Maureen McQuerry

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Shapeshifter

 

There is a moment
when the creature seems to disappear.
Nothing remains, but a quivering
in the air, the invisible finger
that runs your ridge of spine.

My students ask if it hurts
to become another. We’ve read
the stories of humans furred,
flesh erupting to wings, or scales,
gill-gasp of transformation.

I tell them some are stories of pursuit,
a dove answered with a hawk,
a hare with greyhound as reply.
Pursuer and pursued, their deft dance
that ended once with a grain of corn,
swallowed by a hen who birthed
the storyteller, Taliesin.

But what the students want to know is pain.
That remembered moment when
quills pierce skin, fingernails bleed
to claws. Beyond the window
winter’s first kiss startles the grass with frost.

I tell them yes,
there is always pain at birth or when
our tent of flesh opens
like a door to the sky,
and something more, you must
lean close to hear
the single note of joy.

 

Maureen McQuerry is a Young Adult novelist, poet and teacher. The Peculiars, her YA Steampunk novel, debuts in May with Abrams/Amulet followed by Beyond the Door and Time Out of Time. She is also the author of two non-fiction books: Nuclear Legacy and Student Inquiry. Her poetry has been published in many literary journals including Smartish Pace, Quidditty and The Southern Review. Her chapbook Relentless Light was the winner of the New Eden Chapbook award. Maureen teaches writing at Columbia Basin College and lives with her family in Richland, Washington. “Shapeshifter” originally appeared in Endicott Review.

Dennis Caswell

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Kandinsky: Composition 8, 1923

 

An explosion in Stravinsky’s robot workshop:
now poor Igor will never complete
his troupe of clockwork dancers, which,
judging from this jagged blast
of armatures, sprockets, escapements and flanges,
would have looked less like metal humans
than graceful assemblies of drafting supplies:
jeté of dividers, pas de bourrée
of mechanical pencils and pantographs.
This watchmaker’s orgasm, this architectural plan
for the Church of Dissonant Space Flight,
these mad extrusions and stampings and lathe-spun
lenses perform the airborne metal music
of migrating mathematics, honking along the flyways
of a just-manufactured heaven, a heaven
where twentieth-century robots can dance,
can fly, can worship
the innards that make them tick.

 

Dennis Caswell lives outside Woodinville, Washington and works as a software engineer in the aviation industry. Before that, he designed and programmed computer games and educational software. His work has appeared in Floating Bridge Review, Crab Creek Review, Burnside Review, Vain, and assorted other journals and anthologies.

 

Timothy Kelly

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S/P CVA LEFT
HEMIPARESIS

 

The stroke has left her listing
left, her left limbs lagging, and
we are trying to walk ten short
feet without her walker, using
an aluminum quad cane instead,
a new concept, and directing
her straight into a mirror so she
can appreciate the asymmetries
of her gait, and be cued to look
ahead instead of irremediably
at the floor. She remembers
nothing since the firemen and
the ambulance; a month lost
so far, though her speech and
vision are mercifully unaffected
by her peculiar, sequestered,
arguably lucky, anatomically,
bleed. At the mirror, she looks
at me standing behind her,
my right hand wrapped in her
belt. I say Bend your left knee,
Mrs. Davis, and she says, left
eyelid drooping, left side of her
mouth skewing down, You
wouldn’t know it now, but I
was beautiful once. Men came
from Fort Lewis Sundays when
I was 17 to watch me swan out
of First Baptist. She laughs and
I laugh, then she tears up, and I
say Can you bend your left knee,
Mrs. Beautiful? and she says
You about useless, boy. And
I say Yes, ma’am. True truth.
But happiness is fitful, don’t you
find? A flitting wren in a lilac
glides down, lights on your knee.
The left. This. Can you bend it?

 

Timothy Kelly holds Master’s Degrees in Physical Therapy from the University of Washington, and in Fine Arts/Creative Writing from Boston University. Since 1982, he’s worked in Olympia, WA as a Physical Therapist. He’s published three collections of poetry: Articulation, published by Lynx House Press, won the King County Arts Commission Publication Award in 1992; Stronger, from Oberlin College Press, won the 1999 Field Poetry Prize; and The Extremities, published by Oberlin College Press in 2008. Toccata and Fugue, published by Floating Bridge Press, won the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award in 2005.

Elizabeth Austen

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The Girl Who Goes Alone

 

Here’s the thing about being a girl
and wanting to play outside.
All the grown-ups grind it into you from the get go:
girls outside aren’t safe.
The guy in the car? If he rolls down the window and leans
his head out, run
because the best you can hope for is a catcall, and at worst
you’ll wind up with your face on the side of a milk carton.

Even when you’re a grownup girl, your father—because
he loves you—
will send you a four-page article about how to protect yourself
while standing at the ATM, while travelling unescorted, while
jogging solo,
an article informing you how to distinguish phony police
and avoid purse snatchers, pickpockets, rapists, and thugs.

Tell someone you’re going into the woods alone
and they’ll story your head with trailside cougar attacks,
cave dwelling misogynists, lightning strikes, forest fires,
flash floods,
and psychopaths with a sixth sense for a woman alone in a tent.

To be a girl alone in the wilderness is to know
that if something goes wrong—
you picked the trailhead where the ax murderer lurks
or the valley of girl-eating gophers—
if you don’t come home intact, the mourning
will be mixed with I-told-you-sos
from everyone whose idea of camping involves an RV
or a Motel 6.
The message is clear: Girls must be chaperoned.

So, when, at the end of the day, you zip up the tent
and lie back in your sleeping bag,
fleece jacket bundled into a lumpy pillow under your head,
the second you close your eyes every least night noise
is instantly magnified.

You lie there and consider the pungent heft of menstrual blood,
how even your sweat is muskier, louder, when you’re bleeding.
Not hard to imagine its animal allure—every bear
for miles around sniffing you on the night wind.

You lie there, listening, running a mental inventory of any
potentially scented item—
did every one make it into the food bag hung from a tree?
Toothpaste, trailmix, chapstick, sunscreen—fuck.
Sunscreen still in your pack, nestled right beside you
where Outdoor Man used to sleep. So you’re up, out of the tent
headlamp casting its too-bright spotlight, darkening the dark
outside its reach
as you lower the bag, shove the sunscreen in, hoist and tie.

Far enough from the ground to elude the bears?
Far enough along the branch to thwart raccoons?
Tree far enough from the tent to keep from signaling
the proximity of ground-level, girl-shaped snacks?

You go alone—in part—to prove that though Outdoor Man
has left you
his body is the only geography he can deprive you of.
He can give his muscled calves and thighs, his shoulders, chest,
and hands
to another woman, but not the Sauk River old growth,
snow fields of Rainier, sea stacks of Shi Shi.

He can keep you from the sweet, blood-thrilling hum
of his body, but not the sweaty, blood-thumping
pleasure of a hard-earned panoramic view or high altitude
starlight.

The thing about being a girl who goes alone, who goes
again and again, is that it freaks
the potential next boyfriend. He doesn’t want
to be out machoed and he doesn’t want to admit it
and he hopes you can’t tell. The thing
about being the girl who still goes alone is that it proves
you don’t need him and no matter how you show him you
want him
it’s not the same
and you both know it.

Zipped back into the tent you remind yourself you’ve never
really been in danger.
When have you ever been in danger? Well there was that boy,
but years ago
a teenager like you, driving around bored and pissed
at the world, his BB gun and his father’s two rifles
on the seat beside him. Lucky you.
The gun he leveled on the window ledge
lodged nothing more than a BB in your thigh.

The thing about being a girl alone in the woods is
you know too much
about the grain of truth in the warnings.

Even if you seem impervious, weird good luck leaving you
so far unscathed
you know the other girls’ stories—your sister
date raped after a party in college, a friend
raped by a stranger at knife-point, the two women
shot on the Pinnacle Lake trail, the singer
killed by coyotes in Nova Scotia.

The thing
about being a girl
who goes alone
is that you feel like you shouldn’t go
if you’re afraid. If you go it should mean you’re not afraid,
that you’re never afraid. Your friends will think that you go
unafraid.

This girl
who goes alone
is always afraid, always negotiating to keep the voices
in her head at a manageable pitch of hysteria.

I go knowing that there will be a moment—maybe
long moments, maybe
hours of them, maybe the whole trip—
when I curse myself for going alone.
When I lie in the tent and all I am is fear.

I walk into the wilderness alone
because the animal in me needs to fill her nose
with the scent of stone and lichen,
ocean salt and pine forest warming in early sun.

I walk in the wilderness alone so I can hear myself.
So I can feel real to myself.

I go because I know I’m lucky to have a car, gas money, days off
the back and legs and appetite
to take me there.
I go while I still can.

The girl who goes alone
claims for herself
the madrona      juniper     daybreak.

She claims hemlock    prairie    falcon    nightfall
nurse    log    sea star    glacial moraine
huckleberry    trillium     salal
snowmelt    avalanche lily    waterfall
birdsong    limestone    granite    moonlight    schist
cirque     saddle    summit     ocean
she claims the curve of the earth.

The girl who goes alone says with her body
the world is worth the risk.

 

 

Elizabeth Austen is the author of Every Dress a Decision (Blue Begonia Press, 2011), and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Goes Alone (Floating Bridge Press, 2010) and Where Currents Meet (one of four winners of the 2010 Toadlily Press chapbook award and part of the quartet Sightline). Her poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily, in journals including the Los Angeles Review, Bellingham Review and Willow Springs, and in anthologies including A Face to Meet the Faces and Poets Against the War. She served as the Washington state “roadshow poet” and is the literary producer for KUOW 94.9 public radio in Seattle.

Georgia Stewart McDade

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The Way Some of Us Are

 

Carver’s knife found shut, said The Times.
No exclamation necessary.
A period is all there is.
No one knows how not surprised
many folks are.
A human being shot, killed another human
being.
That’s the truth, the fact.
That one human being is white and the other a
Native American is a fact and often a
problem.
The former is a policeman; the latter a carver.
Too often that is a problem.
I submit that if both had looked at each other as
human beings there would’ve been no
killing.
I submit that the white policeman saw red long
before he saw human being.
I submit that many policemen often see a color
before they see a person.
I submit much of the policeman’s culture says
beware of people of color, the darker they,
the more careful you.
I submit the policeman believed he was in
danger though he with his gun was
not close enough to see a closed knife.

And I submit, diminished mental state
notwithstanding, Mr. Williams knew much
of this and chose to risk being himself.

No doubt there is sorrow; there should be.
But absolutely no amount of sorrow nor
anything else, nothing will bring back Mr.
John T. Williams.

Of course, policemen do not want to be killed.
Of course, they must protect themselves.
But as long as they serve a populace they fear,
we can count on too many of them
stomping, beating, and shooting, killing
too—acting and then asking questions.
The cold-blooded killings of their comrades
doubtlessly makes them more guarded.
Until policemen know more of the folks they are
guarding we can expect them to feel justified
in their actions despite being deadly wrong.

 

 

Georgia Stewart McDade, a Louisiana native who’s lived in Seattle more than half her life, loves reading and writing. Most of her career was spent teaching. The African-American Writers’ Alliance member has been reading her stories and poetry in public since 1991. McDade conducts writing workshops usually emphasizing theorizing, organizing, analyzing, and synthesizing. Her works are in anthologies I Wonder as I Wander, Gifted Voices, Words? Words! Words, and Threads. Travel Tips for Dream Trips, questions and answers about her six-month, solo trip around the world and Outside the Cave, poetry, are major components of her portfolio.

Molly Tenenbaum

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Apple Ladder

 

Slimmer than
a lancet arch,
ascending scant,
tapering, then
just air; and lovely
leaning in trees,
lovely leaning
bare by the house,
rungs and clapboards
aligned, side rails
tense with upwardness,
the stronger across
the more the green
wood dries.

And so our grasp
of all, our reach
to gather, climb
to view, our stand
above the orchardslope
could be as lovely,
twined in leaves,
contained as ladders
in themselves,
and light
as ladderwood.

As if, though slung
with heavy sack,
we pause, don’t ache
to put it down,
or press for more,
but stand half-high,
our footings half-
obscured by grass,
at our cheeks
half-shaded curves
of fruit, above
our heads, ripe sun,
and crowns of more fruit hanging.

 

 

Molly Tenenbaum’s three poetry collections are The Cupboard Artist (recently released from Floating Bridge Press), Now (Bear Star Press, 2007) and By a Thread (Van West & Co, 2000),which includes the poem “Apple Ladder.” She is also the author of three chapbooks: Blue Willow (Floating Bridge Press 1998), Old Voile (New Michigan Press), and Story (Cash Machine, 2006). Her work appears in many journals, and her honors include a Hedgebrook residency and a 2009 Washington State Artist Trust Fellowship. She’s also a musician, playing Appalachian string band music; her CDs are Instead of a Pony and Goose & Gander.

Joseph Green

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Jesus, Charles Manson

 

That hair, he said. That hair
and that beard and that look
in your eye, he said. That hair
and that trash on your tongue
and that beard and those jeans,
he said. I wonder what you think
I see when I see you, he said,
with that hair and that beard
and that look in your eye and
those filthy jeans and that trash
on your tongue, and by now
he was shouting, that greasy hair
and that beard and those filthy jeans
I mean Jesus, he said, you look like
Charles Manson with that greasy hair
and that beard and that look in your eye
and those trashy jeans and that
filth on your tongue and that look
and that trash and that filth
and that hair and that beard
and those jeans I mean Jesus.
He said, I mean Jesus.

 

 

Many of Joseph Green’s poems have been collected in His Inadequate Vocabulary (1986), Deluxe Motel (1991), Greatest Hits 1975-2000 (2001), and The End of Forgiveness (2001). “Jesus, Charles Manson” is from his new collection, That Thread Still Connecting Us (2012). At the Peasandcues Press, he produces limited-edition, letterpress-printed poetry broadsides, using hand-set metal type; and at the C.C. Stern Type Foundry, in Portland, he is part of a team working to preserve the craft of casting the type itself. He lives in Longview, where he retired from teaching in his twenty-fifth year at Lower Columbia College.

Christopher Howell

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Dinner Out

 

We went to either the Canton Grill
or the Chinese Village, both of them
on 82nd among the car lots
and discount stores and small nests
of people waiting hopelessly
for the bus. I preferred the Canton
for its black and bright red sign
with the dragon leaping out of it
sneezing little pillows of smoke.
And inside, the beautiful green
half-shell booths, glittery brass encrusted
lamps swinging above them.

What would I have?
Sweet and sour?
Chow mein with little wagon wheel shaped
slices of okra and those crinkly noodles
my father called deep fried worms?
Fried rice?

Among such succulence, what did it matter?
We could eat ‘til we were glad and full, the whole
family sighing with the pleasure of it.
And then the tea!
All of this for about six bucks, total,
my father, for that once-in-a-while, feeling
flush in the glow of our happy faces
and asking me, “How you doing, son?”

Fine, Dad. Great, really, in the light
of that place, almost tasting
the salt and bean paste and molasses, nearly
hearing the sound of the car door
opening before we climbed in together
and drove and drove
though we hadn’t far to go.

 

Christopher Howell has published ten collections of poems, most recently Gaze (Milkweed Editions, 2012), and Dreamless and Possible: poems New & Selected (University of Washington Press, 2010). He has received three Pushcart Prizes, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a fellowship from the Washington Artist Trust. He has also been honored with the Stanley W. Lindberg Award for Editorial Excellence, and has twice won the Washington State Book Award. Since 1996 he has taught at Eastern Washington University’s Inland NW Center for Writers. He lives in Spokane.

Announcements

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  • Elizabeth Austen is teaching Poetry: The Practice of Revision. Wednesdays from 7 to 9p March 14 to May 23 (no class May 16). Registration is open online at Richard Hugo House, Seattle, or via phone at (206) 322-7030. $360 general public/$324 Hugo House members.

 

  • Monica Schley, harp and poetry
    appears MARCH 9 at Bellevue Art Museum’s member’s celebration 6:30-8:00
    Price is free with museum membership OR sign up to join as a member that night
    followed by BAMignite: Meditation Rave (starting at 8:00)
    and MARCH 22 as part of FogDog Gallery‘s bi-monthly poetry series in downtown Arlington 7:00pm

 

  • Reading for Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo
    7 p.m. Tuesday, March 20, Seattle Central Library, Level 4, Room 1

 

  • The Believer just published Doug Nufer’s self-interview on their log/ logger blog.

 


Holly Hughes

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The Bath

 

The tub fills inch by inch,
as I kneel beside it, trail my fingers
in the bright braid of water.
Mom perches on the toilet seat,
entranced by the ritual until
she realizes the bath’s for her.
Oh no, she says, drawing her
three layers of shirts to her chest,
crossing her arms and legs.
Oh no, I couldn’t, she repeats,
brow furrowing, that look I now
recognize like an approaching squall.
I abandon reason, the hygiene argument,
promise a Hershey’s bar, if she will just,
please, take off her clothes. Oh no,
she repeats, her voice rising.
Meanwhile, the water is cooling.
I strip off my clothes, step into it,
let the warm water take me
completely, slipping down until
only my face shines up, a moon mask.
Mom stays with me, interested now
in this turn of events. I sit up.
Will you wash my back, Mom?
So much gone, but let this
still be there. She bends over
to dip the washcloth in the still
warm water, squeezes it,
lets it dribble down my back,
leans over to rub the butter pat
of soap, swiping each armpit,
then rinses off the suds with long
practiced strokes. I turn around
to thank her, catch her smiling,
lips pursed, humming,
still a mother with a daughter
whose back needs washing.

 

 

Holly J. Hughes is the editor of the award-winning anthology, Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease, published by Kent State University Press and the author of Boxing the Compass, published by Floating Bridge Press. Nominated for several Pushcart prizes, her poems and essays have appeared in many anthologies. The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World, a collaboration with essayist Brenda Miller, is forthcoming from Skinner House Press. A graduate of Pacific Lutheran University’s MFA program, she has taught writing workshops at Fishtrap, North Cascades Institute, Edmonds Write on the Sound, Rainier Writers Workshop and Field’s End, among others.