Lillias Bever

Posted on September 19, 2012 by Kathleen Flenniken

Cesarean

There was an opera playing—
I remember that—
so beautiful, a modern piece sung by a woman
whose name I would never remember,
although the surgeon spoke it once, softly,
through his mask, and I strained to hear
past the clatter of implements on silver trays,
the bustle of the scrub nurses,
the murmurs of the anesthesiologist holding my head,
his tray of gauze strips fluttering like prayer rags—

II.

They’d pinned my arms down
like a butterfly’s wings;
I had no feeling from the waist down;
a dreaminess took hold:
and the woman’s voice kept wandering
in and out of the minutes, pulling
my mind after it, the notes
stretched so far the words had become
unintelligible—

The light was as bright as the sun
over an excavation site;
they were cleaning the area,
taking up their tools—

III.

Down and down through a slit
in the world, earth
falling away on both sides, past
history, botched experiments, sepsis,
Jacob the pig-gelder begging permission
to cut open his wife
in labor for three days; past
legend, Caesar cut whole
from his mother;
and deeper still, myth: Bacchus
slit from Zeus’ thigh,
Athena bursting fully-armed from his head,

as whatever is unmothered, torn
from its context, becomes
holy—

IV.

Jars, funeral urns, broken pieces
of pottery still glazed with their lovely enamels,
necklaces of lapis and ivory, gold
crowns encrusted with dirt, the mound

of the ancient city, and the mind,
sharp as the pig-gelder’s knife—

There was something in me;
I’d felt it for such a long time,
and now they were digging to find it,
but not like the archaeologist finding
the glint of something precious
in the earth, no, not as gentle
as that freeing, with its brushes
and soft cloths, more like
a robin tugging at a worm
stuck fast in the earth,

pulling with all its weight—

VI.

On the plain, the tumulus
swollen with artifacts; in the distance
men bending and cutting, digging
then pausing to lean on their shovels
in the hot sun, sweat pouring down their backs;

from where I was, it did not look
like delicate work, more like
hard labor: burnt grass, a broken wall
or two, goats grazing
casually in the shade, and high up in the trees

that ceaseless singing—

VII.

At last they found what they were looking for.
I heard a voice ask, What is it? What is it?
They were cleaning something, holding it up to the light—

“Cesarean” is reprinted from Bellini in Istanbul (Tupelo, 2005).

Lillias Bever‘s first collection of poems, Bellini in Istanbul (Tupelo, 2005), won the Tupelo Press First Book Competition, and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Pleiades, and Shenandoah, among others, and has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from Artist Trust, the Seattle Arts Commission, and 4Culture. She lives in Seattle.

Jesse Minkert

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Kathleen Flenniken

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.

Christine Deavel

Posted on September 11, 2012 by Kathleen Flenniken

from Hometown (Over and Over)

The starchy yarn of spring came
and knitted itself into a blue hyacinth
then unraveled that
and tatted itself into a columbine
then snipped it up
coated it in paste
and spread itself out to make a sky
but cut a small patch
to suggest a doorway
and gave the tiny remnant
to a little girl who
walked about the town below
opening and closing
the little blue door.

* * *

Remind me,
what was our tithe? The peony flowers.
What were our jewels? The peony buds.
What was our relief? The peony shoots.
Who kept watch for us? The peony roots, set so shallow the eyes could nearly see.

“Hometown (Over and Over)” is reprinted from Woodnote (Bear Star Press, 2011).

Christine Deavel is co-owner of Open Books, a poetry-only bookstore in Seattle, and has worked as a bookseller for over two decades. Her collection Woodnote received the Dorothy Brunsman Prize from Bear Star Press in 2011 and the Washington State Book Award for Poetry in 2012.

Judith Skillman

Posted on September 3, 2012 by Kathleen Flenniken

Death of Pan

We were only playing in the pasture,
wearing a patchwork of sun and sky,
ragged with the coming autumn.
That is to say we didn’t mean
to drown out the sound of his flute—
our piper, nor meddle with the conch shell
that caused our fathers to panic.

And his Arcadia—
how we adored her. We made wreaths
of wildflowers, twined tendrils of her hair
around our stubby hands as we brought
her one more gift: a leaf bloodied with color,
a spare sapling, an agate choked in quartz.

Until the river-god,
happy as ever to be plunged in cold,
took him from our arms and flung
his instrument against the rocky shore.
The syrinx shattered into seven reeds or nine,
and we, still infatuated with the echoes
our voices made in that valley, called out
to one another, not so much from loneliness
as the excitement of recitation.

Light breezes
dog us as we go forward in reconnaissance,
teaching one another how to suffer
being schooled by lechers. Our appetite
for the one called Pitys—another nymph
loved by him, who turned into a pine tree
to escape his overtures,
runs nil to none.

“Death of Pan” previously appeared in The Never (Dream Horse Press, 2010)..

Judith Skillman is the author of twelve books of poems, including The Never (Dream Horse Press, 2010), and Heat Lightning: New and Selected Poems (Silverfish Review Press, 2006), and two which were finalists for the Washington State Book Award. Her most recent collection, The White Cypress (Cervéna Barva Press, 2011) was reviewed favorably in The Pedestal Magazine and The Iowa Review and has a review forthcoming The Raven Chronicles. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the King County Arts Commission (KCAC) Publication Prize, a KCAC Public Arts grant, and a Washington State Arts Commission Writer’s Fellowship. Her poems and translations have appeared in Poetry, FIELD, The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, Midwest Quarterly Review, Northwest Review, Prairie Schooner, Seneca Review, and other journals and anthologies. She’s been writer in residence at the Centrum Foundation in Port Townsend, Washington, The Hedgebrook Foundation, and the Jack Straw Foundation. Skillman resides in Kennydale, Washington, and teaches for The Yellow Wood Academy, Mercer Island, Washington.

Julie Larios

Posted on August 9, 2012 by Kathleen Flenniken

Woman with the Beak of an Octopus

She has become almost human, having been a creature
of the sea, multi-armed, dependent on saltwater,
and on certain tidal patterns and marine behavior.

Though she has become almost human, her skeleton is new,
inflexible and strange to her. What she still doesn’t know
about air she is trying hard to learn, with neurons

numbering in the billions now, gills gone, her new brain
localized and voluminous. For years, her arms had been
conscious entities, self-directed. That was before the bones

began to grow and the outer mantle to thin, before
the siphon closed. By choice, she left the shallow floor
of the ocean and began to move closer in to shore,

pulled by a changeable sky and the marvel of human sound.
The idea of seasons charmed her, as did the sun and moon,
and her desire for non-attachment trumped the art of suction.

All that is left is to form a human mouth from her beak.
Soon now, she will forget the ink sac, forget how to breathe
underwater, how to forage below the surface, how not to speak.

In form, she will be human, though whenever she passes
a large window, believing it to be liquid, her heart will race
and her hands will be drawn, inexplicably, toward the glass.

“Woman with the Beak of an Octopus” originally appeared in The Indiana Review in a slightly different form. You might enjoy comparing the effect of the prose-poem structure to the lineated version, above.

Julie Larios has published poems in many reviews including Field, Threepenny Review, The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and The Atlantic. She also publishes books for children (two of them illustrated by Seattle artist Julie Paschkis) and recently wrote the libretto for a penny opera titled “Three Acts of a Sad Play Performed Entirely in Bed” with music by composer Dag Gabrielson as part of the New York City Opera’s VOX Festival. She is the winner of a Pushcart Prize and Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Award and has been published twice in The Best American Poetry.

Jenifer Browne Lawrence

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Kathleen Flenniken

Sedna at the Juneau Cold Storage Dock

There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea and she’s afraid
to go swimming. Not that the water is too cold. Not
that the halibut below the dock—the one
that swallowed a scuba diver tank and all—
is real, but she’s afraid not to believe

the myth, how salmon
heads and lungs, tails and ropy innards
fed the halibut until it grew
a mouth like an orca, a cavern
gaping on its flat, two-tone body,

the girl’s body
shivering in the open boat, she can’t
remove her float coat for a swim,
not even for her father.
There’s a hole in the harbor floor

where the water darkens, out
past the jetty. That’s where she would go
if she were real, if she were the fish-woman
whose fingers were chopped off by her father
to make her let go of the boat.

“Sedna at the Juneau Cold Storage Dock” originally appeared in Narrative Magazine.

Jenifer Browne Lawrence is the author of One Hundred Steps from Shore (Blue Begonia, 2006). She was awarded the 2011 James Hearst Poetry Prize and is a Washington State Artist Trust GAP grant recipient. Recent work appears in Bellevue Literary Review, Caesura, Crab Creek Review, Court Green, Narrative, and the North American Review. Jenifer lives in Poulsbo, Washington, and serves on the Centrum advisory board for the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference.

Lucia Perillo

Posted on July 26, 2012 by Kathleen Flenniken

Domestic

Here the coyote lives in shadows between houses,
feeds by running west to raid the trash behind the store
where they sell food that comes in cans
yesterday expired. Think of it
perching on the dumpster, a corrugated
sheet of metal welded to the straight, its haunch
accruing the imprint of the edge until it pounces,
skittering on the cans. Its attempts
to gnaw them open have broken all its teeth.

Bald-flanked, rheumy-eyed, sniffing the wheels
of our big plastic trash carts but too pigeon-
chested to knock them down, scat full of eggshells
from the compost pile. “I am like that, starved,
with dreams of rutting in a culvert’s narrow light—”
we mumble our affinities as we vacate into sleep.
Because we occupy the wrong animal—don’t you too feel it?
Haven’t you stood in the driveway, utterly confused?
Maybe you were taking out the garbage, twisting your robe
into a noose-knot at your throat, when you stopped
fighting the urge to howl, and howled—
and did you find relief, my friend, however self-deceiving?

“Domestic” appears in On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon Press, 2012).

Lucia Perillo has published six books of poetry, including Luck Is Luck, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, a book of short stories, Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain, and a memoir, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature. Her most recent poetry collections are Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, and her newly released collection, On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). Perillo, a MacArthur Fellow, has taught at Syracuse University, Saint Martin’s University, and Southern Illinois University. She lives in Olympia, Washington.

Jeannine Hall Gailey

Posted on July 16, 2012 by Kathleen Flenniken

Job Requirements: A Supervillain’s Advice

Grow up near a secret nuclear testing site.
Think Hanford, Washington. Oak Ridge,
Tennessee. North and South Dakota
are riddled with them. Your father – is he
an eccentric scientist of some sort? Did you
show early signs of a “supergenius” IQ?
Experience isolation from “normal” childhood
activities? (Multiple traumatic incidents welcome.)
Physical limitations, such as an unusual but poetic
disease or deformity due to mutation, are preferred;
problems due to accidents involving powerful
new weaponry or interactions with superheroes
are also acceptable. (Develop flamboyant
criminal signatures. Adopt antisocial poses.)
Fashionable knack for skin-tight costumes
(masks, hooks, extra long nails) considered a plus.
Study jujitsu or krav maga.
Practice creative problem solving;
for example, that lipstick could be poisoned,
that spiked heel a stabbing implement.
Remember, you are on the side
of the laws of thermodynamics. Entropy
is a measure of disorder.
Chaos, destruction, death: these are your instruments.
Use them wisely. You are no mere mortal.
Don’t lose your cool if captured; chances are,
you can already control minds, bend metal to your whim,
produce, in your palms, fire.
In the end you are the reason we see the picture;
we mistrust the tedium of a string of sunny days.
We like to watch things crumble.

“Job Requirements: A Supervillain’s Advice” is republished from Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe Books, 2006).

Jeannine Hall Gailey is the brand-new Poet Laureate of Redmond, and the author of Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe Books, 2006) and She Returns to the Floating World (Kitsune Books, 2011.) Her poems were featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac and on Verse Daily; two were included in 2007’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Prairie Schooner. She volunteers as an editorial consultant for Crab Creek Review,reviews poetry for The Rumpus, and currently teaches at the MFA program at National University.

Martha Clarkson

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Kathleen Flenniken

Room at the Top

Lydia Shultan has invisible friends, whose names all begin with J.
They live in the attic of her parents’ house
and stick together under the northeast eave.
She holds court sitting Indian-style on her aunt’s footlocker.

Lydia Shultan has an imagination like grass.
Fast growing and self-fertilized, with an occasional blow-able dandelion.
Her parents feel compelled to mow it back now and then,
disregarding her atmosphere.

Lydia Shultan creates a play where her box turtles are the actors.
She names one Charlie Chaplin, because of course it has to be a silent play.
For the score she plays her only piano piece, “Merry Roses.”
The blank-eyed turtles forget to take a bow.

Lydia Shultan isn’t going to get any brothers and sisters.
She’ll have to settle for the attic friends, who tend to be catty
and are unnaturally blonde, and the girls wear nylons instead of knee-highs.
Sometimes they run around the attic naked, so Lydia does, and it feels like flying.

Martha Clarkson manages corporate workplace design in Seattle. Her poetry and fiction can be found in monkeybicycle6, Clackamas Literary Review, Seattle Review, Portland Review, elimae, and Nimrod. She is a recipient of a Washington Poets Association William Stafford prize 2005, a Pushcart Nomination, and is listed under “Notable Stories,” Best American Non-Required Reading for 2007 and 2009. She lives in Kirkland.

Monica Schley

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Kathleen Flenniken

Figeater
For Beth Fleenor

That fig tree attracts wasps. They get wobbly
in the heady fermented fruit

flying lazily on the summer wind
like some Sinatra party guest after martinis.

Masts clang down the hill in the harbor.
Another siren calls while the dusk wraps its ethered scarf

around the neighborhood and the raccoon,
in his nocturnal wonder, takes one look at the tree

to see his paradise, his destiny, like a moth
sees his paramour flame, he knows

he will reach supreme love
from the bright fig at the crown

now illuminated by the moon. The limbs
are as soft as quartz, scratching easily

as he climbs up & up & up.
Drawn out is this moment of reaching—

the way he scampers on the thin branches for footing,
stretching towards splendor, there it is: a purple sack,

a Lilliputian’s laundry bag. He touches as high
as he can without falling. And then he does

manage to clip the fruit with his paw
joyously dropping into his mouth, the wet

and juicy center. A smile perhaps
and laughter at the bulging size of the fig

which in one second slides down his throat
but gets stuck. And there is our raccoon—

on tip-toes in the moonlight at the height of his happiness
in the tree choking. After that there is a fall,

followed by the brief silence of being airborne
before landing at the crux of two crossed branches

that bounce of the sudden glottal stop. Uh-oh.

Everyone is gone from the house to have heard
the accident, but in the morning they find him

strange fruit hanging from the Mediterranean tree.
And so he is plucked (apprehensively)

his soft furry body like a forgotten gym bag
stuffed with stinky socks. He is processioned in a bizarre majesty

down the street on the shovel used to dig his grave.
Now he rests in the old apple orchard

of the abandoned house (half burned out in decay)
there beneath the one oak tree covered

in ivy vines that in a few years from now
will have a small fig tree in its shadow

that started from the seed
in the raccoon’s belly.

Monica Schley earned a BA from UW-Eau Claire (in her native Wisconsin) where she studied poetry and harp. As a poet, her work has appeared in Burnside Review; Cranky; Cream City Review; Crab Creek Review; KNOCK and other journals. Her chapbook Black Eden: Nocturnes (Pudding House Press) was published in 2009 and also doubles as a performance piece with dance/spoken word/music. As a musician, she has worked with some of the Northwest’s mostly highly respected composers and performers including: Jim Knapp; Eyvand Kang; Jherek Bischoff; Lori Goldston; Jesse Sykes; Damien Jurado and many others. She is currently working on recording an album of her own music and poetry and being a new mother. Concert calendar can be found at: www.monicaschley.com

The Far Field

The Washington State Poet Laureate Presents…

Category Archives: myths and stories