Category: About the Journal

thirteen ways of looking at a pelican (4 – 5)

by Louis Moreno

by shaindel beers



4.

The young man and his friends float the river
the Fourth of July
		                 Downstream are parade
sounds    neighing of horses     marching bands 
salvos of gunfire
		         
Here, there is only the river	soft lap of water
against the inner tube

			            The peace only occasionally
interrupted by an Oh shit! when a raft scuffs a rock
gets hung up on a branch

	     Miraculously, the pelicans sit still on the rocks
inspecting from ice blue eyes on either side of long beaks

		        Their heads tilt this way and that
but otherwise they are unmoved by these creatures

the only ones larger than they who float downstream
	    The young man has the odd feeling he has never
been so close to another breathing thing

He looks into the ice blue of the pelican’s eye as he floats
	    by     thinks of the day his eye drew this much
		        attention	      Hiding under the bill of his cap

eye surrounded by magenta bruise, fidgeting to the rhythm
of fluorescent light flicker 	the professor asking

	   My God, what happened?

He recalls the feel of the lie slipping out of his mouth

	    A baseball I didn’t catch

5.

We come home with the groceries, and I see
the slow V of pelicans floating over the neighborhood
try to tell if they are tracing the river.

I’ve heard they are one of the few bird species
that fly “for fun.” I wonder what that means,
try to imagine what it must feel like

to soar on thermals for up to fifteen miles
without flapping a wing, to climb the pillows
of hot air, drop down into coolness

to gain speed. This is called dynamic soaring.
I didn’t used to be so fascinated by anything
but now, I pull out my phone, try to record them.

They are immortalized as radar blips over
my neighbors’ chimney; in the background
my dog barks, my son is excited to be allowed

to run to the porch by himself. How could anything
be so effortless? I wonder what I might miss
if I were afforded their abilities, their innate sense

of measuring air temperature through their nostrils,
of spotting a single fish from sixty feet above water—
All I can imagine missing is the grey house

with its hot pink door which I drive by every day.

thirteen ways of looking at a pelican (1 – 3)

by Louis Moreno

by shaindel beers

1.

The lone pelican in the reeds
of river’s edge seemed odd.
I stopped—watched—
did nothing.

Later in the paper the story
of its broken wing,
likely caused
by flying into a wire.

That it would probably be
euthanized. When you see
a pelican alone, it usually
means something is wrong,
said the wildlife expert.

My self-doubt that kept me
from calling. Did I cause that pelican
more hours of suffering
or gift it a few more hours
of floating in the reeds,
a little while longer to bob
in the gentle current,
the coolness of water over webbed feet?

Forgive me, pelican. I also, am always alone,
also fly too recklessly for my own good.
 

2.

When I told you about the pelican—
that I thought I should have called someone.

You said, That’s your problem. You always
doubt your instincts.

As a woman, I’ve been taught to ignore
connections. The ones between myself

and the moon, the tides
internal and external.

The way the pelican and I
for an instant

were one.
 

3.

The pelicans sit on the rocks preening,
a section of concert violinists bowing

apricot bills against snow velvet down
of breast. I wonder if they can hear

the friction of their surfaces one against
the other. If there is a making of music

out of their bodies. I remember them
later when the photographer says,

When you touch yourself,
when your fingers skim

the hollow between throat and clavicle
you are telling the viewer, Oh, my skin

is so soft, don’t you wish you could
touch it?

the three-body problem

by Louis Moreno

by diane raptosh



               Solutions to the three-body problem may be of an arbitrary
complexity and are very far from being completely understood.  –Scholarpedia


i) Periodic Systems of Astronomical Interest

Like some Carica papayas, George Washington had the XXY condition. He
pointed out that he was statuesque, had no kids but rather broad hips,
a size 13 boot, and a fondness for swatches of calico. He liked to rub
and compare them, to watch them through moon-mote, to flutter and twirl
them in horseshoe orbits. He powdered his red-brown hair and tied it in
a braid down his back like a small mane. When George was elected, a
czarina reigned in Russia, a shogun lorded over Japan. Only the office
of President endures. In this case we can ignore the influence of the
light body on the other spheres. For assurance, Washington carried a
pocket sundial wherever he went. He bred hound dogs he named Tarter,
True Love, and Sweet Lips. He would spell words like blue as
blew, oil as oyl, and eie for an eye. The six white horses in Washington's
stables had their teeth brushed every morning. Washington's orders. As
can be seen, the three-body problem—its four degrees of freedom—offers
myriad options for public service.


ii) Without Loss of Generality, We Consider the Three-Body Problem on a Plane

                                                                         Three healthy male volunteers
in their 20s were placed bare-chested in front of cameras in light-tight rooms
for 20 minutes every three hours from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. for three days.
Researchers watched body-gleam spool through the dark. “If you see the
sheen from the surface of three bodies, you can see the whole body condition,"
states researcher Etsuko Kobayashi from Kyoto U.


iii) Three Bodies of Equal Mass Follow Each Other at Uniform Spacing

If there was a drowning in the River Rappahannock, her mother would

note how that was the third in a series, even if it was not, or how there

would be a third drowning if two had taken place within the past six years.


iv) Celestial Mechanics

Her boyfriend is the mother of her child.


v) Two Bodies Move Closely Round Each Other and Around a Third Body Far Away

The oil-black aril-covered seeds in the papaya’s core, which smack 
of nasturtiums, have contraceptive effects in adult male langur monkeys

and handpicked blue-green eyed persons . . . .

 

“The Three-Body Problem” was first published in The Prose Poem Project, Fall 2010

rugged western individualism

by Louis Moreno

by diane raptosh

A man who is his own wife gives birth to his identical twin through his belly button. For months, he thinks it’s a cyst. Fistula. Ingrown hair. A fir tree germinating in his spleen. He father-mothers this shriven boy, fine and tiny as walnut lung. With equal parts sweetmeats and a firm touch, he bathes this baby in a small green bowl—that wee, webbed blood of living kin. Nights, the man daubs his chafed nipples with tea bags and lays a wet cloth on his eyes. He tugs at the far left swirl of his mustache. He sometimes wonders out loud: Am I famished? Is this fullness? When he kisses his own hand, his wife strokes his cheek.

 

“Rugged Western Individualism” was first published in The Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets (2013)

survey crew

by Louis Moreno

by lesley-anne evans

Shock was not
canvas tents strung along
the shore of Lake Superior rather than sleazy
shag-carpeted motel rooms south of Marathon
no.

Shock was not flying clear dome bell chopper
black fly and bear territory
land-on-a-dime river side
in the middle of the God-forsaken-wilderness
or God’s country depending on how you look at it
no.

Shock was not watching Roy walk pissed off
straight into the bush for a three hour no map
bush-whack straight back to camp
to roll cigarettes
and hork into a smoldering fire
no.

Not night sky infinity
pin pricks bleeding out heaven
not silent adrenaline
pregnant pause voids
not hard luck off rez boys
drunk fireside fights
no.

Shock was
axe clean cut through boot and bone and
big Dan felled like a lodgepole, you pinned
like a bug to the forest floor.

 

“Survey Crew” was first published in The Antigonish Review Issue #177

pacific chorus

by Louis Moreno

by lesley-anne evans



June hangs humid, and Spring Peepers 
call their lungs out just beyond 
the pasture fence. They are a wall 
of sound, a wave of mud dwellers 
all spit and polish in a lovestruck serenade
around the neighbour’s pond. 
  
Pacific Chorus of a thousand perfect pitch
and all for some lithe gal the next field over,
an unsuspecting young thing in a hot chase 
of the more and less suited. She’s empty bellied
and he’s thinking she’s a dish 
best served soon, riparian delight.

She waits at a meadow edge, held by voices 
vying for her and her sisters. All she needs
is a moments peace, hush 
in the dark, to consider if a mass of eggs 
between her legs 
is what she really longs for - with the moon ball 
suspending time, a woodland 
of knowing eyes, skunk cabbage 
unfolding herself, and the pond abuzz 
with fairy moth, mayfly, and water strider.

His green question lingers like eighth notes 
on the stave of her skin,

					dolce 
					delicato 
					dolchissimo 

the repetitious nature of hunger.

and so it goes

by Louis Moreno

by lesley-anne evans



A resident must ensure that no air conditioning units, laundry, flags, clothing, bedding
or other articles are hung or displayed from windows, balconies or other parts
of the building so that they are visible from outside of the building.

Let’s imagine she hauls the basket up the iron steps around back 
and hangs the socks, toe first. Next the shirts, always upside down, 
measuring out the pegs and their double duty, one shirt holding
hands with the next, grasping the next. This pattern 
of one of these things is just like the other, over and over 
along parallel lines, swung over the garden 
where strawberries promise jam in matching jars 
when she gets to it later. Pillowcase and towel flags 
celebrate morning and the sun bleached fresh they’ll share come dark.

“Works and Services” includes highways, sidewalks, boulevards, boulevard
crossings, transit bays, street lighting, wiring, water distribution systems,
fire hydrant systems, sewage collection and disposal systems, drainage collection
and disposal systems and such other infrastructure or systems as may be provided
within the City from time to time.

Let’s say we’re with him in the drive shed tinkering, oil under his nails 
and it won’t wash out. He’s staked the tomatoes, harvest is heavy 
this year. His brother’s coming to take steers from their mothers 
and move them up the east field, their wet noses meet him at the fence 
each morning he puts down alfalfa. They question his intent,
but no use working himself up when the south gate needs mending
and cherries are due for spray. Each day has work enough of its own. 

The Noise Control Bylaw regulates or prohibits the making of
objectionable noise within the City of Kelowna that may disturb the quiet or
enjoyment of other individuals. Objectionable noises include playing radios
and stereos at high volume, or keeping animals or birds which by their noise
unduly disturbs the surrounding neighbourhood.

Let’s picture Sunday afternoon and they’re all there, blankets 
spread on the grass, boy cousins playing stick ball, girls all whispers 
and giggles. He looks at her sitting across from him, remembers
how she planted whips in the fields alongside the men. How her mouth 
is a rose opening, her legs summer gold and capable of carrying them 
well through winter. He bites into his pie, Macintosh, cinnamon,
pastry flakes on his tongue, the flavour of what the land gives
and what it withholds. She leans over, her finger to his mouth 
returns to hers. A taste of him and the pie, that sweetness 
taken in, as she will welcome his body 
in, their harvest in a small house 
by the side of a gravel road.

“Parcel” means any lot, block, or other area in which land is held or into
which land is subdivided, but does not include a Highway.
“Subdivide" or "Subdivision" means:
(a) the division of land into two or more Parcels whether by plan, apt
descriptive words, 
or otherwise;
(b) the consolidation of Parcels into one Parcel by plan; or
(c) the creation of a Highway or a portion of a Highway by plan.

We’ll end it here, say nothing of yellow excavators, fallow fields, 
a sign crudely taped to their white front door. We’ll downplay entirely 
asbestos removals and shattered foundations. We certainly won’t mention 
the grandson’s salvage operation, his pickup and flat bed trailer 
with the old drive shed loaded high, a land barge 
floating long down the lane way, dust clouds in waves,
the field of ripening alfalfa. 


Portions of text taken from the City of Kelowna Civic Bylaws, “intended
to keep Kelowna clean, healthy and safe. City Council enacts bylaws that are
created, interpreted and administered by a number of City divisions and departments.
Bylaw Services promotes, facilitates and enforces general compliance with bylaws
that pertain to the health, safety and welfare of the community.” 
(http://www.kelowna.ca/CM/page1329.aspx)

vineyard

by Louis Moreno

by lesley-anne evans

To walk a vineyard’s long line,
the thrumming rhyme
of post and wire, post and wire,
post and wire. Gnarled stumps
of last year’s growth pruned back hard
to four thin arms, how
everything waits
from the ground up.
Rivers of stone hand gathered
and laid down row by row by row
to warm the waking roots,
this pause, this expectancy,
this too is a prayer.

statement of place: lesley-anne evans

by Louis Moreno

My history with dirt begins as a small child on my grandfather’s two acres, walking barefoot into his vegetable garden I pick a beefsteak tomato big as my hand, and bite down. Juice oozes down my chin and that taste, sun warmed sweetness mixed with earthy undertones, is a marker for how I long for the land and find what feeds me.

I am Belfast, N. Ireland born, with rebel, mystic, and stubborn mule hard wired. My early career as a Landscape Architect in Toronto, Ontario, melds a childhood fluent in Latin plant names, an artistic and no fear of dirt under the nails sensibility, with environmental stewardship. After several years of consulting life I retire West in search of a simpler way. As my creative expressions morph from landscapes to motherhood to words, themes of environment, humanity, and earthy spirituality emerge.

Kelowna, British Columbia, is my home of 22 years, coming full circle from the 1940’s when my grandfather spliced apple whips in Grimsby, Ontario, then shipped them to the Okanagan Valley. The agriculturally rich and vital Okanagan landscape is my contentment and inspiration. Although wilderness is here, I borrow wild views and stay on tamed edges where I lose myself in thought without danger of being eaten. Spaces that feed my creative spirit are Okanagan Lake beaches in off season, cut alfalfa fields, apple orchards, cemeteries, greenways, and South East Kelowna rural roads. I find my place here and learn to flourish.

My wildly creative Landscape Architect/land developer spouse challenges me to see how great project design can sometimes warrant uprooting orchards and leveling farmsteads. It’s not easy for me to accept this. I often write poetry as record and witness to what was. I imagine a way of life where we sustain ourselves yet save vernacular and wild beauty, all the while knowing I live a contradiction of railing against what puts bread on my table. This too feeds my creative process.

icebergs near twillingate

by Louis Moreno

by edward harkness

From this bluff on the coast of Newfoundland,
hulks appear like a ghostly armada.
Near one, a sight-seeing ship vanishes
as it passes behind a steepled mass—
a sudden lesson in size, scale, distance
and the shape of things to come.
Bergs, I learn, wander a mile a week,
bearing cargoes of blue light.
Notre Dames of ice, their buttresses crack,
spires break, topple, un-architected
by the warming Atlantic.
I picture myself on a pier
when one of the bergs arrives,
awash, smaller than a dinghy, enroute
to nothingness, a glass gargoyle, last one
of its kind, bobbing next to a piling.

ancestry

by Louis Moreno

by edward harkness

I’ve spent entire days lost in the warehouses
of dust, searching the archives, imagining my ancestors
boarding ships for America, leaving the coal mines
of Cornwall, only to end in Wright County, Iowa,
in an untended graveyard wedged between a corn field
and the Union Pacific line, their stones toppled,
their names scrubbed by a hundred fifty winters
to an indecipherable blur.

I leave them in their moldering beds to stroll the garden,
drawn by a rufous hummingbird needling the feeder,
his head a burst of copper in the angled morning light.
I love how he bobs among the squash blossoms,
barging into one yellow mansion, then another,
insatiable, as I am, at times, impatient to say
the unsayable, wondering what difference it makes
to the purple finches bickering in the laurel hedge.

I go out again at dusk. He’s still there, levitating,
hovering among the beans, seeking a droplet
from each white beaker. Then he’s gone,
leaving me with my ancestors and their beards,
bonnets and gold time pieces. Farms failed.
Over in Illinois, the Averys upped stakes,
arriving by train at Puget Sound, dumbstruck by the girth
of doug firs and hemlocks bejeweled by April rain.

William, Josie and the new baby, Birdy, trundled toward
a logging camp near Bremerton, bouncing in a wagon
to the end of a mud-gummed road. Might they not have
passed thickets of wild rose? Might they not have seen
those same flashes of copper, startled by the furious
whir of hundreds of rufous hummers, themselves
migrants from Mexico? I want to think so.
I want to think Josie, exhausted from the journey,

said to her baby, Look, sweetheart, at all the wildflowers,
as their buckboard came within hearing
of the rasp of whipsaws, the scream of a steam whistle
and the crash of a felled cedar in this, their new home.

something has been reading the fireroots

by Louis Moreno

by brenda hillman



        —aw aw: crows’ eyebrows… 
The termites have hastily married—soon  
they’ll drop veined wings—  till their vows 
                          are outside!  In the woods,
a shaman moment… tries a cure:
pleiades of sun,   a thrush  [Catharus guttatus] 
     brings spots to you, a seedful anarchist—

              The magicks are merging.
 Lambs swell in the bellies of the ewes;
the great dead approach,
       famished for winter berries…
     What is the enigma 
you carry halfway to equinox, 
your soul feeling his own princely skin
               in the back seat?

Origins of expression— in the caves, 
the fury of nations, 
the handmade stars of lovers’ cries,
     the abstract stroke—; stop telling us 
        what to do, Indo-European languages!
everything has been eating the fireroots, 
    its fluffy hatchlings scratch along— 
it says to itself:
we are on loan from a seamless realm
   —in the pledge, dot-dot,
   —in the syllable of the clause 
              (You’re just making that up)
Am not. 	(Are too.)
Am not.

 

“Something Has Been Reading the Fireroots” was first published in Seasonal Works With Letters on Fire, Wesleyan University Press, 2013

practical water

by Louis Moreno

by brenda hillman



What does it mean to live a moral life

It is nearly impossible to think about this

We went down to the creek
The sides were filled 
    with tiny watery activities

The mind was split & mended
Each perception divided into more

& there were in the hearts of the water molecules
    little branches perpendicular to thought

Had lobbied the Congress but it was dead
Had written to the Committee on Understanding
Had written to the middle  
    middle of the middle
    class but it was drinking
Had voted in cafes with shoplifters &
    beekeepers stirring tea made of water
    hitched to the green arc

An ethics occurs at the edge 
of what we know

The creek goes underground about here
     
The spirits offer us a world of origins    
Owl takes its call from the drawer of the sky



Unusually warm global warming day out

A tiny droplet shines 
    on a leaf & there your creek is found
   
It has borrowed something to
    link itself to others

We carry ourselves through the days in code
DNA like Raskolnikov’s staircase neither
    good nor bad in itself

Lower frequencies are the mind
What happened to the creek 
    is what happened
    to the sentence in the twentieth century 
It got social underground

You should make yourself uncomfortable 
If not you who

Thrush comes out from the cottony 
   coyote bush glink-a-glink 
           chunk  drink 
   trrrrrr
   turns a golden eyebrow to the ground

We run past the plant that smells like taco sauce

Recite words for water 
    weeter wader weetar vatn
    watn voda 
[insert all languages here]

Poor Rimbaud didn’t know how to live 
    but knew how to act
Red-legged frog in the pond sounds like him



Uncomfortable & say a spell: 
blossom knit & heel affix
fiddle fern in the neck of the sun

It’s hard to be water
    to fall from faucets with fangs
    to lie under trawlers as horizons 
    but you must

Your species can’t say it
You have to do spells & tag them
     
Uncomfortable & act like you mean it
    
Go to the world
Where is it
Go there

 

“Practical Water” was previously published in Practical Water (Wesleyan University Press, 2009)

misanthropy

by Louis Moreno

by robert wrigley

— for Paul
 

The only words that exist here
are mine. Well, mine and Paul’s,
who carved his name and a date
twelve years ago in this log
by the fire ring. Let me revise:
the only words that are spoken here
are mine, though they are infrequent.

Unless I am mistaken, all I’ve said
aloud today is “Good morning”
to a cedar waxwing, and “Thank you”
to the wind, for blowing the horde
of mosquitoes away for a while.
Also “Shit,” when I dropped my spoon
in the dirt at breakfast this morning.

At the top of the peak I walked up
earlier, I said “Yes,” peculiarly affirming
the sweat and rigor of the walk. Also the view.
On the way down, entering the trees again,
I saw a bear’s excavation at the base
of a slope of scree and started singing,
for some reason, “When I’m Sixty-Four.”

Because I love places without people,
some people conclude I do not love them.
That I prefer the company of trees.
But by tomorrow, the third day of near wordlessness,
I will be a garrulous fool, addressing the lake
and greeting a single small, white cloud
like an old and very dear friend passing through.

That night I’ll speak my praise to the fire
and say a few poems by heart to the dark.
Then, as the flames begin to settle to coals,
I’ll speak to Paul himself, almost as though
he were here with me, and promise him,
though I disapprove of what he has done,
that I’ll get his name, at least, into a poem.

written in a journal, while sitting on a rock, in the frank church river of no return, august, 2008

by Louis Moreno

by robert wrigley

Very early gray-lit morning. I’m shivering
in my boxers, barefoot in sparse high country grass,
pissing, when I see on the lake’s opposite shore,
a solitary wolf, making its way wherever it is
it’s going, half an hour or so before sunrise.
It may be that it senses my shivering before it sees me,
or hears the spatter of my piss, but now there is no doubt
I am something it would rather not see nor especially be seen by.
It picks up its pace and moves back into the trees.
It stops now and then to be sure I haven’t moved,
then at last breaks into an actual run, and disappears
among boulders along an ancient glacier’s terminal moraine.
I do not ordinarily rise so early to relieve myself,
but through the tent flap I could see mist rising
from the cold surface of the lake, still
and dimpled everywhere by feeding trout.
They were feeding, and still are, on mosquitoes,
which are now everywhere on me and likewise feeding,
but I’m still standing here, shivering, knowing
when the sun comes out it will awaken the wind,
and the wind will ruck the surface of the water
to a thousand tiny, soundless waves, and knowing also
that if I stay where I am, motionless, I might yet see
the wolf again, though I do not, and at last
I do a kind of spasmodic dance to shake away
the mosquitoes, and head back to my tent,
when I note, along the way, the massive canine tracks
of a wolf all around the fire ring, all across
the worn campsite ground to within no more
than a foot from the head of my tent
and around the tents of my still-sleeping compatriots too,
which I will point out to them when they awaken,
after I’ve put on my clothes and built the morning fire,
after I’ve lowered the food bags from the tree limb
we hoisted them to last night, and brewed
a pot of coffee, and sat myself on rock,
and slathered bug dope abundantly over
all my exposed flesh, as I wait for the sun to rise,
for the wind to roughen the surface of the lake,
for them to join me here, where I will point out the tracks
and tell them, in great detail, what it is I have seen.

statement of place: robert wrigley

by Louis Moreno

I have lived most of my adult life in Idaho, and I spend as much time as I can out in the woods and the river canyons. The immensity of Idaho’s wild lands is why I continue to live here. My wife (the writer Kim Barnes) and I spend, on average, a month of nights each summer, camped on one or another of Idaho’s rivers, fly fishing. I love fishing because it’s the only thing I’ve found that’s nearly as difficult, and rewarding, as writing. Since I’m a ways into my sixties, I don’t backpack as often as I used to, but I still get myself into the wilderness for at least one trip each summer. I have heard and twice even seen wolves out there, for which I feel blessed.

country mice

by Louis Moreno

by amber dawn

crickets, monarchs, paints and sparrows
frenchman river, sweet grass sky holds still
out here everything stops
for the wind

— “everything holds still for the wind,” Leah Horlick
 

We find each other
in the cosmopolitan squint, polished
concrete, smoked chrome rooms.
She’s hard to peg at first
lace dress chic, prosecco cocktail
starry in her hand. She’s been
chin-upped by the west. Tested
by an incomprehensible horizon
and passed, but for her pose and bend.
For the wind

that sweeps the wide-open
motherland has left her
with a slant stance, sideways
as corn bowed to a storm.
I too am made
from orchard and axe, crop
and scythe, harvest born
humble earth miles and years
behind me. It’s all rock
out here. Everything stops

making sense in the seam
of mountains and million
dollar condos, high-rise residential
more density, more gravel, more glass, more.
Where I come from elevators
are for nursing homes or sawmills.
She sees the soiled knees of my jeans
knows I kneel to a once-was prayer
late waterways, bygone wells
forgotten river. Sweet grass sky holds still

during these vigils, holds space
for choked swamp, cedar stump
tributaries split from the ocean
Vancouver’s bloodstone—step forward.
My home is a backwards stamp, like hers.
parched-lawn green, forever level.
Now we find each other turned by urban obstacles.
The far-removed markers we share and seek
chokecherries, ink caps, chorus frogs, golden yarrow
crickets, monarchs, paints and sparrows

 

“Country Mice” was previously published in Where the Words End and My Body Begins (Arsenal Pulp Press, Spring 2015)

roots dancing

by Louis Moreno

by susan mccaslin



You could say roots
             squidged as they are
between dark heaps of soil
             shivering and soaked
don’t dance
                          but you’d be wrong

for in that dry, wet
                          wondering dark
they curiously minuet
                          drawing near                and apart
wiggle-stepping             spreading
                                       corkscrewing    around stones

weaving lateral-vertical designs
             criss-crossing
                                                    turning	
delving, snaking
                                                                                                          spiraling wide
clasping and unclasping 
hands
                                                    in the dark ground


Roots are chords
                                                     (cords)             fluent thrummings
drawing water
                                                    from dance’s core

while trees                                 their lanky siblings
                                                                                             thrust themselves skyward

Yes, you’d be wrong
                                                    about roots 
                                                                               not dancing
simply sitting shivering                                                                 and soaked
                                                    between dark clods of soil
hunching together

                                                    immobile

the apt black of crow flight

by Louis Moreno

by ted jean

Crow stumbles into
the open air
after a rough night
of bad rabbit
road kill
and concussive
ice storm
out of the east.

His yawp is forced,
at first, the usual
rehearsal of unrepentance,
that bends toward bliss
as he approaches the arc
of the frozen river.

 

“The Apt Black of Crow Flight” is from Crow Sonnets.

crow

by Louis Moreno

by ted jean



Marsha throws on her jacket,
jumps the fence where it is bent

          the december field is bare

she stalks the erstwhile rye
beside the dogwood brush and hazelnut

          pheasants startle the ditches

stubble and mud require care,
to get precisely nowhere

          our girl bestrides the only stump

field Marsha: cows astonished,
the crow crowd loud with scandal

way off, the lights of Ashland
rise on the solstice

circles she back, black, to the dark house

 

“Crow” is from Crow Sonnets.

pushcart prize anthology nominations

by Louis Moreno

Cascadia Review is excited to announce its nominations for the 2016 Pushcart Prize Anthology. Those nominations are as follows:

  • David Biespiel, “Looking out the Window”
  • Daniel Butterworth, “Cropduster”
  • Amy Miller, “The Jockey of Model Horses”
  • Catherine Owen, “You Make Me Ache River with Your—Let Me Say It”
  • Annette Spaulding-Convy, “In a Shack on Mud Lake”
  • Ingrid Wendt, “In Lieu of a Christmas Letter”

Congratulations to all the nominees. Please take a moment to click on the links above and read their fine work.

hwy 38 along the umpqua near rainrock

by Louis Moreno

by ted jean

High crow and low crow
ply the light above the river,
rising and falling against the neon backdrop alder.

One seems the shadow of the other,
disjunct in their dithering
as a fish with its refraction on a riffled pond.

Are they husband and wife crow?
Where do they go?
Some farcical mission, doubtless,
as they are, after all, crows.

We are driving upriver the opposite way,
Amy staring off into the spruce shadow
and sunlight strobe, possibly deep in thought.
Or not. We will never know.

 

“Hwy 38 Along the Umpqua Near Rainrock” is from Crow Sonnets.

statement of place: ted jean

by Louis Moreno

Even natives complain of the Oregon rain. Not me. The low gray sky, the sifting drizzle. I get a sense of enclosure, calm, quiet. Along a November trail, the brushy bank of dripping hazelnut and thimbleberry thrums with drowsy satisfaction. The streets of downtown Portland reflect puddled light from welcoming shops. Frogs sing in the weeds with all their little green hearts. Golf course coyote regards me urbanely over her dewy shoulder. Beyond her, the firs recede into a pewter mist. Raised in the hot, dry sun of Northern California, I have converted to a better, wet religion.

a cockeyed optimism

by Louis Moreno

by judith skillman



I’ve risen like the day moon
into a sky entirely azure. I’m a venture,
the angels will invest in me.

Little by little I trained myself
on  wine—now I can put away
half a bottle. I’ll fill the gaps
in all your conversations. Nothing
stagnant will grow, no rest marks,
no space between notes of this allegro.

I’ve no room for any silence
except the one I make when I pick up
my needles to knit—when
from the circular needles 
Joseph’s coat grows in cabled stitches
you’ll wear when winter freezes
the machines idling now between
chops at gratuitous trees, those 
that keep sun from infecting rooftops.

I’ve risen like Jesus from the dead
and no one can hold me down,
not the stone, nor the women who’d nag
a Roman soldier till he caved. 

                                    I’ll limp
along beside you, lenticular as a cloud,
undeniable as a mountain, and you
won’t know what hit you—whether
it happened in Prague or Paris,
Venice or Rome, only that love’s
an old woman with a tear in her eye
from laughing, and death’s a cliché
holding its sides, ribs broken, the whole
carapace crumbling like the Parthenon
when time was at its best

and still had a chance to affect 
what I built sidewise in order for you
to learn to lean—but nobly, akin to the tower 
of Pisa, into your own shadows.

postcards to cascadia: m.r. smith

by Louis Moreno

Smith Postcard One Back 2
 

From Lewiston: Whatever room still held / in the heart is filled / by all that remains frontier. / The rocky breaks in the hills / frame the shoulders and hips / of recumbent plainsmen, arrayed / under coarse blankets of endless / grain draping dull ground in full. / The Clearwater drains innocent blood / to later pool in the Pacific under a night sky / taut as a banner pierced by bullets. — M.R. Smith

View postcard image: Cowgirls at the Triangle Ranch Rodeo (Doubleday)

best of the net 2014 nominations

by Louis Moreno

Cascadia Review is excited to announce its nominations for the 2014 Best of the Net anthology. Those nominations are as follows:

  • Polly Buckingham, “Driving Home”
  • Chris Dahl, “Elegy in Shadow and Light”
  • Kathleen Flenniken, “Lilacs”
  • Michael Hanner, “All My Sadness This Road”
  • Alan Hill, “The Three Ships”
  • Beth Myhr, “June Bracken Waist High Under Birch”

Please join us in congratulating each of our nominees. Over the next few days, we will share links to the nominated poems so our readers can revisit these fine poems.

issue six (spring season) contributor index

by Louis Moreno

Faith Allington
Allington is a Washington resident originally from California. Her poems have appeared in Aroostook Review, Pontoon, DMQ Review, King County Poetry on Buses, and Floating Bridge Review. (Work | Statement of Place | Map)
 

Judith Barrington
Barrington has published three poetry collections, most recently Horses and the Human Soul and two chapbooks, Postcard from the Bottom of the Sea and Lost Lands (winner of the Robin Becker Chapbook Award). She was the winner of the 2012 Gregory O’Donoghue Poetry Prize (Cork International Poetry Festival). Her memoir, Lifesaving, won the Lambda Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. She has been on the faculty of the master of fine arts program at the University of Alaska and teaches classes and workshops in the Unites States; England; and Almàssera, Valencia, Spain. (Work | Statement of Place | Website | Map)
 

Daniel Butterworth
Butterworth’s poems have appeared in magazines such as Cream City Review, The Wisconsin Review, The Louisville Review, The Portland Review, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Santa Clara Review, The Midwest Quarterly Review, The Windless Orchard, Plainsongs, Flyway, Amoskeag, The Rockhurst Review, Poet Lore, The Seattle Review, Willow Springs, and other journals. Algonquin Books published his nonfiction book, Waiting for Rain, and Lost Horse Press published his poetry book, The Radium Watch Dial Painters, which was a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards. He teaches writing and literature at Gonzaga University. (Work | Statement of Place | Map)
 

Susan J. Falk
Falk has a wide reputation with work in public and private collections. She is inspired by the surroundings of the natural ponds and forests of her ten-acre studio South Langley location, which is of course home to her many pets, including her horses. Falk’s works have gained kudos from reviewers and commentators for her gallery exhibitions. She was recently recognized as the winner of the 2013 Langley Environmental Hero Award in the individual category for keeping local residents and others aware of the need to protect McLellan Forest East, Langley’s old growth forest in Glen Valley. (Work | Statement of Place | Map)
 

Ann Batchelor Hursey
Hursey’s work has appeared in Seattle Review, Crab Creek Review, Chrysanthemum, and Pontoon, among others. Her poem “Wetland,” published as part of the Poetry and Art on the Busses Project (Seattle, Washington), is the official Shel Sheb Estuary poem. She has been awarded writing residencies at Hypatia-in-the-Woods (Shelton, Washington) and Soapstone: A Writing Retreat for Women (Oregon). Born and raised in Ohio, she now calls Washington State home. (Work | Statement of Place | Map)
 

Tricia Knoll
Knoll lives in Portland, Oregon, where she writes both haiku and poetry. Recent publications include Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place, About Place Journal, and many other journals. This is her first publication in Cascadia Review. In May 2014, Finishing Line Press releases her first chapbook, Urban Wild, poetry about the intersection of wild creatures and theoretically tame beings in an urban environment. (Work | Statement of Place | Map)
 

Lauren Lockhart
Originally from Colorado, Lockhart has spent the last three years between her home there and the West Coast. Now settled in Seattle, Washington, to study community acupuncture and herbal medicine, she hopes to cultivate a strong presence in the music and poetry communities there. Her writing has appeared in several publications, including Minerva Rising and Canary (a Hip Pocket Press production). She also self-publishes her work on a continuous basis, contributes weekly to the online magazine Apple Snacks, and is producing an experimental collaborative art and literature zine, The Year of the Plum. (Work | Statement of Place | Map)
 

Elizabeth McLagan
McLagan’s poems have been published in many journals, such as Poetry Northwest, 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, American Literary Review, Fine Madness, Grove Review, Hunger Mountain, SLAB, Iron Horse Literary Review, Southeast Review, Third Coast, Willow Springs, Zone 3, and on the website Verse Daily. The autumn 2009 issue of The Bitter Oleander featured her poems and an interview. “Some Life” was selected for the 2001 AWP Intro Awards. “A Feather Falls from the Wing of Light” won the 2006 Frances Locke Memorial Award from The Bitter Oleander Press. “All Alien Spirits Rest the Spirit” won the Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Award for 2009. Her collection of poems, In The White Room, is just out from CW Books. (Work | Statement of Place | Map)
 

Paulann Petersen
Petersen, Oregon’s sixth Poet Laureate, has six full-length books of poetry, most recently Understory, from Lost Horse Press in 2013. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Poetry, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, Willow Springs, Calyx, and the Internet’s Poetry Daily. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and the recipient of the 2006 Holbrook Award from Oregon Literary Arts. She serves on the board of Friends of William Stafford, organizing the January Stafford Birthday Events. (Work | Statement of Place | Map)
 

Frank Rossini
Rossini grew up in New York City and moved to Eugene, Oregon, in 1972. He taught at the University of Oregon and Lane Community College until retiring in 2010. His poems have appeared in various journals, including Mas Tequila Review, Seattle Review, and Wisconsin Review. His chapbook, sparking the rain, was published by Silverfish Review Press. sight/for /sight books published a collection of his poems, midnight the blues, in 2013. (Work | Statement of Place | Website | Map)
 

Annette Spaulding-Convy
Spaulding-Convy’s full length collection, In Broken Latin, is published by the University of Arkansas Press as a finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, In The Convent We Become Clouds, won the 2006 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, and in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, among others. She is co-editor of the literary journal Crab Creek Review, and is co-founder of Two Sylvias Press, which has published the first eBook anthology of contemporary women’s poetry, Fire on Her Tongue. (Work | Statement of Place | Map)
 

Scott T. Starbuck
Scott T. Starbuck was a 2013 Artsmith Fellow on Orcas Island who feels destruction of Earth’s ecosystems is closely related to spiritual illness and widespread urban destruction of human consciousness. A former charter captain and commercial fisherman turned creative writing professor, his newest book The Other History, published by FutureCycle, is at Amazon.com, and will be reviewed in the June 2014 issue of Amsterdam Quarterly. He has eco-poetry blog posts at South 85, Miriam’s Well: Poetry, Land Art, and Beyond, forthcoming at Alaskan writer Marybeth Holleman’s Art and Nature blog, and on his blog, Trees, Fish, and Dreams. Starbuck lives on Whidbey Island and in San Diego. (Work | Statement of Place | Website | Map)
 

Caitlin Elizabeth Thomson
Thomson resides in the Chuckanuts, and three deer have been known to live above her garage. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous places, including Radar, The Literary Review of Canada, The Liner, Echolocation, and the anthology Mermaids in the Basement. Her second chapbook, Incident Reports, is forthcoming in 2014 from Hyacinth Girl Press. (Work | Statement of Place | Map)
 

Pepper Trail
Trail’s poems have appeared in Windfall, Cirque, Comstock Review, Atlanta Review, Kyoto Journal, and other publications, including the recent anthology What the River Brings: Oregon River Poems. His essays appear regularly in High Country News and Jefferson Monthly, the magazine of Jefferson Public Radio. He lives in Ashland, Oregon, where he works as a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. (Work | Statement of Place | Map)
 

Diane Tucker
Vancouver, British Columbia, native Diane Tucker has published three poetry books (God on His Haunches, Nightwood Editions, 1996, shortlisted for the League of Canadian Poets’ 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award; Bright Scarves of Hours, Palimpsest Press, 2007; and Bonsai Love, Harbour Publishing, 2014) and a young adult novel (His Sweet Favour, Thistledown Press, 2009). Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and in over sixty literary journals in Canada and abroad. She lives in Burnaby. (Work | Statement of Place | Map)
 

Ingrid Wendt
Wendt has recently returned from a three-month writing residency in Mexico. She is the author of five books of poems, one chapbook, and a teaching guide. Co-editor of In Her Own Image: Women Working in the Arts and the Oregon poetry anthology From Here We Speak, and the recipient of numerous awards, she performs with the Motet Singers, a women’s a cappella ensemble of 13. Her most recent book is Evensong. (Work | Statement of Place | Map
 

Tim Whitsel
Whitsel lives on a one hundred-year floodplain northeast of Springfield, Oregon. He is passionate about gardening, jazz, Western rivers, soccer, bicycling, and wine. He has visited these obsessions in his poems. For six years, he hosted Windfall, a monthly reading series for the Eugene Public Library and the Lane Literary Guild. We Say Ourselves, a 2012 chapbook from Traprock Books, is his first collection. His poem “Mudflat Allure” won first place at the 2013 Northwest Poets’ Concord. The elegy “On The Day You Are Dying” appeared in June 2013 in Construction, an online magazine. (Work | Statement of Place | Map)
 

in praise of staying married

by Louis Moreno

by kelli russell agodon

In perfect middleness,
in the winter of waxwings
and imperfect feathers, lost

friends—
we are not leaving
our nest. Like others

who aren’t entwined
in the honeysuckle, in the blackberry
vines, we stay knotted.

Like clouds refusing to be part
of the mushroom, we rained.
We loved our curves

and our appetite
for showers. Don’t get me wrong,
our mistakes have flooded

the valley, flooded
our blue farmhouse until
the living room was underwater.

Praise the trees and chairs
we climbed to stay dry,
not the wings

that might have brought us here,
but the round bellies
of birds hopping through

puddles, not beautiful,
but full, complete
with their berry-stained beaks.

lilacs

by Louis Moreno

by kathleen flenniken

As though we could string pearls into a necklace

of only good moments, between knots of waxed

string. Tonight, a month after the last lilac bloomed,

I finally noticed, and no hothouse could make the bushes

flower again late, early, whatever you call the period

after you’ve lost everything. Still, cells replicate,

shed skin is replaced. We are not who we were.

I’d seen the lilacs, gone through the motions

of breathing in, swirled the scent in the goblet

of my brain but I wasn’t listening until

this evening, after the first warm day in June

when I considered how fine a bunch of lilacs

would be, enough to fill my arms, to hide my face

in their tender, sweet nostalgia for ordinary life.

1960s tv

by Louis Moreno

by kathleen flenniken

Blue beacon of the evening, formulaic, reassuring, half-witted, half-
cocked. We half-watched the clock to gauge our excitement, passive
as our heroes bounded toward danger—

then the ads for Geritol, Noxzema, Salems, and Kools. No danger
of changing channels—the TV was half
a room away, NBC and CBS our only choices. The best shows were past

our bedtime anyway. We passed
our happy childhoods lit by a flickering screen as dangerous
as quicksand, as a girl with a palm-sized gun, as Simon Bar Sinister in half-

hour predicaments. Now we half-believe that fictional past. Danger, Will Robinson.

from a classroom

by Louis Moreno

by kathleen flenniken

— after Richard Shelton
 

Thirty-two students stare in rows.
In their private minds
pink dahlias bloom, swans fan their wings,
a dog barks behind a barbed-wire fence.
No one raises a hand or answers the question.

Thirty-two pink dahlias bloom in rows.
Students raise a barbed-wire fence.
No one questions the barking dog.
Swans stare behind their fans.

A dahlia stares. Pink hands
fence private minds. Questions
raise their rows of wings.
The swans answer thirty-two.

A pink dahlia answers a barbed-wire stare.
No one raises the question.
Thirty-two students bloom
behind their wings.

lessons from you, father

by Louis Moreno

by patricia wixon

It was July when you closed the front door
carrying your fishing rod and creel, angled hat
banded with dry flies, eager to fly to the mountain
lakes. Soon you’d be edging your way out in waders
so glazed with fish oil they could stand alone.

That night you’d fight to stay alive, not burned
and broken like your copilot, but in shock as your
organs consumed each other. You told the medic
what to give each child. For me, your bamboo pole
but it had already turned to ash.

In those childhood years, you’d bring home a creel
of cutthroat and fry their pink skins crisp.
Sometimes we’d peel sheets of sunburn from your
back, work to sunset in our Victory Garden,
help save tin foil wrappers for the War.

Now I cast a fly at a glint between the rocks, hear
your lessons as I watch the shadows, feel when
a strike sends line singing, feed, wind back a steady
take up. Leaves floating on the water collapse
like ash, linger, then slip beneath the surface.

juxtaposition

by Louis Moreno

by allen braden

— for Kevin Miller
 

Ice in a riverbed: a word
In your mouth: each remembers

The other. Your joy only
One reflection: the way grease

From a boy’s palm darkens
A page. Each time perishable

Freight thunders by, he feels
Hopeful: The girl he’ll leave

Flexes her calves deliberately
Every rung up a picker’s ladder

In Coup’s orchard by the river.
How can anyone make a living

Of departures: when crossing
The line can mean nothing

But distance, a vanishing point
Beyond which light won’t enter?

I mean when the river’s iced over
Horses, a few then hundreds,

Surge across: like one current
Over another: liquid and solid.

Come spring, quick thaw spells out
Sacrament: Or is that sacrifice?

 

“Juxtaposition” first appeared in Poetry International.

bird city

by Louis Moreno

by allen braden

— for Jacob Green
 

Where sweetness is
The only nourishment.
Not a peaceable kingdom
For there is conflict here,
There is pain. But the bad
Inevitably are punished,
The good inevitably blessed.
Their stories, I suppose,
Have a storybook quality:
Peopled not with angels,
Not with true birds either
But rather creatures gifted
With a human fluency
And feathers apt as hands.
The magpie tending bar
Can wipe away troubles;
A seagull begging change
Is not really as down
On his feathery luck
As he’d have you believe;
Osprey redirect the flow
Of traffic for a parade.
Vendors give away candy
Shaped like children
And rich as ice cream.
Along these avenues
To the imagination,
The stacks of nests rise
Like columns of smoke
From ancient sacrifice,
Where any misery is given
The promise of flight
And where any broken
Wing may heal.

 

“Bird City” first appeared in The Colorado Review.

best of the net 2013 nominations

by Louis Moreno

We are thrilled to announce that we have nominated four poems for the 2013 Best of the Net anthology. It was an exceedingly difficult decision because we have received so many outstanding poems since the journal’s inception. In the end, we selected the following:

  • Christopher Howell’s “The Life Boat Dream”
  • Tammy Robacker’s “Owen Beach Aubade”
  • Judith Skillman’s “Starlings” and “Watercress”

remembering precious landscape, but with an elegy in mind

by Louis Moreno

by allen braden

Nevertheless the front yard, even the hawthorn,
flourished. Various roses built a windbreak,
all the catalpa petals splayed themselves open
and pollen splotched the limbs in gold profusion.

Suppose a woman lived there, a young wife,
her tanned arms dappled from whitewashing,
beautifying the wagon-wheel fence assembled
out of last century’s rumbling west for a better life.

Say years later, while kneeling in her rose and iris bed,
she happened to gaze toward the east forty
and witness the men in her family, at a distance,
circling and swinging their long-handled shovels.

They could’ve been mistaken, a hundred years earlier,
for threshers slapping chaff from the harvest.
They were in fact clubbing a wounded badger,
winnowing its blood into the furrows of stubble.

Now suppose that the iris have grown
wooden, their blues and lavenders blackened.
Razed down to the quick, her roses
promise to return. Prolific. Invasive.

 

“Remembering Precious Landscape, but with an Elegy in Mind” was first published in Elegy in the Passive Voice.

the venison book

by Louis Moreno

by allen braden

1. Dressing

Once a practice handed down,
sticking its throat now frowned

upon by most sportsmen. Blood
will take care of itself. Just aft
of the breastbone with a blade
three whetted inches or more,

cut and continue as if unzipping
the abdomen which splits open
like a satchel packed neatly
with the contents of a lifetime.

From the unexpected profile
of a liver came Roman prophecy.
Imagine your own portents.
To empty the cavity with ease,

you may tip the carcass downhill.
Take care though not to nick any offal.
Into the next tiny room, carve a portal
when servicing the lungs, the heart

which loves to spoil if left intact.
Sever arteries and windpipe. Remove.
Let the buck’s antlers alone,
they’ll work as handles later

or tie a rope over the skull’s base,
a half-hitch around the snout.
Now get your rope or chain out,
hoist over a nearby branch or rafter.

Like a lover’s stockings, the hide
tugs off. No need for a knife.
Missed point to call this woods-
dressing undressing, instead of

hog-dressing, rough-dressing,
to gut, disembowel, eviscerate.
At last you may separate
the liceless cape and head

from the body if you wish
or saw the crown off its skull.

 

2. Deconstructing

With sinews and veins stripped
naked of such supple buckskin,

with a hatchet or cleaver,
split sternum, lengthwise,
in two. Pelvic girdle likewise.
Call this the H-bone and crack it

smack-dab down the center
to invent your own alphabet
for dialogue between the dead
and living. What does a blade

whisper to flesh but appetite?
Along a line envisioning the spine,
a hacksaw answers. Other bones
prove easy, especially the hinges

where hooves are defined
from each limb’s articulation.
With dead weight, the gantry
squawks. Never you mind

any sound but your own deliberate
breath. Quarter what remains
into shoulders, saddle, haunches.
Identify the use and cut of each:

neck and chuck, flank and shank,
the meaning drained away returns.
Next, wrap each with foil tight
for flavor then paper against frost.

Cold or salt or smoke cures most
kinds of impermanence for a time.
Treat with an iota of respect.
Collect what you’ve broken apart

and spoken into being. On thick white
butcher’s paper, mark your name.

 

“The Venison Book” was first published in A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood.

issue three (spring season) contributor index

by Louis Moreno

Jennifer Bullis
Originally from Reno, Nevada, Bullis holds a doctorate in English from the University of California-Davis and taught college English in Bellingham, Washington, for fourteen years. Her poems appear in Iron Horse Literary Review, Conversations Across Borders, Natural Bridge, Comstock Review, and Floating Bridge Review. She has won The Pitch contest at Poetry Northwest and received Honorable Mention in the Tupelo Press Poetry Project. Her first book of poems, Impossible Lessons, is forthcoming from MoonPath Press in May 2013. (Work | Statement of Place | Website | Map)
 

Beth Cavener Stichter
Stichter is currently a full-time professional studio artist working in the state of Washington. She received her bachelor of arts in sculpture from Haverford College and her master of fine arts from Ohio State University. She was awarded a USArists Project Grant in 2012, the Artist Trust Fellowship in 2009, the Jean Griffith Foundation Fellowship in 2006, the Virginia A. Groot Foundation Grant and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council in 2005, and the American Craft Council’s Emerging Artist Fellowship in 2004. She has also been an artist-in-residence at the Clay Studio in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana. She has exhibited nationally (at such institutions as the Smithsonian Museum) and internationally and has taught numerous workshops across the country. She is currently represented by the Claire Oliver Gallery in New York. (Work | Statement of Place | Website | Map)
 

T. Clear
Clear’s work has appeared in many journals and magazine, including Poetry Northwest, Seattle Review, Atlanta Review, and Crab Creek Review. Her first full-length manuscript, Dusk, is forthcoming from Floating Bridge Press. (Work | Statement of Place | Map)
 

Jeff Encke
Encke’s poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Fence, Kenyon Review Online, Salt Hill, Typo, and elsewhere. (Work | Statement of Place | Map)
 

Jeremy Halinen
Halinen is co-founder and editor-at-large of Knockout Literary Magazine. His first full-length collection of poems, What Other Choice, was selected by Washington State Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken as winner of the 2010 Exquisite Disarray First Book Poetry Contest. Other poems of his appear or will in such journals as Cimarron Review, Court Green, Crab Creek Review, the Los Angeles Review, Poet Lore, and Sentence. He resides in Seattle, Washington. (Work | Statement of Place | Map)
 

Ann Howard
Howard, a journalism school graduate from 1964, left a career in advertising to raise her family. In 1987, she followed a call to ministry and worked as a chaplain in hospital and hospice settings. Now that she is retired, she is finally making time for poetry again. (Work | Statement of Place | Map)
 

Christopher Howell
Howell is the author of ten poetry collections, including Gaze. Born in Portland, he has received three Pushcart Prizes and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, among many other honors. He teaches at Eastern Washington University’s Inland NW Center for Writers in Spokane, where he is director and principal editor for Lynx House Press. (Work | Map)
 

Peter Keefer
Keefer received a bachelor of fine arts from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in 1958. His interest in printmaking developed shortly afterward, and he continued his training with graduate students at California State University at Northridge, where he was awarded a master of fine arts in printmaking in 1970. During the next ten years, he developed the highly identifiable style which has remained characteristic of his work: earth colors modulated against harsher tones which charge his images with a sense of time and place. (Work | Map)
 

Stella Latwinski
Latwinski is a self-taught artist and illustrator who comes to Montana after a childhood of playing in the lakes and forests of Pennsylvania. She has been drawing since she could pick up a pencil, but it was not until 2007 that she began to share her work with the public. Primarily working with ink and colored pencil on wooden panels, her illustrations have been described as both sweet and unsettling as she strives to create a fairy tale land that is inspired by nature, travel, and dreams—sometimes dark, other times full of whimsy. (Work | Statement of Place | Map)
 

Jerry D. Mathes II
Jerry D. Mathes II is a Jack Kent Cooke Scholar alumnus, author of The Journal West: Poems and an essay collection, Fever and Guts: A Symphony. He has fought wildfire and taught the Southernmost Writers Workshop in the World at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica during the 2009–2010 and 2011–2012 Austral summer seasons. He loves his two daughters very much. (Work | Statement of Place | Map)
 

Tammy Robacker
Robacker is a 2009–10 TAIP Grant award winner for poetry, a 2011 Hedgebrook writer-in-residence, and the author of the poetry collection The Vicissitudes (Pearle Publications, 2009). Robacker received her bachelor of arts in poetry from The Evergreen State College in 1993. She will begin her master of fine arts in poetry at Pacific Lutheran University this fall. In 2009, she co-edited an anthology of Tacoma poetry titled In Tahoma’s Shadow. Her poetry has appeared in Columbia Magazine, Plazm, Floating Bridge Review: Pontoon, Wild Goose Poetry Review, and Allegheny Review. Robacker’s poetry manuscript, We Ate Our Mothers, Girls, was a finalist in the 2009 Floating Bridge Press chapbook contest. Currently, Tammy is working on her second book of poetry, Villain Song. (Work | Statement of Place | Map)
 

Judith Skillman
Skillman’s forthcoming books are The Phoenix—New & Selected Poems 2007 – 2013 (Dream Horse Press, 2013) and Broken Lines—The Art & Craft of Poetry (Lummox Press, 2014). Her poems and collaborative translations have appeared in Poetry, Cimarron Review, FIELD, Ezra, Seneca Review, The Iowa Review, and others. Recipient of an award from the Academy of American Poets for Storm (Blue Begonia Press), two of her collections have been finalists for the Washington State Book Award. Judith also writes fiction, and is a Seattle Jack Straw Writer in that genre for 2013. She strives for a minimalist approach in both poetry and prose. (Work | Statement of Place | Website | Map)
 

egg poems: an english languacultural history of china

by Louis Moreno

by changming yuan

1/ Ancient China

They used to drink tea
Wear silk
Eat from china
Think in terms of zen
And practice Confucianism

Only—is it true?

.

2/ Semi-Colonial China

Wearing cheongsam
These poor coolies arrived here
On sampans
Always ready to kowtow
To a tycoon
Who lived in Shangri-La
Eating dim sum
Drinking oolong
Playing mahjong
Gambling in a casino every day
Though reluctant to give cumshaw

.

3/ Mandarin China

Led by dao
A yin
Running dog
Wearing qipao
Is fighting against a yang
Paper tiger
With wushu
After getting brainwashed
Through maotai
Like a taikongnaut
At a fengshui spot
Dominated by qi

 

A word (or person) with a Chinese origin living in the West is often called an “egg,” which is white-skinned but yellow-hearted.

interview with kathleen flenniken

by Louis Moreno

by dana guthrie martin

Kathleen Flenniken, a resident of Seattle, Washington, is currently serving a two-year term as Poet Laureate for the state of Washington. Her two poetry collections are Famous and Plume. Plume deals with her experiences growing up in Richland, Washington, and working as an engineer at the Hanford site, as contextualized by research and time, and the perspective both afford. The collection centers on her relationship with her childhood friend Carolyn, whose father died from radiation illness. The book was seven years in the making.

The main interview took place in August 2012 near Flenniken’s home, with a follow-up conversation by way of email.

DGM: Tell me how you came to write this collection. What was your process? How did you know the time was right for this undertaking?

KF: In 1988 when we were in our late twenties, my childhood friend Carolyn lost her father to a radiation illness. That was well before I began writing. (I started writing poetry in my 30s, about five years later.) His death was a huge challenge to my understanding of the site and perhaps the first chink in my solid Richland identity.

Writing the poems came many years later, after my parents were gone. That is, I couldn’t even have conceived of writing them while they were still living. My loyalty to my parents and their generation of friends who gave their careers and lives to Hanford was too inhibiting. And I had to attain a certain skill as a poet. When I was first writing poems, I wasn’t good enough to take on the subject matter of Hanford.

My first Hanford poem, “Bedroom Community,” was written (mostly) in 2005. I was casting about looking for new subjects. (I felt I was rewriting the same poems I’d written in Famous and I remembered the old adage, “Write the poems you’re afraid to write.”) So, those first few were memoir poems and poems to my friend Carolyn. Then I started reading about and researching the site, which led to poems based on my research. At that point I thought I was done. It took me a couple of years and misfires to recognize that I needed to write a few more poems in first person, set in the present. That last dozen or so changed the tone of the collection and deepened it.

DGM: How difficult was it to add those first-person poems to the collection? Or did they come easily once you knew you needed to bring the present and the present perspective into the work?

KF: It was all I could manage. I had to figure out what I thought about all of it. There needed to be some kind of shift in understanding, and therefore I ought to be wise about the whole thing. Except I couldn’t just be wise. I wrote a number of angry poems, taking my cue from lots of people who asked me, “Aren’t you angry?” and after looking at poems by Bill Witherup who had written so passionately and angrily about Hanford for decades. But I ended up taking those poems out. It was borrowed anger. In the end, what I felt was deep sadness and confusion. Confusion doesn’t really feel like it should be a terminal emotion—I’m not even sure it is an emotion. Nevertheless, I belonged to both sides and neither side and so I invited that confusion in. And I allowed myself to feel protective of my community while still trying to be factual. The last three poems were the museum poems (“Museum of Doubt” and “Museum of a Lost America”) and the final poem in the collection, “If You Can Read This.” They’re as dispassionate as I knew how to make them—imagining myself confronting my past as though I were in a museum (which actually happened to me, at the Smithsonian Museum of American History) or reading a sign at the site, 10,000 years in the future.

DGM: The personal and scientific come together here in a very strong way. Did you feel those elements were working together in the creation of the poems for this collection, or was one or the other ever an impediment or hindrance?

KF: The science came in when I started writing poems based in research—which was completely new for me. A poem about testing the water at Richland Dock, for example, or retelling the details of The Green Run. My engineering training and Hanford indoctrination kicked in, and I knew my poems must never exaggerate or play fast and loose with facts. “Lies that tell the truth” is all well and good in art, but in this particular circumstance, the truth had to be scientifically and historically accurate. I used a variety of poetic forms throughout and I suppose I thought of scientific accuracy as part of the “form” I had chosen to follow. So I never saw it as an impediment. It was a constraint.

DGM: Tell me about the redactions in the book and why you presented them the way you did.

KF: I lifted three powerful quotations, two from the Atomic Energy Commission and one from J. Robert Oppenheimer, out of Michele Gerber’s amazing environmental history of the Hanford Site, On the Home Front. All three were warnings that Hanford was too secretive about their operations, that their closed communication actually compromised good science. I was thinking about the way Hanford management so often heard what they wanted to hear or twisted information to align it with their beliefs. It came to me suddenly that Hanford obsessively controlled the message by censoring it. What better way to control criticism than redact the parts you don’t like? So I redacted the quotations so that they said something very different—in one case that “fear could end a critical scientific program”—that is, that free access to information would result in panic and would endanger their mission and our country’s safety.

DGM: Did you ever feel afraid about writing the collection, as if you were divulging things you shouldn’t make public?

KF: I never felt afraid, but I definitely felt I was breaking a taboo—revealing the way we truly thought about our lives and our town and our relationship to the country, the secrecy that was ingrained in our culture, the suspicious health problems and messages from the government. There’s been plenty of “Who do you think you are?” and “Who died and made you the expert?” and that’s just inside my head.

DGM: What about outside your head? Have you had any similar feedback from others who aren’t pleased about what you’ve documented and shared?

KF: Not yet. I’ve had next to no feedback from Richland, other than words from friends. Though I hear from many ex-pats living in other parts of the Northwest. I keep waiting for confrontation and am not quite sure how to interpret silence. Even the Tri-City Herald has stonewalled me. No review or mention, though several other sizeable newspapers in the Northwest have reviewed or featured the book at this point.

DGM: You’ve talk about the Richland identity, the mindset of the city in the past and in the present with regard to the Hanford site. You’ve specifically talked about people not understanding that identity and about having times that you feel angry about that lack of understanding, the complexity of the entire situation. Can you talk about that identity and your feelings around it in more detail?

KF: Richlanders have been—by and large, and for years—tone-deaf. It’s not that we aim to offend and scandalize the rest of the world by choosing an atomic bomb as our high school mascot; we just don’t see why we shouldn’t be proud of our history (and I’m using “we” because I was part of this culture, though I long ago recognized the inappropriateness of the Bomber mushroom cloud).

The Richland identity is based in pride. Richlanders still take pride in their Manhattan Project and Cold War successes. We had a job to do and we did it, not matter how dirty. We kept our country safe and “ended the war.” Whether or not you agree with the use of the bomb at Hiroshima or Nagasaki, whether or not you think we were safer for the 60,000 nuclear warheads Hanford helped fuel, it’s difficult not to admire the sheer ingenuity of the engineers and scientists and workers that kept the plants going for decades beyond their original life expectancy.

Now Hanford is embroiled in the largest environmental cleanup in the world and it’s an inglorious and stultifyingly difficult task. It’s one long exercise in shame—cost overruns and unpleasant discoveries of new contamination and technical issues too difficult to solve. So I don’t think it’s very surprising that the community—even three and four generations beyond that original Manhattan Project generation—takes refuge in “Bomber” pride, no matter how unearned.

I also think it is far too easy to demonize Hanford workers, who were after all my neighbors and friends. I know some of those original workers—they were my parents’ friends and peers and they were often remarkable, incredibly intelligent, socially responsible, ethical, often spiritual people. Over and over again they did the right thing. And yet terrible lies were perpetrated, the public was betrayed, secrets protected the institution of Hanford over the lives of its workers and the innocents downstream. I feel very protective and defensive about the people from my hometown. These were not evil people; they were good people who made tragic errors with the best intentions. This is a human story, and it’s going to happen again and in your town, though maybe not with the same long-term consequences.

DGM: Your President Obama quote at the beginning of the book is amazing, and not in a good way. Why do you think more people, including the leader of our country, don’t know about Hanford—both what went on there and the continued effort to deal with the repercussions of what went on there?

KF: The difficulties at Hanford are technical and complicated and mired in decades of cultural and political history. It’s impossible to summarize them in a sentence or two. This isn’t just a problem for poets and politicians. Hanford has a terrible time attracting young workers to take on this tragedy of highly contaminated waste sites, many of which were insufficiently documented. And anti-Hanford activists are having an equally hard time passing their work down to the next generation. Most young people are turned off by Cold War politics, and then add in radioactive waste. Is it any wonder I’m worried sick that this whole site will be written off and forgotten?

The secrecy ingrained in the Hanford community has come back to haunt them. Hanford supporters never wanted anybody talking about the site that didn’t understand it (which they thought was everybody). Now the Hanford story is rarely even taught in Washington State history—which boggles my mind. We need to educate the next generation of citizens who will, after all, be paying and paying for radioactive waste cleanup for the rest of their lives.

DGM: A poet in my writing group read Plume. She’s lived in Walla Walla for a long time. She was part of the protests of the white trains when they were coming through. She was one of the first people, perhaps one of the only people, from Walla Walla who was involved in protests and discussions about nuclear energy and nuclear waste. She was involved in hearings at Hanford and wrote for the local paper about issues related to the site. Her overriding question after reading your collection is, “How do you cope with being a poet of place, a poet of witness, and balance reality and action without falling into despair or insanity?”

KF: I’ve always approached the poems in Plume as deeply personal explorations of my story—my history, my country, my neighbors and friends. This project was autobiographical. That meant I didn’t need to be an expert that represented the whole Hanford community—which I could never be. Instead, my biggest challenge was to make Hanford interesting for a reader who might be new to the story.

I don’t think of myself as a poet of place or witness. I think my role is to tell a story about the place I grew up. Maybe that’s a fine line between the two, but I really think of those poems as very personal, and that’s the only way that I could write them—to think of them as personal poems.

I never tried to make a political statement. I never thought of the poems as activism. I have never sought to make change. It’s not that I’m not hungry for a changing attitude at Hanford. It’s just that I could never place that kind of pressure on the poems; it would have been deadly and I never could have completed the project. Making these poems about me relieved me of feeling responsible for fixing the situation—which would have been, absolutely, a recipe for despair.

I wrote these poems in large part to try to figure out what I thought about all of it.

DGM: And where did you land? How do you feel in the end, after writing the book, and how is that different from how you felt before? What do you think about all of it?

KF: In some ways, I feel closer to the place than I ever did. I think when you see a place, warts and all, and still feel it, it’s a very honest connection. You see how deeply connected you really are. It would be easy to push away or deny it, but on many levels, I still love my hometown; I love the people that I grew up with; and I still think they did the best they could, but it just wasn’t good enough—and I think that’s really more a story of the human condition than it is of the people there. It’s just being human, and maybe being American.

I’m not as defensive about Hanford as I used to be. I think I’m more open to some of the violent distrust and dislike. I can hear that better now than I used to be able to. In some ways, I feel more porous to the whole subject. I feel like it goes through me and I hear it but I don’t have to take it on the way I did for so long.

DGM: Did you know about the protests that were happening? The kinds of things my friend was involved in, either at the time or as you were doing your research?

KF: The white train is something I’ve heard of, but I’m not sure I know exactly when/what that was.

Here’s a window into my mind: I have always disassociated Hanford with bomb-making and bomb distribution. I know Hanford created the fuel, but somehow I have put the weapons into a separate category. Though I have always conceded that nuclear waste usually reappears at Hanford. So I’m not surprised that I’ve blocked the white trains out of my mind. It’s consistent with my coping mechanisms.

DGM: The trains aren’t specifically Hanford-related, but they did involve the transport of missile heads and waste from those missiles making their way across the country into places like Washington State. The train cars were initially painted white out of fear that they might detonate if they got too hot. They were easy to spot, so protestors could organize and stage protests as the cars moved along the tracks.

KF: So when you were talking earlier, before the interview, about the Cascadia independence movement, which pushes for Cascadia to become a separate country, I was thinking that we’ve been the dumping ground for so long, you can see why people have this desire to cast off the colonial power, right? We’ve been a colony for the East Coast for so long, you can see where that separatist movement comes from.

DGM: At the same time, we’d have to clean up the mess alone, even though we didn’t make it alone. We’ve been the victim of so many endeavors that are aspirational in nature, at least in part, but they have outcomes we don’t anticipate—so something tragic or atrocious comes out of those endeavors. As you mentioned before the interview, Hanford is an extreme example of “disastrous consequences.” It’s one thing to do something knowing the outcomes and another to stumble into those outcomes, ones we aren’t at all prepared for.

KF: And even asking for the waste. People have been so hungry for jobs there for so long, they’re in the habit of asking for anything. “Make us your waste site.” They wanted to be the waste site. It’s jobs. It’s money.

DGM: Look at Roosevelt Regional Landfill in eastern Washington, one of the largest landfills in the country, which is importing trash from other states. Or take Hermiston, Ore., where a new horse rendering plant is going to be built and slaughter 25,000 horses a year. Now we’ve got a paper mill, a horse rendering plant, a landfill, the Hanford site. What other dirty, messy industry do you want to bring to what you still seem to consider “nowhere”?

KF: Right. Where there’s “nothing.” It seems late in the game to think that way, doesn’t it? It’s time to rethink that. It’s so interesting that we have this idea that certain landscapes are more beautiful and therefore more valuable and others are less beautiful and so it doesn’t really matter what we do to them.

And yet, in that Hanford landscape, they’ve discovered all kinds of plants that are medicinal, and there’s that ecosystem that turns out to be quite well-preserved in Hanford because they haven’t done a lot to it, and it’s really an amazingly varied and interesting place for all these plants. And you think, “There are no plants there; it’s just desert.” Well, there are lots of plants; it’s just our eyes becoming more intelligent about what we are seeing. It took us a long, long time to figure that out because it’s not green doesn’t mean it’s not “pretty”; it’s just not pretty in the traditional sense.

Yes, like you were talking about, it’s a hierarchy of regions—that one is a “better” place and one is a “worse” place, and so the people here are more important and those there less important or less intelligent—it’s a mindset that can prevail and cause damage to the people and the place.

DGM: When I was driving here today from eastern Washington, I passed Richland and started thinking about your poem “Coyote.” That poem is powerful because you do physically feel a shift between eastern and western Washington as you move into and out of it along I-90. If you’ve lived on both sides of the Cascades, you feel a difference.

When you say you still think the people in Richland did the best they could, and that you’re less defensive now than you have been, that all seems to speak to both individual identity and group identity, which I think is so nicely expressed in “Coyote.” Who am I? Who have I been? How do I move between these two spaces and states?

Your book invites us to move with you between those spaces and states, to come on that journey with you and move along the same lines of inquiry. There’s a kind of dual lens at work. I don’t know if you would use the term insider-outsider, but that’s what comes to mind for me. How do you grapple with that dual identity?

KF: At heart I will always be of Eastern Washington—the friendly, easy interchanges with strangers, the less prettified, more practical and more egalitarian community, the sky. And I will always feel the landscape and weather of Western Washington in my bones, and be grateful for the open-mindedness I find in Seattle.

When I travel to Eastern Washington I feel in some very basic way like I’m among my people. Which is ironic, since I think most Eastern Washington communities disowned Richland long ago as some kind of social experiment gone wrong. But mostly what I feel is solidarity with the whole Pacific Northwest in all its forms. I am a die-hard PNWer, daughter of Oregonians—and you never, ever get that out of your blood.

But to the point of “Coyote”—being from Richland means a very strong “us” and “them” mentality—an insider/outsider frame of reference. Scoop Jackson was always part of the “us” even though he never lived in the Tri-Cities, because he was a supporter and worked hard to bring jobs and status to Hanford. Mostly though, the “us’s” have come from Richland/Hanford. I think I surrendered my “insider/us” badge when I wrote these poems.

But I don’t think about grappling with it. I’m just confused most of the time. Where do I belong? But I know I belong in this landscape. The trees and the water and the rain. I feel as if I am rooted here in some way because of that landscape. But I feel such a loyalty to the people I grew up with.

DGM: So when you say “here,” do you mean west of the Cascades?

KF: This side. Yes.

DGM: That leads to the question: Do you see Cascadia as a place, or are the two sides of the Cascades so distinct that they feel like they aren’t part of the same place?

KF: My parents preached to me about how superior Oregon was to any other place in the world. Washington was, for them, a mere shadow of Oregon. And of course then I was very protective of Washington because that’s my home. So I’ve always had this sense that I am from the Northwest and I will always be of the Northwest. I can’t ever imagine being of any other place. I feel protective of it, defensive about it, proud of it—and that includes the high desert, and it includes the ocean, and includes all the places that I think of as being “my place,” my Northwest.

DGM: So you see a conjunction then, not a disjunction between the western side of the bioregion and the eastern side?

KF: I do. I absolutely do. I see the connection, and I’ve driven through it so many times. I just love that trip over the mountains, where you can see, tree by tree, it’s changing from firs to pines and then to the shrubs and then going across the state, and then at the very end, seeing the pines coming back in Spokane. I love seeing that.

DGM: You said something earlier about this place being treated like a colony. If you look at the Oregon territory, it’s very similar to the outline of Cascadia. It’s almost like we were left as a wild place for so long because we weren’t reachable by settlers. But once settled, we’ve in some ways suffered because of our wildness. But we’ve also grown out of and around that wildness.

KF: In high school as part of a church group, we traveled up into British Columbia and got to stay in people’s homes. I remember the host in Victoria talked about how people in British Columbia so much more identified with the Pacific Northwest in the United States than with the rest of Canada. “We’re one of you” was her attitude. I thought that was really interesting. I think that goes to the landscape. I think we’re more of our landscape here than probably most places. Or maybe that’s just pride speaking.

DGM: My last question is based on your earlier response of not feeling like a poet of place or witness. What do you consider a poet of place or witness to be?

KF: I think the mantle of “poet of place” or “poet of witness” is bestowed by others. I suppose even obvious poets of witness like Carolyn Forché don’t set out to write Poems of Witness, they just write the poems they need to write. I’m responding in good measure to my own worries: What if readers think I’m claiming to be the official witness to and voice of the Hanford story? That would misrepresent my intentions and my relationship with Richland and its history. I was only writing the (very personal) poems I know how to write. If those poems are rooted in place (and they are) and if they give witness to an era and a mindset (and I think they do, though I’m not sure how universally), that’s all I can do and that has to be enough.