Category Archives: description

Jill McCabe Johnson

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Kitchen Waltz

 

We tilled our garden beds, making way for heirloom starts,
cuddled into careful impressions. The peppers we staggered,
left to right, front to back, and they did, in a way, resemble dance steps,

instructional patterns for those less nimble, like me.
I questioned the wisdom of eggplant near sunflower. He questioned
my carelessness: the brush against chickweed, launching seeds

into startled orbit. But then I brushed him, or he grazed me,
and we gathered sprays of rosemary, marjoram, thyme,
and a quiver of chives before stepping inside.

Something happened next in the kitchen, the alchemy of lovers,
where food as primeval as catfish finds sesame oil and tikka masala,
scallions and pecans. Greens melted in the pan, then on our tongues,

like our muscles later in bed. I doubt either of us dreamt of dancing,
but one of us said, “Turn,” in our sleep. Loud enough to wake us both,
but not so loud we could tell who had spoken. Two cooks,

one mind. A drowsy shifting under the covers. Two forks entwined.
A stomach pressed against a back, the other stomach unbridled and breathing.
I thought of quail—savory, delicate, and buttery—with fresh sage and arugula.

 

 

“Kitchen Waltz” is reprinted from Floating Bridge Review.

 

Jill McCabe Johnson’s first poetry collection, Diary of the One Swelling Sea (MoonPath Press, 2013), was inspired by the Salish Sea surrounding her home in the San Juan Islands. Jill is the founder and executive director of Artsmith, which provides artist residencies and other programs to support the arts. She earned her MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop, and will graduate in May 2014 with a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska where she pretends the acres of corn and tall grass prairie are another form of the sea.

 

Emily Warn

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Talking with the Gigantic Maple About the Dragonfly

 

Neither you
nor I
can mimic
a dragonfly
though your seed-wings
clack
like their wings
when they take off
in unison
to practice backflips
above the lake.

Nor can we balance
on a single blade
of shore grass,
admiring ourselves
to shame the lake
into polishing its mirror.

But we can be still
and hear the quiet
between
two echoing thrush.

And in the hush
of our leaves
and breaths
conjoined,
we can see
universes
in the dragonfly’s
eight eyes.

 

(from “Flowering Branches” in The Novice Insomniac (Copper Canyon 1996))
“I stood where you would not see me
And my armload of flowers.”

 

For Emily Warn, poetry links music and meaning every bit as powerfully and oddly as religious traditions do, inventing complicated, invisible relations. She moved to the Pacific Northwest 1978 to work for North Cascades National Park, and a year later moved to Seattle where she has lived, more or less ever since. Sherecently served as the Webby Award–winning founding editor of poetryfoundation.org, and now divides her time between Seattle and Twisp, Washington. Warn has published five collections of poetry, including three books: The Leaf Path (1982),The Novice Insomniac (1996) and Shadow Architect (2008), all from Copper Canyon Press, and two chapbooks The Book of Esther (1986) and Highway Suite (1987). Her essays and poems appear widely, including in Poetry, BookForum, Blackbird, Parabola, The Seattle Times, The Writers’ Almanac. She has taught creative writing or served as writer-in-residence at many schools and arts centers. She was educated at Kalamazoo College and the University of Washington, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

 

Kristen Spexarth

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Fisherman’s Terminal

 

A memorial sits
next to my favorite breakfast haunt.
It’s on a pier where rock songs blare
from a nearby speaker out to working boats,
moored, and waiting for the season.
Seagulls are soaring, circling,
searching for food bits and fish guts,
their cries, like homing pigeons
flying straight to my heart.
I have never been a sailor
but I come here and
fingers following,
touch the fish forever circling,
caught in cast bronze,
and stand, a shadow,
in front of names I never knew
and still they touch me.
Hopping sparrow, hoping for crumbs,
flies off in a hurry finding none.
Canadian geese, majestic, long-necked cruisers
on green effluent
reach out and gingerly nibble insects and eel grass.
Across the ship canal they’ll be scrapping for french fries
but here they float, regal.

 

Kristen Spexarth lives in Seattle and writes about love, loss and the world around as seen through the eyes of a gardener. She’s been writing a long time, has been published here and there and spends her free time working to help educate people about suicide prevention.

Dennis Held

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Sonnet for a Baby Seal

 

Not the one you see on television,
Head tilted up to look like a whiskered
Infant, those pleading, liquid eyes . . . this one
Was real, on black Alaskan sand, ridiculous
With an eagle beating its wings against
The seal’s head, both screaming, the pup too young
To get away, too old to die at once.
The eagle, talons buried, pecked at one
Eye only, to force a way in. Of course
I beat the eagle off with driftwood.
Yes, I tried to kill the baby seal. No one
Could say I didn’t try hard enough.
But when I turned to leave, it swam away,
Blinded, silent, bearing news from Hell.

 

 

“Sonnet for a Baby Seal” is reprinted from Ourself (Gribble Press. 2011).

 

Dennis Held received his BA from The Evergreen State College, and his MFA from the University of Montana, where he was awarded the Academy of American Poets prize. He lives in Spokane, and teaches in a writers in the schools program for Eastern Washington University. His work has appeared in Poetry magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, and many other journals. His first book of poetry, Betting on the Night, was published in 2001 by Lost Horse Press, and his second collection, Ourself, was published in 2011 by Gribble Press.

Diane Allen

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Wasco Wind Farm

 

surreal sentinels
faceless worshippers of the wind
it’s an army of whirlybirds
sleeping in the sun

the windmills of our childhood
were tall wooden contraptions
like erector sets with tinkertoy sails

we climbed them till our dad shouted
GET OFF THAT WINDMILL
morning glories climbed its legs, too
the paint was gray and peeling

now, in an Oregon wheatfield
the wind starts the towers spinning
power to run our homes and lives
they make a low, soft sound
kind of a hum

it could be music, but
it isnt

 

 

Diane Allen is a retired history professor, poet, violinist and pianist who lives in White Salmon. She has organized poetry and other literary readings for the White Salmon library, including the William Stafford Memorials. Her poem ‘st patricks day at the vets home’ won the Wordstock Poetry Challenge in 2005.Diane has published in the local press – Hood River News and White Salmon Enterprise. Her poem ‘Kneeling at Ken Kesey’s Statue’ was published in a left-wing rag in Portland.

Stephen Wallenfels

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The Very Last Time I Shot a Gun

 

I don’t recall whose idea it was the two of us
swishing through knee-high clover while
grasshoppers launched in frenzied flight as if they
knew our purpose before we did.

The gun lead-heavy in my hands and BBs rattling
in my Skittle box and his short legs churning
behind me while I watch for poison oak and gopher
holes and the silken weave of milk snakes big
as submarines.

We reach the water’s edge misty-still where our
quarry basks in memories of a lust-filled
night drunk on the endless possibilities
of a pond beneath the stars.

They slip into mud between the reeds but
we wait for their unblinking eyes to
surface then shoot and shoot and shoot until
all bubbles stop rising and the first belly
floats up a creamy pillow of unexpired air.

Later with windows open we listen to mayflies
bounce against the screen and the belly-growl of
far-off thunder and father popping the top off
yet another Bud my while brother whispers
I can’t hear them and he’s right

the baritone call for love is gone and that
aching note of silence is
emptiness defined.

 

 

Stephen Wallenfels launched his writing career with a short story about a lucky chicken’s foot in National Racquetball Magazine in 1985. That developed into ten years of publishing over 100 feature articles, columns and humorous essays for fitness trade journals. During that time he continued to develop his fiction skills and published several short stories for kids and adults. In 2012 he published his debut novel, POD, with Ace, the SciFi imprint of Penguin USA. While writing fiction receives the bulk of his attention, Stephen’s first love of the written word was, (and still is) poetry. He looks forward to courting that relationship again. He lives in Richland.

Charles Leggett

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NOVEMBER STORM BREAK

So dense and swift these clouds, it’s the tanned olive
moon that seems to move;
as if into this wind your life will lean
susceptible to imagery, the inwrought
pull of all these metaphors we live
in. Now look—the mien
even of the drape is fraught

with it: coronas, eyes recoiling off
the ceiling; or a gaff
trickles the storm drain; or a stage’s curtain
murmur passing cars; the blowsy skein
of each second, frozen-framed, a tea leaf
scholium, a garden
in a cartoon hurricane.

 

“November Storm Break” is reprinted from Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry.

 

Charles Leggett is a professional actor based in Seattle, WA.  Recent publications include Bottle Rockets, The Centrifugal Eye, and Cirque.  Others include The Lyric and Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry; work is forthcoming in Big Pulp, GlassFire, Constellations and Graze Magazine.  His long poem “Premature Tombeau for John Ashbery” was an e-chapbook in the Barnwood Press “Great Find” series.

 

Linda Bierds

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DNA

At hand: the rounded shapes—cloud white, the scissors—sharp,
two dozen toothpick pegs, a vial of amber glue.
It’s February, London, 1953,
and he’s at play, James Watson: the cardboard shapes,

two dozen toothpick pegs, a vial of amber glue.
White hexagons, pentagons, peg-pierced at the corners—
he’s at play, James Watson, turning cardboard shapes
this way, that. And where is the star-shot elegance

when hexagons, pentagons, peg-pierced at the corners,
slip into their pliant, spiral-flung alignments?
Where is that star-shot elegance? This way? That?
He slips together lines of slender pegs that quickly

split in two. (Pliant, spiral-flung, one line meant
solitude. But one to one? Pristine redundancy.)
He slips. Together, lines of slender pegs quickly
conjugate. White hexagons, white pentagons:

not solitude but—one, two, one—pristine redundancy.
So close the spiral shape, now. Salt and sugar atoms
congregate: white hexagons, white pentagons.
So close the bud, the egg, the laboratory lamb,

the salt and sugar atoms’ spiral shape. So close—
it’s February, London, 1953—
the blossom, egg, the salutary lamb. So close
at hand, the rounded shapes—cloud white, the scissors—sharp.

 

“DNA” is reprinted from Virginia Quarterly Review and First Hand (G. P. Putnam and Sons, 2005).

Linda Bierds – DNA from UW College of Arts & Sciences on Vimeo.

 

Linda Bierds was born in Wilmington, Delaware. Her family settled in Seattle when she was seven. She earned her BA and MA, with an emphasis in fiction, from the University of Washington. Her many collections of poetry include Flights of the Harvest Mare (1985); Heart and Perimeter (1991); The Ghost Trio (1994), which was a Notable Book Selection by the American Library Association; The Profile Makers (1997); The Seconds (2001); First Hand (2005); and Flight: New and Selected Poems (2008). Bierds is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Poetry Society of America, and the MacArthur Foundation. She teaches English and writing at the University of Washington, and lives on Bainbridge Island.

 

Linda Greenmun

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Hillside Above Saratoga Passage

 

Adrian and Benjamin launch their kites,
Release what is larger
Within, allow it to ride the wind:
One ascends on red dragon-scaled wings.
The other glides as a flat fish—a skate—
Huge rainbow body ruffling on salt air.
We have turned from dimes
Exchanged for uprooted weeds
That the oldest has picked. And from
The youngest collecting gamatoes—
The word slowly transformed
By his tongue, clicked against his palate,
Into t-t-tomatoes—
Work, then this lifting.

 

“Hillside Above Saratoga Passage” is reprinted from Manzanita Quarterly.

 

Linda Greenmun was one of the founding editors for Floating Bridge Press.  Her book of poems, Wheel of Days, received a Fellowship in Literature from The Washington State Arts Commission and Artist Trust.  She lives with her husband, Renny, on Camano Island.  She is working on a second manuscript, “Cloud Dwellers.”

 

Sharon Cumberland

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TO THE SAUDI STUDENT WHO LEFT HIS PRAYER SCHEDULE BEHIND

 

When he arrived in September he could say “hello”
and smile with eyes one might have seen
in a caravanserai a thousand years ago.
He would leave his shoes outside his bedroom
door, wear perfume in his hair, excuse himself
from the table to pray on a carpet on the floor,
guided by his compass and a yellow schedule.
I taught him how to grill a cheese sandwich,
boil pasta, fry an egg, so he could feed himself
when I was at work. His mothers and sisters
had fed him in Jiddah, and washed his clothes,
so I showed him how to do laundry, empty the trash,
sew on a button. His buddies came over
to practice English, smoke sheeshas—apple
tobacco flavoring the air. Their mothers
sent them spices and recipes for kapsah;
I showed them how to thaw the chicken,
steam the rice. He called me his American mother,
because there is no word in Arabic for a single woman
who owns a home, or drives a car to teach
at a university. His four mothers sent him sugar dates,
almonds and green coffee. They sent me a pound
of saffron. At Christmas I gave him a snow globe
of Santa Claus. He asked to come to church with me,
but lost his courage. He went home at Easter,
returned with a pink hajalib for me, his third mother
proud to have found a dress large enough
to fit such a big American woman.

 

“To the Saudi Student Who Left his Prayer Schedule Behind” is forthcoming in Strange with Age (Black Heron Press, 2014).

 

Sharon Cumberland has been writing poetry since 1983, and has published in a wide variety of magazines and journals, including Ploughshares,The Iowa Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kalliope and Verse. Her first full-length collection is Peculiar Honors (Black Heron Press, 2011). Her second collection, Strange with Age, is forthcoming from Black Heron in 2014. After a career in New York as an arts manager, working for the Lincoln Center Theater Company and the Metropolitan Opera, she earned a Ph.D. in English from the City University of New York. She is now an Assistant Professor of American Literature and Poetry at Seattle University.