Category Archives: environment

Janet Norman Knox

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Wyckoff Superfund Site Sheetpile Wall
After Matthea Harvey

 

Consider the wall, its forced embrace,
holding back, holding arm’s length.

Consider the salt, its corrosive face,
trading electrons for rust,

turning iron to ore to dust
to its mantle-fed home.

Home to the wall
to consider its inside, faced

with floating
oil, sinking blebs—

like canola, molasses, caramel
to coat a face

of wood against sea—home
of many eating things.

Consider your face, its flush
of bacteria coating,

trace the line of your cheek,
one finger trading

a trail of cells
mine to yours, yours

on my fingertip holding
an armful of home.

 

 

Seven-time Pushcart nominee and finalist for the Discovery/The Nation Award, Janet Norman Knox’s poems have appeared in Los Angeles Review, 5 AM, Crab Creek Review, Rhino, Diner, Seattle Review, Adirondack Review, Poetry Southeast, Red Mountain Review, and Diagram. Her chapbook, Eastlake Cleaners When Quality & Price Count [a romance] received the Editor’s Award (Concrete Wolf, 2007). She received the Ruskin Poetry Prize (Red Hen Press) in 2008. The Los Angeles Review nominated her for 2010 Best New Poets. Her poetry was used by composer Paul Lewis for his 2006 opera, Last Poem on Earth. She participated in a 2011 Jack Straw Foundation Grant in collaboration with artist Syracuse University Professor Anne Beffel. Janet Norman Knox is also an owner of 25-year old Pacific Groundwater Group, an environmental and water resource consulting firm. She is an Environmental Geochemist specializing in contaminant investigations and cleanup like a doctor of the land.

Janet will be giving a Pocket Concert at the Seattle Repertory Theatre on September 28, 2012.

UPDATE:  Janet Knox’s poem, “Carbon Shining on our Faces” is worked into bars of glycerin soap available from the Brightwater Environmental Education Center for a limited time.  (September 30, 2013)

Merna Ann Hecht

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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.

 

 

Ted McMahon

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Prosector

 
This morning, on our walk between rain squalls
we circled the lake at the head of the Cayou valley.
There, amidst an insistence of flickers, a burble
of robins, the rusty scrape of the red-wing blackbird,
we happened upon a black-feathered shape, which flew up
at our approach, into the trees. Where it had been,
what had seemed a rumpled blanket,
was a doe, no more than two days dead.
Ribs furled around a thorax
empty of lungs, empty of heart, open
to the thin mist of rain. And the ribs themselves,
pink and clean of meat, a lesson in anatomy taught
by that bald scavenger waiting above, waiting
to resume his lecture on our shared fate.

 

“Prosector” previously appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Ted McMahon’s poetry has appeared in Seattle Review, Convolvulus, Manzanita Quarterly, Rosebud, and the Journal of the American Medical Association, and on The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. His full-length collection is The Uses of Imperfection, published in 2003. He published a chapbook, First Fire, in 1996. Ted received the 1999 Carlin Aden Award for formal verse from the Washington Poets Association, and a 2004 Artist Trust GAP Grant. He was finalist for the Ruth Stone Prize in Poetry in 2005. Ted was a co-editor at Floating Bridge Press in Seattle from 1999-2006. He currently practices Pediatrics half time in the Seattle neighborhood of Ballard and devotes the other half to writing and leading river journeys.  He lives in the Seattle neighborhood of Wallingford with his wife, photographer Rosanne Olson, and their two Maine Coon cats, Zoe and Maxx.

 

 

 

Christianne Balk

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John Muir in the Sequoias
August, 1870

 

Enough of the winds tearing through Merced
Canyon’s boulder-choked gorge, enough
of the stampedes muddying Moss Creek.
Enough hoofed catastrophes. I’ll ride them

all out in these root-caves, framed
with the purple-tinged bark of buttressed
trunks in an unnamed grove. Too tired
of tales of the ground’s cataclysmic quakes –

valleys bottomed out, pine trees tossed,
cedar, oak, gusts snapping massive limbs,
and the sudden rush of flame –
to even imagine fire grazing these old,

close-packed leaves. Spinning, zigzagging,
burning back, surging, scorching every living
thing. Roaring updrafts filling branches filled
with cones. Ashes settling, smoking litter cooling

slowly. The air dark with incense, charred
stumps. Blackened hollows like the one I sit in.
From this loud storm drifts
chestnut snow, down from the quiet

canopy, each fleck smaller than a grain
of flax, a cloud of hope released from tight
cone scales opened by the heat,
flurries of small, flat-winged seeds.

 

“John Muir in the Sequoias” first appeared in Words and Pictures Magazine.
Christianne Balk’s books include Bindweed and Desiring Flight. After majoring in biology at Grinnell College, she studied English at The University of Iowa. Her poems have appeared in The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Alhambra Poetry Calendar, The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and other anthologies and journals. She lives in Seattle with her husband and daughter.

Sheryl Clough

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Exit Glacier

 

Harding Icefield’s chilled womb pushes
the infant glacier toward the terminal
moraine sprawled on Resurrection River.
As other infants’ skull bones knit together,
Exit’s crack and cleave, blue fissures thrust in thunder.
She flings herself down from the nunataks
past heather, avalanche lilies and beargrass.
She crushes hillsides into plains,
hundred-year Sitka spruces to toothpicks,
boulders to glacial flour,
the power in her weight a blue statement
on the way to the grave.

 

“Exit Glacier” originally appeared in Spindrift. 

Sheryl Clough received her MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where she designed and taught UAF’s first writing course linked to environmental literature.  Her writing appears in Spindrift, Explorations, Storyboard, Sierra, Travelers Tales, Soundings Reviewand others.  Sheryl’s kayak adventure story “Icebergs in My Dreams” was published in the Seal Press anthology Solo: On Her Own Adventure.   Sheryl edited the new poetry anthology, Surrounded:  Living With Islands, available through Write Wing Publishing.

James Bertolino

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Blueprint

 

This morning the ice came.
Everything fresh
and new––but don’t be fooled.

Water is old.

When it’s just cold enough,
ice will enclose everything––pebbles,
twigs, ripe fruit and all
we’ve built––in a brilliant casing.

This is the way water memorizes
what is temporary and
in danger. Water carries the blueprint
for what has been made,

what is missing.

At this moment, in the profound depths
of the Pacific, water is remembering
a perfect model of Hiroshima
in April of 1944.

It is glowing with the pink
of plum blossoms.

 

“Blueprint” is reprinted from Finding Water, Holding Stone

 

James Bertolino’s tenth volume of poetry, Finding Water, Holding Stone, was published in 2009 by Cherry Grove Collections. His 26 poetry collections include books from Carnegie Mellon University Press and the Quarterly Review of Literature Award Series at Princeton University. He’s received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, and Book-of-the-Month Club, as well as the Jeanne Lohmann Poetry Prize for Washington State poets. His teaching includes Cornell University, University of Cincinnati, Western Washington University and Willamette University. He served as a judge for the 2009, 2010 and 2011 American Book Awards in poetry. He lives outside Bellingham.

Anne Pitkin

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Lapland Longspur

 

Arctic Sparrow
it balances
on a dwarf fireweed.
Hills and sky roll
off the end of the visible world

which tilts
through the implacable
harmonies
of space, unprotected,
its own laws exacting
and without prejudice.

Even so, a furious
and delicate imbalance
thrives here:

purple aster, harebell,
yellow oxytrope, the Longspur
whose perch trembles
as it lets go and darts to the next.

*

Some proportions
have no meaning: harebell
to Arctic winter, Longspur
to the urgency of summer
on the tundra’s millions of acres
where it nests,
its home lined
with a puff of wool
from the musk ox.

*

Fewer and fewer stars set
as one travels
farther north in winter.
The Auroras swing across the sky,
souls, some say,
of children
who have died at birth.
All night, they dance,
all the sunless weeks
they dance in circles
whipping streamers of light
across the land encased
by an adamant darkness.

*

Tonight, the news
of a death was followed
by a Mozart concerto
for flute and orchestra,

was followed by the music
of Mozart as it has played
through two centuries of loss

for which there is no recompense.

The life of a bird
hurries from sparrow to sparrow.

The Longspur builds
its minute bones with calcium
from the skeletons of lemmings.

Occasionally, on the beach,
it nests in the skull of a walrus

The life of a bird
sometimes hurries from a stutter
of wings to singing that flashes
across an empty landscape.

*

Point Barrow:
Near midnight, July Fourth,
two boys walk out
on the melting sea ice.

From a distance,
against the white sea,
small and black under the sun,
they seem to be dancing
round and round

on the ice
at its most dangerous.

A few say, when we speak
of the end

of the Longspur, even
of Mozart, a very few say still
the earth may heal itself.

 

“Lapland Longspur” originally appeared in Ironwood.

 

Anne Pitkin grew up in Clarksville, TN, and earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Vanderbilt University. She earned a second master’s from Antioch University in 1988. She has worked both as a community college instructor and as a psychotherapist. Winter Arguments (Ahadada Books, 2011) is her third collection after Yellow (Arrowood Books, 1989) and the chapbook Notes for Continuing the Performance (Jawbone Press, 1977). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, and many others. A mother of three, grandmother of two, she currently lives in Seattle, where she plays jazz piano with her friends.

Paul Hunter

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What A Boy Lies Awake Wondering

 

Footsore trudging these fields
while overhead dip and wheel
unfolding lives on the wing
some evenings every other living thing
seems dipped in desire glistening

so I envy the horse that can ripple
its skin out from under the horsefly
and the thousand-eyed horsefly
that bites me clean through
the workshirt stuck to my shoulders

I envy the hen so suspicious
of me she can turn her head backwards
and the slippery calf being nudged up
licked clean of its birth
all set to dance at a touch

and the water skeeter astride
the silvery skin of the horse trough
inhaled by those whiskery muzzles
and the green snake so still in the lilac
whose tongue neatly scissors the world

 

“What A Boy Lies Awake Wondering” is reprinted
from Ripening, (Silverfish Review Press, 2007).

 

Paul Hunter has lent a hand where it was needed—as teacher, performer, grassroots arts activist, worker on the land, and shade-tree mechanic. For the past 18 years he has published fine letterpress poetry under the imprint of Wood Works, currently including 26 books and over 60 broadsides. His poems have appeared in Alaska Fisherman’s Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bloomsbury Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Raven Chronicles, The Small Farmer’s Journal, The Southern Review and Spoon River Poetry Review, as well as in six full-length books and three chapbooks. His first collection of farming poems, Breaking Ground, 2004, from Silverfish Review Press, was reviewed in the New York Times, and received the 2004 Washington State Book Award. A second volume of farming poems, Ripening, was published in 2007, and a third companion volume, Come the Harvest, appeared in 2008. He has been a featured poet on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. His recent prose book, One Seed to Another: The New Small Farming, was published by the Small Farmer’s Journal in 2010. A fourth collection of farming poems, Stubble Field, is due out from Silverfish Review Press, in May 2012.

Katrina Roberts

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MIDWAY ATOLL

— after Message from the Gyre, Chris Jordan

I flip through a stack of photographs, one more colorful than the next – the belly of each albatross chick a beautiful jumble: turquoise and yellow shards, the bright white of bottle caps, fluorescent magenta of someone’s discarded toothbrush, peach of a tampon tube, royal blue lighter — nested within cages of shattered rib, twisted yards of knotted green string, shreds of translucent plastic sheeting, all so far from any land I’ve walked (2000 miles from the nearest continent out in the middle of the North Pacific), yet evidence in waste of my human presence; when I leave my children hungry for attention and drive myself to the ER a random Wednesday evening because I can’t take a full breath for pains in my chest – I picture this: blown open bodies, crevices of unexpected debris, feathers splayed and matted, the elegant curve of bill, silent and still against pebbly sand… and can’t even say it to myself: I was trying in my frenzy to feed you; please forgive me and remember my love.

“Midway Atoll” is from Underdog, University of Washington Press, 2011.

 

Katrina Roberts is the Mina Schwabacher Professor in English and the Humanities  at Whitman College. She is author of Friendly Fire, Winner of the Idaho Prize in Poetry; How Late Desire Looks, which won the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize; and The Quick, an early volume in the Pacific Northwest Series. Her most recent collection is Underdog (University of Washington Press, 2011). Her work appears in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Poetry, and The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets, among other anthologies. She and her husband, Jeremy Barker, an artist and distiller native to Walla Walla, are the proprietors of and winemakers for Tytonidae Cellars, which they started in 2003, as well as founders of the Walla Walla Distilling Company. They can generally find their three small children playing with barn cats in the good dirt somewhere not far from the vineyard.

Cal Kinnear

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IT IS THE EMERALD DRAGONFLY CHANCE I want to talk about
here, the moth-eaten holes

things come and go through passing
from dream. This world of mud and morning light

and oat bread is dense and sweet.
I would be content to stand for ages aerial and ponderous

as a great redwood with unblinking eyes. I would need
nothing, if

there were not fox with her red brush marking the crossings,
here to there and back. Watchful, silent.

Here-and-there name my border
where she knows none.

Red and night are the same
pigment. Tireless

and keep and smoke
name her.

If there were not fox, where
would I die to?

 

 

Cal Kinnear is a third generation resident of Seattle recently retired to Vashon Island. In the course of his life he has been college teacher (University of Virginia and Wells College), owner of a book store in Olympia, Washington, modern dancer, waiter at The Thirteen Coins, sailor, hiker, carpenter, development director for the Church Council of Greater Seattle and Explorer West Middle School, and, until recent retirement, Director of Washington Lawyers for the Arts. He has had poems published in The Louisville Review, The Licking River Review, The Prose Poem: An International Journal, Birmingham Poetry Review, Chrysalis Reader, The Temple, Burning Cloud, and RE:AL, and locally in Crab Creek Review, Point No Point, Pontoon, Floating Bridge Review and Fine Madness. He was winner of Fine Madness’ Nelson Bentley prize in 2003. His book, A Walk in Bardo, was published in 2008 by Blue Begonia Press. A suite of 15 translations from the work of the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan was published by Longhouse Books of Vermont in April of 2009. Raven Chronicles published a suite of poems, Heart Range, on line in November of 2009.