Category Archives: poem

Jeanne Gordner

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River Float – 1950

Three Children and I on inflated mattresses
…….drifted Toutle River’s snowmelt water
…….eddied quietly to a narrow gorge where

the river narrowed between rocky cliffs
dropped steeply…… surged
… white water roiling and spinning
…… past boulders and downed trees.

Toutle’s steep descent tossed us
airborne into whirlpools…… under water and
above again ….in confined passage
between cliffs and reaching driftwood.

water’s roar and echo
. overwhelming our screams, hurled us
……over deep holes…… under tree limbs
………………………. like homing fish.

…….Half a mile downstream the canyon
…….opened and Toutle quieted to the percussion of
…….water against stony beach.

We waded ashore
…. heard nests of song in alder and aspen
.. . felt sun’s heat.

Elated with our venture
we trudged the road back to camp and
… abandoned ourselves again and again
…… to river’s icy race and swirl,
………. its fluid passage between rock and rock. Until

too weary to tramp the road again
we sat and watched water patterns
interlace and elongate westward
watched as sun slid behind trees
its last light dancing in the river.

 

 

(In 1980 Mt. St. Helens erupted, filling the gorge with muck and trees)

 

Jeanne Gordner grew up in Longview Washington, then enrolled in Reed College, majoring in Political Science.  Lloyd Reynolds introduced her to modern poetry, and she has been writing ever since. Eventually she became a teacher and taught for several years in Yakima, and then substituted in Oak Harbor schools when her family moved to Whidbey Island.  She returned to Olympia and was one of the original members of Olympia Poetry Network, which has enriched her writing life in many ways. Currently she lives in a retirement community and participates in a writing class. She has published three chapbooks.  

D. C. Miller

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Keeping Bees Since the Eruption

 

Since you found the burst of fireweed
where the scorched bear plied the chomping brook,
saw crimson blooms squeeze through rent cedar,
told the ladies there are flowers
tasseling for the rest of their lives,
bore them up St. Helens’ spine,
faced their doors toward morning sun
where guard bees wing the gray mist fleeing,
felt the singe of venom in your veins, imagined
fresh comb full-capped, plugged with honey,
interred the dead in ash, and set
her white mansions where earth fell apart—
you can wait with them for the dawn.

Since you were stung in the night,
each sting union and requiem—
you feel the earth’s spin,
understand the dance of bees.
You sense in every Apis mellifera
renewal and matriarch,
and when you push your way
through cheek-high flowers, the bees,
a galaxy of copper stars with frail wings,
the swarm is ether, zuzzing a new skyline.

 

“Keeping Bees Since the Eruption” is reprinted from North American Review.

 

D.C. Miller stumbles up to alpine country regularly, guides ocean kayakers to the B.C. coast, and sorely tries to avoid the ER, from close encounters with the teeth of his Great Pyrenees dog.  Although his commercial beekeeping days are over, he continues to urge small females to fly into his heirloom apples to lick flowers. When not writing, you can find him tethered to “Barkley”, dragged to new heights in the Columbia Gorge &  North Cascades.  He lives in White Salmon.

Tim Sherry

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Word Game with a Little Boy

 

To let him win,
or to play the big word
with five letters and a Q
on the triple word square
is too much ethics to decide–
and I make ON
up in the corner.
We show our left-over letters
and subtract the points.
He beats my by 8,
throws his hands up in the air,
and smiles all the victory
of a little boy
who doesn’t need to learn
so much about losing just yet.
When we are putting the game away,
he looks at me
and asks if I let him win.
Inside the box
there must be a big word to answer;
but I say no,
and he looks at me as if
he is adding up in his head
what just happened.

 

“Word Game with a Little Boy” is from the full-length collection, One of Seven Billion, which will be published in the spring of 2014 by Moonpath Press.

 

Tim Sherry, a long-time public high school teacher and principal, lives in Tacoma, Washington.  He earned a BA from PacificLutheranUniversityand an MA from the Universityof Chicago.  His poems have appeared in Crab Creek Review, The Raven Chronicles, Interdisciplinary Humanities, and Seminary Ridge Review among others.  He has been a Pushcart nominee, and most recently his poem “Of Fires” was a finalist for the Rash Award in Poetry and published in the Broad River Review. His full-length collection, One of Seven Billion, will be published in the spring of 2014 by Moonpath Press.

 

 

Leigh Clifton Goodwin

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the home place

 

some folks say
it’s where
when you have to go there,
they have to take you.

So that’s not wrong
so far as it goes
but it’s a bit unkind, maybe —
unprodigal.

I say
it’s where
when you want to go there
so badly you’ll give up your easy
anonymous wallow,
pick up responsibility again
put it on like a clean shirt,
accept the recognition
of your place in the sweet slow
mechanics of family —

it’s where
when you want to go there
so much you’ll give up
lifting nothing,
to regain the quiet beating weight
that’s everything —

they’ll bear you joyously
over the familiar threshold,
and only say
we’re glad.

We’re glad you’re here at last.

 

Leigh Clifton Goodwin has put in time as a bartender, a maid, a shipwreck victim and a very reluctant banker.  She has had poems published in Crab Creek Review, Drash: Northwest Mosaic, and A Sense of Place: The Washington State Geospatial Poetry Anthology. In early 2011, Leigh accidentally began writing a poem-journal of the cycle of a Seattle year, and has been observing developments with interest.

Debra Revere

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Drowning

 

First you hear the sharp crack of winter
splitting itself from itself. Then you hear the screams,
your brothers on the shoreline safe, frantic,
transforming into heroes. Then, silent, the quiet
underwater, the silence of a winter lake.
Amazing when you’re eight.

Falling through the ice, it happens suddenly and slowly.
You watch it all from a distance, like peering
around the corner late at night,
spying on your parents, on a separate life.

You think you’d like to spend more time down there,
search for creatures slowly breathing, hibernating, look
for the secret place turtles retreat to in the cold.
Find a place to sleep away your life.

But instead, you yell, you reach for the surface, hold
on to the jagged edge marking your path down. Hold on,
hold on, they call. They toss themselves onto the ice,
reaching, lashing you with their love.

 

 

Debra Revere is a Research Scientist and Clinical Faculty working in the field of biomedical and public health informatics at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. She is widely published in her research field which focuses on understanding the information needs of public health. Debra has been writing poetry since she was 9 years old. Her first poem was published in the Lawrenceville Elementary School newspaper, an ode to the Easter Bunny.  She lives in Seattle.

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.

Gary Lemons

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Snake’s Karma

Why this be as it is he wonders.
Questions boundin round inside
His tube like echos in a sewer pipe.

Why not some better endin
For everything—why we got to bring
Down the whirlwind on ourselves,
Past and present rubbed together
Til the future’s set on fire?

Why can’t we do this simple
Thing—love one another, love the land
Includin the land of one another
And the planet where it happens?

What keeps us from gettin it right
And makin peace with death so as
We don’t fear it so much we be invitin
It prematurely into our hearts.

Snake thinkin about this but all the time
He’s salivatin bout the good taste
Of a bone still got some of the critter on it.

 

 

“Snake’s Karma” is reprinted from Snake, Red Hen Press, 2012.

 

J. Gary Lemons writes, “There is tradition but there is also freedom from tradition.  Meaning really there is just freedom.  To look–to see the invisible lines between things, to color the world with thought and paint its huge relevant inexpressible ironies with the tiny brush of personal devotion.  The choice is the gift.  The rest is practice.

I want to be at that place where individual memory and collective memory intersect. Like a scientist picking the fragments of mesons and quarks left after a high speed particle collision,  I want to rake through the details of bones, of threads and odd symbols and mirrors every human being leaves in the safety net below them.  I want to draw attention to, perhaps even comfort, the trembling pieces as they begin to fade.”

His poetry collections include Fresh Horses (Van West & Co., 2001), Bristol Bay: And Other Poems (Red Hen, 2009), and Snake (Red Hen, 2012). He lives in Port Townsend.

 

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