Category Archives: poem

Kate Lebo

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Every Beginning Wants a Good Place to Start

 

According to laws of ownership,
you’re homeless. According to virology
you’re hunted, sore-throated, snotty.
By psychology you’re understood
and spun out, an iced tire. In fashion
you’re an adopter, a crofter, a little black
smock of sleep.

Notice how roofs lift their houses into reason,
their stories into debt. How leather walks years
after the first bloody cut
and shoes say something faster about a man
than his wallet because you don’t
have to ask to see them.

Starting today, you’ll study the discipline
of what you don’t know
about what you don’t want. You want this
like the flu wants lungs. Today,
keep it simple when simple makes sense.
Don’t start with schoolbooks. Start
with breakfast.

 

Kate Lebo’s poems appear in Best New Poets 2011, Poetry Northwest, Bateau, and The Pacific Poetry Project, among other anthologies and journals. She’s an editor for Filter, a literary journal made entirely by hand, and the recipient of a Nelson Bentley Fellowship, a 4Culture grant, and a Soapstone residency. Currently an MFA candidate at the University of Washington, Kate hosts a semi-regular semi-secret pie social called Pie Stand whenever schoolwork allows. Visit Pie-Scream for more about Kate’s zine A Commonplace Book of Pie and other tasty treats.

Michael Schmeltzer

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Phoenix-Tongue

…for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. – Genesis 3:19, KJV

As the days passed, my limbs turned purple and my face turned to the colour of dust. – Kazuko Yamashima, atom-bomb survivor

 

Suppose we are not made of fire. Suppose we turn
children to dust. Should we carry their ash in an urn
as if the sacred exists? What some call love,
others burn as fuel. How should we speak of
paper and people enduring the feral infernos?
I have no choice. I ache. I shower with shadow.
I wrote a poem on my lover’s stomach with
my tongue. Which lasts longer, the width

of saliva, the sonnet, or her skin? Answer
the question in phoenix-tongue. The towers
collapsed on my birthday and a crimson bird
built a nest in a tree. We were kids then, sure,
but how do you explain this; we set the nest ablaze.
One egg cooked in the center. The rest we saved.

 

“Phoenix-Tongue” originally appeared in PacificREVIEW.

 

Michael Schmeltzer earned an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. His honors include four Pushcart Prize nominations, the Gulf Stream Award for Poetry, Blue Earth Review’s Flash Fiction Prize, and the Artsmith Literary Award. Most recently he was a finalist in poetry contests held by Third Coast Magazine and Water~Stone Review. He helps edit A River & Sound Review and has been published in Natural Bridge, Mid-American Review, Water~Stone Review, New York Quarterly, Bellingham Review, and Fourteen Hills, among others. He lives in White Center, Washington.

Paul Hunter

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What A Boy Lies Awake Wondering

 

Footsore trudging these fields
while overhead dip and wheel
unfolding lives on the wing
some evenings every other living thing
seems dipped in desire glistening

so I envy the horse that can ripple
its skin out from under the horsefly
and the thousand-eyed horsefly
that bites me clean through
the workshirt stuck to my shoulders

I envy the hen so suspicious
of me she can turn her head backwards
and the slippery calf being nudged up
licked clean of its birth
all set to dance at a touch

and the water skeeter astride
the silvery skin of the horse trough
inhaled by those whiskery muzzles
and the green snake so still in the lilac
whose tongue neatly scissors the world

 

“What A Boy Lies Awake Wondering” is reprinted
from Ripening, (Silverfish Review Press, 2007).

 

Paul Hunter has lent a hand where it was needed—as teacher, performer, grassroots arts activist, worker on the land, and shade-tree mechanic. For the past 18 years he has published fine letterpress poetry under the imprint of Wood Works, currently including 26 books and over 60 broadsides. His poems have appeared in Alaska Fisherman’s Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bloomsbury Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Raven Chronicles, The Small Farmer’s Journal, The Southern Review and Spoon River Poetry Review, as well as in six full-length books and three chapbooks. His first collection of farming poems, Breaking Ground, 2004, from Silverfish Review Press, was reviewed in the New York Times, and received the 2004 Washington State Book Award. A second volume of farming poems, Ripening, was published in 2007, and a third companion volume, Come the Harvest, appeared in 2008. He has been a featured poet on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. His recent prose book, One Seed to Another: The New Small Farming, was published by the Small Farmer’s Journal in 2010. A fourth collection of farming poems, Stubble Field, is due out from Silverfish Review Press, in May 2012.

Linda Andrews

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Asbury Park

 

Another day goes down
on the old house I am lucky
enough to live in. On the radio a voice
remembers a farm house and suddenly
I do too, a farm house where written words
had no taker, no easy place to pile in corners
or at the sides of beds. This was the place
of Russian grandparents who could neither
read nor write. How odd, now, to save
their house with words.

There’s the corner for the parakeet cage, hung tall
as from a floor lamp, fluttering racket, bird let loose
to flap in your hair. Long table for beer bottles,
pumpernickel bread, head cheese, duck’s blood
soup, horseradish. The kitchen burned with pepper.
Sun blaze of Michigan summer through
the tall windows. Beets from the garden,
bootlegger renter in the basement.

There’s the gas stove where my long hair caught fire.
First the burning smell, then the knowledge.
Hair singed, brittle, broken by the kitchen towel
my grandmother grabbed me with. Let loose
the bird. It never made a mess like this.

Or a mess like the day the bootlegger threw
the mash out in the yard where the ducks
found it, ate it, fell down drunk, were assumed
dead and plucked by my grandmother.
They woozed back to life about the time
grandpa came home, bleary from having
a few beers himself, and found the ducks naked,
curving through the yard.

Long before I came along, destined
to catch fire in the kitchen, my father shot
pheasants from the attic window, the same
attic where, on his way to being able
to fix anything, he took his mother’s sewing
machine apart, was spanked hard for his curiosity,
then he put it all back together and started
the treadle whirring for the next
twenty years. Out back along the tracks
in the tall weeds my 4’11” grandma once waited in the dark,
big stick in hand, waited for the man who said
her sons had stolen his apples. Watch him try
to get home, drunk as a duck, as she waylays him,
tells him don’t you ever say it again and he never does.

I have not abandoned this house, even after
I moved away, the grandparents died and the house
sold. It is mine, jealously, even after new people
bought it, burned it down for the insurance,
left it to become flame and fragment. It is mine,
obsessively. I’ll never let the bootlegger out of
the basement. I keep my grandmother always
climbing her footstool to reach the tall white cabinets.
My grandfather is forever walking home
along the railroad tracks that edge Asbury Park,
coal in his pockets, apples in his lunch pail,
suspenders carving an X into his back.

 

 

Linda Andrews’ poetry and stories have been featured in numerous journals and reviews including Calyx, Nimrod, Spindrift, Poetry Northwest, Crab Creek Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, CutBank, Willow Springs, Midwest Quarterly, Gadfly,and Seattle Review. A book of her poems, Escape of the Bird Women, was published by Blue Begonia Press in 1998 and received a Washington State Governor’s Writers Award the following year. She is the recipient of a Ucross Foundation Fellowship residency, an Artist Trust fellowship grant, a Vernon M. Spence Poetry Prize, and an Academy of American Poets Prize through the University of Washington. Andrews holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Michigan State University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Washington. For breadwinning purposes, she has worked as a speech writer, co-author and editor for non-profit health care executives in Seattle. In this capacity, she has been published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Health Care Resources, American Pharmacy and others. She is currently on the faculty of Walla Walla Community College and teaches writing and literature.

Carol Light

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January Walk

 

The wind has twisted the tops of hemlock and fir;
cones and needles spatter the muddy path.
Rising from nearby chimneys: wood smoke and ash.
A cold mist washes my cheek and cattails stir
the breeze, climbing dried and broken reeds
while birdsong mixes swift, twitter, chit,
and swallows hide among the rosehip thickets.
My jacket snags on tangled arches, while beads
of dew fall from the vine. The year begins
anew. I thumb the cat-tongue underside
of a blackberry leaf, startled by its thorn.
One snapped branch divides our trail. The winds
have spun so little down. Despite the wide
weather warning, this time we missed the storm.

 

published in Poetry Northwest

 

Carol Light has poems published in Narrative Magazine, American Life in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Literary Bohemian, Pacific Poetry Project, and elsewhere. In 2011 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, named a Writing Fellow with Jack Straw Productions, and received a GAP award for poetry from Artist Trust. She studied poetry in the MFA program at the University of Washington where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets prize. She teaches part-time at Olympic College and lives with her family in Port Townsend, Washington.

Kevin Miller

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Chrome and Oranges

 

Some days I drag what I have done
like a sack of wet laundry,
the more I lug the heavier it gets,
and if I don’t tend to it, it sours.
Tub of guts, we said as kids—
it had nothing to do with towing,
still this knowing attracts flies.
Might as well add envy to the pile,
jealous as I am of those able to forget.
And while stench may be a trigger,
I cannot recall the name of the woman
at work who smelled like shower steam
on powdered skin every morning for ten
glorious years. Instead, something I said
to J.B. forty years ago appears like a bull
on the highway. It gives asphalt a lesson
on black, leaves me replaying a stupid beef
over a woman who left both of us.
The Christmas I was ten I rode my new bike
to Richard’s to show off all that chrome.
He showed me checkers and an orange.
Those handlebars rust at the bottom of the sack.
Bad days, I hang each item on a line.
They sag like wet squares of sheetrock.
From a distance, you might wonder how
one man could own so many white shirts.

 

“Chrome and Oranges” previously appeared in the Massachusetts Review.

Kevin Miller lives in Tacoma, WA. Pleasure Boat Studio published his third collection, Home & Away: The Old Town Poems in 2008. Miller taught in the public schools of Washington State for thirty-nine years. He received grants from Artist Trust and Tacoma Arts, and received the Bumbershoot/Weyerhaeuser Publication Award for his first collection, Light That Whispers Morning.

Tess Gallagher

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Sah Sin was published with Tess Gallagher’s permission for a two-month period.

 

Sah Sin is the Nootka word for hummingbird.  “Sah Sin” appears in Tess Gallagher’s latest collection, Midnight Lantern (Gray Wolf, 2011)

 

Poet, essayist, novelist, and playwright, Tess Gallagher was born in Port Angeles, Washington. She received a BA and MA from the University of Washington, where she studied creative writing with Theodore Roethke, and a MFA from the University of Iowa. Her most recent collection of poems is Midnight Lantern (Gray Wolf Press, 2011).  Her first collection, Instructions to the Double, won the 1976 Elliston Book Award for “best book of poetry published by a small press.” Other collections include her first New and Selected, Willingly (1984);  Dear Ghosts (Graywolf Press, 2006); My Black Horse: New and Selected Poems (1995); Owl-Spirit Dwelling (1994); and  Moon Crossing Bridge (1992), written to and about her husband, author Raymond Carver, who died in 1988. About Gallagher’s work, the poet Hayden Carruth wrote, “Gallagher’s poems, beyond their delicacy of language, have a delicacy of perception, and the capacity to see oneself objectively as another person doing the things one really does, with clear affection and natural concern.” Her honors include a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, two National Endowment of the Arts Awards, and the Maxine Cushing Gray Foundation Award.

 

Rebecca Hoogs

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THE MUSES NARRATE A SLIDESHOW

History

Here I am sucking on cherry pits
leftover from the cult of Mithras.

Dance

Here I am on a child’s sarcophagus:
children collecting walnuts to chuck
at a pyramid of walnuts.

Comedy

Here I am with my melon hairstyle
and my prosciutto smile which identify me
as belonging to the 2nd century.

Music

Here I am the sound of one sense
through a bone flute in past tense.

Hymns

Here I am as she who walks and as she
who walks behind and as she who walks behind behind
and is only the hand which pours water or wine.

Astronomy

Here I am as a pair of sheet bronze hands
with gold buttons to navigate by.

Epic Poetry

Here I am writing epic poetry in my head
since I lost my epic pen.

Love

Here I am announcing the flood.

Tragedy

Here I am a copy of a copy
of an original feeling now lost.

 

 

“The Muses Narrate a Slide Show” originally appeared in The Monarch Review.

 

Rebecca Hoogs is the author of a chapbook, Grenade (2005) and her poems have appeared in Poetry, AGNI, Crazyhorse, Zyzzyva, The Journal, Poetry Northwest, The Florida Review, and others. She is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony (2004) and Artist Trust of Washington State (2005). She is the Director of Education Programs and the curator and host for the Poetry Series for Seattle Arts & Lectures.

 

 

Shannon Borg

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Attempting the Equator: Amelia Earhart, 1937

… for it was her voice that made
the sky acutest at its vanishing.
—Wallace Stevens

 

Whenever the cameras wanted her to kiss her husband goodbye
she shook his hand. Newsreel never showed the crimson

in her cheek, the gap between her teeth — he told her: Smile
with your mouth closed, dear. And no hats! We want to see

your tousled locks. So it came to this—nothing to do but tie
a smoky rope around the world. This is the last flight,

the camera clicking questions, You can never miss
an island, she says, tooth-gap smiling its emptiness. This

was her domesticity—a zigzag stitch
connecting hemispheres, above the abyss of Africa, from one

ocean’s obscurity to another. In the cockpit, bottles of water,
tomato juice, airsick pills, sandwiches she couldn’t eat.

From Los Angeles, her stomach in a knot six days. On the phone
from Honolulu to her husband—I’m experiencing

“personnel difficulties”—her radio expert gone, yes,
but this was different, this was code

for the navigator’s whiskey jag. Quit now, come home
Amelia—the line breaking up—I’m finding it

hard to hear you, he says, I’m losing you—
And still to come, the hardest stitch—across

the Pacific’s sheen to Howland Island—the needle could
lose north, cloud’s blue fabric slip apart. This is home—

the Lockheed’s berth, emptied for tanks of gas, emptiness
meant for the parachute and life raft she left behind.

Her bony wrist bare, even the bracelet forgotten,
elephant hair for luck. But her faith immense as the godless sky—

Howland, strip of sand less than two miles wide, thin
mouth on the sea’s vast face, wouldn’t it open for her,

mouth how? Clear morning, her face hot, eyes burning
the horizon with looking, the sun’s thin resting place. Everyone gone,

it seemed, from the world—no husband, no agent, no line
of cars crawling under ticker-tape snow, no heady scent

of roses, intoxication of fame. Just Earth’s endless, indifferent
curve. And this place, this plane: floating, rising, seeming

to fall, then finding solid air. Gasoline evaporating
like a spirit somewhere deep in the motor’s hum, and the scent

of whiskey from the navigator’s mouth, the hush
as he breathes cigarette after cigarette into ash.

You can never miss an island. Her voice breathless
into the speaker—I’m flying the line, can no longer

hear you. Repeat. Cannot hear … her voice falling away
like a chute opening over the sea—slow, circling down—

then, a moment of pure seduction in the drone of fear—
engines quiet now—she points the nose and wings straight

into the darkest cloud bank, hears nothing
of the radio’s crackling code, needle no longer stitching but spinning—

and emerges sunblind and exhausted, into neither
heaven nor hell, but slips between, into the needle eye,

the island herself, into the last silver glint of possibility.

 

 

Shannon Borg is a poet and wine educator living on Orcas Island. Her publications include Corset (poems, Cherry Grove, 2006); Chefs on the Farm (a cookbook, Mountaineers, 2008), and poems in The Paris Review, London Review of Books, Poetry Northwest, and other journals. Shannon holds an MFA from the University of Washington, and a PhD from the University of Houston. Her most recent project is called 26 Kitchens: How Neither Here Nor There Became Home, a collection of essays chronicling every kitchen she’s lived in. It is currently posted on her blog 26Kitchens.  

David Gravender

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Mossehurr

There should be words like “mossehurr,” to indicate
that soft-falling rain that soaks and nourishes the
mossy mats without quite wetting the hair… –-Robert Michael Pyle

We should have so many words we lack—our mouths
clear-cut slopes the rain drops invisibly through—
a nomenclature native and true as any flora
to spell the space that falls between the glisten
of your hair and moistness of my eye, what passes,
a racing cloud, over everything we say. A word
that would mean the clean aftermath of rainstorms
in spring; your skin, pink and warm, emerging
from fogs of soap; the dream that ghosts
my waking day—a language of evanescence
transpiring from the skin of every moment
though our dictionaries grow mossboled
and softbacked, unbearable dense forests
of verb and noun decomposing in a sunless litter
soft as bogs or the burr of lapsing tongues.

 

“Mossehurr” originally appeared in The Seattle Review

 

David Gravender lives with his family in the Convergence Zone (aka Mountlake Terrace). A recipient of an NEA Fellowship, the William Stafford Award, and other prizes, he has published poems in a variety of venues throughout the US, Canada, and UK, including The Seattle Review, The Malahat Review, Descant, Floating Bridge Review/Pontoon, Literary Salt, Riddle Fence, The Cortland Review, and even Metro buses. He earned an MA in English from the University of Toronto and a BA from the University of Washington; he now works as a technical editor.