Luke Johnson

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Late Quartets

 

At home, the deaf boy must spend his days
with a piano he does not play. His small white hands
stay tucked in pockets under overlong t-shirts
that brush his knees. No one in the house plays.

The boy avoids the room where the piano collects
silence, sees his mother as a woman recollecting
girlhood, her shape defining a sundress as she stands
fingertips extended toward the keys, understanding

again the texture of familiar sound, counting one,
two, and a pause here as if she were waiting for her son
to answer three, four. She cannot see him crouched
back-to-the-stairwell. She can only see out

the bay-window to afternoon. It must be fall. It is cold
and there are leaves. This is not music, but keeping time:
a way of acknowledging what we’ve been told
we cannot choose: seasons, ourselves, our family.

 

“Late Quartets” originally appeared in The Threepenny Review.

Luke Johnson is the author of the poetry collection After the Ark (New York Quarterly Books, 2011). His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, New England Review, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. His work has been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and has twice appeared in the Best New Poets anthology. He lives and works in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle.

Karen Entrantt

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Baby Girle

 

Baby Girle,
Sit down
Take off ur too-high designer shoes.
Put ur Coach/designer x bag down.
Rub ur hurting feet.
pull them up til the heels can feel the cushion in the chair.
Or Stretch them out on the coffee table–
I know it’s beautiful/fav stuff on it
but juss thys once, push it aside,
Stretch ur feet out & close ur eyes!
And juss be still for a minute.
No music. No ipod. no x-box.
Juss u & ur long loss/neglected friend–
Silence!
No thoughts about ray-ray/nae/niqua/or the dude u really like;
but he don’t know it!
Juss U & Silence.
Silence will guide u, 2
Go upstairs.
Take off all ur
Impressn-my-peopl-gear-so-that-can’t-c-my-fears~
Pull ur hair back.
Wash all the make-up off ur face, body.
Run a hot bubble bath.
Like u used to do back n the day.
No fancy label, juss somethin w/ good bubbles.
Get in & juss submerge all of u
Into the mystery of lathering/soothin/bubbles…
U close ur eyes, surrendering 2 the comfort of the bubbles…
U seemed to have drifted between the wurlds…
U hear a soft soothin voice

But Baby Girle, there are many around u
who never died.
There’s the Ancestral Governing Council
led by Mother Matriarche herself…
The Chief Elders & the Scrybes–
They are where u really came from,
that’s ur tribe!
Scrybes choose to live a different life than most
Becuz they know the real deal–more than most!
Go back 2 letting Simplicity be ur guide also.
She can show u how to look good & not be almost nekit;
she can help u save $ cuz u don’t have 2 buy the new
thing soon as it comes on the market.
She can remind u of ur own inner integrity & that u don’t
have to compromise urself or ur values, juss so ur not alone
or juss so u can have a man hold you through the nite.
She’ll remind u ur worthy of man that’ll be around
in the day-lite 2.
Ur house ain’t on fire, u don’t need a rescue.
In the Silence u will Always be guides what to do..next.
U’ll see u no longer have to sacrifice ur Self-esteem..for—you know what!
U Baby Girle are Worthy of the Best…
U wake up..feelin as though tyme has stood still…
And evry bubble is still in place…
Until u realize those aren’t bubbles, but tears on ur face

 

 

Dr. Karen Entrantt, Ph.D,  is an author, poet-performer, and creative writing instructor. She has been writing poetry and short stories since the 4th grade.  Her style of writing and poetry performances leave audiences sitting on the edge of their seats in anticipation of more!  She has performed at The ACT Theater, Town Hall  with Poetry + Motion.  Her first book is I Found My Voice! (also available on Amazon and various Seattle book stores). Her second book, The Amplification of My Voice: Another level of Expression! will be out August 2012. She lives in Seattle.

 

 

PM5 – Baby Girle from Poetry+Motion on Vimeo.

Marvin Bell

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The Book of the Dead Man (Rhino)

Live as if you were already dead.
Zen admonition

1. About the Dead Man and the Rhino

The dead man rode a rhino into Congress.
An odd-toed ungulate in the Congress, and no one blinked.
It was the lobbyist from Hell, the rhino that ate Tokyo, a lightning strike in their dark                     dreams.
A ton of megafauna, and nowhere for a senator to hide.
I’m gonna get you, says the momentum of a rhino.
The rhino has been said to stamp out fires, and the dead man hopes it is true.
He steered the beast to the hotheaded, the flaming racist, the fiery pork-barreler, the                  sweating vestiges of white power.
The dead man’s revolutionary rhino trampled the many well-heeled lawmakers who stood           in the way.
He flattens the cardboard tigers, he crushes the inflated blowhards, he squashes the                cupcakes of warfare.
Oh, he makes them into blocks of bone like those of compacted BMWs.

 

2. More About the Dead Man and the Rhino

The dead man’s rhino was not overkill, don’t think it.
He was, and is, the rough beast whose hour had come round at last.
The dead man’s rhino did not slouch, but impaled the hardest cases among the                            incumbents.
The committee chair who thought a rhino horn an aphrodisiac found out.
The dead man’s rhino came sans his guards, the oxpeckers.
He was ridden willingly, bareback, he did not expect to survive, he would live to be a                    martyr.
The rhino’s horn, known to overcome fevers and convulsions, cleared, for a time, the halls          of Congress.
The senators who send other people’s children into battle fled.
They reassembled in the cloakroom, they went on with their deal-making.
They agreed it takes a tough skin to be a rhino.

 

“The Book of the Dead Man (Rhino)” appears in Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems, published by Copper Canyon Press.

 

Three books by Marvin Bell were released in 2011: Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems (Copper Canyon); Whiteout,a collaboration with photographer Nathan Lyons, (Lodima); and a children’s picture book, based on the poem, “A Primer about the Flag”  (Candlewick). Since 1985, he has split the year between Port Townsend and Iowa City. For many years Flannery O’Connor Professor of Letters at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he teaches now for the brief-residency MFA based in Oregon at Pacific University, One can see a brief interview with him about writing in the literary video series  “On the Fly,”  and others at Drunken Boat,  Arch Literary Journal, and Poetry Kit.
.

 

 

Lindsey Walker

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My Kitchen Can Beat Up Your Kitchen

 

My sweet tea is a song played on a saw.
My sweet tea is the bluest yodel,
the bone-chill fog raking fingers down the Unicois.
The throats of those who’ve ever tasted
hum with the wanting
of my sweet tea.

The stovetop moans
under grease splatter; red coils
smoke spilled peanut brine.
Linoleum cracked, peeled, scuffed.
My kitchen testifies
in odors of cornbread and orange pekoe.

My catfish is crusted with the dry tears
of freshwater mermaids, their brown fins muddy,
their whiskers!
My catfish is fried in fat rendered from cherubs,
the batter crisps, the flesh yields.
All tongues rejoice in glossolalia,
for the salivating
salvation of my catfish.

My okra hops a train, rides the rail
all the way up to Chattanooga.
My collard greens evangelize the feet
of adventurers before they enter my kitchen.
My dumplings hotwire a Cadillac made of teeth;
they hold the uvula for ransom.

The stockpot boils over, yellow froth
off sweet potatoes. My kitchen
is haunted by ghosts
wielding flour sifters, whose recipes
in graphite curl with broth steam.
My kitchen is a wishbone
I snap in half.

 

Lindsey Walker is a poet and writer originally from Chattanooga. She has won the Loft Poetry Contest, the League for Innovation Award for essay, and the Whidbey Writers Workshop Students’ Choice Award for fiction. Her work has been published a little in print and a lot online, recently by Your Hands, Your Mouth, the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, and P.Q. Leer. Her poetry will be featured in the upcoming issue of Third Wednesday. She lives in Seattle with a boy and a dog.

Judith Roche

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The Husbands

 

I married them for all the wrong reasons.
One for sex, another for a boat,
though the boat wasn’t for me
but for the son left behind
from the sex I married the first one for.
But it was the daughter I carried inside
when I married the first one.
There were others but they
didn’t quite count as husbands.

The third I didn’t even marry.
He read me poems in bed
and left little behind, nothing of any value.
But the pain turned out about the same.
And then there was my daughter,
steady, there through all of it,
watching me with blue owl eyes,
thinking, is this the way you do it?

We had boat enough to teach us
of the sea, the beauty of fish,
the son’s love for water.
The first left me my daughter and my son,
both, my dawn, noon, sunset, and night.

The husbands are all far away now,
two into that great good night–
strange to have outlived them.
The third, off in his own mysteries.
They surface in my dreams,
sometimes even the others join in,
as lions, as kings, as husbands.
They all blend together, vivid,
purring loudly and shape-shifting.
I love them – or him –
the one Great Husband,
for whom
I am still a wife.

 

Judith Roche is the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Wisdom of the Body, an American Book Award winner, which was also nominated for a Pushcart. She has published widely in various journals and magazines, and has poems installed on several Seattle area public art projects, including  installations at the Brightwater Treatment Plant in King County. She has written extensively about our native salmon and edited First Fish, First People, Salmon Tales of the North Pacific and has salmon poems installed at the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks in Seattle. She has been Distinguished Northwest Writer-in-Residence at Seattle University, has taught at Cornish College of the Arts, and currently teaches at Richard Hugo House and around the state for the Humanities Washington Inquiring Mind series.

–

Anne McDuffie

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A Thought in the Shape of a Bird

 
A thought in the shape of a bird
unfolds its subtle origami in three beats:
leaf / wren / leaf.

 

A gesture in the shape of habit
worrying the pavement for seeds,
its tail tipped straight up.

 

Calder’s “Eagle,” fades red
into the chestnuts beside the museum.
The great, hooked beak, the cocked tail

 

distinctly flanged and wren-like, though I’m not sure
it is a tail. There’s no body here—
only line and curve, weld and bolt,

 

the scattershot lines of something
I’ve seen before. Tail, brow, beak.
Or glide, spread, crouch.

 

I can’t account for the piece that stands
straight up—

 

until a crow alights on top
and casts a languid eye on this poor human
scrabbling over the wet grass below,

 

and I feel a jot of pity for the wren
who spasms into flight at my approach,
stitching escape across each retina.

 

This wren
squats in my path, with the gravity
of a dead thing. Only a leaf

 

I’ve overtaken now, passed by
while the mind keeps circling,
watching for movement, some flash or flicker under the surface.

 

That’s the meat calling. And the mind,
with its inquisitive talons, will answer. Will tip itself over
into the pure line of its sight

 

and fall.

 

 

 

“A Thought in the Shape of a Bird” originally appeared in Crab Creek Review.

 

 

Anne McDuffie writes essays, poetry and book reviews. Her work has appeared in Colorado Review, Crab Creek Review, A River and Sound Review, Rattle, American Book Review and the anthology, Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction (Norton, 2005). She received her MFA in 2007 from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University, and lives in Seattle, WA.

 

Arthur Ginsberg

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Burn

 

His face so terrible in the bus window’s reflection,
you cannot turn away.
You did not know when you sat down
he would look at you as though to see
what flesh you are made of. He does not speak;
that hideous maceration of eschar,
crocodile scales, lipless mouth, lashless eyes
that burn like coals into your face. Outside
the snowstorm howls as the bus coasts down Avenue Cotes Des Neiges.
At night you’re drenched by monstrous dreams
of icthyosis and thick-lipped crackling flesh. In the mirror
you stare at the fuzz on your twelve year old cheeks,
imagine the skin shrinking
into a shriveled mask across your face’s
bird-bone precision.
In the morning on the bus he is there again,
and again you sit beside him.
For a week you do this impossible thing, until,
on the seventh day when the air is clear,
when he turns to you and grasps your hand,
and you see underneath,
something grotesquely beautiful. And he asks your name.

 

Arthur Ginsberg is a neurologist and poet based in Seattle. He was born and grew up in Montreal, Canada, and attended undergraduate and medical school at McGill University followed by internship and residencies in the United States. He has studied poetry at the University of Washington and at Squaw Valley Community of Writers with Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds and Lucille Clifton. Recent work appears in the anthologies, Blood and Bone,  and Primary Care, from University of Iowa Press, and Beyond Forgetting, from Kansas State University Press. He was awarded the William Stafford prize in 2003 in Washington State by the renowned poet, Madeline DeFrees. He received the Humanities Award from the American Academy of Neurology in 2009, and serves as a reviewer for the poetry section, Reflections, in the journal, Neurology that is distributed worldwide to thirty thousand neurologists. His chapbook, Faith is the Next Breath, was released by Puddinghouse Press in Ohio. His full length manuscript, The Anatomist, has been accepted for publication by David Roberts Books, and another chapbook, Crossing Over, will be published by Winterhawk Press. Ginsberg was awarded an MFA degree in creative writing in July 2010 from Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon where he studied with Dorianne Laux, Marvin Bell and David St. John.

Hannah Faith Notess

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Meditation on the Divine Blueness with Two Pop Songs
Rishikesh, India

 

It’s just that in “My Sweet Lord” George Harrison
sounds so Jesusy, with his platoon of earnest handclappers
and strummers on backup, transparent

like the Maranatha choruses of my childhood
slapped verse by verse onto the overhead projector.
And so I start to think it’s really still 1968 here.

I got the song’s joke the first time, but here
I hear it for myself—in the Rishikesh German Indian
Chinese Israeli Continental Bakery—Hare Krishna

is just two syllables away from Hallelujah
and “My Sweet Lord” is not even two notes away
from “He’s So Fine” (doo lang doo lang doo lang)

and Jesus is just two notes away from Krishna
but in flesh-colored makeup, too shy to show us
his true blue skin. It’s 1968, and the Beatles

are decked in saffron garlands,
posing in a row around the Maharishi,
this gleaming green river behind them,

under a god’s skin blue February sky. It’s 1968
and I’m staring at the same green February water, wishing
the Australians upstairs would just

put the damn sitars away. Any minute now
it’ll be 1971, and George’s new backup singers
will get out their tambourines and start clapping

like some scruffy kids picked up at a beachside revival, squinting
at the transliterated mantras Rama Rama Hare Hare.
It’s 1971 and—really, I’m not stoned—the Chiffons

are suing George Harrison for royalties
(doo lang doo lang doo lang) and incidentally, Krishna
is suing Jesus because he thought of incarnation first.

Jesus swears it was an accident; he didn’t mean to copy,
but the court doesn’t care. And anyway, it’s 1975 now and my dad,
long-haired, is sitting cross legged in a work shirt

and bell bottoms with a guitar
on somebody’s living room floor in Virginia,
strumming the same chords, a mimeographed

scripture song. I really wanna see you Lord, but it takes
so long my Lord. It’s 1975 and the Chiffons are recording
My Sweet Lord (doo lang doo lang doo lang)

as a joke: the magic’s over. We missed the real thing.
I know there are so many Indias, but this is one
of mine. It’s 1975 and night is falling

on the hill above the bakery, where the hostel
owner—just a girl—leads us into a room
the color of Krishna, the color of Shiva’s throat

when he swallowed the poison. There we lay down
our bags. The posters on the wall—a parade
of Krishnas, the fat baby stealing the milk,

him posing on a lotus with His blue rolls of baby fat,
then Radha and her blue boyfriend
wrapped in two versions of the same green sari

so close, so fine you couldn’t call them anything
but Radhakrishna (doo lang doo lang doo lang)
taped to the ceiling, the way the world’s teenage girls

taped the Beatles to their ceilings, till the corners yellowed
and peeled, till the magic faded. We’ll sleep there, safe under
Krishna’s gaze, so peaceful in God’s blue belly.

 

 

 

Hannah Faith Notess is managing editor of Seattle Pacific University’s Response magazine and the editor of Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical, a collection of personal essays. She earned an MFA in creative writing from Indiana University, where she served as poetry editor for Indiana Review. Her poems have appeared in Slate, Rattle, Crab Orchard Review, Los Angeles Review, Poet Lore, So To Speak, The Christian Century, and Floating Bridge Review, among other journals. She lives in Seattle.

 

Christianne Balk

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John Muir in the Sequoias
August, 1870

 

Enough of the winds tearing through Merced
Canyon’s boulder-choked gorge, enough
of the stampedes muddying Moss Creek.
Enough hoofed catastrophes. I’ll ride them

all out in these root-caves, framed
with the purple-tinged bark of buttressed
trunks in an unnamed grove. Too tired
of tales of the ground’s cataclysmic quakes –

valleys bottomed out, pine trees tossed,
cedar, oak, gusts snapping massive limbs,
and the sudden rush of flame –
to even imagine fire grazing these old,

close-packed leaves. Spinning, zigzagging,
burning back, surging, scorching every living
thing. Roaring updrafts filling branches filled
with cones. Ashes settling, smoking litter cooling

slowly. The air dark with incense, charred
stumps. Blackened hollows like the one I sit in.
From this loud storm drifts
chestnut snow, down from the quiet

canopy, each fleck smaller than a grain
of flax, a cloud of hope released from tight
cone scales opened by the heat,
flurries of small, flat-winged seeds.

 

“John Muir in the Sequoias” first appeared in Words and Pictures Magazine.
Christianne Balk’s books include Bindweed and Desiring Flight. After majoring in biology at Grinnell College, she studied English at The University of Iowa. Her poems have appeared in The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Alhambra Poetry Calendar, The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and other anthologies and journals. She lives in Seattle with her husband and daughter.

Kevin Craft

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Pigeon Guillemots

 

Dangle bright red legs
Floating and diving
Like simple sentences
By the ferry terminal—

So close, and closing in—
Their glidepaths trimming
Acrobatic pilings,
Rounding off the long division

Of the tide. Spring: Saturday
opens a beer and passes it
Around. Dear sunlight,
We missed your clean throw rugs

Beating on the bay.
There’s no place to get to
But we’re going anyway.
Guillemot—like guile,

Only less so, a bon-mot
Waiting to lodge itself
In your bailiwick.
Compact. Glossy.

The world still has a thing
Or two to show us,
Much of which passes
For guillemots today.

 

Kevin Craft is the editor of Poetry Northwest. He lives in Seattle, and directs both the Written Arts Program at Everett Community College and the University of Washington’s Creative Writing in Rome Program. His books include Solar Prominence (Cloudbank Books, 2005) and five volumes of the anthology Mare Nostrum, an annual collection of Italian translation and Mediterranean-inspired writing (Writ in Water Press). He has been awarded fellowships by the MacDowell Colony, Bogliasco Foundation, Camargo Foundation, 4Culture, and Artist Trust. His poems, reviews, and essays have appeared widely in such places as Poetry, AGNI, Verse, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Stranger, Poetry Daily, and Kenyon Review.