Monthly Archives: June 2013

Timothy Roos

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Wolf Eel

 

The fish line pulled heavily as a dog
dragging front paws first.

A gray creature emerged,
wide head, bulging eyes.
Its long, freckled tail twirled,
a risen flag over the depths
of prehistory.

I worked it free of the foreign wind,
my questions afloat beside me.
Needle-tipped canines clicked
against my pliers.

How odd then, returning to shore
empty handed, to feel myself
embraced, unbroken,
in the kingdom of the peculiar.

 

“Wolf Eel” appeared in Tidepools and it won its first place poetry prize in 2008.

 

Timothy Roos grew up in western Washington, and has lived in central Washington, southern California, and on the Olympic Peninsula, where he and his wife raised two children.  He works as a special education teacher in Port Angeles, pursues wildlife photography and fishing, and travels the Western states.  His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Raven Chronicles, Pontoon, Poetry East, Soundings Review, Plainsongs, Dandelion Farm Review, and Tidepools.

John Glowney

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Visitation

 

My neighbor tonight is in his underwear
carrying out a bag of trash, a working-class
Santa, no robe, his spindly calves
catching the sequined moonlight
like the face of the sickly kid
in the war movie on the late night
you know will freeze up in the big battle.
He is not drinking or cursing the dark
or taking a drag on the faint fire-fly
of a cigarette; he is just crossing
the cracked and scored rectangle
of the driveway/ basketball court
wearing only white underwear
and a pair of flip-flops that make
an odd little tune, clip-clip, scrape,
clip-clip, above the canned applause
of a tv show looping out
of the window into the zombie slave
glow of tonight’s stars. And to
the other hierarchal order of almost
but not quite invisible beings
for whom he’s carrying this load
of manna, to the unwashed crowd
awaiting bread crusts, coffee filters,
banana peels, grapefruit rinds, left-over
chicken pot pie, his mind is
great and unknowable and terrible
and his questions play the die
of chance or fate, and what he
empties into the metal can may
not be enough, or may not be in
time, or will not last until the next
visitation, but he has risen anyway
from his tv and his bag of potato chips
as if he understood the role of a god
was to atone for his long absences
as best he can.

 

“Visitation” previously appeared in Pontoon.

 

John Glowney is a past winner of Poetry Northwest’s Richard Hugo Prize and Poetry Society of American’s Robert H. Winner’s Memorial Award. His poems have appeared in, among others: ZYZZYVA (forthcoming); Passager; Pontoon; Poetry Northwest; River Styx; Green Mountains Review; Connecticut Review; Southeast Review; Alaska Quarterly Review; Nimrod, Mid-American Review, Northwest Review; Michigan Quarterly Review.  He is a practicing attorney in Seattle.

Lisa Fusch Krause

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Leather

 

We wandered through streets of houses,
each a different possibility;
the black cat curled up on the front mat
could have been mine,
looked like mine

As we walked in the door,
I imagined our clothes in the closet,
our dishes in the sink;
thought where we’d put your TV,
where I’d place my speakers

I imagined the counters cluttered,
the newspaper spread out
across our kitchen table;
waking up to you
standing at the stained-glass window

We tried the house on like new shoes,
walked around—
our toes already beginning
to stretch the leather

 

Originally published in Cascadia Review.

 

Lisa Fusch Krause resides in Seattle, Washington, with her husband, teenage daughter, and two black cats. As a long-time professional editor, she is immersed in words for a living. Lisa has published both poetry and prose in journals such as Respuestas: the Neruda Project,  Artsmith, Cahoodaloodaling, Cascadia Review, and Scissors and Spackle. She thinks of her writing in terms of “snapshots,” capturing images and moments of time.

David Stallings

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Leaving Nashville, 1952

 

I’m packed between suitcases and boxes
into the back seat of a Buick Dynaflow. The view

blocked, the air thick with Dick’s Camels
and my mother’s Herbert Tareytons.

I try to filter my breath
with Kleenex—

the asthma isn’t fooled.
How will I make it all the way to Alaska?

On the way out of town, Dick swings into a gas station.
The trailer we’re towing slows us down,

and another car slips in front.
Asshole! my new stepfather roars, and grabs

for his .45 automatic in the glove box.
All I see is his arm

and my pleading mother’s grip
on his wrist.

I can barely breathe.

 

“Leaving Nashville, 1952” is reprinted from Boston Literary Magazine.

David Stallings was born in the U.S. South, raised in Alaska and Colorado before settling in Washington State. Once an academic geographer, he has spent many years promoting public transportation in the Puget Sound area. His poems have appeared in several North American and U.K. literary journals and anthologies.

Tod Marshall

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Angry Birds

 

When the eagles leave, spawned out red fish
must be mostly eaten, finished with silt,
sand, and eggs, a genetic frenzied push
to breed here, now, with furious force. We will
ourselves into bed, away from Netflix, X-
box, the new astonishing app that counts
calories, miles to go, snowflakes, the next
minute’s number of moans: O happy grunt
that says hey-ho, this is done, pixilated
and, best of all, uploadable as a ring tone
that goes fishy, fleshy, fowl. Someone’s IPhone
measures the speed of a bird penetrating
the lake to seize a foundering Kokanee.
“So fast!” Not death, the connectivity.

 

 

Tod Marshall was born in Buffalo, NY.  He earned an MFA degree from Eastern Washington University and a PhD in literature from the University of Kansas.  His first collection of poetry, Dare Say, was the 2002 winner of the University of Georgia’s Contemporary Poetry Series. He has also published a collection of his interviews with contemporary poets, Range of the Possible (EWU Press, 2002), and an accompanying anthology of theinterviewed poets’ work, Range of Voices (2005).  In 2005, he was awarded a Washington Artists Trust Fellowship. In 2009, his second collection, The Tangled Line, was published by Canarium Books; it was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award.  His third collection will be released in February 2013.  He lives in Spokane and teaches at Gonzaga University.

Charlotte Gould Warren

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THERE WERE DEER BARKING IN THE HILLS

 

When was it—
in between the bridge’s planks—

the river winked at me from below?
Not that blue

I’d seen from the porch,
but a sharpening of knives,

the way, stealth-footed,
dawn opens the doors.

*

Whistling, stropping your razor,
you were the father.

Mother slept late.
Star-flowered jasmine

spilled over the tile roof,
bougainvillea, trumpet vine.

Soon the light
would come.

*

Kishan served us
early breakfast—toast and tea

and half a grapefruit picked
from a tree in our garden.

Oh, it was sweet!
Just the two of us

on the porch at the wicker table
set with knives and sugar.

*

Still in bathrobes, sandals flapping,
we walked across the Jumna, the bridge

not yet crowded, the river far below us,
Allahabad, City of God,

creaking awake on its wooden wheels:
bullock carts, hoof clops, dark leather blinders,

the slow bells of oxen.
I skip-hopped beside you.

Soon the sun would rise,
crinkling the river to a maze of gold,

hiding deeper currents
where snapping turtles scavenged the dead.

*

Mother planted blousey sweet peas, marigolds,
larkspur bruised and iridescent,

colors she cut and carried indoors.
I wanted her to hold me.

*

Mahatma, intransitive verbs,
Mark Twain—

the students adored you.
Their saris and homespun

tied at the waist, you pitched them
basketballs, ran with the javelin,

its shaft shuddering
upright in earth.

I climbed the leathery limbs of the banyan
or watched from the game field, munching chunna.

*

Afternoons, I found you
at home at your desk, scribbling notes

on student papers, coaxing
sermons onto the page.

You lit a hand-rolled cigarette, pet crow
on your shoulder, mongoose

asleep in your tucked-in shirt.
Under the ceiling fan’s

paddle of flies and sun motes,
I climbed into your lap.

*

When was it, you found me, still asleep,
slipped into my pajamas, insistent,

the way the deer’s short barks,
hunted, came breathless?

Always, the day began again,
as if nothing had happened—

insects probing
the ghostly netting,

the hard wooden bed frame
I climbed over to the floor.

The way the sun bore down.

 

“There Were Deer Barking in the Hills” is reprinted from Ghandi’s Lap (The Word Works).

 

Charlotte Warren’s poetry collection, Gandhi’s Lap, won the Washington Prize and publication by Word Works in Washington, D.C.  Her second poetry manuscript was a finalist in both the Phillip Levine and Ashland national contests. Warren’s poems have appeared on Seattle buses as well as in journals such as Orion, Calyx, The Hawai’i Review, The Louisville Review, and Kansas Quarterly. Warren’s recently published memoir, Jumna:  Sacred River, chronicles her childhood in India during its fight for independence from Great Britain in 1947, and her coming of age in the United States as it entered the turbulent sixties. She received her MFA in Writing from Vermont College, and taught part time at Peninsula College in Washington State.  She and her husband have called the Olympic Peninsula home for over forty years, have two grown sons and two grandchildren.

Jay McAleer

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Composite # 6

When confronted with the issue, many people will admit that at numerous times they have felt as though they were waiting for their lives to begin.

Strange how things change, rearrange, as if another person inhabited the body, my body, anybody, any body. Not that far fetched – go fetch an identity, some entity to fill the subtle void. Avoidance is the trick, total avoidance, in addition to the fact that when you look back nothing seems to be there. My history, a catalogue of events, a residue of experience, the thick residue of experience. This series of events, a spider’s web, and the ripple is felt across the strands. Strands like sands of time, thyme and rosemary, everything stewing together, the salt of the earth and all that. The fingers dipped in the water as we bow down, so many bent knees, genuflection, circumspection. The words pop out, the word the world, only a letter difference there, fluttering will get you nowhere. Know where? “Over there,” they used to sing or at least they did in the movies and all of us marched along.

 

 

Jay McAleer is a poet and fiction writer from Seattle. He was recently selected as a 2013 Jack Straw writer and is honored to be part of that program. Composite # 6 is an excerpt from a series of interlinked poems entitled Composites.

Kevin Minh Allen

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Down Here

 

The thick of it,
the strange of it,
the crux of it.

Everything around here
glows red, even the faces
on brick window ledges.

Old women smile and look ahead.

Bubble tea,
drop-tops
and noodle shops,
one on every corner.

The trash bins are full of people looking for work.

The alleyways echo with the clatter of sudsy dishes,
coughing fits and gobs of spit.

 

Kevin Minh Allen was born Nguyễn Đức Minh on December 5, 1973 near Sài Gòn, Vietnam to a Vietnamese mother and American father who remain unknown to him. He was adopted by a couple from Rochester, NY and grew up in Webster, NY with his two younger sisters. In 2000, he moved to Seattle, WA to pursue a life less ordinary. Kevin has had his poetry published in numerous print and online publications, such as Aileron, Lantern Review, HazMat Literary Review, Chrysanthemum and, most recently, Eye To The Telescope.

 

Richard Wakefield

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At the River

 

From Mary’s Peak the valley’s slow descent

to southward gave our river sweeping wide

meanders. Six or seven miles it went

to cover two or three, from side to side.

Around the stones and over fallen trees

I heard it breathe a languid vowel that fell

from snowfields, sounds suspended through the freeze

of winter, whispered now as if to tell

the secret cold to every lowland field.

Along the banks the trees in colonnade

traced out the vein of water they concealed.

On August evenings families sought the shade

to picnic there, and on the hottest nights

brought cots and strung their tents from lines between

the trees. I lay and watched their lantern lights

blink out upstream and down, then from unseen

encampments heard their voices droning low,

inhaled the scents of cattle, cedar, hay.

Beneath it all I heard the river flow,

forever saying what it had to say.

The farms where all the people lived are gone,

the people gone to graves – or town. The land

lies fallow. Yet the river murmurs on,

some days in words I almost understand.

 

Richard Wakefield has been a reviewer and critic for the Seattle Times since 1985 and has taught writing and American literature at various colleges in the Seattle area since 1979.  His first collection of poems, East of Early Winters, was published by the University of Evansville Press and won the Richard Wilbur Award in 2006.  His collection A Vertical Mile was published by Able Muse Press in 2012.  He and his wife, Catherine, live in Federal Way and have two grown daughters.