Category Archives: poem

Ronda Broatch

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ANATOMY OF A NATURAL DISASTER

 

Call yourself crazy, but these swallows in the eaves speak
of arriving, of settling in like flames.
…………………………It is midnight when you steal

with your daughter into the garden, blessing
a nursing bra, holey pair of panties. How you stare, amazed
…as people grow from the ground, shimmery

in prom fronds, tuxedos to praise the raging body
of what moments ago you called your home, gaping
…windows keeping nothing sacred. …Morning you return,

…………………………………………………………………..your house a post-
holocaust sanctuary, plastic hair brush grafted to the altar
of your vanity. Fascinated, you see in the sodden marriage

of your photos a glue no prying will undo: wife to husband,
the mouth of your child an O against the ear of a relative
whose name escapes you. ….All the next year

you dream of flight, of burning and birth. ….You find
a looseness in this, and you sleep more and longer.
….wandering often
…………………… amongst the ashes where you haunt
the ghosts of your belongings: knitting needle stuck
to the baby’s doll, the hearts of sweaters eaten away by mice.

You admire charred trees for their audacity
to reach beyond earth, think of planting beans, of attaining heaven
…by climbing. You pine for simpler things,

whole days outside. Blood, as a method of expression, not a map
of your years. In the soil you find another piece of glass
…and your eyes burn –

pollen, or the low morning sun – you’ve no time to question it now,
what with these seeds to tamp down, one more year rushing by
………………………………………………………………like a house on fire.

 

“Anatomy of a Natural Disaster” is reprinted from Linebreak.

Ronda Broatch is the author of Shedding Our Skins (Finishing Line Press, 2008), and Some Other Eden (2005). Nominated seven times for the Pushcart, recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant, and finalist for the May Swenson Poetry Book Award, Ronda is currently Poetry Editor for the literary journal, Crab Creek Review. She is also a photographer, and samples of her work can be seen on her photo blog, Ronda Broatch Photos.

 

Pat Hurshell

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Vienna Charm, Vienna Smiles
And the Gargoyles

 

In Vienna all the other Americans (not the Brits, not even
……..the Canadians) were and are light-
hearted, delighted by Viennese charm. They love the operettas,
……..the funny dialect songs, the operas
that make the audience always cry while they cheer and they
……..love the wine, of course.

Also the schnitzel. Viennese street-smiles are never shy,
……..greetings forever nice welcomes-filled
charm–beams so you know Vienna means Good Will, Jolly Folks,
……..Friendly Facts (except on the buses —
never on the buses – where Viennese faces stay blank, defenses
……..high the way they’ve been taught in
the old carefulnesses, cautious as raccoons crouched bland
……..against strangers, those others riding
too who might know some secret the rider should maybe hide).

In the wine-houses – their name Heureigers – or This Year’s – lets
……..you know these wines are brand new,
freshly pressed for now-imbibing – no bad memories hang around
……..with the grapes for those who don’t
like much to remember what went on before. It’s not as hard

for survivor Jews who came back home to live as you might think.
……..They know what they know, just
like the stony heads of the high-up gargoyles still staring down or
……..out over passersby in the silence

that hovers over all the visitors who marvel at this still-ancient baroque
……..in always-present modernity where
I myself lived once. How odd to think about South Africa and Germany
……..neatly adjusting to their own pasts.
My mother never forgot how she went once to some women’s club
……..In Seattle where Eleanor Roosevelt
explained to the women (I think this was around 1942) that Jewish
……..refugee children wouldn’t really feel
at home in the States so really it was better for them to stay over there
……..with their own families. My family
didn’t take a child either. I was sitting in a Viennese synagogue when
……..I remembered that.

 

Pat Hurshell, U.W. Ph.D. in English, has received Ford and Woodrow Wilson grants for her research on Jewish women and the Shoah;  When Silence Speaks, When Women Sorrow: Rue & Difference in the Lamentations for the Six Million won the U.W. Engl. Department’s Robert Heilman Distinguished Dissertation Award. She taught for the U.W. English and Women Studies Departments from 1978-1997 and is the founder and coordinator of the U.W. Jewish Women’s Lives Project [1986- ]. Seattle-born, in her first life she sang for 26 years in European opera houses  (Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, plus those in New York, New Orleans, Chicago, and Seattle). Her poems have been heard on Oregon radio’s Literary Café, & published in a variety of journals, including Best American Poetry, 2009. She is currently translating the German Shoah poems of Gertrude Kolmar, Hilde Domain and Rose Auslander as well as preparing a book of her own poems.

Betsy Aoki

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Speaking Language

I am not speaking English now.
The lightest word will alter our trajectory.
The slightest touch, and another marvel
of translation blows itself to feathers,
to pieces of paper fluttering in a cracked wall.
I am trying to tell you. Listen to the faucet.
Hear what I look like. Imagine

the dark-haired phrase you fell in love with
during a sixth grade picnic. Now give her
eloquent eyes, a slender body, a new name.
Her syllables roll over your tongue,
skate over breaking ice. Words do that well.
White grains, small grains,
long grains scattering on linoleum. What
language looks like: a woman unafraid to eat.

The lake is breaking. Underwater
swims a long black fish, a sleek diver.
She is not speaking English now.
She sends meanings to the surface
in white bubbles, in pearls. They roll
up the sides of your face, in laughter.
They break against the glass.

You say she is that kind of woman. You slur
the night with her. She leaves behind
no letter, no predictions. You have not heard
the diction of her face for weeks. She has
given voice to me. And I am not speaking
English. Listen harder. Tell me
what I look like, once you’ve looked away.

 

 

Elizabeth (Betsy) Aoki completed her MFA from the University of Washington and has received fellowships from the City of Seattle, Jack Straw Writers Program, and Artist Trust Foundation. In addition to various academic literary journals, her poetry has been anthologized in Yellow as Turmeric, Fragrant as Cloves: A Contemporary Anthology of Asian American Women’s Poetry and in Fire On Her Tongue: an eBook Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry. Her chapbook, Every Vanish Leaves Its Trace was published in 2009 by Finishing Line Press.

Mike O’Connor

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THE HUMANIST
—In Memoriam, T.G.

 

At Sea Breeze Trailer Court
(in mill-smoke range),
my friend, the old professor states:
“TV’s my babysitter now;
please, take a seat.
I’m always glad to see you.”

Wrapped in wool sweater
on a wooden built-in couch,
legs draped with blankets,
oxygen tubing curled at his feet . . .

“I’m breathing better now,”
he says. “My mood improves, but
I can’t sleep. Whatcha
been reading?”

Heart surgery, arthritis, pleurisy—
he declares he misses coffee
with the writing gang.

“Oh, you’ll be back,” I tell him.
“We all expect it.”

The trailer’s light is dim
as on a trans-Pacific flight.
I fetch a cup of soda for him
and a pill.

Remote in hand,
he changes channels.
“Here’s the Discovery station,”
and I look:

a pride of female lions
(muscled, eager)
splits off a bovine
from a grazing herd.

“Cats right out of Gaudier-Brzeska,”
I observe.

Terrified, the ox
brandishes its horns; then turns
and tries to lumber off,
its big hindquarters
easy for the cats.

One lion springs upon the ox’s withers;
a second climbs its haunches.
Both getting teeth and claws in,
ripping chunks of flesh and hide.

A third tears at the ox’s underbelly;
a fourth, bounding ahead,
seizes the ox’s snout
(briefly, we see the ox’s eyes)
to suffocate it, as the beast
is ridden to its knees
in the sub-Saharan grass.

It will take some time,
notes the narrator,
for the ox to die
while it is being ripped apart alive.

Some of the hunt is shown again,
and in slow motion
when a point of science
merits emphasis.

I see now at the end,
the African sun setting
on the scene, forming silhouettes
of the statuesque cats
as they finish eating on their prey.

Some folks speak coolly of “things as they are”;
others, like Jeffers, of the “beauty of God.”

But the old professor—
incorrigibly humanist—
changes channels

and remarks, “If I were God,
I would have made things differently.”

 

Mike O’Connor, a native of the Olympic Peninsula, Washington State, is a poet, writer, and translator of Chinese literature. Beginning in the 1970s, he engaged in farming and forest work, followed by a journalism career in Asia. He has published eleven books of poetry, translation, and memoir, including Unnecessary Talking: The Montesano Stories; Immortality; and Where the World Does Not Follow: Buddhist China in Picture and Poem. O’Connor is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature, an International Writers’ Workshop Fellowship (Hong Kong), and a Washington State Artist Trust Fellowship.

Sarah Galvin

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The Sign with Nothing On It

This blank sign in front of the motel was my favorite object in the neighborhood as a child. It is shaped like it outlines words, but it has been a solid gray-green for as long as I can remember. “Look, it’s the sign with nothing on it!” I yelled to my parents when we passed it in the car. After much thought about why a blank sign existed, I decided it must be art.

My uncle said, “Paintings of the crucifixion can be beautiful. That’s the difference between a real crucifixion and a painting. That’s why people make paintings.”

The night my mom drove her car into the front yard, my uncle came all the way to our house. I was standing alone in the kitchen with the lights off, and he picked me up. My uncle who used to put his fake teeth in his belly button and make it talk to me.

I imagined crucifixions were the popsicle truck colors of the neighbors’ weathered plastic Jesus, and smelled like adults’ coats after some event where it was necessary to sit down and be quiet.

 

 

“The Sign with Nothing On It” is reprinted from Io.

 

Sarah Galvin is the author of The Stranger’s “Midnight Haiku” series, which are neither haiku nor at midnight. She has a blog called The Pedestretarian, where she reviews food found on the street. The thing she loves most about reviewing discarded food is receiving text messages that say things like “I hear the bus stop on 3rd and Union is covered with ham.” Sarah is poetry MFA student at University of Washington, and her poems can be found in io, Proximity, Pageboy, Dark Sky, and Ooligan press’s Alive at the Center anthology.

Sally Green

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AUNT MABEL TALKS ABOUT ADULTERY

 

Don’t know why you have to go
and ask me such a question.

I don’t even like the word. It’s one of those
brutal sounds gets inside you churning
up feelings, even ones you didn’t know
you owned. Like a plow tearing through
played-out land gone to seed.

And it makes no matter whether
its kin, or a dear friend
the pain of it all spreads quick
as prairie fire threatening everything
in its way. And that’s all
I’m going to say.

 

“Aunt Mabel Talks About Adultery” is reprinted from Clover. 

 

Sally Green—poet, printer, book designer, calligrapher—is copublisher
of the award-winning Brooding Heron Press, which publishes fine,
letterpressed editions of poetry (Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, Donald Hall,
Hayden Carruth, John Haines, etc.). In 2008, Pacific Lutheran University
awarded her a Stanley W. Lindberg Editor’s Award for excellence. Her own
poems have appeared in The Poets Guide to the Birds (an anthology edited by
Judith Kitchen and Ted Kooser, and published by Anhinga Press), The Ladies
Printing Bee, Clover, The Planet Earth Poetry Anthology (Leaf Press) as well as
other publications. She was a featured poet at the annual Lower Columbia
College literary festival, the Planet Earth poetry reading series at The Moka
House in Victoria, and the Northwind Reading Series in Port Townsend.

Sharon Cumberland

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TO THE SAUDI STUDENT WHO LEFT HIS PRAYER SCHEDULE BEHIND

 

When he arrived in September he could say “hello”
and smile with eyes one might have seen
in a caravanserai a thousand years ago.
He would leave his shoes outside his bedroom
door, wear perfume in his hair, excuse himself
from the table to pray on a carpet on the floor,
guided by his compass and a yellow schedule.
I taught him how to grill a cheese sandwich,
boil pasta, fry an egg, so he could feed himself
when I was at work. His mothers and sisters
had fed him in Jiddah, and washed his clothes,
so I showed him how to do laundry, empty the trash,
sew on a button. His buddies came over
to practice English, smoke sheeshas—apple
tobacco flavoring the air. Their mothers
sent them spices and recipes for kapsah;
I showed them how to thaw the chicken,
steam the rice. He called me his American mother,
because there is no word in Arabic for a single woman
who owns a home, or drives a car to teach
at a university. His four mothers sent him sugar dates,
almonds and green coffee. They sent me a pound
of saffron. At Christmas I gave him a snow globe
of Santa Claus. He asked to come to church with me,
but lost his courage. He went home at Easter,
returned with a pink hajalib for me, his third mother
proud to have found a dress large enough
to fit such a big American woman.

 

“To the Saudi Student Who Left his Prayer Schedule Behind” is forthcoming in Strange with Age (Black Heron Press, 2014).

 

Sharon Cumberland has been writing poetry since 1983, and has published in a wide variety of magazines and journals, including Ploughshares,The Iowa Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kalliope and Verse. Her first full-length collection is Peculiar Honors (Black Heron Press, 2011). Her second collection, Strange with Age, is forthcoming from Black Heron in 2014. After a career in New York as an arts manager, working for the Lincoln Center Theater Company and the Metropolitan Opera, she earned a Ph.D. in English from the City University of New York. She is now an Assistant Professor of American Literature and Poetry at Seattle University.

Sherman Alexie

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Death Song for Polar Bear

 

Dear polar bear—pale warrior, snow
Walker, seal hunter, floe-to-floe
Swimmer—when you tire and slip below
The water’s surface, do you see ghosts

Of other drowned bears and join the ursine
Migration into a far north afterlife?
Of course not. But, polar bear, when you die,
I hope you are dreaming of blood and ice.

 

Copyright © 2013 by Sherman Alexie. All rights reserved. No reprinting or reuse of any kind without the author’s prior written approval.

 

 

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award for Short Fiction, a PEN/Hemingway Citation for Best First Fiction, and the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, Sherman Alexie is the author of, most recently, Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories. He has also recently published the 20th Anniversary edition of his classic book of stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Poet, short story writer, novelist, moviemaker, and comedian, Alexie lives in Seattle with his family.

David K Wheeler

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Slaughter Season

 

Before August was over, and the air remained a cotton fog in the lungs of all the school
chums back on grounds bleached by the heat that came early and stayed late,

we single-filed back through the wide stairwells and blue gymnasium that doubled as
the house of God on weekends when metal lockers weren’t slamming shut

and into students, winding around the hallways toward biology class, or Bible—it’s hard
to remember which, with the windows open and the room not getting cool;

the sweltering heat only made it that much harder to pay attention to whatever we
studied; we heard squeals across the street from animals they raised

at the subsistence ranch—pigs, cows, emus, and dogs at differing times over the
years and seasons—but, that humid afternoon kill was definitely a pig

because we later found the bloody stump of its neck and head, skinless and chewed, on
the thirty-five yard line of the overgrown football field behind the school

where the ranch hound took it like she’d found a new toy that tasted like true hide
and real blood instead of the rubber guts she was given on her birthday;

and, the real blood was on her snout and paws and in the yard and across the
parking lot, but also in the air, a thick stain on every breath that smelt like flesh

had come unpackaged and fissured from muscle, bone, tissues, and every sinew tied
together into the fabric and skin that manages to hold every piece together, in,

until one bullet and steel meat hooks pull the sheets apart to drain the blood and expose
the vital organs to elements like Idaho sky and quiet breezes from the south

that carried the fumes into the classroom where a girl cried while Mr. Syth tried to pry
us from the windows so as to discuss dissection technique—or was it sacrifice?

 
“Slaughter Season” is reprinted from Contingency Plans (T.S. Poetry Press)

 

David K Wheeler is the author of Contingency Plans, which was a finalist for the 2011 Booksellers Choice Award sponsored by Melville House. He has contributed writing to The Morning News, Burnside Writers Collective, and The High Calling, and received his Bachelor of Arts from Western Washington University. He now lives in Seattle.

 

Nelson Bentley

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A slight break in protocol today in order to present this unpublished poem by the late Nelson Bentley, dated 1954.  Many thanks to Sean Bentley for the opportunity to publish a beloved figure in Washington’s poetic history one more time.

 

Kalaloch: Looking Toward Destruction Island

 

A driftwood barricade blends into dying pines.
On the beach, Thomas’s hullabalooing clams,
Gull and pipers, run
Through a creek where it meets the ocean.
The tide’s rolling
Backs me toward driftwood. Destruction Island
With its white lighthouse is a long black rock
Some miles at sea. A tree holds roots aloft,
Foot and head

Irrelevant in the pattern.
The low roar of ocean
Takes voice in the first row of whitecaps.
The horizon towers. Stillness deep
In driftwood juts seaward. In the last rim of pines
A crow calls. One washed-up trunk points
Inland like a cannon, roots smoothed as shell.
Gulls and creek water are smally

Beautiful as I walk pushing a buggy.
Gull feathers, shell fragments, lodge and dislodge.
Sandpipers run on their reflections,
Between wave reaches.
A clan of shells on the wet
Mirror spread butterfly wings, just lit,
Black on fresh fragrant sand.
I watch the pipers, white bellies and

Speckled backs, fragile feet, bills dabbing, as they run
To keep on the verge. What focuses the scene
Is the slender human footprint
Beside the assortment of twelve bright stones;
Beth’s brown form and black hair,
Far down the tidal fringe;
Shawn at four months in blue turtleneck sweater,
Alert eyes from his buggy above the foam’s reach.

Beside him, in the wet sand, a gull flies.
Foaming cold swirls around my ankles,
Brushed by gullfeathers.
Flying pipers sound over surf’s white thundering.
The tide digs hollows
Under my heels;
The sandpipers’ feet and their
Reflections dance the shore.

(1954)

 

Nelson Bentley (1918 – 1990)  studied under W. H. Auden. He was a friend and colleague of Theodore Roethke, among other Northwest poets who created a distinct regional voice. In his forty years as a professor at the University of Washington, he conducted workshops, hosted readings at literary venues around the city and on radio and public television, juried poetry contests, edited poetry for journals and newspapers, and was a co-founder of Poetry Northwest and The Seattle Review. Although he was a fine poet in his own right, he believed his own greatest accomplishment to be his work in teaching hundreds of other poets who published in nationally recognized poetry outlets. He founded the Castalia Reading Series, which started at the University of Washington in the mid-seventies and continues today.  The Friends of Nelson Bentley continue to celebrate his life and legacy.