Student Poem

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Galileo Demands An Apology
by Sarah Groesbeck

 

“Eppur si muove: and yet it moves.”
– Galileo Galilei

How fickle and stubborn
you are. Once praising my telescope and
the celestial bodies uncovered,
now branding me a heretic
for going against God and His scripture by saying
we are not the center.
I set out only to discover the truth;
to follow the evidence
with a mind open to wherever it may lead.
You, however, carelessly dismiss my results
by thumbing through verses.
And yet it moves.
I implore you, open your eyes and look
to the heavens, to our sister Venus
and the revolving moons of Jupiter.
See what I see;
only then will you discover
the Earth is moving.

 

Sarah Groesbeck, a Seattle native, is a student at Highline Community College. She is going for her AA degree with an emphasis in Mathematics. She decided to be brave and took a Creative Writing class where she discovered a new delight in poetry.

 

 

Keith Moul

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GENERATIONAL TIES ON THE PALOUSE

 

This is a local road;
the avenue for everyday movement;
the only direct access for me to local farms;
the gallery for the art of spring wheat, fall wheat
that will go gold among dispersing clouds;
and the twisting road tying the generations.

 

There must certainly be a road.
But I notice its minimal dimensions.
Spring shoots begin at the road’s edge,
roll up to and beyond the many ridges,
while packing jauntily among their own.

 

There must certainly be frequent return
(for those like me unsuited to residence);
there must be bread to sustain our lives;
there must be the will to roam this road;
there must be love for local displays of light.

 

;

 

 

“Generational Ties on the Palouse” appears in Straight Forward Magazine and in Reconsidered Light.

 

 

Keith Moul’s latest  full length collection is Reconsidered Light from Broken Publications.  His poems have been published widely for almost 45 years.  Recently two chaps have been released: The Grammar of Mind (2010) from Blue & Yellow Dog Press and Beautiful Agitation (2012) from Red Ochre Press.  He also publishes photos widely.  In fact, in 2010 a poem written to accompany one of Keith’s photos was a Pushcart nominee.

 

 


James Gurley

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BIOPHILIA

–at the conservation reserve outside London, Ontario–
after E.O. Wilson

The fox came upon us unexpectedly.
He froze and our world narrowed to a span
meters wide. I heard your words
break into fragments. So uneasy–
something so extraordinary
stood close to where we stood. His diaphragm
rising and falling, eyes searching
for any movement that might
betray us. The smell of water, the directional
bend of a plant stalk
mattered. I turned my head
and he vanished. Melted
into abstract description,
that’s just a metaphor for slyness,
malevolence, the implicit threat.
These qualities he channels
into his ability to stay alert.
Alive. It’s nearly dusk; the trees
suffused with dimming light.
We stop by a pond fringed with larch–
rest, still craving a sense
of the mysterious. Your words pour
in and around me, and I want to know the touch
of everything. Described this way,
it’s nothing but a glimpse
of one small animal.
Say it’s only myth: say he looks
at us from his own world. In the end
it’s enough to just believe.

 

“Biophilia” originally appeared in ARC and in Human Cartography (Truman State University Press, 2002).

James Gurley, originally from North Carolina, has lived in Seattle for over 22 years. He holds an MFA from the University of Montana, where he studied with Richard Hugo. His poems have appeared in American and Canadian journals. He has published two chapbooks, and one full-length collection of poetry, Human Cartography, winner of the T. S. Eliot Award. His writing has been supported with grants from Artist Trust and the Seattle and King County arts commissions, as well as a literary fellowship from the Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission.

Anastacia Tolbert

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How to Comfort & Say Goodbye

 

if you were a lost bobtail
i could easily calm you with
warm milk & a ball of yarn
let you get distracted by heat
& color & action
if you were a shiba inu
i’d find any object & throw it
far enough to watch you run
but close enough for you not
to get discouraged at the distance
of the thing you want the most
if you were my baby/us tied
by a bloody chord of spirit &
sacrifice i’d hold you close to my heart
& let you hear something familiar,
something true
let the thump surround sound
you. watch your lips pleat
into a smile.
but you are fear & i don’t know
how to stop your grinding, gnawing
gnashing—as there is no comfort
for separating a thing from its
maker.

 

 

Anastacia Tolbert’s work is a trellis of twilight, ultramarine ache and lowercase loam. She is a writer, Cave Canem Fellow, Hedgebrook Alumna, EDGE Professional Writers Graduate, VONA alum, creative writing workshop facilitator, documentarian and playwright. She is the recipient of the San Diego Journalism Press Club Award for the article “War Torn.” She is writer, co-director, and co-producer of GOTBREAST? Documentary (2007): a documentary about the views of women regarding breast and body image. Her poetry, fiction and nonfiction have been published or is forthcoming in: WomenArts Quarterly, Specter Magazine, Crab Creek Review, Everyday Other Things, Women Writers in Bloom, Saltwater Quarterly, The Poetry Breakfast, Things Lost, Midnight Tea Book, Reverie, Alehouse Journal, Women. Period., The Drunken Boat, Torch and many others.

Anastacia Tolbert features at Seattle SPIT + OPEN MIC @ Wildrose, 1021 E Pike pm Thursday, January 10 at 8:30 – 10:00 pm.

 

Suzanne Paola

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No Words Lecture Hall

 

You’re not the boss of me my son screams.
He’s tired, and thirteen, and skidding into
my and his sudden strangeness.
(Who is this woman who leaves her wine out on the swing,
crams wisteria in a drinking glass, can’t find a vase?
Who asks him to quit the 80 decibel belching.
She has grown foreign, and ridiculous.)

He says to me, you embarrass me and he says I don’t want you
in my room

I want to say, I love you. You’re

embarrassing me I love you and I’d
never lock you up. Never let anybody shock you
with 130 volts of electricity through your head.
Stick the bit in your mouth, spread
conducting gel on either side of your fine high
forehead.

Don’t you understand how huge that is?
Don’t you see how that makes me a good mother?
I do say these things, in my mind.
Even there with a pleading, with a pitched
hum.

 

“No Words Lecture Hall” previously appeared in The New Republic.

Suzanne Paola’s (Susanne Antonetta’s) most recent book, Inventing Family, a memoir and study of adoption, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. Other books include an environmental memoir, Body Toxic, and two collections of poems, Bardo, winner of the Brittingham Prize, and The Lives of the Saints. Awards for her poetry and prose include a New York Times Notable Book, an American Book Award, a Library Journal Best Science book of the year, a Lenore Marshall Award finalist, a Pushcart prize, and others. She is also coauthor of Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction. Her essays and poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Orion, Seneca Review and many anthologies, including Short Takes and Lyric Postmodernisms. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, with her husband and son.

 

 

Rachel Kessler

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Parade of Fences

 

Donkey Fence. Brown Corduroy Suit Holiday High-jumping Fence. Cyclops’ Golden Grasses Fence. Spying Bushes Fence. Teenage Angst and Loneliness Fence. Tangerine Bikini Fence. Masking Tape and Wrath in Shared Bedroom Fence. Ancient Stone Fence. Family Religion Fence. Electric Fence. No Fooling Barbed Wire Fence. Angry Bull On the Other Side of This Fence Fence. Creaky Chainlink Gate Leading to Unplanned Pregnancy Fence. Falling Down Fence. Fence for Napping. Fence Without Hope. Wet Phone Books Fence. Garden Hose Wielded as Weapon Fence. Hedge Full of Surprising Thorns Fence. Invisible Fence. Useless Deer-proof Netting Fence. Bad Dog Barking Fence. Idealistic Fabric Hung By Hopeful Young Mother Trying to Be a Writer Fence. Small Children Hanging from Mother’s Limbs (Including Accidental Labial Grab) Fence. Horrible Grin Fence.

 

 

Rachel Kessler is a poet of the everyday.  She is a founding member of the Typing Explosion and Vis-à-Vis Society. For the past ten years, these critically acclaimed groups have been writing collaborative poetry and presenting their work in the form of text-based art installations, interactive multi-media shows, and collaboratively written handmade books.  Her collaborative poems have appeared in Tin House, TATE, and USA Today. She recently launched her “Public Health Poems” interactive hand-washing installation in public restrooms throughout the city of Seattle.

Vis-a-Vis Society will present their work at The Frye Art Museum, Sunday, January 6, 3:30PM – FREE!

Rachel Kessler will read at Cheap Wine & Poetry at the Hugo House on Thursday, Jan 17, 7:00 pm.

 

Duane Niatum

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Cedar Man

I

The sculptor grows calmer on the beach;
waits for the block of wood to talk with his hands,
bring the song and path his knife must take,
clear to the edge where his ancestors sit.
The Old Ones show him in dreams and hallucinations
the knife is blind to the creature of beauty embedded
in the wood until his rage dies and he offers
the storm a piece of his skin.

He dances on one foot to ease the fury
that froze his hands closed three seasons,
tosses in the air cedar chips to honor the tree
his elders name “life-giver,
great mother of the forest.”
He grows tired of a life as barren
as the wolf’s jaws in a blizzard.

Like a log along the shore, he drifts
in no direction like a man without shadow.
He watches bone, shell, feather,
amulet and agate drop to his feet.
Stepping from silence to silence
down the path of inner-darkness,
a voice emerges from his entrails.
It calls for him to dig for his life,
whittle out the confusion knots he fed with fear
and the last words that nearly lodged
permanently in his throat.

II

He kneels to cup water to his lips,
salt his nerves with the moves that will
free him from the trap.
He hopes the fool dancing in the square
will not be him or the hatchet toes of Trickster.
From the balls of his feet the currents
swirl and shake through an octopus’s eye.

In the pounding surf and spray
he sees his love at home tending the fire,
the healing poise of her supple body.
Birds flying above the beach in every direction
know from the sparks that he holds her
in his mind the way light holds
the grain of red cedar.

III

On the third day he bends south
like a cattail in the marsh.
Wind weaver carries the voices of old friends,
grandfathers who place his knife at the source,
each wave of cloud falling to the cliff,
the last rock, the last cave.

Now a figure of earth, sky, air and water,
he opens his hands to the formless haze
shaping itself into a songbird of the mind,
a grandmother who loves his failures
and angers as much as the full net of his dreams.
Throwing four logs on the fire
he starts to carve a nest for the song sparrow.
The night chant loosens the star points
of his fingers, hones his blade for the grip
of wonder, puts him within the guttural
drumming of his bowels.

 

Duane Niatum has published numerous collections of poetry, including Ascending Red Cedar Moon (1974); Song for the Harvester of Dreams (1980), which won the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award; and Drawings of the Song Animals: New and Selected Poems (1991). His most recent book is The Pull of the Green Kite (Serif & Pixel Press, 2011). A former editor for Harper & Row’s Native American Authors series, Niatum also edited the Native American literature anthologies Carriers of the Dream Wheel (1975) and Harper’s Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry (1988). His own poetry has been widely anthologized and translated into more than a dozen languages.His honors include residencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts and Yaddo, the Governor’s Award from the State of Washington, and grants from the Carnegie Fund for Authors and the PEN Fund for Writers. Niatum lives in Seattle and has taught at Evergreen State College and the University of Washington, as well as area high schools.

Laura Schaeffer

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Confessions of a Submissions Editor

 

When reading other poets
I have a pen ready to underline,
circle,
slash through words
sounding disabled
or weak
or unnecessary
or common
or boring.

Sometimes, depending on the weather,
I can amputate whole limbs
with a straight line,
recalling my attachment to old prosthetics
with screws that beep in public places
such as airports and department stores—
since, and maybe because of the sludge of raining months,
the artificial has voice.

Worse than a pen though, are saws
clearing trees on ridges—
the solitary thud generating dusty clouds,
and mostly, gaps between things.

 

 

Laura Schaeffer is employed with Housing Kitsap in Bremerton and serves as the Resident Services Coordinator. She has been piling up her writing under her bed for most of her life, though she came out of the closet during her college years and earned a BA in English with a Creative Writing Emphasis from the UW. Schaeffer writes, “I’ve decided that I’m going to share my poems from now on because maybe, through my own hardships and struggles, I’ve learned something about giving.” She lives in Kingston.

Elizabeth Myhr

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you are a boy on your small mare searching

 

but neither of us can find her

in the oysterbed of hoofbeats and wind

in the torn light between grasses and dunes

 

the lost sword washes up on the sand

 

I urge the white horse of memory

with a whip and a branch of heather

your wildest sorrow wet and bright

 

racing the cloudy stallions of afternoon

 

but inside the bedsheet’s dry white tent

you hold in your face the salty blade

and I wear by your tears’ consent

 

her wet crown and the pearl at my neck

as over your shoulder great and riderless

he comes for you snorting with loose bit

  and reins trailed through hoof gouged moor

 

his saddleless highbred back soaked to one long muscled darkness with rain

 

 

Elizabeth Myhr is a poet, editor and publisher. She holds a BA from the Evergreen State College and an MFA from Seattle Pacific University, has served as artist-in-residence at Centrum, and is a Milotte Foundation scholar. In 2010 she co-founded Calypso Editions, a virtual, cooperative press that specializes in literature in translation and emerging writers. Elizabeth currently serves as an editor and manager for Marick Press and Calypso Editions, and has served as editor at Web Del Sol Review of Books, Raven Chronicles and Shining Horns. Her book the vanishings & other poems was published by Calypso in October, 2011, and was listed by Christianity Today as one of its three notable poetry books of 2011. Elizabeth lives in Seattle with her family.

Mary Eliza Crane

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FRIDAY NIGHT

 

With a flash of light
an eagle splits
the seamless gray
of sky
and river in the rain.

At your house
the key sits on a dusty beam,
the kettle steeps with tea.
Coals in the stove stoked
with white grain alder
uprooted in another winter,
dried to perfection
in a blazing summer sun.
Quiet taps of heat expanding glowing flames
against dark red walls
burn deeply into blackness of the night.
Clothes peeled,
two more blankets piled on my side
burrowed down with steaming mug and book
into soft gold light.

I dissolve into the echo of the rain upon the roof.

By what unlikely stroke of grace
does this define a life?

 

“Friday Night” previously appeared in At First Light (Gazoobi Tales Publishing, 2011).

 

Mary Eliza Crane is a native New Englander, transplanted to the western slope of the Cascade foothills east of Duvall. She weaves together the personal, political and natural world. A regular feature at poetry venues in the Puget Sound region, she has two volumes of poetry, What I Can Hold In My Hands, and At First Light, both published by Gazoobi Tales.