Category Archives: poem

Martha Clarkson

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Room at the Top

 

Lydia Shultan has invisible friends, whose names all begin with J.
They live in the attic of her parents’ house
and stick together under the northeast eave.
She holds court sitting Indian-style on her aunt’s footlocker.

Lydia Shultan has an imagination like grass.
Fast growing and self-fertilized, with an occasional blow-able dandelion.
Her parents feel compelled to mow it back now and then,
disregarding her atmosphere.

Lydia Shultan creates a play where her box turtles are the actors.
She names one Charlie Chaplin, because of course it has to be a silent play.
For the score she plays her only piano piece, “Merry Roses.”
The blank-eyed turtles forget to take a bow.

Lydia Shultan isn’t going to get any brothers and sisters.
She’ll have to settle for the attic friends, who tend to be catty
and are unnaturally blonde, and the girls wear nylons instead of knee-highs.
Sometimes they run around the attic naked, so Lydia does, and it feels like flying.

 

Martha Clarkson manages corporate workplace design in Seattle. Her poetry and fiction can be found in monkeybicycle6, Clackamas Literary Review, Seattle Review, Portland Review, elimae, and Nimrod. She is a recipient of a Washington Poets Association William Stafford prize 2005, a Pushcart Nomination, and is listed under “Notable Stories,” Best American Non-Required Reading for 2007 and 2009.  She lives in Kirkland.

 

James Bertolino

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Blueprint

 

This morning the ice came.
Everything fresh
and new––but don’t be fooled.

Water is old.

When it’s just cold enough,
ice will enclose everything––pebbles,
twigs, ripe fruit and all
we’ve built––in a brilliant casing.

This is the way water memorizes
what is temporary and
in danger. Water carries the blueprint
for what has been made,

what is missing.

At this moment, in the profound depths
of the Pacific, water is remembering
a perfect model of Hiroshima
in April of 1944.

It is glowing with the pink
of plum blossoms.

 

“Blueprint” is reprinted from Finding Water, Holding Stone

 

James Bertolino’s tenth volume of poetry, Finding Water, Holding Stone, was published in 2009 by Cherry Grove Collections. His 26 poetry collections include books from Carnegie Mellon University Press and the Quarterly Review of Literature Award Series at Princeton University. He’s received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, and Book-of-the-Month Club, as well as the Jeanne Lohmann Poetry Prize for Washington State poets. His teaching includes Cornell University, University of Cincinnati, Western Washington University and Willamette University. He served as a judge for the 2009, 2010 and 2011 American Book Awards in poetry. He lives outside Bellingham.

Therese Clear

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Kitchen Mischief

 

Best when used by. Rich
and creamy. Extra virgin.
Those with sweet flavors.
Double-acting. Will perk up.
Only cold water should be used!

Add hot juice. Beat. Bring to a boil.
As desired. Grease lightly.
Until completely dissolved.
Shake well.
May explode if heated.

A pinch or two.
Gives zest to.
Adds pungency.
Fast rising and active!
Questions? Comments?

Do not use delay timer.
Knead. Let double in size.
Even the most delicate.
Most unadulterated.
Raw & real. Honey.

 

Therese Clear is a Seattle poet, a founder of Floating Bridge Press,
and has been publishing her work for over thirty years. Poems have
appeared in Poetry Northwest, Fine Madness, Calyx, Crab Creek Review,
Atlanta Review, and other journals and anthologies. She manages
production and shipping for a Seattle glass artist.

Student Poem

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True Music

 

Playing an instrument is like reading a book
With each stroke, the plot thickens and creates a hook
It starts off happy, until disaster comes
Music explodes like thunder then is followed by quiet hums
Caused by the disaster no one knew would come

Music begins returning as a hero appears in the gloom
Slowly, a magnificent crescendo fills the room
For the hero began the battle with the dreaded evil that lay before him
The song’s intense, as well as the battle
But the hero is winning, and his rival starts to cower

For the battle is finally over
As peace is restored to the land
Both with song and story
Beginning to end

 

 

Kevin is an eighth grader in Janet Freece’s Language Arts class at Mt. Solo Middle School in Longview. I visited last month and had the pleasure of hearing Kevin and many of his classmates recite their own poems as well as classic poems like “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert Service and “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop. They had also worked on a project “interviewing” dead poets, and turned some of their questions on me. Congratulations to Janet for creating so much enthusiasm in her classroom for poetry!

Kary Wayson

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The Lives of Artists

 

I’m a nuisance on my route, an imposition

in the alleyway, just past the house of
shared custody: glass clock in the window like a ticking
terrarium. I manage like a mother
with a daughter who looks just like her father
and I am almost up to here

where once, in an alcove
of myself, I lingered in a stand of birches. Here
my mind gets shy
as if I’d asked my daughter to say hello
to a stranger. I don’t have a daughter. But crossing the street,
I jerk her little arm.

There is a joy in talking through an open window with a friend

on the sidewalk below. My mother understood it, with her
underwater tea parties on the bottom of the swimming pool.

Map for me my walking route and I will walking go.

It is new to be beautiful

and unseemly to say so. I manage
many paintings of the same Catholic saints, each
family holy according to another —
and then we get to the Caravaggio.

It’s new to be beautiful
and boring. It’s like counting to two
and turning around
and counting to two again.

But I was good! I was good! I let

the offer lie there like I’d rent
an empty room: the one electrical outlet,
the sink in the corner, the pull-out, the sofa.

I took how many tenants through.

The only clothes I’m wearing now
is the dress on the bed beside me –

And I am to bed like the station to the train:

to the bed headed
by the street below it. I mean
I am the station. There is the train
like a river
deranged by colors of cargo.

I go to the river
to read red books
and reason —

I sit with the sky. I go for a walk
to visit this direction:
really there’s no need to rhyme.

 

 

“The Lives of Artists” was previously published in Crazyhorse, and the winner of the Linda Hull Memorial Prize, selected by James Tate.

 

Kary Wayson’s poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Poetry Northwest, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Nation, The Journal, FIELD, Filter, The Best American Poetry 2007, and the 2010 Pushcart Prize anthology. Kary was a 2003 Discovery/The Nation award winner, and her chapbook, Dog & Me, was published in 2004 by LitRag Press. Her first full collection, American Husband, won the Ohio State University Press/ The Journal Award in 2009. Kary lives and works in Seattle.

 

Anne Pitkin

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Lapland Longspur

 

Arctic Sparrow
it balances
on a dwarf fireweed.
Hills and sky roll
off the end of the visible world

which tilts
through the implacable
harmonies
of space, unprotected,
its own laws exacting
and without prejudice.

Even so, a furious
and delicate imbalance
thrives here:

purple aster, harebell,
yellow oxytrope, the Longspur
whose perch trembles
as it lets go and darts to the next.

*

Some proportions
have no meaning: harebell
to Arctic winter, Longspur
to the urgency of summer
on the tundra’s millions of acres
where it nests,
its home lined
with a puff of wool
from the musk ox.

*

Fewer and fewer stars set
as one travels
farther north in winter.
The Auroras swing across the sky,
souls, some say,
of children
who have died at birth.
All night, they dance,
all the sunless weeks
they dance in circles
whipping streamers of light
across the land encased
by an adamant darkness.

*

Tonight, the news
of a death was followed
by a Mozart concerto
for flute and orchestra,

was followed by the music
of Mozart as it has played
through two centuries of loss

for which there is no recompense.

The life of a bird
hurries from sparrow to sparrow.

The Longspur builds
its minute bones with calcium
from the skeletons of lemmings.

Occasionally, on the beach,
it nests in the skull of a walrus

The life of a bird
sometimes hurries from a stutter
of wings to singing that flashes
across an empty landscape.

*

Point Barrow:
Near midnight, July Fourth,
two boys walk out
on the melting sea ice.

From a distance,
against the white sea,
small and black under the sun,
they seem to be dancing
round and round

on the ice
at its most dangerous.

A few say, when we speak
of the end

of the Longspur, even
of Mozart, a very few say still
the earth may heal itself.

 

“Lapland Longspur” originally appeared in Ironwood.

 

Anne Pitkin grew up in Clarksville, TN, and earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Vanderbilt University. She earned a second master’s from Antioch University in 1988. She has worked both as a community college instructor and as a psychotherapist. Winter Arguments (Ahadada Books, 2011) is her third collection after Yellow (Arrowood Books, 1989) and the chapbook Notes for Continuing the Performance (Jawbone Press, 1977). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, and many others. A mother of three, grandmother of two, she currently lives in Seattle, where she plays jazz piano with her friends.

Joanne M. Clarkson

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Sky of Four Sisters

 

Four firs marked the northern edge
of our acres. Our welcome, we
watched them for miles calling us
home. Our warriors, they shielded us
from the worst of winter storms, moss
cushioning our ice. In summer we
camped beneath their feathered
shade, lazy with evergreen breezes.

“We live at Four Sisters,” we would say
and everyone knew our place.

So that after a lightning strike took down
the eastern-most tree, we didn’t change
our address, still seeing her sway
like a Kirlian print, pinnacle home to falcon
and crow, needles a mist of cocoon spin.

‘Four Sisters’ on a mailbox;
how memory continues a sacred name.
How some bonds have such deep
roots, that even the wind
honors their space.

 

“Sky of Four Sisters” was previously published in Caesura.

 

Joanne M. Clarkson is the author of two books of poems: Pacing the Moon (Chantry Press) and Crossing Without Daughters (March Street Press). Her work has appeared recently in Hospital Row, Amoskeag Review, Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease, and Shadow and Light: A Literary Anthology on Memory. She has a Master’s Degree in English and has taught but currently works as a Registered Nurse specializing in Hospice and Community Nursing in Olympia.

Jeff Crandall

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I Am Your Winged Torso of Eros

“Everything breakable in you has been broken . . .”
— Daniel Hall

Archival air belies the dirt they drew me from.
My wings lie crumbled in that ground still.
(Fingers marked unknown in a Reykjavik museum,
one ear completes a French recruiter’s stall.)
Fluorescence pours its green on all of us.
Why then return to face this embarrassment
of cracks and absence, blind luck and loss?

You’ve got it wrong (in sneakers and jeans, the docent’s
sneeze, the guidebook’s backward fold): Let me go
into the world: part saffron-dusted swallowtail,
part fountain jazz, wine and laughlines. The stone
heart erodes, forgotten as a pearl in its fossil shell.
Take, instead, the light sighs . . . I am broken,
yes, but broken like bread — a piece for everyone.

 

Jeff Crandall is a poet and artist living in Seattle.

Derek Sheffield

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Mosses, Slugs, and Mount Rainier

Roethke’s last words to me: “Beefeater all right?”
–Nelson Bentley (1918 – 1990)

 

Leaning forward, cupping an ear
For every student reader, he loved a great refrain
Tinctured with mosses, slugs, and Mount Rainier.

When critics passed over his vision of rapture,
He licked a pencil and penned “Letter to Robert Hayden.”
Leaning forward, cupping an ear,

Students in the back row heard him swear
Roethke’s song could match the mind of Auden.
Tinctured with mosses, slugs, and Mount Rainier,

His classes spilled to the Blue Moon’s bar
For Bud and Blake and windows mottled with rain.
Leaning forward, cupping an ear,

He mouthed words like smoke, dusk, and cincture.
As the Denny clock rang another noon
Tinctured with mosses, slugs, and Mount Rainier,

He gave us our sonnets with circled clutter:
Omit? O, in every concise beauty, Nelson
Leans forward and cups a wakeful ear
Tinctured with mosses, slugs, and Mount Rainier.

 

 

“Mosses, Slugs, and Mount Rainier” is for Professor Nelson Bentley who taught at the University of Washington from 1952 to 1989. This poem was published in Limbs of the Pine, Peaks of the Range: Poems by Twenty-Six Pacific Northwest Poets (Rose Alley, 2007).

Derek Sheffield’s A Revised Account of the West won the Hazel Lipa Environmental Chapbook Award judged by Debra Marquart. His full-length collection was runner-up for the 2012 Emily Dickinson First Book Award. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Orion, The Southern Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review,  Terrain, and Wilderness, and he is the recent winner of an Artist Trust Literary Fellowship. He lives with his family outside Leavenworth, WA, and teaches poetry and nature writing at Wenatchee Valley College.

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.