Category Archives: family

Laurie Lamon

Posted on by
2

The Beginning and the End

 

 

What do we make of the God of vengeance, the bloodshed of kings,

  the women running from homes without

preparation; what do we make at the end of astonishment’s

    glance without preparation for darkness, and afterward,

darkness? What do we make of the landscape where stone begat stone,

   where soil was lifted and carried, and the cell’s

transparency was lifted and carried; what do we make of the feathers,

   the imprint of glass, the black weather swept

into floorboards; what do we make of the twenty-seven bones

    of the hand, the clod of dirt, the ring?

What do we make of the son replacing his meals with mourning,

   his evening run and the hour of bedtime reading

with mourning? What do we make of a father’s wristwatch, a hospital

   window, sun-splintered; what do we make

of the driver’s license and telephone number, the heart’s

   empty quarter, the history of voices, birthplace and geography,

the blurred eye, the shoelace pulled from the shoe?

 

 

“The Beginning and the End” is reprinted from Without Wings (CavanKerry Press, 2009).

Laurie Lamon’s poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New Criterion, Ploughshares, Arts & Letters, Journal of Contemporary Culture and others, including 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Ordinary Days, edited by Billy Collins, and the Poetry Daily and Verse Daily websites. In 2007 she received a Witter Bynner award, selected by Poet Laureate Donald Hall.She has also received a Pushcart Prize. Lamon holds an M.F.A. from the University of Montana and a Ph.D. from the University of Utah. Her two collections of poetry are The Fork Without Hunger and Without Wings, CavanKerry Press (NJ), 2005 and 2009.  She is a professor of English at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington.

 

READING:  Laurie Lamon will be reading from The Plume Anthology of Poetry, 2012 at Elliott Bay Books on Thursday, November 1, along with poets James Bertolino, Brian Culhane, Tess Gallagher, and Richard Kenney,

Thomas Brush

Posted on by
Reply

The Shrew

 

I found him dead
In a cold corner of the garden, between the rock
Wall and the spring that never goes completely
Dry, his small hands soft as a child’s lost gloves, his blind eyes
Closed to the wet earth he came from where I returned
Him with only two turns
Of the shovel. Now, in this quiet house,
While my wife and son sleep and wind brushes the cold
Floor of dawn, with the year nearly gone, I wonder
How we got this far and why
Our fathers pitched their tents under the old threats
Of storms and floods, cut sod to make roofs, outlasted
The winter, dug deep for water in summer and stayed
Alive so far from here. And why the stars still cross
The crooked sky and why the fox flashing in the fairy tale returns
To me tonight like the dreaming face of the shrew and the narrow tunnels
He must have made, here, with the first month of winter buried
In leaves and rain and waiting for snow to fall again
Like the light of that small heart that just went out,
And the larger one that pauses and then goes on
Of its own accord, waiting for the first slight song
To rise from the blue edge of the world, greeting the New Year with love
And hope because our fathers came for the dream that wouldn’t leave
Them, put candles in the greased paper
Windows of those first houses so the lost could come home,
And prayed for the dead because they were.

 

“The Shrew” is reprinted from Last Night (Lynx House Press, 2012), winner of the Blue Lynx Prize.

 

Thomas Brush’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review, Mid-American Review, Crazyhorse, North American Review, and many other journals and anthologies.  The quality of this work has been acknowledged by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Artist Trust, and the Washington State Arts Commission. He lives in Seattle.

Connie Walle

Posted on by
Reply

Withholding of Love as the Ultimate Violence
From Battery, Robin Morgan

 

No curl was set correctly, no
movement was graceful
or complete. No silver shined
next to the washed dish.

The silence of her lips,
the sight of her back left me
empty handed. The moon
always shrouded in veil.

Ripples of her judgment
could drown me in despair.
She peeled layers
from me year after year,

until reaching my hard core.
That she could not destroy.
That I polished like crystal.

 

Connie Walle, residing in Tacoma, Washington, is President and founder of Puget Sound Poetry Connection where she hosts the “Distinguished Writer Series”. Connie also founded Our Own Words, a Pierce County Wide teen writing contest.   A few of her publications include Floating Bridge Review, Raven Chronicles, Tahoma’s Shadow, and Cradle Song.

 

Lillias Bever

Posted on by
Reply

Cesarean

I.

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—

V.

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.

J. W. Marshall

Posted on by
1

from Taken With

 

I’d wheeled Mother where
Faith Hour was slated to begin
after the chaplain got there

wiping first her chin
because a spoon in her hand
was an inexact tool.

I was set to leave.
Where are you going Mother asked.
I’m going home.

Take me with you she said
and laughed a kind of wreck.
The woman to her left

said take me with you too
then the six or seven of them all
took the sentence on

like hail taking on a garbage can.
Take me with you haw haw haw.
Take me with you laugh laugh laugh.

Like a headache made of starlings.
I can’t I said I have a wife and dog.
A dog haw haw haw haw.

A wife laugh laugh laugh.
Take me with you take me with you.
Haw haw laugh laugh laugh.

I zippered my coat closed
with a ferocity that shut them up.
Unbalanced silence in the room. Mom

knocked it over saying
you should go.
Saying I’ve been where you’re going.

Anyway go walk your dog.

 

Reprinted from the book-length poem, Taken With (Wood Works Press, 2005) and also the full-length collection, Meaning A Cloud (Oberlin College Press, 2008).

 

J. W. Marshall co-owns and operates Open Books, a poetry-only bookstore in Seattle, with his wife, Christine Deavel.  His first full-length book of poetry, Meaning a Cloud, won the 2007 Field Poetry Prize and was published by Oberline College Press in 2008.  Prior to that two chapbooks of his poetry were published by Wood Works Press, Blue Mouth in 2001 and Taken With in 2005.  Most recently his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Hubbub, Poetry Northwest, Raven Chronicles, and Seattle Review.

 

Abbie Miller

Posted on by
Reply

My Granddaughter

I brag                                                                                                                                              a quarter Indian
Lakota and Cherokee

It’s on her other side                                                                                                                          I know in fact
She’s no more than a sixteenth                                                                                                      though she looks at least half

With dark brown hair                                                                                                                       black eyes of almonds
Golden skin

The most beautiful thing                                                                                                                   I’ve ever seen
Perfect teeth                                                                                                                                      fingers and toes
Of prehistoric determination

She climbs                                                                                                                                    like a monkey
Stalks and attacks                                                                                                                          like a hunter warrior

Calls herself a tom boy                                                                                                                     yet comes home
With sticks and stones                                                                                                                      to make a fire

She can, by herself                                                                                                                         at five
Put on all my jewels

She picks the beaded pieces first

The neck shawl                                                                                                                               black and red
Green and white

For a moment she holds it                                                                                                                 right under her eyes
It covers her nose                                                                                                                             mouth and chin

She says, “can I keep it like this?”                                                                                                   be the most exotic queen of Sheba,
Cleopatra or perhaps                                                                                                                  Scheherazade

We think                                                                                                                                             as she lays the abalone necklace
On top of her head

Both wrists in bracelets                                                                                                                    one from Aunt Shirlee                                                                                                                 one from Auntie Pat

She repeats the names                                                                                                                  as I tell her
One after another

Where all the pieces came from

 

“My Granddaughter” is reprinted from Born & Raised to Be (2007).

 

Abbie Miller was born in Okanogan County in 1957, grew up and lives in the Methow Valley, where she raised her family as a single mother. Her ancestors were some of the original pioneers of North Central Washington. Her grandchildren are the seventh generation to live in Okanogan County; the fifth to be on her place in Carlton. She lives in what was once her grandfather’s barn, and writes in the old coop, on the farm, where she and her husband keep bees. Abbie considers herself a folk poet, has performed her poems many times and has been a regular contributor to the Methow Valley News. Her first collection is Born & Raised to Be (2007).

Jed Myers

Posted on by
Reply

Leveled

 

The pocket of chaos in my father’s head,
so far, has left him unable
to walk, find words, lift food on a fork,
or know what day it is. It makes him
emotional—he weeps as I enter
the room in which he reclines for hours
a day on his hospital bed. He speaks
with a new stutter, says Help me
whenever he comes to a hole in the ground
of his memory. Yes, it was
Connie Mack Stadium, Dad—I knew
what he was getting at. I see it too,
as it was, out past Strawberry Mansion
in the summer evening light. It was leveled
decades ago, when he never wept.

 

“Leveled” first appeared in Summerset Review.

 

Jed Myers lives in Seattle. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod International Journal, Golden Handcuffs Review, qarrtsiluni, Atlanta Review, Drash, Quiddity, The Monarch Review, Palooka, Fugue, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Rose Alley Press anthology Many Trails to the Summit, and elsewhere. He hosts the long-running open-mic cabaret NorthEndForum, and is a member of the ensemble Band of Poets. He is a psychiatrist with a therapy practice, and teaches at the University of Washington.

Shin Yu Pai

Posted on by
1

Search & Recovery
for James Kim (1971 – 2006)


it could have
happened to any
of us

a wrong turn
down a logging road
tires tunneled
into snow

a man’s undying
love for his children

moves satellites
maps aerial images

eighteen care packages
dropped over sixteen
miles of the Siskiyou,

bearing handwritten
notes from a father
to his son

the signs
you left for those
who came after you

a red t-shirt
a wool sock,
a child’s blue skirt

layers of a life,
stripped down to
a family’s fate –

the weight of being
unseen – to travel
a path back to

what you knew
at birth, the warmth
of being held close

brought home

 

“Search & Recovery” originally appeared in Adamantine (White Pine, 2010).

Shin Yu Pai is the author of Hybrid Land (Filter Press), Adamantine (White Pine), Haiku Not Bombs (Booklyn), Works on Paper (Convivio Bookworks), Sightings: Selected Works (1913 Press), The Love Hotel Poems (Press Lorentz), Unnecessary Roughness (xPress(ed)), Equivalence (La Alameda), and Ten Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers (Third Ear Books). She is the former poet-in-residence for the Seattle Art Museum and has been the recipient of individual artist and heritage awards from 4Culture, as well as a SmArt Ventures grant from the City of Seattle’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs. She is recently returned to Seattle.

 

 

Lana Hechtman Ayers

Posted on by
1

The Toe

Despite how mystically moonlight snakes a path across the lake tonight, and because love is the property solely of country music, and since Plath’s bell jar of pain runneth over for all eternity, I will write only of a toe—a plain enough thing—the fourth toe on my mother’s right foot and how each day, despite my bathing it, my application of greasy salve, the wrapping and rewrapping to apply just enough pressure, it continued to blacken, the toe like a banana past sweetness to the other side of neglect, or salt beef dried to jerky, tenderness abandoned to gristle, so I write this about my mother’s toe, how the doctor tells us it must go as if speaking of an ingrown hair or a splinter, as if it were nothing important, nothing a person spent her whole life walking on, on grass, over damp-mopped kitchen linoleum, dancing backwards in high heels over slick-waxed ballrooms floors, or in babyhood grabbed for all googley-eyed and occasionally even sucked, this dried-up toe that oddly causes mother no pain, and yet when the doctor says the toe must go, this woman who was a marble column at father’s bedside during his failed chemo, who later presided over father’s grave, stolid as a granite headstone, and not long after, this woman who sat composed as Rodin’s “Bather” as another doctor spoke the word mastectomy to her, and all through radiation wore a Mona Lisa smile, this woman does a thing I’d never seen her do, my mother cries, sobs, weeps, exhausts all the tissues in the doctor’s stainless dispenser, and keeps crying over this very small rotten toe, this calamity of losing what one least expected to lose.

 
 

“The Toe” appears in the e-book anthology Fire on Her Tongue (Two Sylvias Press, 2012).

Lana Hechtman Ayers, originally from New York, lives in Kingston, Washington after a seventeen year sojourn in New England. She has been writing poetry since she could hold a crayon and is now working on her first novel. Her two most recent poetry collections, What Big Teeth (chapbook) and A New Red (full-length), are concerned with the real adult life of Red Riding Hood and associates. Lana runs two poetry chapbook presses, Concrete Wolf (national) and MoonPath Press (dedicated to Pacific Northwest Poets). Ice cream is Lana’s favorite food group.

 Lana will be reading new work at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle on Friday, July 27, at 7:00, along with poets Raul Sanchez and John Burgess.

 

David Wagoner

Posted on by
Reply

 

Mother’s Night

 

She’s celebrating it for me. She’s coming back
from the place where she was scattered, from the place
where she was introduced to medical students
and their teachers and was slowly taken apart,
back from where she lost herself among nurses,
from what was left of her house, from her single bed,
from her sink and her kitchen window where she could see
the dead stalks in her garden. She’s coming back,
her arms full of the flowers I gave her once
a year in April, and she’s asking me
to put them back on the stems in the greenhouses
they came from, to let them shrink away from the light.

 

“Mother’s Night” is reprinted from “After the Point of No Return” (Copper Canyon Press, 2012).

David Wagoner was born in Ohio and raised in Indiana. Before moving to Washington in 1954, Wagoner attended Pennsylvania State University where he was a member of the Naval ROTC and received an M.A. in English from Indiana University. Wagoner was selected to serve as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1978, replacing Robert Lowell, and he served as the editor of the original Poetry Northwest until its last issue in 2002. Known for his dedication to teaching, he was named a professor emeritus at the University of Washington. Wagoner has been compared stylistically to his longtime teacher and friend, Theodore Roethke. He is the author of ten novels (including The Escape Artist) and 24 books of poetry, most recently Good Morning and Good Night (University of Illinois, 2005), A Map of the Night (University of Illinois, 2008), and After the Point of No Return (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). He also collected and edited Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke (1972). He lives with his family in Lynnwood.