Category Archives: family

Dana Guthrie Martin

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Our Story

 

I thought I knew what I wanted to say
about language, but all I can think of now
is my father on the lake, his rod bent,                                                                                                                                            our anticipation
of what would happen next — a fish

writhing in the boat near our feet
as my mother tried to lift it into the cooler,
one last look at its not-yet-clouding eye
before we slid the cooler’s lid into place.                                                                                                                          When the line went lax

and we lost one, we were suddenly not.
Not family, not unified, not defined                                                                                                                        against what could have been:
the thrill, the fear, the sadness of what we,
together, had done. We were not organized

around the words capture and gut and dinner
and sport. We were wordless — indistinct
from boat, lake, countryside, gravel roads.
How would we become us again,                                                                                                                                                  without the body

we gathered for? Without that single word —
fish — and all it held, holding us apart
as other, as separate from, as living?

 

“Our Story” originally appeared in Knockout Literary Magazine.

Dana Guthrie Martin’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Boxcar Poetry Review, Failbetter, Hobble Creek Review, Knockout Literary Magazine and Vinyl Poetry. Her chapbooks include In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press, forthcoming), Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books, 2012) and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press, 2009). She edits Cascadia Review, an online poetry journal that showcases work by poets in the Cascadia bioregion.

 

 

Luke Johnson

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Late Quartets

 

At home, the deaf boy must spend his days
with a piano he does not play. His small white hands
stay tucked in pockets under overlong t-shirts
that brush his knees. No one in the house plays.

The boy avoids the room where the piano collects
silence, sees his mother as a woman recollecting
girlhood, her shape defining a sundress as she stands
fingertips extended toward the keys, understanding

again the texture of familiar sound, counting one,
two, and a pause here as if she were waiting for her son
to answer three, four. She cannot see him crouched
back-to-the-stairwell. She can only see out

the bay-window to afternoon. It must be fall. It is cold
and there are leaves. This is not music, but keeping time:
a way of acknowledging what we’ve been told
we cannot choose: seasons, ourselves, our family.

 

“Late Quartets” originally appeared in The Threepenny Review.

Luke Johnson is the author of the poetry collection After the Ark (New York Quarterly Books, 2011). His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, New England Review, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. His work has been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and has twice appeared in the Best New Poets anthology. He lives and works in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle.

Judith Roche

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The Husbands

 

I married them for all the wrong reasons.
One for sex, another for a boat,
though the boat wasn’t for me
but for the son left behind
from the sex I married the first one for.
But it was the daughter I carried inside
when I married the first one.
There were others but they
didn’t quite count as husbands.

The third I didn’t even marry.
He read me poems in bed
and left little behind, nothing of any value.
But the pain turned out about the same.
And then there was my daughter,
steady, there through all of it,
watching me with blue owl eyes,
thinking, is this the way you do it?

We had boat enough to teach us
of the sea, the beauty of fish,
the son’s love for water.
The first left me my daughter and my son,
both, my dawn, noon, sunset, and night.

The husbands are all far away now,
two into that great good night–
strange to have outlived them.
The third, off in his own mysteries.
They surface in my dreams,
sometimes even the others join in,
as lions, as kings, as husbands.
They all blend together, vivid,
purring loudly and shape-shifting.
I love them – or him –
the one Great Husband,
for whom
I am still a wife.

 

Judith Roche is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Wisdom of the Body, an American Book Award winner, which was also nominated for a Pushcart. She has published widely in various journals and magazines, and has poems installed on several Seattle area public art projects, including  installations at the Brightwater Treatment Plant in King County. She has written extensively about our native salmon and edited First Fish, First People, Salmon Tales of the North Pacific and has salmon poems installed at the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks in Seattle. She has been Distinguished Northwest Writer-in-Residence at Seattle University, has taught at Cornish College of the Arts, and currently teaches at Richard Hugo House and around the state for the Humanities Washington Inquiring Mind series.

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Hannah Faith Notess

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Meditation on the Divine Blueness with Two Pop Songs
Rishikesh, India

 

It’s just that in “My Sweet Lord” George Harrison
sounds so Jesusy, with his platoon of earnest handclappers
and strummers on backup, transparent

like the Maranatha choruses of my childhood
slapped verse by verse onto the overhead projector.
And so I start to think it’s really still 1968 here.

I got the song’s joke the first time, but here
I hear it for myself—in the Rishikesh German Indian
Chinese Israeli Continental Bakery—Hare Krishna

is just two syllables away from Hallelujah
and “My Sweet Lord” is not even two notes away
from “He’s So Fine” (doo lang doo lang doo lang)

and Jesus is just two notes away from Krishna
but in flesh-colored makeup, too shy to show us
his true blue skin. It’s 1968, and the Beatles

are decked in saffron garlands,
posing in a row around the Maharishi,
this gleaming green river behind them,

under a god’s skin blue February sky. It’s 1968
and I’m staring at the same green February water, wishing
the Australians upstairs would just

put the damn sitars away. Any minute now
it’ll be 1971, and George’s new backup singers
will get out their tambourines and start clapping

like some scruffy kids picked up at a beachside revival, squinting
at the transliterated mantras Rama Rama Hare Hare.
It’s 1971 and—really, I’m not stoned—the Chiffons

are suing George Harrison for royalties
(doo lang doo lang doo lang) and incidentally, Krishna
is suing Jesus because he thought of incarnation first.

Jesus swears it was an accident; he didn’t mean to copy,
but the court doesn’t care. And anyway, it’s 1975 now and my dad,
long-haired, is sitting cross legged in a work shirt

and bell bottoms with a guitar
on somebody’s living room floor in Virginia,
strumming the same chords, a mimeographed

scripture song. I really wanna see you Lord, but it takes
so long my Lord. It’s 1975 and the Chiffons are recording
My Sweet Lord (doo lang doo lang doo lang)

as a joke: the magic’s over. We missed the real thing.
I know there are so many Indias, but this is one
of mine. It’s 1975 and night is falling

on the hill above the bakery, where the hostel
owner—just a girl—leads us into a room
the color of Krishna, the color of Shiva’s throat

when he swallowed the poison. There we lay down
our bags. The posters on the wall—a parade
of Krishnas, the fat baby stealing the milk,

him posing on a lotus with His blue rolls of baby fat,
then Radha and her blue boyfriend
wrapped in two versions of the same green sari

so close, so fine you couldn’t call them anything
but Radhakrishna (doo lang doo lang doo lang)
taped to the ceiling, the way the world’s teenage girls

taped the Beatles to their ceilings, till the corners yellowed
and peeled, till the magic faded. We’ll sleep there, safe under
Krishna’s gaze, so peaceful in God’s blue belly.

 

 

 

Hannah Faith Notess is managing editor of Seattle Pacific University’s Response magazine and the editor of Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical, a collection of personal essays. She earned an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University, where she served as poetry editor for Indiana Review. Her poems have appeared in Slate, Rattle, Crab Orchard Review, Los Angeles Review, Poet Lore, So To Speak, The Christian Century, and Floating Bridge Review, among other journals. She lives in Seattle.

 

Laura Read

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For the Bible Tells Me So

 

On the tape with his voice on it,
your father is asking if you think
your mother’s legs are pretty.

You were five, you didn’t know
what makes a leg pretty,
how it should curve out

and then taper down to the ankle,
how one should cross over the other,
the skirt slide up.

He laughs when you don’t answer
the way adults do.

I can hear your breath on the tape,
I can see you in the living room
with the gilt-framed faces of people

named Ludrick and Vida,
the turquoise chairs and the Zenith tv,
your mother with her eyebrows

drawn on and her dresses belted,
your father with his microphone
and innuendo.

You and your brother
wear robes over your cuffed pajamas,
you have crewcuts and long, thin bones.

This is the America
you were born into, where lines
were marker-thick

between Cowboy and Indian,
your mother and your father,
even you and your brother

who sings loud into the tape
but you they have to threaten
with going to bed early

if you won’t do it
so your voice comes at us mad
across the forty years—

Jesus loves me, this I know,
for the Bible tells me so.

This is your father, dead so long
you don’t remember his voice
even when you hear it.

All those years, your mom dusted him
like that empty vase
she kept up on the mantle

made of pink Depression glass.

 

 

“For the Bible Tells Me So” previously appeared in The Florida Review.

 

Laura Read has published poems in a variety of journals, most recently in Rattle, The Mississippi Review, and The Bellingham Review. Her chapbook, The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You, was the 2010 winner of the Floating Bridge Chapbook Award, and her collection, Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral, was the 2011 winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and will be published this fall by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She lives in Spokane, WA with her husband Brad and their two sons, Benjamin and Matthew.

Frances McCue

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The Other One Waits At Home

 

I’ve let the dog down.
Late with meals and walks,
I’m dog-deep in woeful starts
to make things better.
Not easy, this life–
the way it swings along:
Sore dog. Happy dog.
Folly of my needs.
“Love us,” we say.
“We command you.”
Her head nuzzles into
the corner of my arm.
She shivers along
shanks and withers
and sings far below
our frequency,
pinging along:
“dog-dog-dog,”
all muzzle and chop,
click click, chomp.

But please, Dog, sleep.
I’m tired too. Fetch
the dream life that tilts
any past askew.
Forgive me through
all these lacks and
I’ll forgive you
your drool and shits and
other indignities
of the expressionless.
Give me time to set it right.
I’ll roam the yards, flip
the cans, turn
woman-howler
through the bark-less,
hot twilight.
You rest.

 

Frances McCue is a writer and poet living in Seattle, where she is writer-in-residence at the University of Washington’s Undergraduate Honors Program. She was the founding director of Richard Hugo House from 1996 to 2006. McCue is the author of The Stenographer’s Breakfast, winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize, The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs:  Revisiting the Northwest Towns of Richard Hugo, with photographer Mary Randlett (University of Washington Press), and The Bled (Factory Hollow Press), winner of the 2011 Washington State Book Award and the2011 Grub Street Book Prize.

Carolyne Wright

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“This dream the world is having about itself….”

–William Stafford

won’t let us go. The western sky gathers
its thunderclouds. It has no urgent need

of us. That summer in our late teens we
walked all evening through town–let’s say Cheyenne–

we were sisters at the prairie’s edge: I
who dreamed between sage-green pages, and you

a girl who feared you’d die in your twenties.
Both of us barefoot, wearing light summer

dresses from the Thirties, our mother’s good
old days, when she still believed she could live

anywhere, before her generation
won the War and moved on through the Forties.

As we walked, a riderless tricycle
rolled out slowly from a carport, fathers

watered lawns along the subdivisions’
treeless streets. We walked past the last houses

and out of the Fifties, the Oregon
trail opened beneath our feet like the dream

of a furrow turned over by plough blades
and watered by Sacajawea’s tears.

What did the fathers think by then, dropping
their hoses without protest as we girls

disappeared into the Sixties? We walked
all night, skirting the hurricane-force winds

in our frontier skirts so that the weather
forecasts for the Seventies could come true,

the Arapahoe’s final treaties for
the inland ranges could fulfill themselves

ahead of the building sprees. We walked on
but where was our mother by then? Your lungs

were filling with summer storms, and my eyes
blurred before unrefracted glacial lakes.

Limousines started out from country inns
at the center of town, they meant to drive

our grandparents deep into their eighties.
Our mother in her remodeled kitchen

whispered our names into her cordless phone
but before the Nineties were over, both

of you were gone. Mother’s breath was shadow
but her heart beat strong all the way in to

the cloud wall. You carried your final thoughts
almost to the millennium’s edge, where

the westward-leaning sky might have told us
our vocation: in open fields, we would

watch the trail deepen in brilliant shadow
and dream all the decades ahead of us.

In memory of my sister

 

“This dream the world is having about itself…” was winner of the Firman Houghton Award, published in The Iowa Review, reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2009 and in The Pushcart Prize XXXIV: Best of the Small Presses.

 

Carolyne Wright has published nine books and chapbooks of poetry, a collection of essays, and four volumes of translations from Spanish and Bengali. Her latest book is Mania Klepto: the Book of Eulene (Turning Point, 2011). Her previous collection, A Change of Maps (Lost Horse Press, 2006), finalist for the Idaho Prize and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the PSA, won the 2007 IPPY Bronze Award. Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire (Carnegie Mellon UP/EWU Books, 2nd edition 2005) won the Blue Lynx Prize and American Book Award. She is editing an anthology on women and the work place for Lost Horse Press. A Seattle native who studied with Elizabeth Bishop and Richard Hugo, Wright has been a visiting writer at colleges, universities, schools, and conferences around the country. She moved back to Seattle in 2005, and teaches for the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts’ Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA Program, and for Hugo House.

Student Poem

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This is the poem

 

 

This person is Taylor, whose wacky noises and lip piercings
tell a story all its own.

This person is Tyler, who’s always there to put the broken pieces of shattered reality back together.

This person is April, who’s home to me, a mom, who’s always there for me.

This person is Dawson, whose jokes hold then shatter like the fiery explosions of the fourth.

This person is Corey, who’s due to be a dad, and who’s waiting for the day the water slides.

This person is Britney, who’s Corey’s first real love, and who is also waiting for the water to slide.

This person is Virginia, who’s quiet and shy, a little misunderstood. But, she is my best friend.

This person is Shanon, who’s outspoken, sometimes funny but a little pushy.

This person is Hay Hay, who’s always here at Marshall, and who’s always there to help bail me out of an NC in math class.

This person is Tabitha, who’s been a sister to me my whole life, but was never blood related.

This person is Anastasia, who’s Tabitha’s daughter, and who’s a little bit obsessed with littlest pet shop, and moshi monsters.

This person is Jaden, who’s Tabitha’s son, and who’s obsessed with video games just like his deadbeat of a dad.

This person is Cindy, who’s psycho, a compulsive liar, and a bad case to be Shanon’s mom.

This person is Ron, who’s always tried to hard to make everyone happy.

This person is Marge, whose love kept me happy as a child, but the only thing i have of hers, a necklace, only brings sorrow.

This person is Dee, who’s a second mother, and who shows that no matter what, you can power through any obstacle.

This person is Joe, whose heart is always in the right place.

This person is from my dream, who’s helped me look at the brighter side of things.

This person is Leroy, whose love for his workshop, wife, children, and grandchildren, like me, show us to cherish the time we have together, cuz life doesn’t last for eternity.

This person is My Father, who’s always haunting my dreams never stopping once to let me forget all he’s done to me.

This person is me, a girl who’s always searching for meaning in this world, like a single river looking to find a vast ocean.

 

 

Teah is an eighth grader at Thurgood Marshall Middle School, Olympia. Thank you, Teah.

Erin Malone

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And Then

 

In the windows we were drawn:
I held my knobby baby
in dawn’s automotive light.
A fleet of cars sailed by
as school-kids stomped their boots
shook their shiny coats.
I put my baby in a basket.
We slept in fits & as the weather
turned we started to grow older.

I bounced him hobbledy-hoy, hobbledy-hoy!
I wound my wobbly bumpkin
& in the garden
let him go. We went in circles.
This is the way the farmers ride.
Another year. Another.
I lost count of worn-out shoes.
Bees came to the flowers of his ears.
His hair got long.

Around us red leaves
lettered to the ground &
I became a tree.
I swung my boy like a bell
by his knees. His mouth
made the shape of a song.
Where had he heard it?
I listened to the tune.
This was not a song I’d known.

 

Erin Malone’s poems have appeared in journals such as Field, Beloit Poetry Journal, POOL and online at Verse Daily. Her chapbook, What Sound Does It Make, won the Concrete Wolf Award in 2007. The recipient of grants from Washington’s Artist Trust, 4Culture and the Colorado Council of the Arts, she has taught writing at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, Richard Hugo House in Seattle, and at the University of Washington Rome Center in Italy. Currently she teaches poetry in Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools program.

 

Larry Matsuda

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Too Young to Remember

Minidoka, Idaho— War Relocation Center

I do not remember the Idaho winter winds,
knee deep mud that oppressed 10,000 souls
or the harsh summer heat and dust.

I do not remember miles of clotheslines,
mounds of soiled diapers, clatter of families crowded
into barracks, the greasy closeness
of canned Vienna sausage,
of pungent pork and sour brine
exuding from mess halls.

Floating in the amniotic fluid,
tethered in salt sea, odors
nourished by fear and sadness—
my Mother’s anxieties
enveloped and nurtured me.

Maybe it was the loss of her home,
the sudden evacuation,
being betrayed by her country.
Or maybe it was the stillborn child
she referred to as It,
sexless blob of malformed tissue,
a thing without a face that would have been
my older sibling.
My aunt described it as budo,
a cluster of grapes.

I recall what Barry, my psychiatrist friend,
said about parents emotionally distancing themselves
from children born immediately after a stillbirth.

Sixty years later on drizzly Seattle days,
when November skies are overcast,
and darkness begins at 4:00 p.m.,
I feel my mother’s sadness
sweep over me like a cold wind from Idaho.

I search for Minidoka,
unravel it from the memories of others.
Like a ruined sweater, I untwist the yarn,
strands to weave a tapestry
of pride and determination—
the “children of the rising sun” once banished
to desert prisons, return from exile
with tattered remnants, wave them overhead,
time-shorn banners salvaged from memories
woven in blood and anguish.

I wish I could remember
Minidoka. I would trade
those memories for the fear and sadness
imbedded in my genes.

 

 

Note:  The Minidoka War Relocation Center was one of ten U.S. World War II concentration camps that held120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans for approximately three years.

This poem appears in A Cold Wind from Idaho, Black Lawrence Press, New York, 2010

 

Larry Matsuda was born in the Minidoka, Idaho War Relocation Center during World War II. He and his family along with 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were held in ten concentration camps without committing a crime and without due process for approximately three years.

Matsuda has a Ph.D. in education and was recently a visiting professor at Seattle University. He was a junior high language arts teacher and Seattle School District administrator and principal for twenty-seven years.

He studied poetry under the late Professor Nelson Bentley at the University of Washington and has participated in the Castalia Poetry Reading Series there. He has read his poetry at numerous events in Washington, California, Oregon, and Idaho including the famous Kobo at Higo’s venue in Seattle’s International District with his mentor Tess Gallagher.

His poems appear in Poets Against the War website, The New Orleans Review, Floating Bridge Press, The Raven Chronicles, Ambush Review, Cerise Press, Black Lawrence Press website, and the International Examiner Newspaper. In 2005 he and two colleagues wrote and co-edited the book Community and difference: teaching, pluralism and social justice, Peter Lang Publishing, New York. The book won the 2006 National Association of Multicultural Education Phillip Chinn Book Award. In July of 2010 his book of poetry entitled, A Cold Wind from Idaho was published by Black Lawrence Press in New York.

He lives with his wife, Karen, and son, Matthew in Seattle and is a consultant presently helping to re-design schools as better physical learning environments.