Category Archives: family

Linda M. Robertson

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Child, You Did Not Have

 

Child,
you did not have much of life:
seven days times ten,
all the while swimming
—a minute amphibian in fetal waters,
xxxxxxthe primeval sea within me.

How you floated, and grew:
formed fists and feet; dark eyes
that would never see beyond the placenta
to which you were moored by the pulsing cord,
as your diminutive heart
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxbeat.

Abruptly, you, in your sea began to drift;
as if the anchor
xxxxxxxxxxxxxgave way.
On convulsive waves
you slipped from me.

Child,
you did not have much of life:
I never felt you quicken or kick, did not
grow sore from heel or elbow beneath my ribs
—you never gasped for air.

No ashes to cast,
no small grave to visit and tend—
nothing to mark your beginning, your brief becoming,
xxxxxand end.

Child, I loved you.
I was your mother each moment of your life;
xxxxxxmy never-born, my littlest one.

 

“Child, You Did Not Have” previously appeared in the chapbook, Reply of Leaves (Magic Mountain Publishing, 2002).

 

Linda M. Robertson has lived outside of Winthrop, WA, up the Chewuch Valley for over 25 years. Her chapbook Reply of Leaves was published in 2002. She is currently a Low-Residency MFA Candidate at Chatham University, Pittsburgh and working on a collection of poems inspired by visual art.

Suzanne E. Edison

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The Fantasy
………….after Louise Glück

 

Walking the halls with my daughter,
her IV pole like Asclepius’ staff, snake
twined, she rolls past

curtained cubicles, other children
with cancer, Crohn’s, cauldrons
of misinformed codes, cellular traffic jams,

bodies rising against
themselves. Hydra monsters
slither out their noses, spiral from chests,

wrapping arms like bindweed.

While medicine drips—a cup
of Gorgon’s blood might heal—injecting
sunny day regularity like morning coffee—

we mothers clutch Medusa’s mask,
stroke stubble-crowned heads, calm
buzzing needles of fear.

We call upon our powers of invention
imagining we are the ones
who escape unharmed and

ward off time in cartoon
fantasies, where Roadrunner
is never road-kill.

 

 

“The Fantasy”; Ars Medica, Spring, 2012

 

Suzanne E. Edison’s work appears in print: in her small books, Tattooed With Flowers and What Cannot Be Swallowed; The Examined Life Journal of the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine; The Healing Art of Writing,Volume One; Blood and Thunder: Musings on the Art of Medicine; Ars Medica; Face to Face: Women Writers on Faith, Mysticism and Awakening; Pearl; and Crab Creek Review, among other places. Also found online at Dermanities, Literary Mama, and KUOW.  She lives in Seattle, Washington.

 

Chrysania Marie Monroe

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Still Estranged Family Photo

 

We all look
directly at the camera.
In children, it is called parallel play.
It looks like interaction.

My father stands between his wife
and me, a hand on both a shoulder of hers
and mine, his body leaning toward her,
his head slightly closer to mine.

We all wear black sweatshirts,
except the baby who is drop-dead
in the center. One day he will understand
why blending in is important.
He shares their DNA.

My father’s wife’s daughter
is there too. No one is touching her.
She is intellectually befuddled, functional,
and capable of breeding.
I cannot compete.

Rays of the stranger looking at us
as a singular flash makes us visible.
This light is a shock.

Neither my father nor I
satisfy. These people, this stranger
with the fully attentive mouth.
His age must have kept his lips
from lifting but perhaps the lean got me,
or maybe the hand.
I show teeth.

I keep us in my wallet
because he won’t.

 

 

Chrysania Marie Monroe is a young woman in Washington studying at a community college and works part time at a local coffee shop. Having always loved storytelling, she primarily focuses on poetry and performance theater. “Artists should be zealously well-rounded creatures.” This is her first publication.

Darby Ringer

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O Thou Small Opening, O

For Macy, at seven days

 

Your small mouth,
a circle of light reaching for milk,
opens, perfect as the well-formed
O of a chorister singing,
or the complete roundness of the moon.

We cry an O of adoration,
and trace the shape of your ear.
We skate on winters of deepening ice,
forgetting our own firemaking wonder.
We take the blurred path, a slender line,
an O we share between us,
and like the geese flying north,
follow the snow of our beginning.

 

Title taken from the poem “O Thou Opening, O” by Theodore Roethke
King County Poetry and Art on Buses 2001

 

Darby Ringer’s poems have appeared in Pontoon #1, Floating Bridge
Review #5, switched-ongutenberg.org, Poetry and Art on the Buses, 2001,
among others. She has received bachelor’s degrees from the University of
Washington in French and Landscape Architecture. She is a landscape
designer and lives in Seattle, Washington.

Gloria Piper Roberson

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Clifton’s Cafeteria, LA, CA 1940’s

 

We ate there every evening
after our late night Vaudeville performance
at the Hippodrome Theatre on Main Street.

We chose from an uncountable variety of foods–
peas, peas and carrots, string beans, lima beans,
pickled beets or plain, creamed corn, and spinach.

Mashed potatoes with gravy pools or if you preferred
a pat of butter. Sliced and diced or whole peaches, pears,
and apricots, stewed purple plums with cinnamon.

Hot baked or fried chicken, crisp hash, and pork chops
wearing their green feathered parsley. There was Jell-O plain,
fruited, and marshmellowed. Pies for every tastebud

that bloomed. Two-layer carrot cake that oozed cream cheese
frosting and chocolate cake freckled with walnuts
and always the menacing, unforgiving, staring fish-eyes

of tapioca pudding. You could wear scruffy overalls, empty pockets,
mink coats, or Crowns and fill a tray with any plate that huddled
and waited—five or 10 cents each. Then pick the Rain Room

with its tin roof, Jungle Room with chattering, screeching monkeys
and an occasional roar that ducked your head in fear or
the Waterfall Room with its misty, tumbling water that collided

with lily pads, the Polynesian Room where leis and hula skirts
swayed on the walls as if at a luau—then sat and became part
of the cacophony of glee. Father fended for himself at home

those nights with a pot of beans, and his own cornbread,
and a quart of beer from Ward’s Grocery Store around the corner
on Hadley street. If he wished, he could wipe his lips clean

with one of the initialed Clifton’s napkins
Mother always inserted covertly
into her purse beside several swabbed, white dishes.

 

 

Gloria Piper Roberson is a wife of 62 years, a mother of four, grandmother of six and great-grandmother of twin boys and their younger sister.  She has taken 12 quarters of Creative Writing at Wenatchee Valley College since 2002, eight with Derek Sheffield.  Her work has appeared in Mirror Northwest (2006-2007) as well as Whitman Community College’s The Noisy Water Review (2006-2007) and she authored the book Winning Hearts…Winning Wings, The Story of the First Nonstop Transpacific Flight (Wenatchee Valley Museum Cultural Center, 2003) which has been translated into Japanese. She lives in Wenatchee.

Michael Bonacci

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AND FOR ALL THIS, NATURE IS NEVER SPENT
–Gerard Manly Hopkins

My mother’s on the mountain,
a seventy-five year journey

joined to deadfalls and blowdowns –
the Romance of fallen trees.

The stuff of her, golden dust
in the candy jar that always held lemon drops,

flung to the breeze, lighting on
licorice ferns, salal and salmonberry,

frenetic fronds of fireweed.
Father followed a year later,

asked for the river, the alluvial fan
at the edge of the flats

around the islands and out to sea.
Flipping through field guides

and fingering topographical maps
I try to conjure them,

buds of the earth’s bounty
briefly grasped, and from a distance.

 

Michael Bonacci‘s collection of poems, The Former St. Christopher, won the 2004 Floating Bridge Chapbook Award.  Michael.writes poetry, adapts historical documents for the stage, and is still shopping around that first novel hoping to find an agent who will bite.  Artisan bread baking is another way to keep his hands busy, and now that his Japanese style landscape is maturing, he’s learning how to edit with pruning shears. He and his fiancé David Bricka, and their amazing wonder dog Buddy, live in Mount Vernon, WA.

Samar Abulhassan

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For My Mother on her 60th Birthday

1.

I am putting together a parcel to send to my mother,
a bilingual volume of poetry, poems translated from the Arabic.

I read the poems in English, pausing
to lift words in Arabic and copy them in my notebook.
My innocent wide-eyed script. I don’t make a dash
to represent a pair of eyes,
or forgo luxurious curves, like someone fluent might.
Earnest child, setting out each word to sea,
releasing the palms with the blessing of heat, to take flight.

I cannot chart my mother’s spine, whether the book
is a paperweight, pretend-chamber of colored sand
or will she ingest the Arabic like liquid,
and veer to the translation, only to hear a small hum inside her:
Sky, brain, heart.

My ink traces your silhouette.

Here is an unknowable space, this margin between mine and yours.
In the spine, I cast a river over despair, a path in which all eyes must pass.
Verdant.

2.

This is just an entrance.

The Butoh master offers, “I speak baby English. Enjoy.”
We move while words are slowly spoken.

Previous generations are summoned.

The accent of my parents used to make me cringe
but this Japanese man has rinsed English into something bald, phosphorescent.

Mother, let’s find this flower through your body.
Flower never sinking, the Butoh master
recites over and over,
as we circle around the room, invisible
center.

I am trying to lift it
to become the girl who cannot see
but dances to the music.
A line has been whispered from
the center of my head
to the ceiling.

Now the body crumpling, seething.

3.

I reach long for the tender symphony. “And in the evening light they started to dance.”

At your son’s wedding, your body leapt up, wooden.
No buoyant whoosh inside, like a loosening, after many prostrations.

So here:
Now that the museum guards have gone home, slip inside
this hypnotic light show.
The sea roars at your feet.
The page is soaked with glittering sea dragons murmuring
private.
Dance on into the night.

4.

Mother, think about the legendary songstress,

vocal cords so
strong she had to stand
several feet away from the microphone.

Feet, arms, belly, yield to reddened.

Most of all, we long for touch. Who has congregated in this room?
I am listening for the wider stance.
Take, for example, gesture. Your word for it much more sensual,
a true beginning. A long sigh and whisper together.
Tumble,
A word learned by the body.

 

 

Samar Abulhassan earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University in 2001. She teaches for Writers in the Schools, a program of Seattle Arts and Lectures, and the Richard Hugo House. She has published three chapbooks, and lives in Seattle.

Mary Elizabeth Gillilan

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DRUNK LIKE THAT

 

1
A cloudburst over the bird yard
turkeys gone to church—mouths agape
heads up

Grandma shakes her head, rheumy eyes
stare past something
I cannot see

She pours me Boston coffee, milk
and Folgers equal parts, I blow circles
across the top of the cup

Drown—they’d as soon drown
mean too—Grandma with her cane
shooed the cloud devotees back
to the barn. Her red Irish head soaked
and black round eye glasses smeared
with dust and rain.

2
Bare-footed and wrapped in Mama’s
hot pink shawl, tonight I crane my head
upwards and gawk at a moon
too large for consumption
but I drink until moon drunk

every bit as bright
as a turkey in the rain.

 

 

Mary Elizabeth Gillilan is the editor-in-chief of Clover, A Literary Rag. She leads writers groups at the Independent Writers’ Studio in Bellingham, Washington. Her novel, Tibet, A Writer’s Journal was published in 2007. Her greatest achievements are her two wonderful daughters. She lives in a hundred year old house in Bellingham with three rescue dogs and a cat.

Cora Goss-Grubbs

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Morning Rite

 

 

Cora Goss-Grubbs lives in Woodinville, WA, with her spouse and two sons, in a house sandwiched between a wetland and a blueberry farm. Her work has appeared online at Literary Mama, and Diverse Voices Quarterly (Pg. 39). Her poems and essays have been published in She’s Shameless: Women write about growing up, rocking out and fighting back by Tightrope Books; Pontoon 10, an anthology of Washington State Poets; and Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women. She is a 1998 and 2010 Hedgebrook alumna and 2003 Jack Straw Productions writer-in-residence. Currently Cora is working on a young adult novel.

Roberta Feins

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New Year’s Eve, 1921

 

I was combing my sister’s fragrant hair,
braiding it down her white nightgown,
when Mother came into the room
to tell us The world will end tonight,
sometime before the year is over.

Out of bed, she said, and on your knees.
We shivered and sniffed on the cold floor
as she wept above our heads, calling
Oh, hasten time towards Your Glorious End,
which I and my two lambs eagerly wait, Amen.

Emily and I crawled under the covers,
twining our feet together for warmth.
The preacher’d predicted the scythe would reap
so fine a path that of two in the bed,
one would be saved, the other doomed.

Through the sludge of hours, I waited, knowing
my sister and myself were both equally
guilty of the sins of children: inattention,
disobedience, dirt. Which of us
would rise through the room’s frost air,

through the ceiling and the roof, to soar
upon the warm wind of God? Which,
waiting to be lifted, would plummet
plunged into to the icy lake of Hell?
My salvation would be my sister’s doom.

In terror that God might come, in fear
of being alone, of being caught
in a selfish wish, I lay, listening
to her breathe, trying not to think,
until the cuckoo clock panted midnight.

Then a celebration, without horns
or colored hats: just the blessed relief
of quiet, thoughtless sleep.
Next morning at the breakfast table,
Mother served oatmeal and red-eyed silence.

 

“”New Years Eve, 1921” is reprinted from Poets West Literary Journal. 

 

Roberta Feins was born in New York, and has also lived in North Carolina and (currently) in Seattle. She works as a computer consultant. Roberta received her MFA in poetry from New England College in 2007. She has been published in The Cortland Review, Pif Magazine, Antioch Review, Tea Party, Floating Bridge Review, The Lyric, and Five AM. Roberta is an editor of the e-zine Switched On Gutenberg.