Category Archives: poem

Christopher Herold

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somewhere
within

the
roar
of
the
falls

birdsong

 

 

Christopher Herold has been writing haiku for more than forty years. He is co-founder and former managing editor of The Heron’s Nest. Six collections of his work have been published. A Path in the Garden received a Haiku Society of America Merit Book Award. In the Margins of the Sea was a winner in Great Britain’s Snapshot Press manuscript competition. Inside Out, was runner-up for a Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. He has received two Museum of Haiku Literature awards. His work has been published worldwide in more than twelve languages. He lives with his family in Port Townsend, Washington.

Colleen J. McElroy

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Breaking Wild Horses

 

When romance walked in
there were too many fatal secrets
hiding in sheltered places.
We tried reining them in
corralling their savage cries
for attention – nothing seemed
to hold them at bay especially
as night broke the skyline
with the first signs of morning
and our guards were down —
our fences rattling with weakness
the whinny and stomping
of half remembered injuries
and families scabbed over.
We fussed with the images
trying to tidy them into civil
obedience – read how others
had calmed their unruliness
as they nuzzled soft places
left trails of rancid breath
flicked debris into the room (onto the table).
When romance moved on
the old nags came closer to the house
chewed on the lace curtains.
We couldn’t just put them down
not after they had been around
so long and carried so much baggage.
So we groomed them
trotted them out for prizes
boasted about their origins —
how difficult it had been to finally
keep them away from our comings
and goings – herded them into a far field
where their passing might go unnoticed
where even weeds bloomed in colors.

 

By permission of the author.  © Copyright 2012.

 

Colleen J. McElroy lives in Seattle, Washington where she is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington, and served as Editor-in-chief of the Seattle Review from 1995-2006. McElroy’s collection of poems include most recently, Sleeping with the Moon (2007), for which she received a 2008 PEN/Oakland National Literary Award. Her latest collections of creative non-fiction include: A Long Way From St. Louie (travel memoirs), and Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar (finalist in the 2000 PEN USA Research-based Creative Nonfiction category). Winner of the Before Columbus American Book Award, she also has received two Fulbright Fellowships, two NEA Fellowships, a DuPont Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Fellowship. Her work has been translated into Russian, Italian, Arabic, Greek, French, German, Malay, and Serbo-Croatian. McElroy’s ninth collection of poetry, Here I Throw Down My Heart, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2012.

Student Poem

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That Man
by Blake (4th grade at View Ridge Elementary)

In that
movie I wish
I could be
that man.

that man
can do lots
of different
kinds of tricks
like back flips,
front flips, 360’s.
Oh and you can’t
forget the triple
4.9000 trick.

That man
is a magician
and an action
figure. There’s this
really special trick
that he does and
he never does it.

People say that
man has to show
us but he says
what are you
talking about.

And I say
that man is awesome.

 

I’m pulling this poem out of my personal storehouse of student work from View Ridge Elementary in Seattle, where I have worked through Writers in the Schools for five years now. “That Man” makes me laugh every time I read it, guaranteed. Thanks to WITS for helping to make the world go round.  –KF

Ann Teplick

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MOON, in ten parts

For a dying father

 

I.

When December crystals the hospital window, when the moon flutes to your bed, when I turn out the light, you ask for your top hat and tails. I fetch mine, too.

 

II.

Nothing more to do than borrow moonlight for this journey. A baby step? A baby’s breath? Rubenesque, and plumped in love?

 

III.

Hearts break dead center, in the river where the moon waits at the bend—crescent, gibbous, full.   Be my huckleberry friend as we ring the rosy, pinkies linked, crown you King of the perfect fathers.

 

IV.

Moon on the tip of your nose, Eskimo kiss. Moon on the tip of your toes. Jitterbug kiss. Moon, sandwiched in Oreos. Let’s kiss the wafer, scrape the crème, let our teeth scream for more! more! more! time to be father and daughter.

 

V.

The moon is Columbo’s glass eye, sticky with tricks, that wanders and foils the slicksters.

 

VI.

And while we’re at it, let’s cast the brush aside—no more watercolors, acrylics, or oils—from here on, let’s speak to the moon face-to-face about the hooey of green cheese, how we crowded around the TV, yahooed, confettied the room with buttered popcorn, the moment Neil Armstrong set those big galoofy boots for 600 million to see. And how nothing could keep us from moon walking in 1983 with Michael Jackson to “Billie Jean.”

 

VII.

Moon in a barrel, you never know just when the bottom will fall out. When you will open your eyes. When you will try to climb out of bed, again. You never know if I will undrape this flag of grief, left ear on your heart, left cheek on your ribs, left my wife and 48 kids, right right right in the middle of the kitchen floor. Let’s sing that song again, on our way to Murray’s Delicatessen, in our corduroy shoes, switch the hops of our feet. Live inside of the beat. Silly, for pastrami on rye.

 

VIII.

I shift your pillow closer to the moon. Shift to the denouement, to fatherless. Shift to your hands and feet, a minty blue. Shift to the miles of junk for the dump—Spic and Span your condo. Shift to your face, concave and hollowed. Shift to the Strawberry milk, our darling. Shift my hips, fidget for a script. Shift to the gurgle in your throat, swab the mucous. Shift my last words from death march to Boogie Woogie, watch you fire the keys. Lay it down with “Chicago Stomps” and “Honky Tonk Train.” Bugle Boy, Bugle Boy, Company C.” I shift your pillow closer to the moon.

 

IX.

Now I understand how the third verse of moon and the third verse of longing are spun. Over, under, over, under, knit one purl two, loop de loop, dress the loom for tabbies, twills and satins. I understand, now, the act of clinging, the floss by floss unbuttoning, in this ropy slow motion.

 

X.

Spanning continents, your in-breath, Nathan. Out-breath, Nathan. We cradle your shoulders, cheeks, crown of your head. Thread of gray hair that sits like a sage to an aria of grace, disappears the moon.

 

 

“Moon, in ten parts” originally appeared in the Jack Straw Writers Anthology, Vol. 15, 2011.

 

Ann Teplick is a Seattle poet, playwright, prose writer, and teaching artist, with an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. For eighteen years she’s written with youth in schools, juvenile detention centers, psychiatric hospitals and hospice centers–working with Pongo Teen Writing, Writers in the Schools, Powerful Schools, Richard Hugo House, and Coyote Central. Her work has appeared in Crab Creek Review, Drash, Chrysanthemum, Hunger Mountain, Reality Mom, Honest Potatoes, Jack Straw Writers’ Anthology, Washington State Geospatial Anthology,and others. Her plays have been showcased in Washington, Oregon, and Nova Scotia. In 2010, she participated in the Artist Trust EDGE Personal Development Program for Writers. In 2010/11 she received funding from Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs and 4Culture for a collection of poetry The Beauty of a Beet, Poems from the Bedside. In 2011 she was a Hedgebrook and  Jack Straw fellow.  She is currently a member of the Washington State Arts Commission’s Teaching Artist Training Lab.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Allen Braden

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Van Gogh’s Noon: Rest from Work (after Millet)

 

His wheatfield redistributes the light evenly
over the pair of strawstacks, of shoes and sickles
set off to one side which belong to the couple
drowsing in the dark gold shade of afternoon.
Only the wagon in the background is singular
though two oxen are loitering near enough
to rub dumbly against its iron-shod wheels.
Less distinct in the distance is a crop of wheat,
as high as a wainscot between earth and sky,
still not cut or bundled or loaded for winnowing.
No question of the tasks which await them,

those two in the foreground who are faceless
as cattle and as serene in their exhaustion.
An observer can practically feel the prickling
of the severe stubble where they are at ease,
the itch of chaff when their sweat evaporates.
How masterfully each subject mirrors itself,
the man and woman in a cotton tunic or smock,
the way even one work shoe parallels the other
and sickle blades curve into quotation marks
as if to complete some statement on the balance
between art and whatever is perfectly ordinary.

–Allen Braden

Allen Braden is the author of A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood (University of Georgia) and Elegy in the Passive Voice (University of Alaska/Fairbanks), winner of the Midnight Sun Chapbook Contest. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and from Artist Trust of Washington State as well as the Emerging Writers Prize from Witness magazine, the Grolier Poetry Prize, the Dana Award in Poetry and other honors. Former poet-in-residence for the Poetry Center and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he lives in Lakewood, Washington.

 

 

Sierra Nelson

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YOUR EYES ARE CLOSED BUT YOU AREN’T DREAMING

 

You are traveling slowly,
like a great shipwreck still sailing.
Almost tenderly, the sun puts a hand to your forehead.
Yes, you think, I’ve been unwell. You sink into the feeling.
But the sun is blind and must touch everything:
always feeling its gold way forward towards the dark.

 

 

This poem first appeared on a Seattle metro bus through the Poetry on Buses program, and is featured in I Take Back the Sponge Cake: A Lyrical Choose Your Own Adventure by Sierra Nelson and Loren Erdrich, Rose Metal Press 2012.

 

Seattle poet Sierra Nelson is co-founder of The Typing Explosion and Vis-à-Vis Society, president of Seattle’s Cephalopod Appreciation Society, a MacDowell fellow, and has poems in Crazyhorse, Poetry Northwest, Thermos, Fairy Tale Review, and Forklift Ohio, among others. Her lyrical choose-your-own-adventure book,  I Take Back the Sponge Cake, with visual artist Loren Erdrich, debuts from Rose Metal Press this month. Sierra will read from her new book at Open Books on Friday, April 20 at 7:30 pm, along with poet Zachary Schomburg.

Student Poem

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It looks like the inside of machinery.

Fuming, working different emotions endlessly.
Never stopping, it turns these gears called emotions
…but all this machinery is now leaving.

Being blasted away and burning as it leaves the earth’s atmosphere.
The flame is made of all sorts of colors.
Yellow for my mellowness,
red for my anger,
blue for my curiosity,
orange for my danger.

All that’s left of my negative emotions lay in rubble.

Fear, of others watching me
…judging me on moves I make.

Hatred, the blood boiling feeling whenever a thought
that provokes anger crosses my mind.

Then I see a package, floating down on a parachute.
The box is bursting with all the emotions I never meant to send away.
Sense of family returned,
acceptance and love.
The best was beauty…
natural and glowing of utter flawlessness from inside.
~

Falmata, age 15, partipated in the 2012 Dr. Carver Gayton Youth Curator Program at the Northwest African American Museum.  He and his fellow curators worked with writer Daemond Arrindell on poems based on  the Northwest Gallery exhibition, “Xenobia Bailey: Aesthetics of Funk.”

Jeremy Halinen

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Afternoons above I-5

We used to drop acid
and sit on the overpass
to watch the dragon faces
the cars would make at us
as they raced
beneath our dangling legs.
Cars like it when you’re high enough
above them to notice
more than their surfaces.
It’s the story of their exhaust
they want you to care about,
not their paint jobs
or the treads
on their tires. They want you to lean down
and touch them.
I know what you’re thinking.
It’s dangerous,
what we used to do. But
the cars told us they’d catch us if we fell.
You say, So what if they did?
And you’re right.
There’s always a catch.

Jeremy Halinen is cofounder and editor-at-large of Knockout Literary Magazine. His first full-length collection of poems, What Other Choice, won the 2010 Exquisite Disarray First Book Poetry Contest. His poems appear or will in such journals as Cimarron Review, Court Green, Crab Creek Review, the Los Angeles Review, Poet Lore, and Sentence. He resides in Seattle.

Rick Barot

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LOOKING AT THE ROMANS

 
in the museum, the heavy marble busts
on their white plinths, I recognize one likeness
as my uncle, the retired accountant
whose mind, like a conquered country, is turning
into desert, into the dust of forgotten things.
The white head of an old man, big as a god,
its short curled hair still rich
as matted grass, is my grandmother,
a Roman on her deathbed, surrounded
by a citizenry of keening, her breaths rising out
of the dark of a well, the orange medicine bottles
massed like an emergency on the table.
The delicate face of the serious young man
is another uncle, the one who lost
his friends when a plane hit their aircraft carrier,
the one who dropped pomegranate fires
on the scattering villagers, on the small
brown people who looked like him.
One bust is of a noblewoman, the pleats
of her toga articulated into silky marble folds,
her hair carved into singular strands:
she is the aunt who sends all her money home,
to lazy sons and dying neighbors.
Another marble woman is my other aunt,
the one who grows guavas and persimmons,
the one who dries salted fish on her garage roof,
as though she were still mourning
the provinces. Here is the cousin who is a priest.
Here is the cousin who sells drugs.
Here is the other grandmother, her heart still
skilled at keeping time. Here is my mother
in the clear pale face of a Roman’s wife,
a figure moving softly, among flowers and slaves.

 

“Looking at the Romans” first appeared in Tin House.

 

Rick Barot has published two books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002), and Want (2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri, the MacDowell Colony, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Threepenny Review. He lives in Tacoma, Washington and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University, and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Alice Derry

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Beech

Where there are beech trees, the land is always beautiful.
— a phrase by Richard Jeffries given me by my friend Bob Pyle,
a foremost butterfly expert

 

Rain had soaked you, Bob,
as you scrambled down a hillside
in Switzerland, beeches opening their leaves
like an overture to Beethoven.

Hungry, not because you were,
but because you were almost out of money—
all that lay between you and want.

You couldn’t work up courage to visit
the great Nabakov and talk butterflies.
What would you have to say?
“I’ll come back,” you promised yourself.
Before you could, he was dead.

How many times I’ve gone that same distance
in a foreign country, found what I’ve hungered for,
but couldn’t ready myself
to brave the stares and break silence
with rasped, clotted speech—
a near miss of how words
in another language should sound.

Regret. Unable to discharge debt,
your life became
what you didn’t have a chance to tell him.

♣

Half an hour to visit the viewpoint at Königstuhl,
and my companions, far ahead, anxious to see
what the guidebook promised.
I dawdled as always,
hoping something would speak.

Nothing could match our Northwest firs,
I scoffed—but disdain can open a space.
Around me the smooth gray of the giant beech trunks,
their unreachable canopy, filtering light,
a kind of silence: holding fast
the chalk cliffs above the Baltic.

I was standing where Friedrich stood
when he painted sea and jagged rock, framed
by these sheltering beeches—a Romantic painting,
the trees guardians, keeping
his three wanderers from the edge.

♣

Buchenwald—beech forest. The one
near Weimar no different in its hundred-foot trees
rising in full, trembling leaf.

Buchen, hollow and breathy,
wind in the highest branches,
point of no return. But Wald brings me back,
and I lean into the trees, trunk to trunk.

A word can be tied by torment
to so many things opposite of tree and leaf,
of bare branch and breaking forth
from green-gold, red-brown bud—
that to say it
is to break a certain kind of faith
with those who heard it as death.

Which break, then, must be rescued
from silencing.

Say Buchenwald, beech forest,
bearing its necessary other burden,
where human blood’s been soaked indelibly,
denied spirits still calling.

Say Buchenwald. Without its sound,
we might forget this forest.
Trees don’t need to speak. We do.

 

first printed in Fine Madness, then in Floating Bridge Review

Alice Derry’s newest collection of poems, Tremolo, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2012. It received a 2011 Washington Artist Trust Award. Strangers To Their Courage, from Louisiana State University Press, 2001, was a finalist for the Washington Book Award. She has two previous full collections, Stages of Twilight (chosen by Raymond Carver) and Clearwater (Blue Begonia Press). A chapbook of translations from Rainer Rilke appeared in 2002 from Pleasure Boat Studio, New York City. Derry taught English and German at Peninsula College in Port Angeles, Washington, for twenty-nine years, where she co-directed the Foothills Writers’ Series.