Category Archives: poem

Student Poem

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Today’s poem is by Rose, age 16, who participated in the Pongo Teen Writing Project in the King County Juvenile Detention system. Her poem is featured in There Had to Have Been Someone, one of 13 print poetry anthologies that Pongo has published over the past 17 years. Please watch a short video by John Sharify, Poetry flows from teens behind bars, featured on KING5 News yesterday, for more information about Pongo’s important work with distressed youth.

 

Ice Cream Man

I just thought you should know
that sometimes I’m afraid of you.
I don’t mind you rep’ing the gangs,
but sometimes when I look into your eyes,
I see violence against me,
I see violence against your grandma,
and it hurts me inside.

I just thought you should know,
I want to work in here someday,
helping kids that went through what I went through,
help them understand why I ran away from home,
because my parents beat me,
because the stress in my life
made me do something stupid.
I was the girl who stopped going to school,
I was the girl who stopped listening to her parents,
who started drinking and smoking.

I just thought you should know
that one side of me wants to be with you
and one side of me does not,
and the side that does not is confused,
feels like a lost sheep.

I just thought you should know,
I see myself with a happy family
in a park, Oakland, CA, eating barbequed lamb
next to the swimming pool while dads play tennis
and moms talk and serve food
and all the Tongan people speak to the ice cream man.

I just thought you should know
I’m tired of seeing what people do on the streets,
and I’m tired of being part of it.

I just thought you should know,
I want to say hello again to the ice cream man.

—
Dedicated to Z

 

“Ice Cream Man” previously appeared in There Had to Have Been Someone, 2011.

 

Rose, age 16, wrote “Ice Cream Man” with the Pongo Teen Writing Project, which teaches and mentors personal poetry by distressed teens all over King County, especially those who have a hard time expressing themselves. Pongo is the brainchild of poet Richard Gold, who has worked tirelessly to create, maintain, and promote this program that helps  youth understand their feelings, build self-esteem, and take better control of their lives. Pongo’s trained volunteers establish writing projects inside juvenile detention centers, psychiatric hospitals, and other sites.  The Pongo web site provides writing opportunities and invites youth to write poetry on the web site.  They also happily share resources and teaching methods with counselors and teachers, all for free. The program was featured on KING5 News in Seattle yesterday.

Pongo Teen Writing Project from Richard Gold on Vimeo.

Ted McMahon

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Prosector

 
This morning, on our walk between rain squalls
we circled the lake at the head of the Cayou valley.
There, amidst an insistence of flickers, a burble
of robins, the rusty scrape of the red-wing blackbird,
we happened upon a black-feathered shape, which flew up
at our approach, into the trees. Where it had been,
what had seemed a rumpled blanket,
was a doe, no more than two days dead.
Ribs furled around a thorax
empty of lungs, empty of heart, open
to the thin mist of rain. And the ribs themselves,
pink and clean of meat, a lesson in anatomy taught
by that bald scavenger waiting above, waiting
to resume his lecture on our shared fate.

 

“Prosector” previously appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Ted McMahon’s poetry has appeared in Seattle Review, Convolvulus, Manzanita Quarterly, Rosebud, and the Journal of the American Medical Association, and on The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. His full-length collection is The Uses of Imperfection, published in 2003. He published a chapbook, First Fire, in 1996. Ted received the 1999 Carlin Aden Award for formal verse from the Washington Poets Association, and a 2004 Artist Trust GAP Grant. He was finalist for the Ruth Stone Prize in Poetry in 2005. Ted was a co-editor at Floating Bridge Press in Seattle from 1999-2006. He currently practices Pediatrics half time in the Seattle neighborhood of Ballard and devotes the other half to writing and leading river journeys.  He lives in the Seattle neighborhood of Wallingford with his wife, photographer Rosanne Olson, and their two Maine Coon cats, Zoe and Maxx.

 

 

 

Jenifer Browne Lawrence

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Sedna at the Juneau Cold Storage Dock

 

There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea and she’s afraid
to go swimming. Not that the water is too cold. Not
that the halibut below the dock—the one
that swallowed a scuba diver tank and all—
is real, but she’s afraid not to believe

the myth, how salmon
heads and lungs, tails and ropy innards
fed the halibut until it grew
a mouth like an orca, a cavern
gaping on its flat, two-tone body,

the girl’s body
shivering in the open boat, she can’t
remove her float coat for a swim,
not even for her father.
There’s a hole in the harbor floor

where the water darkens, out
past the jetty. That’s where she would go
if she were real, if she were the fish-woman
whose fingers were chopped off by her father
to make her let go of the boat.

 

“Sedna at the Juneau Cold Storage Dock” originally appeared in Narrative Magazine.  

 

Jenifer Browne Lawrence is the author of One Hundred Steps from Shore (Blue Begonia, 2006). She was awarded the 2011 James Hearst Poetry Prize and is a Washington State Artist Trust GAP grant recipient. Recent work appears in Bellevue Literary Review, Caesura, Crab Creek Review, Court Green, Narrative, and the North American Review. Jenifer lives in Poulsbo, Washington, and serves on the Centrum advisory board for the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference.

 

Jed Myers

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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

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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.

 

 

Lucia Perillo

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Domestic

 

Here the coyote lives in shadows between houses,
feeds by running west to raid the trash behind the store
where they sell food that comes in cans
yesterday expired. Think of it
perching on the dumpster, a corrugated
sheet of metal welded to the straight, its haunch
accruing the imprint of the edge until it pounces,
skittering on the cans. Its attempts
to gnaw them open have broken all its teeth.

Bald-flanked, rheumy-eyed, sniffing the wheels
of our big plastic trash carts but too pigeon-
chested to knock them down, scat full of eggshells
from the compost pile. “I am like that, starved,
with dreams of rutting in a culvert’s narrow light—”
we mumble our affinities as we vacate into sleep.
Because we occupy the wrong animal—don’t you too feel it?
Haven’t you stood in the driveway, utterly confused?
Maybe you were taking out the garbage, twisting your robe
into a noose-knot at your throat, when you stopped
fighting the urge to howl, and howled—
and did you find relief, my friend, however self-deceiving?

 

“Domestic” appears in  On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon Press, 2012).

Lucia Perillo has published six books of poetry, including Luck Is Luck, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, a book of short stories, Happiness is a Chemical in the Brain, and a memoir, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature. Her most recent poetry collections are Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, and her newly released collection, On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). Perillo, a MacArthur Fellow, has taught at Syracuse University, Saint Martin’s University, and Southern Illinois University. She lives in Olympia, Washington.

 

Lana Hechtman Ayers

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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.

 

Raúl Sánchez

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Euphoria

 

Tonight

I feel like Huracán Ramírez

Blue Demon, Lucha Libre champions
slamming rudos at the Coliseo

I live for a noche de tango
and red wine, vino tinto
singing with Carlos Gardel
milongas with versos
de Neruda whispered
in the ear de la mujer

the woman I love,

que yo más quiero

I feel like a kid skipping
down rain soaked sidewalks
I feel like sitting on white porch steps

cigar in one hand

Cuban rum in the other
 

I don’t care about piñatas dangling

sticks batting the air

no candy tonight

All the children

safe in bed
 

Running scared from the sacred

called and recalled

I am alone at last

tonight

 

Raúl Sánchez lives in Seattle, where he conducts workshops on The Day of the Dead. His most recent work is the translation of John Burgess’ “Punk Poems”  and his own debut collection, All Our Brown-Skinned Angels, released by MoonPath Press 2012.

Raúl will be reading from All Our Brown-Skinned Angels at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle on Friday, July 27, at 7:00, along with John Burgess and Lana Hechtman Ayers.

John Burgess

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[Ballad of James Acord]

 

Sometimes alone.
Sometimes in clusters. Sometimes

in parallel but a lifetime apart. Sometimes
sinking. Sometimes afloat. “There are

2 parallel paths on which human beings
seek the truth.” Sometimes tangled

in each other’s hair. Sometimes oblivious.
Sometimes replicas coming off a conveyor

belt upstream. “I wanted to be able to identify
and imagine how everything I saw was made.”

Sometimes punk. Sometimes Li Po
folded into paper boats. “Demonstrate

the ancient link between art and
technology.” Sometimes mammalian

noses just above drowning. Sometimes
a Cold War that never ended. “Science

and art, art and science—they’re
just two spokes going into the center

of the Karma Wheel.” Sometimes a rodeo.
Sometimes a Veteran’s Day parade.

Sometimes loose-cannon protons released
from larger atoms looking to start

a chain reaction. “We have not stolen
anything. We have just learned about it.”

Sometimes long stretches like nothing is
wrong. Sometimes failure takes years. “If

you want to make things, if you want to
create things, everything is hazardous.”

 

Samples: James Acord as quoted in “Looking for Acord,” The Observer (July 1998) and “James Acord: Atomic Artist,” Nuclear News (November 2002).

 

JOHN BURGESS grew up in upstate New York, worked on a survey crew in Montana, taught English in Japan and now lives and works in Seattle. He has three books of poetry from Ravenna Press: Punk Poems (2005), A History of Guns in the Family (2008) and Graffito (2011).

John will be reading from Graffito at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle on Friday, July 27, at 7:00, along with Raul Sanchez and Lana Hechtman Ayers.

 

David Wagoner

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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.