Mark Simpson

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Sweet Plenitude

 

The Aurora Borealis reminds me
of the disappointed—
the bum on the street, the little girl
not invited to the party.
Early one fall I saw it.
I stood on the back patio at 3am
looking northward,
and made out, finally, the streaked sky—
washed out colors indistinct
against the dark.
3am for this, I thought, retuning to bed,
the magnetic flexure of air carrying on
its vexed dance without me.
The bum wakes from his cold nap
and the little girl turns on the TV.
I lie sleepless for the rest of the night.
What has become of the fullness
we have been promised?
In the wood lot, owls have left
the bones of mice—
so many under the green pines.
Day after day of enumeration.
The sun’s white disk behind early fog,
too weak to cast shadows—
so that things must stand for themselves,
frost-edged, claiming their own territory.

 

“Sweet Plenitude” is reprinted from The New Poet.

Mark Simpson’s work has appeared in a number of magazines, including Hiram Poetry Review, Cream City Review, Faultline, and Poetry Quarterly, and online in Full of Crow, Albatross, and Dialogist. He works in Seattle as writer for an instructional design firm. A chapbook, Fat Chance, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

 

Ben Holiday

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I met Ben Holiday through the wonderful Red Badge Project at Joint Base Lewis McChord. I’m happy to have the chance to post one of his poems.–KF

 

The Gray Man

There are many colors that we are,
and many colors that weve seen.
The most common of these colors,
are red, blue and green.

Red is for the anger,
the fury and all the rage

Blue is for the lost ones,
and for the worst of our days.

Green is for envy and jealousy
and like a tree it grows,

But there is one color,
few have ever seen,
or will ever know.
The one color that is gray,
the one that never shows.

Amongst all the other colors he stays,
silent like a ghost
for its these other colors
that keep him hidden
in this mist,
and fog
and smoke.

The Gray Man is everywhere,
even though most dont know,
this man that is invisible
whose identitiy never shows
he sits and waits patiently
for what he knows will come to be.
The actions and the tactics,
of all his foes and enemies
that the oblivious
and the ignorant
and the blind just cant see.

But dont think that The Gray Man
hasn’t seen any other colors in his life,
thats the reason he became gray
because thats the color that survives.
Surviving all of the trials,
all of his enemies schemes and plans
and this survival tactic
is called being The Gray Man.

There are many colors that we are,
and many colors that weve seen.
Most other colors out there fight dirty,
but they dont know
that one color is aware
of the scam, and their whole plan,
the one color that isnt “there”
the one they call …….
The Gray Man

 

His name is Ben Holiday, some call him Buzz. He is from Spokane Wa. He is ex military and always thinks twice about what he says….The majority of the time he is quiet, he believes it’s far better to listen than it is to speak. He first started writing poetry while injured in an overseas hospital. He doesn’t speak about about what or who he is, instead he’ll use poetry….Poetry is his only voice. Through writing he gained a freedom of perception, which became his salvation….”In his opinion”

Joan Swift

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LISTENING TO MY BONES

 

When the doctor holds my upper arm in his two hands,
he bows his head and listens as if he were waiting to hear
the song of a rare endemic bird no one has seen for centuries.
I start to speak, but he shakes his head, does not loosen his grip
on my arm, turns his fingers around the curve
of my skin and listens again.
I am afraid to clear my throat. My toes stay still.
He must hear my heart where it beats
but he is listening to the sound of bones
the way NASA turns its telescopes far over our heads on Mauna Kea
and hears the universe move.

Rain falls so hard on the roof, I think it might break through.
Imagine all those luminous drops that had been the backbone
of a cloud shattered and lying above the orthopedic surgeon’s head
and mine. Soon a puddle, then a trickle into the Wailuku River.
This will mend well, he says, shows me two x-rays.
In the waiting room is a large salt water tank. A zebra moray eel
folds in one corner its brown and white stripes.
I think how it must have no bones at all
or bones so light this eel can wind
around its heaven all night when everyone has left
and dream the dream of breaking into the world.

 

“Listening to my Bones” is reprinted from The Southern Review.

 

Joan Swift has published four full-length books of poems, the two most recent both winners of the Washington State Governors Award.  Her most recent poetry collection is the chapbook Snow on A Crocus, Formalities of a Neonaticide, 2010.  Swift’s poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Poetry, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Puerto del Sol, DoubleTake, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review and dozens of others.  Among the awards she has been granted are three National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, an Ingram Merrill writing award, a grant from the Washington State Arts Commission, and a  Pushcart Prize.  After graduating from Duke, she earned an M.A. at the University ofWashington where she was a student in Theodore Roethke’s last class. She lives and writes in Edmonds,Washington.

Patty Kinney

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How To Talk To Your Schizophrenic Child

Would you like to swing on a star?
Carry moonbeams home in a jar?
– Burl Ives

Point to the Big Dipper
Ask them which star they are?
Explain therapists cannot function
without their wisdom, expertise
Repeat the term Ordinary Genius
sewing it into eyelids
agree it’s okay to Google
your silhouette,
shoplift a shovel,
duct tape thrift store shoes you use
to walk on water

Of course you are Jesus
heart on fire
lit by the tip of a match
and those traffic cameras
are watching, making movies
renaming you through
every intersection sending
CliffsNotes to the CIA

So
fly your flag
that middle finger
at those aliens who abducted
you last night
but next time they come
tell them to rinse
the chili from the pan.

Intervention is just a jigsaw
dismantled before we find
the last piece

In reality
you’re a wives’ tale
in high def
freight train
waiting to be jumped
carrying toxic waste, nerve gas, the sting of
salt in a new tattoo of
you and you and you.

 

“How To Talk To Your Schizophrenic Child” appears in the latest issue of Crab Creek Review.

 

Patty Kinney has been published in The Sun, hipMama, Poetry Motel, Mamaphonic, Poets On The Coast – as well other journals and anthologies online and in print.  She is a recent graduate of the Artist Trust Edge Program for Writers and is very active in the Olympia Poetry Community. She regularly reads at the Olympia Poetry Network’s monthly readings.

Kay Mullen

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Out of the Alphabet Horn

 

tumbles the fruit and fire of my life,
the heart and harvest of words.
As a child I learned to breathe soft O’s
and Ah’s, click T’s and K’s, letters

strung like beads of stone.
Our ancestors survived on oxen, inverted
the yoke to form A. Clans clung to seeds
of insight and drew a bow on the eye

of history. They predicted with patterns:
B hogans standing to guard the rivers,
V hooks for prodding horses with H-fence
protections, O’s in the eyes of osprey,

M’s estuary. Letters tumbled to me
over centuries. Even Einstein withdrew
from questions of monkey tail’s Q,
astonished at history ahead of itself.

There is always room in the beta
for the Buddha, bract of the scauler willow,
women with eyes in their hands,
drawing the unpredictable bow.

 

“Out of the Alphabet Horn” is reprinted from Tattoos on Cedar, 2006.

 

 

Kay Mullen’s work has appeared in a variety of poetry journals and anthologies, most recent journals: Valparaiso Poetry Journal, Appalachia, Wrist Magazine, San Pedro River Review. She has authored three full-length poetry collections, Let Morning Begin, 2001, A Long Remembering: Return to Vietnam, 2006, and most recent, Even the Stones, 2012. Kay received an MFA in poetry, Rainier Writing Workshop,Pacific Lutheran University.

 

Heather Curtis

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Trees of my Childhood

Returning to home of my youth
I walk the yard –
Lingering among the trees
I climbed and knew as a child.

They gave me pause
and entreated me to
embrace them.
Shoulders swooning
and heart willing
I nearly did –

I longed to engage them
in conversation,
like the days when they were
the greatest actors
in my most masterful plays;
We performed daily while I lay
in their arms and played at their feet.

But I stopped short
under the gaze
that I assumed was
judging from the window.

I was ashamed then,
and again, more fervently,
later.

Heather Curtis grew up in Wisconsin and earned an English degree at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, before migrating to Washington. She currently resides in Anacortes where she writes, enjoys nature, and is actively pursuing publication for her poems. This is her first.

John Davis

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Frango

Today I’m lonely for light brown rain clouds
layered like frango mint ice cream, a flavor
gone the way of downtown department stores—
boarded up or sold. Saturdays I rode the bus
through Industrial Seattle, pulled the bell-cord
at Frederick & Nelson’s, beelined
past perfume counters, ran down brass-railed
stairs, quick right into the Paul Bunyan Room,
spun in my own orbit on a metal stool
until a waitress wearing a black and white

maid dress, hairnet, pencil tucked behind her ear
wiped a rhapsody of handprints and perfect
circles of plates and cups, scribbled frango mint
milk shake on her pad. How I spun,
thrumming, kicking the leg of the stool—
a young John Glenn circling the Earth.
Heaven arrived in a metal container,
condensation sliding down the chalice like angel
blessings. In that first moment of pouring
and swallowing, I was the ice cream, the milk,
the frango, the body and bread of Christ and life

everlasting, Judgment Day, the place
where questions about angels were answered,
sugar traveling to invisible bouffants in my body.
I was every rivet of the metal, was sugar
melting ice, was Marilyn Monroe’s eyes.
Every vessel in my body whispered frango,
frango. On the wall Paul Bunyan ran
in brown and green earth tones. On the stool
I spooned chunks of heaven with my straw,
swallowed, toasted the first day of the universe.

 

“Frango” is reprinted from Jeopardy.

 

John Davis is the author of Gigs (Sol Books) and The Reservist (Pudding House Press.) His work has appeared in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Cider Press Review, Crab Creek Review, Cream City Review, Cutbank, Iron Horse Literary Review, The North American Review, Poetry Northwest, Rio Grande Review, Sycamore Review, and many others. He lives on Bainbridge Island where he teaches high school and performs in rock and roll bands.

Washington State Poetry Presses in the NY Times

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Today New York TImes blogger Dana Jennings reviews four “micro presses” from Washington State:  Sally and Sam Green’s Brooding Heron Press, Paul Hunter’s WoodWorks Press, the late C. Christopher Stern and Jules Remedios Faye’s Grey Spider Press, and Copper Canyon Press (wonderful, yes, but beyond micro!).  Here is the link to a longer appreciation that includes excerpts from some lovely poems.

Mary Lou Sanelli

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Lovebirds

 

The sun was hot, the wind calm, the sea
spectacularly blue.

I am not a tourist on this island
drawn to the center of action,
the center stage where hula dancers sway.

I’ve come for the edges, a rocky rim
over a black sand beach, colossal leaves
cupping tiny red fruit.

And to meet my friend’s fiancee

who cuts three mangos down with a knife
(“a man with a knife instead of an iPhone?”
I whispered to Amira, “how manly is this?”)
and, minutes later, sitting cross-legged on sand,
we tore through the reddish-green skin,
juice dripping down our arms.

We swam and walked and swam
some more and I don’t remember every detail
about our sun drenched afternoon
but I do remember how the wind came up
and blew the lid off Kaila’s cooler,
the sand sharp as glass against our cheeks,
and how Amira’s face remained calm,
unfazed, and I remember thinking
she looked a decade younger than the year before
and how this seemed perfectly natural
and fitting.

I remember she smelled of coconut oil
and Kaila smelled of beer, his breath yeasty.

I remember Kaila running up to the truck, opening the door for us.
I remember his strong, hairy forearm held Amira close.
I remember Amira winked, reached for the top of my hand
to give a little squeeze, huge
in meaning, though.

I remember she mouthed the word, lovebirds.

And, oh, how I wanted to believe in that word.
I wanted to believe that Amira may have fallen,
but Alika had caught her. I wanted to believe
he was a man capable of such a catch.

I stared at the two of them. I pretended not to.
I stared some more.

I had this thought that things were going to turn out
“just fine.”

If “just fine” was a man dressed in board shorts and slippahs,
who cared what happened to Amira,
who would give her a sense of home in his little house in Kailua.

I hoped for a man who would not just open our door
but his—I am looking for a better word here, but there is none—heart.

Naturally I heard every other thing I said to myself: “Alika?
Don’t kid yourself. Men like him open only their zippahs.
Don’t let his adorable cottage draped in bougainvillea
fool you otherwise.”

I countered: “Mainland pessimist!
I am fed up listening to you.”

I remember after that exchange
there was a somewhat strained atmosphere in the truck.

If only in my seat.

 

Mary Lou Sanelli is  the author of seven poetry collections and a recent book of essays,Falling Awake, selected as “one of the most fabulous 2008 Northwest titles” by Seattle writer/reviewer Lesley Thomas. Among Friends: A Memoir was a bookclub choice throughout the country. She is a regular columnist in City Living Magazine for Seattle’s Pacific Publishing Newspapers, as well as for Art Access Magazine, and her commentaries have been aired on Weekend Edition and NPR. She presents her staged reading of her book of the same name, The Immigrant’s Table, throughout the country.

 

Eric Ode

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The Barnacle

Startled,
the barnacle
hunkers to hide
until she is only
a stony, cone-shaped shell,
silent and still,
in the shallow tide.

But when I stop
and when I sit
and when I watch
and wait a bit,
she reappears to dance about,
in and out,
this way and that,
like a feather on a fancy hat
caught in the wind.

 

“The Barnacle” is reprinted from Sea Star Wishes (Sasquatch, 2013).

 

Eric Ode is a national award-winning children’s singer, songwriter, and author.  His original music has been recognized with Parents’ Choice Awards and is heard on many comilation albums and national children’s radio programs.  His book of children’s poems from the coast, Sea Star Wishes (Sasquatch, 2013) was National Children’s Poet Laureate Kenn Nesbitt’s book pick for July. Eric Ode lives in Bonney Lake.