Category Archives: metaphor

Kim-An Lieberman, 1974 – 2013

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Kim-An Lieberman has left us too early. On the few occasions I met Kim-An in person or heard her read, I wished to know her better–warm, funny, and so so smart, kind, down to earth, generous. I knew her through her poems, especially her gorgeous first book, Breaking the Map (Blue Begonia Press, 2008).

I think most of us come to writing, at least initially, to sort out our own identities, and I felt that was so with Kim-An’s first book. Here were the two sides of herself–her Vietnamese heritage, her Jewish heritage, and the split between. She found rich material, for example, in her grandmother’s sudden and epic relocation to California from Saigon in 1975. She writes about this in the introduction to her wonderful poem, “Water Buffalo Tale” on the Poetry Northwest site. The surreal sometimes appeared in Kim-An’s poetry, surprising but perfectly at home, and seemed to grow up out of that split in her identity like a flower in a sidewalk crack.

I’m eagerly anticipating Kim-An’s forthcoming collection, In Orbit, which will appear from Blue Begonia Press early in 2014.  Jack Straw Studios will be hosting a reading from In Orbit sometime this spring.  Please keep an eye out for a date and help us celebrate her abiding talent and voice.  Find a beautiful tribute to her in The Seattle Times here, and another by poet Alan Chong Lau in the International Examiner here, and a third by local literary critic Paul Constant here.

A memorial will be held on December 30th at 3:00 p.m. in the Seattle Asian Art Museum. In lieu of flowers the family requests donations be made to the Kim-An Lieberman Memorial fund at The Evergreen School to offer financial aid for students in need.

Here is Kim-An’s beautiful and unexpected poem, “Wings,” from Breaking the Map.

Wings

It had been three years, maybe longer, and the map of his body
……….was etched
in her palms.  The stretch of his legs. The stiff, clean-shaven line of
……….his jaw.
His left ring finger, curved slightly inward.  So of course she made
……….the discovery.

The first feathers appeared in a pair.  She was facing him in the grey
……….wash of morning,
stroking the knoll of his shoulder blade, when twin quills broke
……….suddenly through the skin.
He locked himself in the bathroom for hours, cursing blankly
……….at the mirror.

They grew quickly, eclipsing his back like snowfall.  In the moonlight they
……….were lustrous.
she would brush them gently with a damp washcloth, gather loose
……….feathers in a basket.
Under their spreading canopy his muscles formed tight knots, pulsing
……….like fists.

He complained about their aching weight, how they poked holes in his
……….favorite sweater
and sometimes, of their own accord, began to flap and pull his feet
……….from the ground.
Just think of all the usefulness, she said, fan on a flaming night or extra
……….warmth in winter.

But he became sullen, took long walks alone after dinner, absolutely
……….refused to see a doctor.
He would not go to the beach anymore, even when she promised
……….a three-color sunset.
Can’t trust these things, he told her, and I’m not stupid.  I know
……….my mythology.

When he asked her to leave, it was another grey morning. He lay
……….sprawled on his stomach
at the opposite end of the bed. He gave no reason, but she knew it was
……….another woman
because their beauty was blinding. Even fully clothed he leaked
……….gallons of light.

In time she moved on, ripped up his pictures and set the ridiculous
……….basket of feathers on fire.
But some mornings she woke drenched in jealousy. Half-believing
……….she heard a rustle,
she would stare at her husband’s empty back and wonder if anything
……….would change.

 

Lily Myers

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On Loneliness

I
Last night I fell asleep reading One Hundred Years of Solitude
while my roommate and her boyfriend kissed on the bunk below me
which is to say,
lately I’ve been alone.
Claustrophobic in the small room of my own body.
I wonder what it would be like to have another person’s wrists.

II
All the nothing days—
beer in a friend’s garage, teeth chattering
not quite inhabiting this envelope of skin

Sitting next to myself on the morning bus ride
moments hanging in the air like ghosts,
forgetting to pass.

III
This afternoon the sky was yellow.
Patches outlined in light blue cloud.
Rain started falling from the middle of the sky.
I stood still. Stared fully. Felt nothing.
Was not a body.
Was part of the air underneath the loving yellow sky.

 

Lily Myers is a poet and a Sociology student at Wesleyan University, where she competes on the Slam Poetry team. Her home is Seattle. She is convinced that by sharing and listening to each other’s writing, we can better understand and thus humanize each other. She loves poetry for the way it makes us honest and vulnerable. She is looking for poetry submissions for her feminist blog: http://shapeswemake.tumblr.com

 

Jeanne Lohmann

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Best Words

Like a heavy temple bell
struck loud
death claims a good man
And his love resonates after
shimmering through our lives

—Joseph Stroud, “Steps to the River”

Is he around me all the time
helping me along, as once he said
I helped him on his dying way?
He thanked me for that.

Now there’s no way for me
to tell him thanks.
The simple truth is I miss him.
I want him to know,
want the words we said then
as alive in him
as they are in me.

But when there’s no answer,
no body listening,
even the best words between lovers
disappear as chimes on the air,
memory like a poem
more than its words,
the way love always is.

 

Jeanne Lohmann has ten poetry collections in print, and two of prose. Her most recent work is Home Ground (Fithian Press, 2013). Her poems appear in chapbooks, literary journals, and anthologies, and have been read on local and national public radio. The Jeanne Lohmann Poetry Trail  with six poems is part of the wooded landscape at Providence St. Peter Hospital in Olympia, Washington.

Mario Milosevic

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When I Was

When I was a bear
I filled the world.
My paws were wide,
and I walked large.
I ate all summer
and slept all winter,
dreaming of the time

when I was a dragonfly
and I wove the world.
Darting through air,
skimming over grass,
hovering on water,
my compound eyes
embroidering my dreams of the time

when I was a turtle
and I carried the world.
Walking slowly with the weight,
squat body on four thick legs,
hard shell holding me in,
keeping my dreams of the time

when I was a salmon
and I fed the world.
Sleek skin sliding down river throats,
pink flesh nourishing my cousins.
I swam upstream,
where death took me
and I swallowed my dreams of the time

when I was a tree
and I held the world.
Roots gripping soil,
branches embracing sky,
my vision
encompassing dreams of the time

when I was a raven
and I sang the world.
Single note struck from my throat,
pushed into air,
the sound a call to listen
to the unseen
and honor my dreams of the time

when I was a bear;
when I was a dragonfly;
when I was a turtle, a salmon, a tree;
when I was a raven.

 

“When I Was” is reprinted from The Journal of Mythic Arts and Animal Life (Green Snake Publishing).

 

Mario Milosevic’s poems and stories have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Rattle, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and many other magazines. His novels include Terrastina and Mazolli: A Novel in 99-Word Episodes, Claypot Dreamstance, and The Coma Monologues. He has published three volumes of poetry: Animal Life, Fantasy Life, and Love Life. All his books are published by Green Snake Publishing. He lives with his wife, writer Kim Antieau, in the Columbia River Gorge and works at the Stevenson Community Library in Stevenson, Washington.

 

Steve Potter

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“Forcing twentieth-century America into a sonnet — gosh, how I hate sonnets — is like putting a crab into a square box. You’ve got to cut his legs off to make him fit. When you get through, you don’t have a crab any more.”           

 –William Carlos Williams

Boxed Crab

Dear Doctor Williams, with all due respect
For worlds of pleasure I’ve found in your verse,
On this account I feel I must defect.
I love your offhand lines — “so much for the hearse”
From “Tract” for one — and how you defied the norm,
Filled your poems with ordinary speech
And escaped the strictures of long-standing form
Extending by great lengths the poet’s reach.

But, gosh, the twentieth-century whole?
A crab so large should be delegged, declawed!
Who, dredging such a creature from the shoal,
Would not pull back in horror overawed?
A crab of such size must be cut to fit
Boiled, dipped in butter, eaten bit by bit.

 

“Boxed Crab” is reprinted from Able Muse.

 

Steve Potter was active in Seattle’s literary scene as board member and frequent emcee for Red Sky Poetry Theater in the ’90s. He performed at events such as Seattle Poetry Festival, Subtext, Rendezvous Reading Series and Cheap Wine & Poetry sometimes accompanied by guitarist Bill Horist or the sitar/tablas duo Bakshish. He edited an eclectic but short-lived literary magazine called The Wandering Hermit Review. While he keeps a lower profile these days, Potter is writing as much as ever. His work has appeared in journals such as; Able Muse, Blazevox, Drunken Boat, Galatea Resurrects, Knock, Marginalia, Raven Chronicles and Stringtown.

John Olson

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Inventing Emotions

 

Sometimes I invent emotions. I make them out of neon and punctuation. Semi-colons, for instance, are seminal to an understanding of linen.
Commas are drops of hesitation. Colons are bold.
Somewhere at the end of a sentence, I rub the night. Sparks fly. I follow a pain to the end of time. I live in a palace of thought. Everything is composed of butter, chlorophyll, and the ancient molecules of midnight.
I have a Cubist tongue and a Dada nose. My haircut used to be a garage. Next time you see a ghost at the supermarket it might be me. Then again, it might also be Thomas Paine, or Pablo Picasso.
I define pain by its weight. Paintings hanging crookedly on walls.
I watch The Kinks on YouTube, and redeploy them as a proposition.
Each day I run past the house of the symphony conductor I see him holding a glass brain with a fugue in it.
Music does this to people. Makes them wonderful and cogent, like the smell of dirt in front of the radio station just after the pansies have been watered.
Do you see the way the earth grips a tree? It is actually a tree gripping the earth.
I do not yet have a name for this emotion. The emotion itself is incomplete. But what emotion is ever whole and self-contained? Ask that woman over there, laughing and eating popcorn. She will tell you that the caliber of all emotions depends on the diameter of Tucson. But that’s only because she is from Tuba City, and is watching a movie about blank-eyed underwear-clad zombies.
I hate the fourth of July.
I prefer Halloween.
Which is why I’ve never been to Texas.
But I ask you: what are your specific needs? Say anything you want. I can always use a little ambiguity. I love ambiguity.
Emotions are difficult to pin down because each word has different properties. In the Museum of Invisible Injuries, for instance, the word ‘cook’ actually means ‘combination.’ And if you say the word ‘bone,’ an Iranian woman appears from the shadows with a huge gem on her finger, a ring that symbolizes the disembodiment of gherkins.
An emotion is thick and puzzling like a forest. It takes a long time to fully feel it. What is the point of becoming president if all you feel is power? Even lawn mowers feel power. Power is not where it’s at. Where it’s at is infinity. The exhilaration of light amid the pornography of black.

 

“Inventing Emotions” is reprinted from Larynx Galaxy (Black Widow Press, 2012).

 

John Olson is that author of eight books of poetry, the most recent of which is Larynx Galaxy, which Black Widow Press published in 2012. He published Backscatter: New and Selected Poems in 2008. He is also the author of three novels, including Souls of Wind (Quale Press), The Nothing That Is (Ravenna Press), and The Seeing Machine (Quale Press). He is the recipient of The Stranger’s genius award for literature in 2004 and three Fund for Poetry awards. In 2008 Souls of Wind was shortlisted for a Believer Book of the Year Award, and in 2012 he was one of eight finalists for the Artist Trust 2012 Innovator Award. He is currently at work on another novel tentatively titled My Other Car Is A Bed In Paris. His blog, Tillalala Chronicles, may be accessed at www.tillalala.blogspot.com.

 

 

 

Jane Elder Wulff

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DEATH’S SUITCASE

As the years pass, as I ride this train, watching
days and weeks go by outside the window
(everything the same in here, unchanging,
only a little shaky from time to time),
I begin to feel that I am carrying
Death’s suitcase.

This bag of flesh, blood and bone, containing
the news and means of my destruction, goes
with me everywhere, unassuming, inevitable.

Sometimes I set it down and walk away from it,
and there it sits alone on the platform, but only
temporarily. No one ever picks it up. Of course
I always go back for it, and then I keep it by me,
next to me in the empty seat, near at hand in the
dining car, always closed.

Strangers make conversation, and no one asks
about Death’s suitcase. No one ever says, “Well,
what’s in the suitcase?” And I never bring it up.

It bears its tags and patches, its scuffs and scars
to show where it has been, and it grows stiff
with wear, and more dignified. I would not be
without it now, for love nor money.
You will not catch me
leaving it behind.

 

 

Jane Elder Wulff was born in Florida and lived in the South until age ten, when her family moved to Pullman, Washington. She attended Antioch College, received a B.A. in English from Washington State University, and came to Vancouver, Washington in 1967 with an M.A. in English and Creative Writing (the first such combined degree offered by WSU) to teach English at Clark College. From 1988 to 2012 she worked full time as a freelance writer for clients and regional publications to support her own work in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Currently she is concentrating on her own work.

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.”

 

Polly Buckingham

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The Crone

I wake in a city.
Bodies cover the snowy streets.
The left-over

halves of people bend
their heads against dead chests.

An infection rages in my eyes.
I rest in complete dark.

My dead sister
sits at my bedside pushing

my hair from my face,
wiping my forehead with a dead
cloth.

I am a tree. I am a crone.
I stare into the flaring fire.

I stand in a basement
filled with brown water.

I meet my sister at a carnival.
We hold hands and run into the crowd.

I’m standing in a glass ball
filled with fog.

I turn and turn and turn.

 

“The Crone” is reprinted from Chattahoochee Review.

 

Polly Buckingham’s poems and stories appear in The New Orleans Review, The North American Review, The Tampa Review, (Pushcart nomination), Exquisite Corpse, The Literary Review, The Chattahoochee Review, The Potomac Review, Hubbub, The Moth and elsewhere.  She recently won the Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award and as a result has a fiction chapbook forthcoming from Hoopsnakes Press.  She was a finalist for Flannery O’Connor Award in 2011, 2012, and 2013.  Polly is founding editor of StringTown Press and teaches creative writing and literature at Eastern Washington University.

Emily Bedard

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Loss

 

Remember the time you announced
that you were no longer going to clean
your ear wax out, that you were, at last,
going to trust your ears to do their job
the way the Good Lord had intended,
which would have been easier to commit to
had you actually believed in God,
though sometimes grand gestures require
grand sacrifices, in this case your atheism,
which you sort of just wiped off yourself
with a mental swab and tossed out
the window of our conversation? At first
nothing was different. You were the same guy
with the same ears, a little mashed maybe,
but well formed, and the same hearing,
fond of the black-capped chickadees outside
our window in the early morning and the children
doing their Uncle Murray voices as they ran
through the sprinkler and the obscure radio shows
you found on the dial late at night by yourself.

………………….But gradually, by spring maybe,
the accumulation had begun to take hold
and you missed little snippets of conversation
around you, you looked in wonder at the patterns
of intricate feathers on the tiny gray wings,
undistracted by song. You had a look of half
amazement and half despair as the burbling,
clicking, rustling world fell away behind the wall
of silent wax in your head. We spoke to your face,
we raised our voices, but you just stared
at our mouths opening and shutting like fishes
gulping the wrong kind of air. And when
the muffling was complete, when your two ears
like tender contoured shells on the sides of your head
had fully erected a fortress of quiet, you just swam
alone in there in circles, listening to
the whispers of a God you had never believed in.

 
 

Emily Bedard writes poetry, fiction, and collaborative screenplays with her sister, Bridget Bedard. She has an M.F.A. from the University of Montana and lives in Seattle, where she teaches for Richard Hugo House, Seattle Arts & Lectures, and the Henry Art Gallery. Currently, Bedard is working on a new collection of poems, a novel, and a group of memoir-ish essays, all at the same time.