the small herd, the lost

calves dramatic as Shakespeare
though I don’t know who’s the hero
of this piece, maybe my brother’s stepdaughter,

thirteen, carrying her 22-rifle
and stalking our coyote
over the brown winter fields,

marshes seeping to her boot tops
and the scree of a red-tailed hawk
falling over the deep woods. Our coyote

is nowhere to be found, curled
in her den, I suspect, with wet pups,
her dugs so swollen

she can’t hunt. Then one new calf
turns up at feeding time
with its mother

and, in the orchard,
blossoms curl against black boughs
like hands waiting to unfold.

 

“Hunger” is reprinted from Sparrow, now available from Writers & Books.

 

Bethany Reid teaches American literature and creative nonfiction at Everett Community College — and the inevitable college composition. She and her husband live in Edmonds with their three teenaged daughters, and their three cats.  Her first full-length collection, Sparrow, is just released from Writers & Books.

 

 

James Gurley

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BIOPHILIA

–at the conservation reserve outside London, Ontario–
after E.O. Wilson

The fox came upon us unexpectedly.
He froze and our world narrowed to a span
meters wide. I heard your words
break into fragments. So uneasy–
something so extraordinary
stood close to where we stood. His diaphragm
rising and falling, eyes searching
for any movement that might
betray us. The smell of water, the directional
bend of a plant stalk
mattered. I turned my head
and he vanished. Melted
into abstract description,
that’s just a metaphor for slyness,
malevolence, the implicit threat.
These qualities he channels
into his ability to stay alert.
Alive. It’s nearly dusk; the trees
suffused with dimming light.
We stop by a pond fringed with larch–
rest, still craving a sense
of the mysterious. Your words pour
in and around me, and I want to know the touch
of everything. Described this way,
it’s nothing but a glimpse
of one small animal.
Say it’s only myth: say he looks
at us from his own world. In the end
it’s enough to just believe.

 

“Biophilia” originally appeared in ARC and in Human Cartography (Truman State University Press, 2002).

James Gurley, originally from North Carolina, has lived in Seattle for over 22 years. He holds an MFA from the University of Montana, where he studied with Richard Hugo. His poems have appeared in American and Canadian journals. He has published two chapbooks, and one full-length collection of poetry, Human Cartography, winner of the T. S. Eliot Award. His writing has been supported with grants from Artist Trust and the Seattle and King County arts commissions, as well as a literary fellowship from the Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission.

Cynthia Neely

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Birding at the Potholes

 

Red epaulets flash on marsh grass,
draw our scopes from familiar fields of view,
the hunt for something to lift us
from our narrowed focus. We search

for cranes, whose stilt legs barely
carry them, whose wings loft them
graceless – a run, stumble, flap – before air
becomes substance that will bear them.

Our son follows, crane-legged, iPod-eared.
He doesn’t hear the calls that pull us forward,
doesn’t see the meadowlark, bibbed and shining,
the porcelain painted puff of chucking quail.

His footprints are as big as ours, but
he won’t fill them, his head bowed, back bent
to minutiae: ants, scat, a feathered sign of struggle,
the treasure of pebble and spent shotgun shell.

He has no interest in our quest; the present
and the past are all right there
under his feet, no need to scan the sky
for cranes, already gone.

“Birding at the Potholes” previously appeared in The Raven Chronicles and San Pedro River Review.

 

Cynthia Neely is the 2011 winner of the Hazel Lipa Prize for Poetry with her chapbook “Broken Water”, published by Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in, among others, Bellevue Literary Review (Honorable Mention – Marica and Jan Vilcek Poetry Prize, 2011), Crab Creek Review, Floating Bridge Review, and Raven Chronicles, and are included in several sonnet anthologies.

 

Gail Tremblay

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Meditation on The Dalles Dam
for Lillian Pitt

 

Electricity is humming in a spider web of lines
as copper wires cased in rubber cross the land;
what sorrow builds in this sound that only whines

where the thunder of water no longer combines
with a wild rush of salmon so close at hand?
Electricity is humming in a spider web of lines.

Where fish runs were rich, everything declines.
No one explains how a body can withstand
The sorrow that builds in this sound that only whines.

Fishermen stood on scaffolds amid the steep inclines
of rock; water foamed before the flow was dammed
so electricity could hum in a spider web of lines.

Rocks watched while men made strange designs
To swell the river to places no rush of water planned.
What sorrow grows when the new sound only whines?

The bodies of old ones wash out of ancient shrines—
how can the spirits of the dead learn to understand
the electricity that hums in a spider web of lines.
What sorrow builds in this sound that only whines?

 

From Wikipedia:  Celilo Falls (Wyam, meaning “echo of falling water” or “sound of water upon the rocks,” in several native languages) was a tribal fishing area on the Columbia River, just east of the Cascade Mountains, on what is today the border between Oregon and Washington. The name refers to a series of cascades and waterfalls on the river, as well as to the native settlements and trading villages that existed there in various configurations for 15,000 years. Celilo was the oldest continuously inhabited community on the North American continent until 1957, when the falls and nearby settlements were submerged by the construction of The Dalles Dam.

 

Gail Tremblay is a descendant of Onondaga and Micmac ancestors. She resides in Olympia, WA and has been an artist, writer, and cultural critic for over thirty years. She shares a unique vision through her multi-media visual works, art installations, her writing on Native American Art, and her poetry. She is a professor at The Evergreen State College, where she has mentored students in the fields of visual arts, writing, Native American and cultural studies. Her book of poems, Indian Singing, was published by Calyx Press, and her poetry is widely anthologized and poems have been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Japanese and published internationally.

Natasha Kochicheril Moni

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Harlot

 

Wisteria contain yourself, your legs are far
too feral—spawning by day, rising to twelve
new shoots by morning.

The apple tree spied you
making a pass at the pear
who has done nothing
but boast about her figure.

Oh, my
green, my curves.

Remember your thirst, Wisteria, what first
sent you scaling—how you bet the English
Ivy you’d fetch the sun, a wheel of light to throw.

But your tongues are always
in the way, dripping
and who will trust a tongue
whose purple is her iris

whose iris is her fall
whose kiss could paint
portraits in the dark.

With your many eyes, Wisteria, swallow
what bears. Your trellis fills.
Your garden betrays you as you betray.
Feast, Wisteria, on the light you’ve stolen.

 

First published in Pebble Lake Review.

 

Natasha Kochicheril Moni is a naturopathic medical student and a writer. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and book reviews regularly appear in journals including: Defenestration Magazine, Rattle, Indiana Review, The Pedestal Magazine, and Fourteen Hills. Natasha’s poems have been nominated for Best of the Web and Best of the Net.

Richard Kenney

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Hydrology; Lachrymation

 

The river meanders because it can’t think.
Always, with the river, the path of least resistance.
Look: lip of a low bowl swerves the river tens
Or thousands of miles wild. The least brink
Of a ridge and its python shies… How efficient— think—
Would a straight sluice to the sea be, in terms
Computable? When’s water simpler? Cisterns
Certainly, still as a tearful blink;
Lake effects likewise, like the great circular storms,
Tornadoes, hurricanes; those lesser weather systems
Too, troubling the benthos where the icecaps shrink.
Straightforward isotherms… or is it isotheres…
But a moment ago, someone mentioned tears.
Why tears, for love? Why rivers? I can’t think.

 

“Hydrology; Lachrymation” is reprinted from The One-Strand River (Knopf, 2008).

 

Richard Kenney’s most recent book is The One-Strand River (Knopf, 2008). He teaches at the University of Washington, and lives with his family in Port Townsend.

 

READING:  Richard Kenney will read with Tess Gallagher, Jim Bertolino, Brian Culhane, and Laurie Lamon at Elliott Bay Books on Thursday, November 1 at 7:00 pm.

Brooke Matson

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Twilight

 

The cold brass of sun slides

the evening leaves.

 

Star magnolias spin

on the surface of the pond

 

like a tattered gown.

The moon slips

 

from night’s fingers

as a broad-winged crane descending—

 

no more reason to hold herself

so far above the world.

 

“Twilight” is reprinted from The Moons (Blue Begonia Press, 2012).

Brooke Matson was born and raised on the rural side of Yakima, Washington. She attended Gonzaga University, where she received her B.A. in English and her M.A. in Educational Leadership. Her work has been published in the Blue Begonia Press anthology, Weathered Pages, in 2005. Her first book is The Moons (Blue Begonia Press, 2012). Matson lives in Spokane where she teaches at a small experiential high school.

Joannie Stangeland

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The Lake Makes a Mirror

 

She sees herself on the surface, a little wavy,
as though looking through old glass.

The wind arrives, ruffles her image, rustles
through willows along the shore,

each leaf turning like another page
and she sees the plots unfold

in shifting currents, the water’s texture
becoming a scheme she can open

like the paper fortune tellers
she folded as a girl. Here,

she writes a new future without worry,
chooses a villain

who makes a suave entrance
and looks nothing like a crab.

Evasive, the lake’s face hides
the light she knows will come

when this weather has done its work.

 

 

“The Lake Makes a Mirror” previously appeared in Into the Rumored Spring, Ravenna Press, and in The Midwest Quarterly.

 

Joannie Stangeland’s third book of poems, Into the Rumored Spring, was published by Ravenna Press last fall. Her chapbook A Steady Longing for Flight won the inaugural Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award, and her chapbook Weathered Steps was published by Rose Alley Press. Joannie’s poems have appeared in Crab Creek Review, Floating Bridge Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Many Trials to the Summit, Fire On Her Tongue, and other publications. Joannie was a 2003 Jack Straw writer, and she serves as poetry editor for the online journal The Smoking Poet.

 

READING:  Joannie Stangeland will be reading from Into the Rumored Spring at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle, tomorrow, October 13, at 5:00 pm.  Poet Marjorie Manwaring will join her with poems from her new chapbook, What to Make of a Diminished Thing.  

Jesse Minkert

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CHARCOAL IN THE MILK

 

Collector of time and twine camping in the pantry
flashlight in an underwater cavern walls all look
alike. What you hear above the clatter:
what can’t exist can’t make demands.

Once these places were one place. Engines
carried us to knowable destinations. Corners
stand now on toes. Jobbers glide past our lips.

Let chance decide. Let rivers flood
the neighborhoods. Let floor lamps
pretend to be bonfires. Mats and napkins
beckon; gestures on the glass.

Master of time and isotopes. Half this life
is half enough. Brother under skin healing
in the dispensary. Neutrinos in the nursery.

Sutures over eyebrows. Sweet sleep
on fresh sheets. Sweat on the face.
Blood in the stool. Clusters of cells
deforming midnight to dawn
Hair grows on the mask.

Once this was all one place. Motors carried us
we didn’t care where. Feathers filled our pillows
pheasants basted in wine pretended to embrace
the fate of many slathered in the same sauce.

 
Jesse Minkert lives in Seattle. He has written plays for theater and radio, short stories, novels, and poems. Wood Works Press published Shortness of Breath & Other Symptoms, in 2008. His poetry appears or is upcoming in Floating Bridge Review, Harpur Palate, Aunt Chloe, Raven Chronicles, and Naugatuck River Review.