Sarah Mangold

Posted on by
Reply

She has a gilt complex and a poison pen
………………….The night was like a moment added to the day. Signing his

name and forgetting his friends   like years going backwards to

the beginning of ambient textuality.

…………………Endless couplets and in the brilliant sunshine

the unchanging things began again. Non-pressure modalities.

The characters of the story were always tiresome. The administrative and

problematic heavy industry publications.

………………..The ideas   the wonderful quotations   if you looked closely

metadata containers   everybody knew. I’m reading a novel   I’m on an

architectural space. Dear Eve   Shakespeare is a sound.

………………….He was secretly interested in adventurers and adventuresses

the book in durational energy. Paid for does it make dinner

an uncomfortable domestic container. Before she finished the chapter

Miriam knew the position of each piece of furniture.

…………………The information on the surface was romantic and modular.

Every page a discrete unit absorbed in a massive amount of footnotes.

 

Sarah Mangold live in Edmonds, WA and is the recipient of 2013 NEA Poetry fellowship. Her first book, Household Mechanics (New Issues, 2002) was selected by C. D. Wright for the New Issues Poetry Prize. Her second book, Electrical Theories of Femininity (forthcoming, Pavement Saw Press) was selected for the Transcontinental Poetry Award. Her most recent chapbooks included Cupcake Royale (above/ground press), I Meant To Be Transparent (LRL e-edtions) and An Antenna Called the Body (Little Red Leaves Textile Editions). From 2002-2009 she edited Bird Dog, a print journal of innovative writing and art.

 

Jeffrey Morgan

Posted on by
Reply

The Rental

 

The stairs to the basement sound like an animal in another language.
I smell mold, but think about God and try to understand

His attention like a particle that might not exist.
Realtors have a way of speaking that means nothing

to me: proximity to transportation; square footage and usable space.
I step into the closet to be polite. I think it would be funny

to moan like a ghost, but don’t. I like the wastefulness of long hallways
on every floor, the new refrigerator’s virginal magnetism.

I feel obligated to flush each toilet.
She asks me what I do. She asks me if I have children.

I listen to water moving in the pipes and condense my face
in a way I hope conveys approval. She wonders what I’m holding together,

and I want to explain all the invisible forces.

 

 

“The Rental” is reprinted from Third Coast.

 

Jeffrey Morgan is the author of Crying Shame (Blazevox, 2011). Newer poems appear, or will soon, in Barrow Street, Bellevue Literary Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Pleiades, Diode, Third Coast, and West Branch, among others. He lives in Bellingham, WA and blogs very occasionally at Thinnimbus.tumblr.com.

Polly Buckingham

Posted on by
Reply

The Crone

I wake in a city.
Bodies cover the snowy streets.
The left-over

halves of people bend
their heads against dead chests.

An infection rages in my eyes.
I rest in complete dark.

My dead sister
sits at my bedside pushing

my hair from my face,
wiping my forehead with a dead
cloth.

I am a tree. I am a crone.
I stare into the flaring fire.

I stand in a basement
filled with brown water.

I meet my sister at a carnival.
We hold hands and run into the crowd.

I’m standing in a glass ball
filled with fog.

I turn and turn and turn.

 

“The Crone” is reprinted from Chattahoochee Review.

 

Polly Buckingham’s poems and stories appear in The New Orleans Review, The North American Review, The Tampa Review, (Pushcart nomination), Exquisite Corpse, The Literary Review, The Chattahoochee Review, The Potomac Review, Hubbub, The Moth and elsewhere.  She recently won the Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award and as a result has a fiction chapbook forthcoming from Hoopsnakes Press.  She was a finalist for Flannery O’Connor Award in 2011, 2012, and 2013.  Polly is founding editor of StringTown Press and teaches creative writing and literature at Eastern Washington University.

Thom Caraway

Posted on by
Reply

The Leper Attends the Idaho State Roadkill Fur Auction

 

Like mine, their removal
is detachment from
the body, ruined
but not too ruined.

I think about the men
who hustle the long roadwork
of Idaho, who have learned
the language of blood,
smeared down fifty yards
of highway—the parallel skid tracks
of the locked-up vehicle,
a body inside, a body outside—
those men whose job it is
to quantify the dead.

Love is not
the coexistence
of two alonenesses.

Like the roadkilled raccoons,
porcupines, deer, skunk,
the occasional bear, the coyote,
house cat, lost dog—
like all the other beloveds
lost on the back roads
of this terrible wilderness,
and like the men who
collect, strip, and scrape
the pelts, I would also
remove my skin if it meant
my permutation into the world.

 

“The Leper Attends the Idaho State Roadkill Fur Auction” is reprinted from Ruminate.

 

There was a time in his life when Thom Caraway wanted to be a truck driver. He still occasionally regrets his decision not to pursue that path, a regret that was inadvertently reinforced by his son, Sam, who recently said, “Bus drivers have the coolest jobs. Why aren’t you a bus driver?” Thom lives in Spokane, and does a variety of things that, to a six-year-old, are not as cool as driving a bus. (Though one might be: Thom has just been named Spokane’s inaugural Poet Laureate.)

 

Announcement

Posted on by
Reply

APPLICATIONS SOUGHT FOR 2014-16 WASHINGTON STATE POET LAUREATE
Submissions are due November 8, 2013

My appointment as Washington State Poet Laureate will conclude in February 2014. They’ve been the most gratifying two years of my working life.  My most wonderful sponsoring organizations, Humanities Washington and Arts WA, have just announced they are accepting applications for 2014 – 2016 Poet Laureate.

Please help me get the world out to interested and qualified poets in our state?  And quickly, as the deadline for submission is November 8! We have only just started to explore the possibilities of this role in our state’s poetry community. With each successive laureate we can stretch and redefine the position and expand public interest. Do you have a vision and meet the qualifications? Please consider applying! I am happy to answer any questions you have about the position: feel free to drop me a line at poet@humanities.org.  Kathleen Flenniken

 

Aaron Counts

Posted on by
Reply

Becoming Iron

High above the hustle
of the Brownville Projects,
bullies find Mike’s solace:
a rooftop walk-in filled with
pigeons named for boxing greats.
In his hands, Mike cradles
his prize racer, Mongoose,
cooing as the bird pecks
seed from his lips.

Lemme hold it,
the big guy says, and wrenches
Mongoose from Mike’s chubby
fists. The sidekick chuckles
and the bullies pass the bird back
and forth, take turns pushing
Mike away, laugh as he pleads
with them to thtop it.

Mike almost holds in his squeal
as they pop the head off Mongoose,
twisting its cap as easy
as opening a soda bottle.
The big bully shoves
Mike back in the coop,
then throws the limp bird at his soft
chest and walks away smiling.

When they’re gone, Mike raises
his arms; palms open like he’s addressing
his congregation, and commands
the other birds out of the coop.
Feathers flutter in the air like dirty
snow, and Mike slumps
against the back wall, crying. He wipes
his nose on his sleeve and vows
to take the head off every fool
that tests him.

He’ll start with the tips of their ears.

 

 

Aaron Counts has written and read with professors, prisoners, high school dropouts and national book award winners. He is a teaching artist with Seattle’s Writers-in-the-Schools program, and his non-fiction book, Reclaiming Black Manhood, has been taught in area jails, prisons and juvenile detention facilities. He holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia.

Julene Tripp Weaver

Posted on by
1

Face to Face with Audre Lorde

 

……..What is it you want? She asks. She
looks at me across her desk, her dark brown eyes
deep set. I st, stam, stamm….mmer and pout—
she, so full of powerful words—what do I want
but a life of meaning and telling.

……..I don’t know, honest my answer. She tells me,
go jogging, do something, anything, to move into yourself.
I know there is no perfect answer, no plan, to make life
come together well. The masters lived, went jogging even,
stumbled poorly city to city, traveled wide breached plains
to get where they’ve been.

……..Audre crosses her desk and hugs me. But,
the best thing she ever did? Throw that poem back at me,
ask, How old are you? Cowering in my chair I stammer,
Thirty-two. In her booming voice she declares,
Thirty-two, you have more experience in life than this—rewrite,
she throws back my measly attempt at a poem. Huh!?
The word inscribed.

……..Cold honest mother love. Her quest—How
does it make you feel? The response she demands
to every poem. My shock to feel! Long history of denial
suppressed grief my main reason to write—move this grief
from the deep down stuck place it hides in an inner
box wrapped, hidden even from myself. Her tough words
push all of us, I will not be here someday, you must learn
to carry on without me.

…………….Thank you for your push. The grains of sand
in my underwear uncomfortable and humbling to shake out
in front of you. All my excellent mistakes. This gratitude
comes deep from the yet closed boxes wanting and afraid.
Sharp-leaved grasses cut, the words said to me by Audre
shearing open the boxes. Her questions echo, strong internal
probes, the way I’ve learned to gauge my life.

 

“Face to Face with Audre Lorde” is reprinted from The Arabesques Review.

 

Julene Tripp Weaver has a private counseling practice in the Ravenna neighborhood of Seattle. Her book, No Father Can Save Her was published by Plain View Press. She is widely published in journals, and anthologies, a few include Qarrtsiluni, Drash, Menacing Hedge, Gutter Eloquence, Redheaded Stepchild, and Pilgrimage; her work is included in Garrison Keillor’s collection, Good Poems American Places. Her chapbook, Case Walking: An AIDS Case Manager Wails Her Blues, contains writing from her work through the heart of the AIDS epidemic. She sometimes does wordplay on Twitter @trippweavepoet and has a website: www.julenetrippweaver.com.

 

Jeffrey G. Dodd

Posted on by
1

And

 

The day my sister’s cancer staked its claim
I learned that Milosz left Harry Potter
on his desk when he died, his letters
from the pope piling up in his mailbox.
And what letters. Two old Poles talking life:
“Ah Czeslaw,” says the pope, “I’m just the grease.
You’ll have to talk to the wheels.” No one knows
the question, but this is a pope I can
get behind. Humble. Humorous. Infallible.
And I think of me and the pope: he’ll let me
call him Karol as he tours me through
the Vatican, and we’ll send papal envoys
for pizza, and on his day off we’ll visit
the Fiat factory in Turin, stick our fingers
in mounds of fresh ground pork at a local
grocery store, and he’ll teach me the Polish
folk tunes sung before the war. And I’ll get
to a Mass or two in Latin or Italian,
and late one night I’ll find decorum
and a minute to ask the question I came
all this way to resolve: the thing about
my sister. And you know the thing he’ll say
about my sister, about the angel on his right
and the grim believability of it all.

 

“And” is reprinted from Santa Clara Review.

 

Rylie Dodd buys cowboy shirts for her husband Jeffrey G. Dodd. The couple lives in Spokane, WA, but he’s from southeast Texas and sometimes needs his homesickness eased. Plus, the little pearlescent snaps are so crisp and tactile. Someday, she thinks, he’ll write a poem about them. The snaps, not the shirts. She’ll be featured prominently. Like his other poems, it may be published in journals such as Ruminate, Rock & Sling, Copper Nickel, and Meridian. She doesn’t tell him this; he doesn’t need the ego boost.

Emily Bedard

Posted on by
Reply

Loss

 

Remember the time you announced
that you were no longer going to clean
your ear wax out, that you were, at last,
going to trust your ears to do their job
the way the Good Lord had intended,
which would have been easier to commit to
had you actually believed in God,
though sometimes grand gestures require
grand sacrifices, in this case your atheism,
which you sort of just wiped off yourself
with a mental swab and tossed out
the window of our conversation? At first
nothing was different. You were the same guy
with the same ears, a little mashed maybe,
but well formed, and the same hearing,
fond of the black-capped chickadees outside
our window in the early morning and the children
doing their Uncle Murray voices as they ran
through the sprinkler and the obscure radio shows
you found on the dial late at night by yourself.

………………….But gradually, by spring maybe,
the accumulation had begun to take hold
and you missed little snippets of conversation
around you, you looked in wonder at the patterns
of intricate feathers on the tiny gray wings,
undistracted by song. You had a look of half
amazement and half despair as the burbling,
clicking, rustling world fell away behind the wall
of silent wax in your head. We spoke to your face,
we raised our voices, but you just stared
at our mouths opening and shutting like fishes
gulping the wrong kind of air. And when
the muffling was complete, when your two ears
like tender contoured shells on the sides of your head
had fully erected a fortress of quiet, you just swam
alone in there in circles, listening to
the whispers of a God you had never believed in.

 
 

Emily Bedard writes poetry, fiction, and collaborative screenplays with her sister, Bridget Bedard. She has an M.F.A. from the University of Montana and lives in Seattle, where she teaches for Richard Hugo House, Seattle Arts & Lectures, and the Henry Art Gallery. Currently, Bedard is working on a new collection of poems, a novel, and a group of memoir-ish essays, all at the same time.

Sean Bentley

Posted on by
Reply

Cathedral

The cathedral was swathed in scrims
and scaffolding; sandblasters scoured
off the grime of the century.
We’d found the door like the loose
end of a bandage to begin the unraveling.

Now from the observation deck halfway up St. Paul’s,
from which London flowed
lava-like in all directions, sun-shot
and hazy, we spiraled down hardwood steps,
537, like maple seedlings toward terra firma,
past grafittoed names knifed into stucco
two, three hundred years ago,
stairs buffed, darkened, eroded
by generations of feet, the pious or curious.

Through occasional windows like arrow slits
the city revealed itself but we were encased
in the entrails of history. We continued
to the crypt, cool and oddly
bright to help us see the residents
beneath, behind, stone slabs incised
with names and dates like the walls,
with lore, with epitaphs. Henry Moore,
his plaque as angled and unMoore-like
as the rest, Samuel Johnson, Bulwer-
Lytton, the great Turner at our feet
and back, and back, to Blake,
bust black, globe-pated and pugnacious.

Until well warmed, parched, awed,
we gravitated to the crypt café
where across from the tea dispenser
a great placard served as tombstone
for those who’d lain here before the first
cathedral fell in the Great Fire.
Including–holy crow!–King Ethelred,
died 1016. It sank in
as we chewed our sandwiches, absorbing
the ancient holy space transmogrified

to museum. We bought our postcards
and replicas of Roman coins and exited
into the blast of summer London, the stink
of tourist buses. The priest intoned
as the door shut
about this week’s Iraqi deaths, the Sudanese,
the war, wars, never far despite the lessons
we should have learned since Ethelred ruled.

We wished for peace, change
as incremental, imperceptible as the bending
of all those sturdy stairs to the persistent
will of foot after foot after patient foot.

 

Sean Bentley is currently focusing on photography, as well as nonfiction. But it’s probably just a phase. He is the son of Nelson and Beth Bentley, and born in Seattle.  He was coeditor of Fine Madness magazine from 1984 to 2006, and is president 1998-2000 of Friends of Nelson Bentley. Visit the web site for a list of Sean Bentley’s publications, sample poetry and fiction, etc. He lives in Bellevue and works as a technical writer for Tyler Technology. Sean Bentley’s poetry collections include: Grace & Desolation: New Poems (Cune Press, 1996),  Instances: Poems (Confluence Press, 1979), and Into the Bright Oasis (Jawbone Press, 1976).