a cockeyed optimism

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.

sea smoke

by judith skillman


As far as winter
stretches, I am alone
on this cliff
staring down at what
could be fog or steam or mist.

The whisper of reeds recalls
a wound I barely remember,
a figure who could be . . .

As far as we are apart,
as old as that
and more, our differences,
the complaint you mustered
upon finding heat coalesced
into a lump.

The body, cremated, can be compressed
to diamonds. Stroke of gray
on a gull, prescience,
hull of the boat that might have saved Icarus
when he came of age . . .

As far as the dead are concerned,
the sun is smoke
the moon milk,
stars salt. With seared eyes
the dead see the living,
hunched figures
who find by dreaming
what it is they are looking for.

A glimpse of cloth,
bone of hanger left between a coat
torn from its closet
and the marred dowel
from which hung
garment bags. Mothballs
of ancient Styrofoam,
the insects have eaten
through silk, cashmere, linen,
and more.

Hat that should have been worn
in minus centigrade—
the dead see
our flesh in tatters
and the foreshortened days,
foreshadowing.

 


“Sea Smoke” was first published in Heat Lightning New and Selected Poems 1986–2006, reprinted by permission of Silverfish Review Press.

postcards to cascadia: eileen walsh duncan

Duncan Postcard One Back 3

 


There Be Fiends: Dear Mom, / You gave me your truth, warnings / that skitter out of my satchel, / zing my spine. / If I’d known anything, / I would have asked for tools, / and ditched the dress, the lipstick, / all edible markings. / Tools I collected out here: / When cornered, / do not meet their gaze, they / thirst for your retina’s quiver. / Watch the shoulders, they / presage the strike. / To be invisible, / synchronize / each intake of breath. — Eileen Walsh Duncan

View postcard image: The Wizard of Oz

where the water is

by lauren lockhart


men with their mile counting and their maps
            maps with their measurement and

lines,
a curious violence.

the Aspen bends where she wishes, stooping

to touch a white rock
nameless
I am surprised to find that she touches me first

and the Hackberry tree advises
that I follow the bird.

I know which one she means,
the one that fits inside my eye

which means
go where the water is

which means
name your daughter before the men begin to measure her.

anatomy of the profit

by lauren lockhart


one day
while I was floating inside her
my mother gave me a story

with her blood she gave it to me—
a transfused history which has removed my marrow
and replaced it with

fibers from a Douglas Fir.

born from one womb to enter the next—
Earth wounds me and heals me in the same breath.

her story opens
with a perverted momentum—
acres of clear-cutting
which is unlike the cycled fires,

and I do not want to trade my blood.
our infections are each a gift but I can trade my name
as a prelude to forgiveness.
            maybe.

when I am spine down on the ground outside,
I am home.

and I can hear my body’s wooden voice
which is her voice
which is the voice of this place, still

I cannot decide whether to sleep
outside with a spade
or in the basement with the mold.

medicine moves down

by lauren lockhart


weeping,
the water drained from hawk’s belly
rolls down,

sweet like
milk in the sun

the stream collides with all three parts of my
mind and lulls the inflammation there into a

weighted peace.

It begins with the center-

my heart knows it is my organ
and my nest
it knows it is a borrowed comfort

like a sudden breeze through the window

amber liquorish root
shining in the glass

sketch of a fig tree

by kelli russell agodon


Halfway through the day with the sun like a halo
over my neighbor’s house, I think about God
and time and if it’s possible to feed my soul with a pen
and ink drawing I saw at a museum by an artist
whose name I didn’t recognize.

Somewhere across the country my house is falling apart,
or maybe it did years ago, returning to my old neighborhood
to realize the streets were never as big as I thought
and the house I lived in was not as nice
as the house down the road, but I was never allowed
to walk that far.

I’m older now and what’s falling apart is the sunset
I try to watch from my office window
where I’m surrounded by books
and it doesn’t matter how much the fog moves in
or if there’s a neighborhood where kids fight

about the color of poppies. I think back to the fig tree
that grew in my yard and how the leaves always reminded me
of being somewhere else or in the middle of a Rousseau painting
where the jungle was a prayer and everything I needed
was above me and all I had to do was reach up,
all I had to do was open my hands.

writing studio d: a retrospective in spring

by kelli russell agodon


— Port Townsend, Washington

Imagine this: it’s the day before Easter
            and beautiful if you love sun 

and birdsong and egg hunts, but not 
            if you’re wishing for rain, if you think Jesus 

is a distraction from real life and birdsong 
            is the unexpected alarm now waking you 

before 6 a.m. But it is, beautiful, the day before 
            Easter and you have to drive forty-five minutes

to watch your daughter at a two-minute Easter egg
            hunt, but that is three hours from now

and right now, you’re in a room typing a poem.
            Imagine this: It’s the week before Easter

and you’ve planned a writing retreat with friends, 
            to go to a haunted apartment to write

for five full days, five full days, because there is
            nothing more you want to do 

than lose yourself in your words. But you’ve 
            learned to stop saying “retreat” and use 

the term “residency” because others
            think you’re on vacation, some sort of

girl’s weekend with wine and pedicures. No, 
            this is where they’ve become confused.

This is where a friend says, It’s so nice 
            your husband can watch your daughter

as if he’s not related to her, as if he’s not 
            responsible for her care. And there was

this week I found myself
            annoyed because my daughter’s teacher 

wrote me after my husband went
            on a field trip with her class:

Your husband was a wonderful chaperone.
            Thank you for sharing 

him with us. And I wanted to hit
      reply say, Dads get points 

just for showing up. Imagine 
      the teacher ever writing 

my husband to say, Thanks for sharing 
      your wife with us. Thank you 

for not only being a dad who showed up, 
      but also a Filipino dad, 

you’ve added so much diversity 
      to this busload of white kids. 

Imagine this: It’s the day before
      Easter and I’m beautiful 

and not bitter that my generation is still
      stuck between women who live

for their men and the girls who expect 
      more. Maybe they will resent 

their husbands for caring too much
      about hairstyles, for using product.

There’s an Easter Egg hunt in less than 
      three hours and I’m frothing 

about relationships, about already having drank 
      my first cup of coffee and it’s empty, 

instead of realizing I’m still here, in this
      room looking out to a forest 

of blackberry bramble, of trees with moss
      on the north side, just like

in the Camp Fire Girl book I had as a child
      when I believed that good deeds

created beads and patches and I could rename
      myself Kekoa because it meant

Brave One, because I would grow up
      to be thankful for my ability to start

fires when the other girls fumbled with their flint.
      And while in this town, Jesus is a distraction

because he’s walking up the street in a tiny toga
      with an Elvis in wings

singing, Hunka-hunka burning love during the Easter
      parade because it’s hippie-dippie here.

I know where I reside best and how I can leave 
      last minute from a beautiful day-before-

Easter-morning to arrive back into my life of family 
      members who forget to drag the garbage 

down to the corner and be thankful I only start fires
      because someone needs warmth

but otherwise, I can leave the flint in my pocket and
      no longer create spark just to prove I’m the best.

in praise of staying married

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 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 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 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.

crossing bone river

by jed myers


The bay widens and welcomes
more light onto the road.
It’s all silver, and then
back into the conifer greens and blues,
the silt-brown rain-swollen creeks,
moss-mottled alders, windless
ponds and their nibbling geese.

And the memory of arriving,
driving in the other direction, toward
the city where the kids would be born.
I’m not leaving—I’m returning,
to the beginning of who I’ve become,
the beginning of this long rainy season,
its leaks in the roof and walls,

mist-walking in the mud of the creek
in the shadows of the ravine, small hands
in my hands. Those young
who arrived through the body of the one
woman I married, they’ve flown
out of the rain. I’m still arriving.
The bay is quiet over the oysters . . . .

interview with kathleen flenniken

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.

signatures

by joannie stangeland


1. Water stares back

Here, a thicket
of Nootka rose,
salal clouding low.

Here, a stand of alders.
Each tree a moment.

The forest stories,
writing on the ground,
sound puddled.

The pond opens, a door.
Sudden gold surfaces.

A sunlight knife.


2. The knife writes

The hand signs its name.
Two cup for water.

Sunlight streaks the knuckles.

A palm, a psalm,
another dusk.
My kingdom for a thumb.

In the hand, a glass,
wine darker than blood.

Hands carve the soil, 
plant calendula, 
tomatoes, peppers, kale.

Sun on dirt.
Iron residue.
 


3. Far from Ypsilanti

Noise for the eyes,
the wind clapping,
slim shivers.

Each leaf shimmers its notes
without sound.

I write around the pool’s verge,
stack my little words
like a city built of toothpicks,

empty matchbooks.
Without light.

I leave out
the hard parts,
but I do not leave.

Each silence glints, another knife.
Each cut mutes and opens,
a bad mouth gulping.

Syllables chuck
in my throat, in mud,
on brambles.

Empty pockets.
Raw.

I want to give you a white horse,
a slap on its rump,
a clear path out of here.

I want to give you a glass of wine,
fish and spinach.

I don’t want to watch you 
through that door.