Samuel Green

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CONSTELLATIONS

We knew he was different,
the one who called a pause
in our pasture baseball once,
the quiet, oldest son, still living
at home. He’d been to the store
& was taking a shortcut back. Stop,
he said, & we did, letting bats
& gloves dangle. From this angle
you could be . . . & he named
a constellation none of us knew
from school or Scouts. We were playing
work-up. I’d just hit an easy out
toward the cow flop we used for third,
a pop fly that rose like a soiled moon
before tumbling into the pocket
of Frankie’s Ted Williams mitt
with a wet plop. That’s when the man said
Stop, said we looked like stars in a field
of sky, said we should imagine each of us
a billion miles apart. For a moment
it scared us, so much sudden distance
from each flaring heart, & then
he shuffled away toward the sagging wire
fence, taking with him the Greek
name that for a moment helped him see
some sort of earthly sense.

 

“Constellations” is forthcoming in Clover 

Samuel Green was born in Sedro-Woolley, Washington, and raised in the nearby
fishing and mill town of Anacortes. After four years in the military, including service in
Antarctica and South Vietnam, he attended college under the Veterans Vocational
Rehabilitation Program, earning degrees from Highline Community College and
Western Washington University (B.A. & M.A.). A 36-year veteran as a Poet-in-the-
Schools, he has taught in literally hundreds of classrooms around Washington State. He
has also been a Visiting Professor at Southern Utah University, Western Wyoming
Community College, Colorado College, and served nine winter terms as Distinguished
Visiting Northwest Writer at Seattle University, as well as nine summers in Ireland.
Poems have appeared in hundreds of journals, including Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Poet &
Critic, Poetry East, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and Puerto del Sol. Among his ten collections of poems are Vertebrae: Poems 1972-1994 (Eastern Washington University Press) and The Grace of Necessity (Carnegie-Mellon University Press), which won the 2008 Washington State Book Award for Poetry. He has lived for 29 years off the grid on remote Waldron Island off the Washington coast in a log house he built himself after living in a tent for three years. He is, with his wife, Sally, Co-Editor of the award-winning Brooding Heron Press, which produces fine, letterpressed volumes. In December, 2007, he was named by Governor Christine Gregoire to a two-year term as the Inaugural Poet Laureate for the State of Washington. In January of 2009, he was awarded a National
Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and was a member of the NEA’s poetry
panel for the 2011 fellowships.

Student Poem

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This is the poem

 

 

This person is Taylor, whose wacky noises and lip piercings
tell a story all its own.

This person is Tyler, who’s always there to put the broken pieces of shattered reality back together.

This person is April, who’s home to me, a mom, who’s always there for me.

This person is Dawson, whose jokes hold then shatter like the fiery explosions of the fourth.

This person is Corey, who’s due to be a dad, and who’s waiting for the day the water slides.

This person is Britney, who’s Corey’s first real love, and who is also waiting for the water to slide.

This person is Virginia, who’s quiet and shy, a little misunderstood. But, she is my best friend.

This person is Shanon, who’s outspoken, sometimes funny but a little pushy.

This person is Hay Hay, who’s always here at Marshall, and who’s always there to help bail me out of an NC in math class.

This person is Tabitha, who’s been a sister to me my whole life, but was never blood related.

This person is Anastasia, who’s Tabitha’s daughter, and who’s a little bit obsessed with littlest pet shop, and moshi monsters.

This person is Jaden, who’s Tabitha’s son, and who’s obsessed with video games just like his deadbeat of a dad.

This person is Cindy, who’s psycho, a compulsive liar, and a bad case to be Shanon’s mom.

This person is Ron, who’s always tried to hard to make everyone happy.

This person is Marge, whose love kept me happy as a child, but the only thing i have of hers, a necklace, only brings sorrow.

This person is Dee, who’s a second mother, and who shows that no matter what, you can power through any obstacle.

This person is Joe, whose heart is always in the right place.

This person is from my dream, who’s helped me look at the brighter side of things.

This person is Leroy, whose love for his workshop, wife, children, and grandchildren, like me, show us to cherish the time we have together, cuz life doesn’t last for eternity.

This person is My Father, who’s always haunting my dreams never stopping once to let me forget all he’s done to me.

This person is me, a girl who’s always searching for meaning in this world, like a single river looking to find a vast ocean.

 

 

Teah is an eighth grader at Thurgood Marshall Middle School, Olympia. Thank you, Teah.

Sibyl James

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Twisp, Washington

 

Back east, they’d call these foothills mountain,
but you learn to map a different scale here
where the road west of you keeps rising
into a pass closed Thanksgiving to April,
where yards of rusted Ford bodies
and wringer washers aren’t lack of pride
but history to people that don’t read books,
a comfort of real things to talk
and tinker about, drawing off the restlessness
that comes between Saturday nights.

You could live a good winter here,
rent rooms in any grey weathered house
and watch the snow shift on porch chairs
left out ready for spring. Eat venison
and brown gravy at the Branding Iron
every Sunday, and walk it off
on the ridge behind the old copper mine
with that pack of scavenger horses and mules
snorting at your heels, and your own breath clouds
frozen at your lips like cartoon speech.
You won’t need much talk here
where the names of things get crystal
and definite as that frozen air, something to exchange
hand to mittened hand on the morning bridge.
“Neighbor” is the guy who takes your shift
the day the baby’s born. “Love”’s the years
of Saturday nights she’s held your head above the john.

When the sawmill shuts down, the quiet
goes sharp and ebony behind a fine mesh of stars.
The creek runs louder than the road then, a sound
drawing you out to walk until the frost patterns your eyes,
and the cold burns in your blood like a hunger
for coffee and wood smoke, turning you back to town.

In one good winter, you could get so solitary here
that you’d forget the name for lonely,
until the spring came, surprised you
like the sound of ice breaking under the bridge.
It would be the day you swept the snow from porch chairs,
the night you stayed past closing in the Branding Iron
while the waitress shared Wild Turkey on the house,
let you talk until she turned the empty bottle over,
smiling, handing you the news the pass was open,
like a word she’d dusted off that morning
and knew you’d just turned foreign enough to use.

 

 

Sibyl James has published nine books, including The Adventures of Stout Mama (fiction), China Beats (poetry) and, most recently, The Last Woro Woro to Treichville: A West African Memoir. She has taught in the US, China, Mexico, and–as Fulbright professor–Tunisia and Cote d’Ivoire.

Erin Malone

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And Then

 

In the windows we were drawn:
I held my knobby baby
in dawn’s automotive light.
A fleet of cars sailed by
as school-kids stomped their boots
shook their shiny coats.
I put my baby in a basket.
We slept in fits & as the weather
turned we started to grow older.

I bounced him hobbledy-hoy, hobbledy-hoy!
I wound my wobbly bumpkin
& in the garden
let him go. We went in circles.
This is the way the farmers ride.
Another year. Another.
I lost count of worn-out shoes.
Bees came to the flowers of his ears.
His hair got long.

Around us red leaves
lettered to the ground &
I became a tree.
I swung my boy like a bell
by his knees. His mouth
made the shape of a song.
Where had he heard it?
I listened to the tune.
This was not a song I’d known.

 

Erin Malone’s poems have appeared in journals such as Field, Beloit Poetry Journal, POOL and online at Verse Daily. Her chapbook, What Sound Does It Make, won the Concrete Wolf Award in 2007. The recipient of grants from Washington’s Artist Trust, 4Culture and the Colorado Council of the Arts, she has taught writing at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, Richard Hugo House in Seattle, and at the University of Washington Rome Center in Italy. Currently she teaches poetry in Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools program.

 

Larry Matsuda

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Too Young to Remember

Minidoka, Idaho— War Relocation Center

I do not remember the Idaho winter winds,
knee deep mud that oppressed 10,000 souls
or the harsh summer heat and dust.

I do not remember miles of clotheslines,
mounds of soiled diapers, clatter of families crowded
into barracks, the greasy closeness
of canned Vienna sausage,
of pungent pork and sour brine
exuding from mess halls.

Floating in the amniotic fluid,
tethered in salt sea, odors
nourished by fear and sadness—
my Mother’s anxieties
enveloped and nurtured me.

Maybe it was the loss of her home,
the sudden evacuation,
being betrayed by her country.
Or maybe it was the stillborn child
she referred to as It,
sexless blob of malformed tissue,
a thing without a face that would have been
my older sibling.
My aunt described it as budo,
a cluster of grapes.

I recall what Barry, my psychiatrist friend,
said about parents emotionally distancing themselves
from children born immediately after a stillbirth.

Sixty years later on drizzly Seattle days,
when November skies are overcast,
and darkness begins at 4:00 p.m.,
I feel my mother’s sadness
sweep over me like a cold wind from Idaho.

I search for Minidoka,
unravel it from the memories of others.
Like a ruined sweater, I untwist the yarn,
strands to weave a tapestry
of pride and determination—
the “children of the rising sun” once banished
to desert prisons, return from exile
with tattered remnants, wave them overhead,
time-shorn banners salvaged from memories
woven in blood and anguish.

I wish I could remember
Minidoka. I would trade
those memories for the fear and sadness
imbedded in my genes.

 

 

Note:  The Minidoka War Relocation Center was one of ten U.S. World War II concentration camps that held120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans for approximately three years.

This poem appears in A Cold Wind from Idaho, Black Lawrence Press, New York, 2010

 

Larry Matsuda was born in the Minidoka, Idaho War Relocation Center during World War II. He and his family along with 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were held in ten concentration camps without committing a crime and without due process for approximately three years.

Matsuda has a Ph.D. in education and was recently a visiting professor at Seattle University. He was a junior high language arts teacher and Seattle School District administrator and principal for twenty-seven years.

He studied poetry under the late Professor Nelson Bentley at the University of Washington and has participated in the Castalia Poetry Reading Series there. He has read his poetry at numerous events in Washington, California, Oregon, and Idaho including the famous Kobo at Higo’s venue in Seattle’s International District with his mentor Tess Gallagher.

His poems appear in Poets Against the War website, The New Orleans Review, Floating Bridge Press, The Raven Chronicles, Ambush Review, Cerise Press, Black Lawrence Press website, and the International Examiner Newspaper. In 2005 he and two colleagues wrote and co-edited the book Community and difference: teaching, pluralism and social justice, Peter Lang Publishing, New York. The book won the 2006 National Association of Multicultural Education Phillip Chinn Book Award. In July of 2010 his book of poetry entitled, A Cold Wind from Idaho was published by Black Lawrence Press in New York.

He lives with his wife, Karen, and son, Matthew in Seattle and is a consultant presently helping to re-design schools as better physical learning environments.

Student Poem

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Negativity and racism roams through our society, it’s something we can’t get rid of, permanent like a sharpie.
I can be the nicest person in the world, or your worst enemy, switch like a light switch.
The realness that I write, I can make your mind twitch. Make you think if you should stop or keep reading, why stop now? You have to hear the happy ending.
Step by step my confidence starts to rise, it’s a good morning, and I’m glad to see the sun rise.
Listen to my words and let them take you on a joyride. Fly so high, drive past Mars, glare at all the stars and shake hands with god.
Visit all my friends that never got a chance, where their first mistake was hopping that fence, trying to be someone they’re not.
Having their pants dangle by their thighs, walking down the street throwing up gang signs.
They loved being “hood” they loved it with a passion, with a flag out their pocket, yes that was their fashion.
Bullets fly through the air and now their life is flashing.
I guess so much for a happy ending, but take notes from my words of wisdom.
Life is dangerous so be careful with what you say.

Trey, 16 and a student at Franklin High School in Seattle, participated in the 2012 Dr. Carver Gayton Youth Curator Program at the Northwest African American Museum.  He and his fellow curators worked with writer Daemond Arrindell on poems based on  the Northwest Gallery exhibition, “Xenobia Bailey: Aesthetics of Funk.”

Kate Lebo

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Every Beginning Wants a Good Place to Start

 

According to laws of ownership,
you’re homeless. According to virology
you’re hunted, sore-throated, snotty.
By psychology you’re understood
and spun out, an iced tire. In fashion
you’re an adopter, a crofter, a little black
smock of sleep.

Notice how roofs lift their houses into reason,
their stories into debt. How leather walks years
after the first bloody cut
and shoes say something faster about a man
than his wallet because you don’t
have to ask to see them.

Starting today, you’ll study the discipline
of what you don’t know
about what you don’t want. You want this
like the flu wants lungs. Today,
keep it simple when simple makes sense.
Don’t start with schoolbooks. Start
with breakfast.

 

Kate Lebo’s poems appear in Best New Poets 2011, Poetry Northwest, Bateau, and The Pacific Poetry Project, among other anthologies and journals. She’s an editor for Filter, a literary journal made entirely by hand, and the recipient of a Nelson Bentley Fellowship, a 4Culture grant, and a Soapstone residency. Currently an MFA candidate at the University of Washington, Kate hosts a semi-regular semi-secret pie social called Pie Stand whenever schoolwork allows. Visit Pie-Scream for more about Kate’s zine A Commonplace Book of Pie and other tasty treats.

Michael Schmeltzer

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Phoenix-Tongue

…for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. – Genesis 3:19, KJV

As the days passed, my limbs turned purple and my face turned to the colour of dust. – Kazuko Yamashima, atom-bomb survivor

 

Suppose we are not made of fire. Suppose we turn
children to dust. Should we carry their ash in an urn
as if the sacred exists? What some call love,
others burn as fuel. How should we speak of
paper and people enduring the feral infernos?
I have no choice. I ache. I shower with shadow.
I wrote a poem on my lover’s stomach with
my tongue. Which lasts longer, the width

of saliva, the sonnet, or her skin? Answer
the question in phoenix-tongue. The towers
collapsed on my birthday and a crimson bird
built a nest in a tree. We were kids then, sure,
but how do you explain this; we set the nest ablaze.
One egg cooked in the center. The rest we saved.

 

“Phoenix-Tongue” originally appeared in PacificREVIEW.

 

Michael Schmeltzer earned an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. His honors include four Pushcart Prize nominations, the Gulf Stream Award for Poetry, Blue Earth Review’s Flash Fiction Prize, and the Artsmith Literary Award. Most recently he was a finalist in poetry contests held by Third Coast Magazine and Water~Stone Review. He helps edit A River & Sound Review and has been published in Natural Bridge, Mid-American Review, Water~Stone Review, New York Quarterly, Bellingham Review, and Fourteen Hills, among others. He lives in White Center, Washington.

Paul Hunter

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What A Boy Lies Awake Wondering

 

Footsore trudging these fields
while overhead dip and wheel
unfolding lives on the wing
some evenings every other living thing
seems dipped in desire glistening

so I envy the horse that can ripple
its skin out from under the horsefly
and the thousand-eyed horsefly
that bites me clean through
the workshirt stuck to my shoulders

I envy the hen so suspicious
of me she can turn her head backwards
and the slippery calf being nudged up
licked clean of its birth
all set to dance at a touch

and the water skeeter astride
the silvery skin of the horse trough
inhaled by those whiskery muzzles
and the green snake so still in the lilac
whose tongue neatly scissors the world

 

“What A Boy Lies Awake Wondering” is reprinted
from Ripening, (Silverfish Review Press, 2007).

 

Paul Hunter has lent a hand where it was needed—as teacher, performer, grassroots arts activist, worker on the land, and shade-tree mechanic. For the past 18 years he has published fine letterpress poetry under the imprint of Wood Works, currently including 26 books and over 60 broadsides. His poems have appeared in Alaska Fisherman’s Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bloomsbury Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Raven Chronicles, The Small Farmer’s Journal, The Southern Review and Spoon River Poetry Review, as well as in six full-length books and three chapbooks. His first collection of farming poems, Breaking Ground, 2004, from Silverfish Review Press, was reviewed in the New York Times, and received the 2004 Washington State Book Award. A second volume of farming poems, Ripening, was published in 2007, and a third companion volume, Come the Harvest, appeared in 2008. He has been a featured poet on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. His recent prose book, One Seed to Another: The New Small Farming, was published by the Small Farmer’s Journal in 2010. A fourth collection of farming poems, Stubble Field, is due out from Silverfish Review Press, in May 2012.

Linda Andrews

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Asbury Park

 

Another day goes down
on the old house I am lucky
enough to live in. On the radio a voice
remembers a farm house and suddenly
I do too, a farm house where written words
had no taker, no easy place to pile in corners
or at the sides of beds. This was the place
of Russian grandparents who could neither
read nor write. How odd, now, to save
their house with words.

There’s the corner for the parakeet cage, hung tall
as from a floor lamp, fluttering racket, bird let loose
to flap in your hair. Long table for beer bottles,
pumpernickel bread, head cheese, duck’s blood
soup, horseradish. The kitchen burned with pepper.
Sun blaze of Michigan summer through
the tall windows. Beets from the garden,
bootlegger renter in the basement.

There’s the gas stove where my long hair caught fire.
First the burning smell, then the knowledge.
Hair singed, brittle, broken by the kitchen towel
my grandmother grabbed me with. Let loose
the bird. It never made a mess like this.

Or a mess like the day the bootlegger threw
the mash out in the yard where the ducks
found it, ate it, fell down drunk, were assumed
dead and plucked by my grandmother.
They woozed back to life about the time
grandpa came home, bleary from having
a few beers himself, and found the ducks naked,
curving through the yard.

Long before I came along, destined
to catch fire in the kitchen, my father shot
pheasants from the attic window, the same
attic where, on his way to being able
to fix anything, he took his mother’s sewing
machine apart, was spanked hard for his curiosity,
then he put it all back together and started
the treadle whirring for the next
twenty years. Out back along the tracks
in the tall weeds my 4’11” grandma once waited in the dark,
big stick in hand, waited for the man who said
her sons had stolen his apples. Watch him try
to get home, drunk as a duck, as she waylays him,
tells him don’t you ever say it again and he never does.

I have not abandoned this house, even after
I moved away, the grandparents died and the house
sold. It is mine, jealously, even after new people
bought it, burned it down for the insurance,
left it to become flame and fragment. It is mine,
obsessively. I’ll never let the bootlegger out of
the basement. I keep my grandmother always
climbing her footstool to reach the tall white cabinets.
My grandfather is forever walking home
along the railroad tracks that edge Asbury Park,
coal in his pockets, apples in his lunch pail,
suspenders carving an X into his back.

 

 

Linda Andrews’ poetry and stories have been featured in numerous journals and reviews including Calyx, Nimrod, Spindrift, Poetry Northwest, Crab Creek Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, CutBank, Willow Springs, Midwest Quarterly, Gadfly,and Seattle Review. A book of her poems, Escape of the Bird Women, was published by Blue Begonia Press in 1998 and received a Washington State Governor’s Writers Award the following year. She is the recipient of a Ucross Foundation Fellowship residency, an Artist Trust fellowship grant, a Vernon M. Spence Poetry Prize, and an Academy of American Poets Prize through the University of Washington. Andrews holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Michigan State University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Washington. For breadwinning purposes, she has worked as a speech writer, co-author and editor for non-profit health care executives in Seattle. In this capacity, she has been published in The New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Health Care Resources, American Pharmacy and others. She is currently on the faculty of Walla Walla Community College and teaches writing and literature.