Kary Wayson

The Lives of Artists

 

I’m a nuisance on my route, an imposition

in the alleyway, just past the house of
shared custody: glass clock in the window like a ticking
terrarium. I manage like a mother
with a daughter who looks just like her father
and I am almost up to here

where once, in an alcove
of myself, I lingered in a stand of birches. Here
my mind gets shy
as if I’d asked my daughter to say hello
to a stranger. I don’t have a daughter. But crossing the street,
I jerk her little arm.

There is a joy in talking through an open window with a friend

on the sidewalk below. My mother understood it, with her
underwater tea parties on the bottom of the swimming pool.

Map for me my walking route and I will walking go.

It is new to be beautiful

and unseemly to say so. I manage
many paintings of the same Catholic saints, each
family holy according to another —
and then we get to the Caravaggio.

It’s new to be beautiful
and boring. It’s like counting to two
and turning around
and counting to two again.

But I was good! I was good! I let

the offer lie there like I’d rent
an empty room: the one electrical outlet,
the sink in the corner, the pull-out, the sofa.

I took how many tenants through.

The only clothes I’m wearing now
is the dress on the bed beside me –

And I am to bed like the station to the train:

to the bed headed
by the street below it. I mean
I am the station. There is the train
like a river
deranged by colors of cargo.

I go to the river
to read red books
and reason —

I sit with the sky. I go for a walk
to visit this direction:
really there’s no need to rhyme.

 

 

“The Lives of Artists” was previously published in Crazyhorse, and the winner of the Linda Hull Memorial Prize, selected by James Tate.

 

Kary Wayson’s poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Poetry Northwest, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Nation, The Journal, FIELD, Filter, The Best American Poetry 2007, and the 2010 Pushcart Prize anthology. Kary was a 2003 Discovery/The Nation award winner, and her chapbook, Dog & Me, was published in 2004 by LitRag Press. Her first full collection, American Husband, won the Ohio State University Press/ The Journal Award in 2009. Kary lives and works in Seattle.

 

Anne Pitkin

Lapland Longspur

 

Arctic Sparrow
it balances
on a dwarf fireweed.
Hills and sky roll
off the end of the visible world

which tilts
through the implacable
harmonies
of space, unprotected,
its own laws exacting
and without prejudice.

Even so, a furious
and delicate imbalance
thrives here:

purple aster, harebell,
yellow oxytrope, the Longspur
whose perch trembles
as it lets go and darts to the next.

*

Some proportions
have no meaning: harebell
to Arctic winter, Longspur
to the urgency of summer
on the tundra’s millions of acres
where it nests,
its home lined
with a puff of wool
from the musk ox.

*

Fewer and fewer stars set
as one travels
farther north in winter.
The Auroras swing across the sky,
souls, some say,
of children
who have died at birth.
All night, they dance,
all the sunless weeks
they dance in circles
whipping streamers of light
across the land encased
by an adamant darkness.

*

Tonight, the news
of a death was followed
by a Mozart concerto
for flute and orchestra,

was followed by the music
of Mozart as it has played
through two centuries of loss

for which there is no recompense.

The life of a bird
hurries from sparrow to sparrow.

The Longspur builds
its minute bones with calcium
from the skeletons of lemmings.

Occasionally, on the beach,
it nests in the skull of a walrus

The life of a bird
sometimes hurries from a stutter
of wings to singing that flashes
across an empty landscape.

*

Point Barrow:
Near midnight, July Fourth,
two boys walk out
on the melting sea ice.

From a distance,
against the white sea,
small and black under the sun,
they seem to be dancing
round and round

on the ice
at its most dangerous.

A few say, when we speak
of the end

of the Longspur, even
of Mozart, a very few say still
the earth may heal itself.

 

“Lapland Longspur” originally appeared in Ironwood.

 

Anne Pitkin grew up in Clarksville, TN, and earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Vanderbilt University. She earned a second master’s from Antioch University in 1988. She has worked both as a community college instructor and as a psychotherapist. Winter Arguments (Ahadada Books, 2011) is her third collection after Yellow (Arrowood Books, 1989) and the chapbook Notes for Continuing the Performance (Jawbone Press, 1977). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, and many others. A mother of three, grandmother of two, she currently lives in Seattle, where she plays jazz piano with her friends.

Joanne M. Clarkson

Sky of Four Sisters

 

Four firs marked the northern edge
of our acres. Our welcome, we
watched them for miles calling us
home. Our warriors, they shielded us
from the worst of winter storms, moss
cushioning our ice. In summer we
camped beneath their feathered
shade, lazy with evergreen breezes.

“We live at Four Sisters,” we would say
and everyone knew our place.

So that after a lightning strike took down
the eastern-most tree, we didn’t change
our address, still seeing her sway
like a Kirlian print, pinnacle home to falcon
and crow, needles a mist of cocoon spin.

‘Four Sisters’ on a mailbox;
how memory continues a sacred name.
How some bonds have such deep
roots, that even the wind
honors their space.

 

“Sky of Four Sisters” was previously published in Caesura.

 

Joanne M. Clarkson is the author of two books of poems: Pacing the Moon (Chantry Press) and Crossing Without Daughters (March Street Press). Her work has appeared recently in Hospital Row, Amoskeag Review, Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease, and Shadow and Light: A Literary Anthology on Memory. She has a Master’s Degree in English and has taught but currently works as a Registered Nurse specializing in Hospice and Community Nursing in Olympia.

Jeff Crandall

I Am Your Winged Torso of Eros

“Everything breakable in you has been broken . . .”
— Daniel Hall

Archival air belies the dirt they drew me from.
My wings lie crumbled in that ground still.
(Fingers marked unknown in a Reykjavik museum,
one ear completes a French recruiter’s stall.)
Fluorescence pours its green on all of us.
Why then return to face this embarrassment
of cracks and absence, blind luck and loss?

You’ve got it wrong (in sneakers and jeans, the docent’s
sneeze, the guidebook’s backward fold): Let me go
into the world: part saffron-dusted swallowtail,
part fountain jazz, wine and laughlines. The stone
heart erodes, forgotten as a pearl in its fossil shell.
Take, instead, the light sighs . . . I am broken,
yes, but broken like bread — a piece for everyone.

 

Jeff Crandall is a poet and artist living in Seattle.

Derek Sheffield

Mosses, Slugs, and Mount Rainier

Roethke’s last words to me: “Beefeater all right?”
–Nelson Bentley (1918 – 1990)

 

Leaning forward, cupping an ear
For every student reader, he loved a great refrain
Tinctured with mosses, slugs, and Mount Rainier.

When critics passed over his vision of rapture,
He licked a pencil and penned “Letter to Robert Hayden.”
Leaning forward, cupping an ear,

Students in the back row heard him swear
Roethke’s song could match the mind of Auden.
Tinctured with mosses, slugs, and Mount Rainier,

His classes spilled to the Blue Moon’s bar
For Bud and Blake and windows mottled with rain.
Leaning forward, cupping an ear,

He mouthed words like smoke, dusk, and cincture.
As the Denny clock rang another noon
Tinctured with mosses, slugs, and Mount Rainier,

He gave us our sonnets with circled clutter:
Omit? O, in every concise beauty, Nelson
Leans forward and cups a wakeful ear
Tinctured with mosses, slugs, and Mount Rainier.

 

 

“Mosses, Slugs, and Mount Rainier” is for Professor Nelson Bentley who taught at the University of Washington from 1952 to 1989. This poem was published in Limbs of the Pine, Peaks of the Range: Poems by Twenty-Six Pacific Northwest Poets (Rose Alley, 2007).

Derek Sheffield’s A Revised Account of the West won the Hazel Lipa Environmental Chapbook Award judged by Debra Marquart. His full-length collection was runner-up for the 2012 Emily Dickinson First Book Award. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Orion, The Southern Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review,  Terrain, and Wilderness, and he is the recent winner of an Artist Trust Literary Fellowship. He lives with his family outside Leavenworth, WA, and teaches poetry and nature writing at Wenatchee Valley College.

Carolyne Wright

“This dream the world is having about itself….”

–William Stafford

won’t let us go. The western sky gathers
its thunderclouds. It has no urgent need

of us. That summer in our late teens we
walked all evening through town–let’s say Cheyenne–

we were sisters at the prairie’s edge: I
who dreamed between sage-green pages, and you

a girl who feared you’d die in your twenties.
Both of us barefoot, wearing light summer

dresses from the Thirties, our mother’s good
old days, when she still believed she could live

anywhere, before her generation
won the War and moved on through the Forties.

As we walked, a riderless tricycle
rolled out slowly from a carport, fathers

watered lawns along the subdivisions’
treeless streets. We walked past the last houses

and out of the Fifties, the Oregon
trail opened beneath our feet like the dream

of a furrow turned over by plough blades
and watered by Sacajawea’s tears.

What did the fathers think by then, dropping
their hoses without protest as we girls

disappeared into the Sixties? We walked
all night, skirting the hurricane-force winds

in our frontier skirts so that the weather
forecasts for the Seventies could come true,

the Arapahoe’s final treaties for
the inland ranges could fulfill themselves

ahead of the building sprees. We walked on
but where was our mother by then? Your lungs

were filling with summer storms, and my eyes
blurred before unrefracted glacial lakes.

Limousines started out from country inns
at the center of town, they meant to drive

our grandparents deep into their eighties.
Our mother in her remodeled kitchen

whispered our names into her cordless phone
but before the Nineties were over, both

of you were gone. Mother’s breath was shadow
but her heart beat strong all the way in to

the cloud wall. You carried your final thoughts
almost to the millennium’s edge, where

the westward-leaning sky might have told us
our vocation: in open fields, we would

watch the trail deepen in brilliant shadow
and dream all the decades ahead of us.

In memory of my sister

 

“This dream the world is having about itself…” was winner of the Firman Houghton Award, published in The Iowa Review, reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2009 and in The Pushcart Prize XXXIV: Best of the Small Presses.

 

Carolyne Wright has published nine books and chapbooks of poetry, a collection of essays, and four volumes of translations from Spanish and Bengali. Her latest book is Mania Klepto: the Book of Eulene (Turning Point, 2011). Her previous collection, A Change of Maps (Lost Horse Press, 2006), finalist for the Idaho Prize and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the PSA, won the 2007 IPPY Bronze Award. Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire (Carnegie Mellon UP/EWU Books, 2nd edition 2005) won the Blue Lynx Prize and American Book Award. She is editing an anthology on women and the work place for Lost Horse Press. A Seattle native who studied with Elizabeth Bishop and Richard Hugo, Wright has been a visiting writer at colleges, universities, schools, and conferences around the country. She moved back to Seattle in 2005, and teaches for the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts’ Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA Program, and for Hugo House.

Student Poem

Little Magics

 

They loved pie, and the small
chew toy in the yard.
They loved the pat
and the emotional tug of a friend,
they loved run on sentences.
They loved the higgeldy piggeldy topsy-turvy
up and down over and out sound.
They looked at the glass
purred and ate.
They popcorned, gnawed, and
squeaked, and they loved it.
They hid, then scratched.
They hated that.
They loved helicopters
and screaming for no reason.
They loved skipping
the middle and going to the end.
They loved mixing and
not matching.
They enjoyed poems
They loved words
They loved and loved
every sound and feel of all the
little magics
They loved song
They smiled at Alexander
the Great, and they understood
every second.
They loved chicken
soup.
They loved me.
They loved random hum
like messy classrooms
and they loved sayings
and not endings.

 

Cameron was a fifth grader at View Ridge Elementary when he wrote “Little Magics.”  He worked with me through the Writers in the Schools program in Seattle.

Shann Ray

BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH
I wonder if suicides aren’t in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life. Václav Havel

 

Are there any real questions
to be asked anymore?

Like the one you asked
when we walked

among blue spruce mountains
and saw a yellow butterfly

stumbling over the cattails
along the river.

Why does water sometimes pause
and seem to run against itself before going on?

Lord knows, we need
the light in these loyal mountains.

I won’t forget the night
you placed your hands on the back of my head.

I had my face in my arms but
I heard the absolute heaven
saying do not be afraid.

 

 

Shann Ray is a poet and prose writer whose work has appeared in Best New Poets, McSweeney’s, and Poetry International. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, he is the winner of the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize, the Subterrain Poetry Prize, and the Crab Creek Review Fiction Award. He is the author of American Masculine (Graywolf), and Forgiveness and Power in the Age of Atrocity (Rowman & Littlefield). He lives with his wife and three daughters in Spokane where he teaches leadership and forgiveness studies at Gonzaga University.

Monica Schley

Figeater
For Beth Fleenor

 

That fig tree attracts wasps. They get wobbly
in the heady fermented fruit

flying lazily on the summer wind
like some Sinatra party guest after martinis.

Masts clang down the hill in the harbor.
Another siren calls while the dusk wraps its ethered scarf

around the neighborhood and the raccoon,
in his nocturnal wonder, takes one look at the tree

to see his paradise, his destiny, like a moth
sees his paramour flame, he knows

he will reach supreme love
from the bright fig at the crown

now illuminated by the moon. The limbs
are as soft as quartz, scratching easily

as he climbs up & up & up.
Drawn out is this moment of reaching—

the way he scampers on the thin branches for footing,
stretching towards splendor, there it is: a purple sack,

a Lilliputian’s laundry bag. He touches as high
as he can without falling. And then he does

manage to clip the fruit with his paw
joyously dropping into his mouth, the wet

and juicy center. A smile perhaps
and laughter at the bulging size of the fig

which in one second slides down his throat
but gets stuck. And there is our raccoon—

on tip-toes in the moonlight at the height of his happiness
in the tree choking. After that there is a fall,

followed by the brief silence of being airborne
before landing at the crux of two crossed branches

that bounce of the sudden glottal stop. Uh-oh.

Everyone is gone from the house to have heard
the accident, but in the morning they find him

strange fruit hanging from the Mediterranean tree.
And so he is plucked (apprehensively)

his soft furry body like a forgotten gym bag
stuffed with stinky socks. He is processioned in a bizarre majesty

down the street on the shovel used to dig his grave.
Now he rests in the old apple orchard

of the abandoned house (half burned out in decay)
there beneath the one oak tree covered

in ivy vines that in a few years from now
will have a small fig tree in its shadow

that started from the seed
in the raccoon’s belly.

 

 

Monica Schley earned a BA from UW-Eau Claire (in her native Wisconsin) where she studied poetry and harp. As a poet, her work has appeared in Burnside Review; Cranky; Cream City Review; Crab Creek Review; KNOCK and other journals. Her chapbook Black Eden: Nocturnes (Pudding House Press) was published in 2009 and also doubles as a performance piece with dance/spoken word/music. As a musician, she has worked with some of the Northwest’s mostly highly respected composers and performers including: Jim Knapp; Eyvand Kang; Jherek Bischoff; Lori Goldston; Jesse Sykes; Damien Jurado and many others. She is currently working on recording an album of her own music and poetry and being a new mother. Concert calendar can be found at: www.monicaschley.com

 

Martha Silano

It’s All Gravy

 

a gravy with little brown specks
a gravy from the juices in a pan

the pan you could have dumped in the sink
now a carnival of flavor waiting to be scraped

loosened with splashes of milk of water of wine
let it cook let it thicken let it be spooned or poured

over bird over bovine over swine
the gravy of the cosmos bubbling

beside the resting now lifted to the table
gravy like an ongoing conversation

Uncle Benny’s pork-pie hat
a child’s peculiar way of saying emergency

seamlessly      with sides of potato of carrot of corn
seamlessly      while each door handle sings its own song

while giant cicadas ricochet off cycads and jellyfish sting
a gravy like the ether they swore the planets swam through

luminiferous      millions of times less dense than air
ubiquitous         impossible to define a gravy like the God

Newton paid respect to when he argued
that to keep it all in balance to keep it from collapsing

to keep all the stars and planets from colliding
sometimes He had to intervene

a benevolent meddling like the hand
that stirs and stirs as the liquid steams

obvious and simple      everything and nothing
my gravy your gravy our gravy      the cosmological constant’s

glutinous gravy      an iridescent and variably pulsing gravy
the gravy of implosion      a dying-that-births-duodenoms gravy

gravy of doulas of dictionaries and of gold
the hand stirs      the liquid steams

and we heap the groaning platter with glistening
the celestial chef looking on as we lift our plates

lick them like a cat come back from a heavenly spin
because there is oxygen in our blood

because there is calcium in our bones
because all of us were cooked

in the gleaming Viking range
of the stars

 

“It’s All Gravy” is reprinted from The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception (Saturnalia Books, 2011).

 

 

Martha Silano is the author of What the Truth Tastes Like (Nightshade Press), Blue Positive (Steel Toe Books), and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, chosen by Campbell McGrath as the winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in North American Review, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry 2009, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Martha has received fellowships and grants from The University of Arizona Poetry Center, Seattle Arts Commission, Washington State 4Culture, and Washington State Artist’s Trust. She teaches at Bellevue College, near her home in Seattle, WA.