Category Archives: poem

Maya Jewell Zeller

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Honesty

 

It’s true I drove an SUV once
through Fresno with a backseat full
of college boys to whom I found myself
having to explain you could still catch herpes
even while wearing a condom. One of them
in particular was incredulous, he was listening to his I-pod
and he removed his headphones and said he had
a few more questions. These were my husband’s
varsity runners, and I was a volunteer, so I was awarded
the new rental with only four miles on it when we left
the lot. I’m not going to lie—
I liked driving it. It was nothing
like riding coach or making love
with protection. There were so many buttons
to push, and they all did something satisfying,
like drop from the ceiling a DVD player
for passengers or warm the driver’s legs
in just the right places. The seats were leather,
the kind you feel guilty just sitting on,
the good kind of guilty when you can’t help
but imagine parking somewhere with someone
so you can watch the stars rise over the city,
take time to check out all the automatic features.
The boy you’re with will want to know
how things work, and you’ll end up showing him,
because he is young, because he has a bag of sour apple
or peach fruit rings he’s willing to share, because his face
can look so becoming in the streetlights.
But mostly it’s because you can no longer remember
where you were going. Was it to dinner?
Were you taking him back to his hotel, where
he’ll sleep, dream of winning?
Or maybe it was a nighttime snack
run. The SUV is black
and the night is blacker. You can feel it
closing, like a fist around a steering wheel.
You’re not the fist. You’re the wheel.

 

“Honesty” first appeared in Rattle.

 

Maya Jewell Zeller has spent most of her life in the Pacific Northwest. Her first book, Rust Fish, was released in April 2011 from Lost Horse Press. Individual poems have won awards from Sycamore Review, Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, and Dogwood, and appear in recent issues of Rattle, Rock & Sling, The Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. Maya lives in Spokane with her husband and daughter, and teaches English at Gonzaga University.

Ed Harkness

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Saying the Necessary

 

I read of a Montana man
whose pickup
stalled in the mountains.
Cross-country skiers
found him next spring,
their skis rasping
on the top of his cab
just showing through the snow.
His engine dead, no map,
he’d apparently decided
to wait for help.
His diary calmly records
his life of being lost.
He describes the passing days,
how he rationed his crackers,
an Almond Joy,
built a few small fires at night,
ate his emergency candles,
ice from a pond,
a pine’s green lace of moss.
He hoarded every spark
from his battery.
There’s evidence he wandered
up a nearby ridge.
He might have noticed a marmot,
gold and relaxed on a rock,
or spotted mountain goats
wedged high in grey basalt.
From a pinnacle of broken
lichen-colored scree
he watched the world bend away blue,
rivered with trees.
He might have heard
the whine of a plane
in the next valley,
looking, looking.

Then the cold came.
Frostbite settled the matter
of hiking out.
He wrote detailed accounts
of the weather,
noting the clear, icy air,
little flares of stars
drawing no one’s attention.
Not so frigid this evening.
A later entry read:
Ribbed cirrus clouds moving in.
Then tender goodbyes
to his wife and daughter–
my lilac, my rose.

When the blizzard buried him,
he wrote by his interior lights,
and when the battery failed
he scratched in the dark
a strange calligraphy,
covering the same pages,
the words telegraphic,
saying only the necessary
as he starved.
In the end,
his script grew hallucinatory–
…toy train…  …oatmeal…
…farmhouse lights just ahead…–
illegible, finally,
like lines on a heart monitor.
Several pages he tore out and ate.

He must have known
even words wouldn’t save him.
Still, he wrote.
He watched the windshield
go white like a screen,
his hands on the wheel,
no feeling.
He listened to his heart
repeat its constant SOS,
not loudly now,
but steadily–
a stutterer who’s come to love
the sound of his one syllable,
at peace with his inability
to get anything across.
He must have pictured himself
wading through the drifts,
traversing the heartbreaking distance
between voice and any ear,
searching for tracks,
a connector road that leads
down to everyday life.
By glow of moonlight filtered
through snow-jammed windows,
his last act was to place his book,
opened to a page marked Day One,
on the passenger seat beside him.

 

Ed Harkness is the author of several poetry chapbooks, including Fiddle Wrapped in a Gunny Sack (Dooryard Press, 1984), Watercolor Painting of a Bamboo Rake (Brooding Heron Press, 1994), and most recently Syringa in Twilight (Red Wing Press, 2010). Pleasure Boat Studio has published his two full-length poetry collections, Saying the Necessary (2000), and Beautiful Passing Lives, (2010). His poems can be found in print journals including Fine Madness, Great River Review, The Humanist, Midwest Quarterly, Portland Review, Seattle Review and others. His work has also appeared in several pioneering online literary journals, including Mudlark, Switched-on Gutenberg, and Salt River Review.  Harkness’ poem, “Kaylyn, Hermiston Elementary,” was featured on the Writer’s Almanac radio program. He lives with his wife, Linda, and teaches writing at Shoreline Community College.

Alan Chong Lau

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father’s bamboo grove

 

 

those mexican kids
clothes pins clamped on the ears
to make me squeal

as a tagalong
one had to earn
rites of passage

we sat on haunches
drawing secret parts
of women in the dirt

hidden away
in my father’s bamboo grove
that grew back
after each cut

even after gravel
delicate green shoots
defined stones

they’d laugh
break off hollow stems
cop hits of bamboo smoke
satisfied only after
i’d coughed myself
red

came end of harvest
they left
their mother dead
after making a tamale pie

the bamboo too
no more
trampled over
still under a parking lot

only leaf patterns
cast in tar

with my fathers’s chinese restaurant
we were the only ones
left in town

 

 

Alan Chong Lau wrote The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99 (Buddhahead Press) with poets Lawson Inada and Garrett Hongo. He is the author of Songs For Jadina (Greenfield Review Press) and Blues And Greens – A Produce Worker’s Journal (University of Hawai’i Press). As a visual artist he is represented by Francine Seders Gallery in Seattle. He continues to work in an Asian produce market in Seattle’s Chinatown/International District neighborhood. His poetry and art appear in a forthcoming book  this fall by his sister Linda Lau Anusasananan entitled The Hakka Cookbook – Chinese Soul Food From Around The World (University of California Press).

 

Student Poem

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First Impressions – Inner Expressions
Poem #2

by Octavia, age 15, Garfield High School

If art is healing then sickness is not being able
to express yourself.
If sickness is not being able to express yourself,
funk is the cure…
Curing your heartbreaks, curing your loss,
curing your loneliness, curing the cause.

Funk sounds like laughter louder than their whispers.
Funk feels like healing…
healing the pain that caused so many tears.

Healing feels like you getting over a struggle…
a rash spreading rapidly that has weakened your body
and taken over your soul with no way out.
Screaming is pointless because you’re the only one that hears.

My mother’s tears, from her eyes, to her cheeks, to her ears
…she was the strongest through it all…
smiling through her pain is when she’s the prettiest to me.

Funk is music.
A generation of self-expression and fun
…my grandparents with high afros and high shoes.
Funk is the cure of a sickness no one can control.
A healing process that makes all troubles disappear
and all the tears fade away… all the memories grow faint.

Funk makes life easier…
easier to drown out the hate, easier to ignore the doubt.
You can’t be mad, can’t be sad. You just let funk take over.

Funk is when you’re you.
It’s when you’re smiling to destroy the ones that like to see you cry.
It’s when you’re standing tall, upsetting the ones that like to see you fall.
And, when you are being yourself,
no one can take that away.

The Northwest African American Museum (NAAM) Youth Curators is a community outreach program that introduces local teens to the Museum world and encourages their creativity and expression through themed projects. The 2012 project, First Impressions – Inner Expressions, was co-facilitated by Daemond Arrindell who led the students in a process to write and speak their opinions. They became familiar with navigating rhythms, owning their expression and connecting to the power of words. Much of the inspiration for the spoken word was derived from the current NAAM exhibition Xenobia Bailey: The Aesthetics of Funk.

 Octavia will present her poem along with other student poets on Saturday, April 7, 2012, 1:00 – 3:00 at the Northwest African American Museum to celebrate the exhibition opening and the 2012 Dr. Carver Gayton Youth Curator Program.

 

Katrina Roberts

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MIDWAY ATOLL

— after Message from the Gyre, Chris Jordan

I flip through a stack of photographs, one more colorful than the next – the belly of each albatross chick a beautiful jumble: turquoise and yellow shards, the bright white of bottle caps, fluorescent magenta of someone’s discarded toothbrush, peach of a tampon tube, royal blue lighter — nested within cages of shattered rib, twisted yards of knotted green string, shreds of translucent plastic sheeting, all so far from any land I’ve walked (2000 miles from the nearest continent out in the middle of the North Pacific), yet evidence in waste of my human presence; when I leave my children hungry for attention and drive myself to the ER a random Wednesday evening because I can’t take a full breath for pains in my chest – I picture this: blown open bodies, crevices of unexpected debris, feathers splayed and matted, the elegant curve of bill, silent and still against pebbly sand… and can’t even say it to myself: I was trying in my frenzy to feed you; please forgive me and remember my love.

“Midway Atoll” is from Underdog, University of Washington Press, 2011.

 

Katrina Roberts is the Mina Schwabacher Professor in English and the Humanities  at Whitman College. She is author of Friendly Fire, Winner of the Idaho Prize in Poetry; How Late Desire Looks, which won the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize; and The Quick, an early volume in the Pacific Northwest Series. Her most recent collection is Underdog (University of Washington Press, 2011). Her work appears in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Poetry, and The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets, among other anthologies. She and her husband, Jeremy Barker, an artist and distiller native to Walla Walla, are the proprietors of and winemakers for Tytonidae Cellars, which they started in 2003, as well as founders of the Walla Walla Distilling Company. They can generally find their three small children playing with barn cats in the good dirt somewhere not far from the vineyard.

Sheila Bender

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Folding

 

You are folding the clothes of a child
and thinking about this afternoon and the month after next
when the ghost of your husband carries the ghost of your girl,
“She’s fallen 6 feet from the porch rail to the sidewalk,”
and the child sleeps in his arms breath shallow as at birth.

Touch her skin and you feel it collapse like a parachute.
Watch her eyes flicker open, they are murky, do not reflect
even the clouds up there waiting to come together,
and now the future waits,
all of you suddenly pinched behind the neck.

In the next minutes she will respond to her name.
You can see in her waking
there are clouds in her eyes
and you remember her saying this morning
her friends believed god lived in the sky
but she knew she would have seen him up there
riding the clouds and anyway she’d heard on television
that god had a purple head.

The hours in intensive care you will watch
clouds sheet the sky like hospital linen
and hear the chirp of heart monitors like crickets
out of place in the night.

This night you are a stage mother pushing
your child to perform for neurologists and nurses
in the reciting of names, her own, her brother’s, her dog’s,
in the telling of how many fingers
and the matching of her finger to theirs.

After this only waiting is left.
Hours unfold out of themselves like a telescope
and you watch the sky turn the lightest shade of purple.

Then you pray to her god and to all
the grape popsicles in the freezer, to her purple crayon,
to the foxglove and alyssum in the yard,
to all purple things that they may keep their color,
retrieve it from her bruised forehead, ear, stem of her brain.

 

“Folding” is from Behind Us The Way Grows Wider, due out in a month or two from Pixelita Press, Port Townsend, WA, and first appeared in Poetry Northwest and then in Love From the Coastal Route.

Sheila Bender is a nationally known author, poet, writing instructor and mentor. She has published six books on writing and numerous books of poetry. Sheila is the founder of Writing it Real, a very successful writing instructional program, and her latest venture is working with Pixelita Press for an eBook series for iPad that includes instruction via interactive writing prompts using photography. Discover more of Sheila’s work at Writing it Real.

Karen Finneyfrock

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Like You Said it Would

 

The kids at school claim fevers,
hand their laughs to spring, new
and generous, dropping its pollinated
water all over me, sweating pink
salt into my eyes. Go ahead,
spring, pee on my grass.

Let boys come to school without deodorant.
Let boiler rooms cook painted windows
into brick. Let me go to bed cozy and wake up freezing,
spring, do these things. Let men fill my boxes with mail.
Let them pineapple after me. Let them circle my building
in the evening humming throaty come out of your house
tonight, Karen songs. Let them offer beds of tulips, draw
close with toothbrushes tapping at my fire escape.
Let each pull a hair from his head and hold it
between his fingers. Let us see which one
the wind carries in.

 

Karen Finneyfrock is a poet, novelist and teaching artist in Seattle, WA. Her second book of poems, Ceremony for the Choking Ghost, was released on Write Bloody press in 2010. Her young adult novel, The Sweet Revenge of Celia Door, is due from Viking Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Group USA in 2012. She is a former Writer-in-Residence at Richard Hugo House in Seattle and teaches for Seattle Arts and Lectures’ Writers-in-the-Schools program. In 2010, Karen traveled to Nepal as a Cultural Envoy through the US Department of State to perform and teach poetry and in 2011, she did a reading tour in Germany sponsored by the US Embassy.

Cal Kinnear

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IT IS THE EMERALD DRAGONFLY CHANCE I want to talk about
here, the moth-eaten holes

things come and go through passing
from dream. This world of mud and morning light

and oat bread is dense and sweet.
I would be content to stand for ages aerial and ponderous

as a great redwood with unblinking eyes. I would need
nothing, if

there were not fox with her red brush marking the crossings,
here to there and back. Watchful, silent.

Here-and-there name my border
where she knows none.

Red and night are the same
pigment. Tireless

and keep and smoke
name her.

If there were not fox, where
would I die to?

 

 

Cal Kinnear is a third generation resident of Seattle recently retired to Vashon Island. In the course of his life he has been college teacher (University of Virginia and Wells College), owner of a book store in Olympia, Washington, modern dancer, waiter at The Thirteen Coins, sailor, hiker, carpenter, development director for the Church Council of Greater Seattle and Explorer West Middle School, and, until recent retirement, Director of Washington Lawyers for the Arts. He has had poems published in The Louisville Review, The Licking River Review, The Prose Poem: An International Journal, Birmingham Poetry Review, Chrysalis Reader, The Temple, Burning Cloud, and RE:AL, and locally in Crab Creek Review, Point No Point, Pontoon, Floating Bridge Review and Fine Madness. He was winner of Fine Madness’ Nelson Bentley prize in 2003. His book, A Walk in Bardo, was published in 2008 by Blue Begonia Press. A suite of 15 translations from the work of the German-Jewish poet Paul Celan was published by Longhouse Books of Vermont in April of 2009. Raven Chronicles published a suite of poems, Heart Range, on line in November of 2009.

Doug Nufer

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Lounge Acts

 

Doug New and the Fur
Rob Roy and the Nightcaps
Colt Fore and the Tee Fives
Gib Lee and the Frescas
Jim Beam and the Royal Crowns
Gar Nish and the Twists
Mick Surr and the Swizzle Sticks
Pop Off and the Grenadines
Red Dye and the Mariscinos
Dick Cull and the Jewel Lips
Miss Stir and the Boss Stun
Ray Near and the Shots
Black Jack and the Daniels
Barb Back and the Pour
Butch Mills and the Rocks
Dee Tease and the Squeezings

Honey Castro and the Bee Feeders
Dina Martina and the Stemware
Harvey Danger and the Wallbangers
Philip Glass and the Binge
Ivy Poison and the Coasters
Mack Jigger and the Riling Steins

Mark Curse and the Make
Al Roy and the Keyer
Ape Pee and the Eye
Key Turk and the Wild
Fire Salve and Bay Bomb
Tan Hat and the Man
Neat Teen and the Mar
Kane Rick and the Her

Moe Hee and the Tow
Ray Most and the Fizz
Jane Bee and the Bar Flies
Mal Beck and the Swill
Mess Gal and the Posh
Bart Thyme and the Stool
Mel Lure and the High Life
Scott Land and the Balvenie
Hy Ball and the Vat 69
Bound Sir and the 86ed
Seve Finn and the Seven
Graham Sport and the Six Grapes
Clare Rhett and the Five Crew Class A
Bea Girl and the Four Roses
Mack Way and the Triple Sec
Tzar Mash and the Doubles
Scott Shore and the Single Malts
Doe Zahg and the Brute Zero
Ry Plonk and the Well
Rod Gut and the Dive
Jay Surr and the Knock-backs
Mick Finn and the Pick-ups
Jen Mill and the Last Call

 

Doug Nufer writes fiction, poetry, and pieces for performance, favoring “formal constraints,” such as in his most recent novel Never Again, in which it is said that no word appears more than once. Other novels include On the Roast and Negativeland (both published in 2004 “although I finished them over a 15-year period”). He has also been published in the Washington Free Press, Art Access, The Stranger, American Book Review, and The Nation.

Doug Nufer will be part of “Lit Crawl” Friday, March 30.

 

Tiffany Midge

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After Viewing the Holocaust Museum’s Room of Shoes
and a Gallery of Plains’ Indian Moccasins: Washington, D.C.

 

The portrait is clear;
one is art the other
evidence. One is artifact
the other atrocity.
Each is interned
behind glass,
with diagrams
and panels,
a testament to miles
walked. Both
are worn,
each a pair,
one is cobbled
one is beaded.

At my tour’s end
can I buy a key-chain shoe?
Will I be assigned
the ID card
of one of the perished
at Wounded Knee?

The moccasins
are beautiful. Seed pearls
woven intricate as lace.
We don’t mourn
the elegant doe skins,
we admire the handicraft.
We don’t ask from whose soles
do these relics come from?
We don’t look for signs of resistance,
or evidence of blood.

Nor do we wonder
if he was old
and passed in his sleep,
or if this child
traded for a stick of candy
or a pinch of dried meat.
We do not make assumptions
of original ownership at all.

Their deaths were not curated,
not part of an installation. We
don’t absorb their violent
or harrowing ends under soft
lights or dramatic shadows.

We look right
through them,
more invisible
than the sighs
of ghosts.
And then we move
on to the next
viewing,

and the next,

and the next,

to another
collector’s trophy
lying
beneath a
veil of glass.

 

“After Viewing the Holocaust Museum’s Room of Shoes and a Gallery of Plains’ Indian Moccasins: Washington, D.C.” previously appeared in Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights and New Poets of the American West.

 

Tiffany Midge is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux, and a recent poetry MFA graduate from the University of Idaho. Her previous collection of poetry Outlaws, Renegades and Saints: Diary of Mixed-up Halfbreed won the Native Writers of the Americas First Book Award for poetry and was published by Greenfield Review Press in 1996. The chapbook, Guiding the Stars to their Campfire, Driving the Salmon to their Beds was published by Gazoobi Tales in ’05. She has published poetry and prose in, Growing Up Ethnic in America, Viking/Penguin; Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, W.W. Norton; Blue Dawn, Red Earth, New Native American Storytellers, Anchor Books; Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing about Learning to be American, Viking Penguin, as well as in poetry journals such as Shenandoah, North American Review, Poetry Northwest and most recently in The Raven Chronicles and Florida Review. She calls both Seattle and Moscow, Idaho home (among other places) and teaches part time with Northwest Indian College.