洞月亮 Cave Moon Press September 2016

FEATURED POET: Jerome Gold PhD—is the author of fifteen books, including The Moral Life of Soldiers and the memoir, Paranoia & Heartbreak: Fifteen Years in a Juvenile Facility. Russell Banks said about this book: “I’ve finished reading Jerome Gold’s terrific book cover to cover without a break… It’s a powerful and very tenderhearted book without a soupçon of sentimentality. Unforgettable!” Mr. Gold’s novels include Sergeant Dickinson, about which the New York Times Book Review said: “[It] belongs on the high, narrow shelf of first-rate fiction about battlefield experience.” He has published stories, essays, reviews and poems in Chiron Review, Moon City Review, Fiction Review, Boston Review, Hawaii Review, and other journals.

He is the founder and editor of Black Heron Press.

EVERYTHING THAT FELL

We mowed down the forest with bulldozers,
cleared the red soil of everything that grew.
All that soft wood, all those porous stalks,
those ropey vines and spiked leaves—
In two months, we burned everything that fell
and that was everything.

One day in the middle of this a man
running from fire of a different kind came
out of the shade of the remaining trees.
He wore the classic black pajamas
and an expression of bewilderment.
He ran back into the forest, and out again.
The place where he could hide was gone.
The place to which he had adapted his life, focused
his memories—gone. What must he have thought?
Had his wife given birth here (there had been a village)?
Had he met here with others to plan an ambush?
Did he call out the names of his parents, his brothers?
You might say his death was a result of his
failure to adapt to a changed environment.

In those days we had all gone feral.

—Jerome Gold

ICARUS
                                   for Roy McCready

From the ground I might have seemed
an angel falling out of orbit
or a tiny meteor aflame
spinning on it lopsided axis
arc-ing downward to a terrible rendezvous.

Inside, beginning to burn, I sat,
unable to reach an ejection handle,
anticipating the melt and crackle of my eyeballs.
My brain, working at light’s speed,
fastened finally on the solution to my problem:

I would ride the plane into the sea,
the sea would douse the fire,
I would climb out and be saved.
I held to this desperate idiocy for an
electric moment’s fraction before my plane exploded,

loosing me into hot sunlight
where my parachute snapped, rippled,
opened and set me down in brine
that doused my burns. The helicopter
arrived before the enemy and I was saved,

though somewhere in the tangle of shouting and harness,
drumming rotor blades and lathering water,
and the fearful hammering of cannon
I lost my Navy-issue .38-caliber
revolver

which
as I healed in hospital in San Diego,
the FBI, in a confrontation classic in irony,
dispassion, and the agency’s determination
to extinguish evil in all its guises,

accused me of stealing with the motive of
profit, or nostalgia, or
providing aid to the enemy.



WRITE YOUR POEM

accused me of stealing with the motive of
profit, or nostalgia, or
providing aid to the enemy.

Gold provides us with an ironic punchline too outlandish to make-up even for a fantasy prose writer. It is also given to us, not in a heavy handed fashion, like too much syrup on some pancakes.  It comes from a bare knuckled, witness style of poetry.

We saw much of the same thing with Crysta Casey's poems.  Although our passion and emotion can enter into the writing of a poem, there is something to be said for the dispassionate observation of the event that adds power and meaning.  Hemingway did it for prose about war and in places T.S. Eliot did the same, although there was still a sense of style and flair with Eliot's work.    

Write two versions of your next poem.  Write one full of gushing emotive adjectives.  Write another as if you were a dispassionate robot observing the event.  What shifts do you have to make?  Scribble your poem on a napkin at breakfast in the coffee shop.  Stuff it in your pocket for later.

洞月亮 August 2016

FEATURED POET: CRYSTA E. CASEY(1952-2008) was born in Pasadena, California. She graduated from The State University of New York, Stony Brook, in 1976, where she was one of the founding members of The Women Writers Workshop. After college, she became the first woman hired by the City of Irvine, California, in Parks and Maintenance. In 1978, she enlisted in the all-new voluntary military, serving in the U.S. Marine Corps as a journalist, then as a self-declared “Resident Poet” until her honorable discharge under medical conditions in 1980. She moved to Seattle, Washington in the early 1980s, where she studied with the poet Nelson Bentley and collaborated with Esther Altshul Helfgott on the It’s About Time Writers Reading Series. Her first collection of poetry, Heart Clinic, was published in 1993 (Bellowing Ark Press). In 2004 she received a Hugo House Award from Richard Hugo House, and, in 2006, she was a finalist for Seattle Poet Populist. In 2010, Floating Bridge Press brought out a chapbook of her work, Green Cammie. Rules for Walking Out was the last manuscript Crysta completed and approved before her death at the Seattle VA in the spring of 2008. It was published by Cave Moon Press in June 2016. Crysta’s papers are housed in the University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections.

Check out her latest book @ Cave Moon Press

V.A. SMOKE SHACK

In a loosely-tied robe, the man with stump legs,
in a wheelchair, his gray hair pulled back
in a ponytail, swaps tales with another vet,
peanut butter in C-rats and M-16s
that clogged in the mud. One old man says,
“I don’t know nothin ‘bout Vietnam.”
He’s from WWII, lost on a long shot,
still betting the Kentucky Derby
that afternoon on TV. The nurse
on the night shift tells me about neighbors
who make too much noise getting drunk,
letting their kid jump on the floor.
“Shoulda never bought that place
near the airport. When planes take off
going north, the house rattles
and I wear earplugs.”
The vets in the smoke shack
stare at the sky with lost eyes
when a plane flies over. A man says,
“They’re going to remove half my face.
It was always my bad side.” Another says
he has a cowboy hat like that other vet
from Idaho, but he doesn’t wear it.
“I think I’m being punished,” says the old
man who asks for a light.

—Crysta E. Casey

MIRACLE

Last night I performed
a miracle. I poured
the bottle I had left
down the drain. I turned wine
into water.

—Crysta E. Casey

WRITE YOUR POEM!

Accoutrements:

I turned wine

into water.

The subject slaps us in the face more than the arrangement of the words.  We are hammered not by a certain meter or form.  We are hammered by a glimpse into the pain of a veteran.  So, since she set us up with that premise, the use of an ironic allegory at the end functions beautifully in this piece.

So, as you write your poem, what are you relying on to drawn in the reader?  If you lean on the accoutrements, then you have a challenge.  The reader has to be along for the ride, much like a fashionista needs to understand what is happening on the runway in Paris.  

In any case, write your poem.  Push the subject.  Accoutrements end up a dash of salt, in powerful poems.  If you are going to push the form, push it to the edge.

May, 2016

FEATURED POET: TOD MARSHALL grew up in Kansas. His book Bugle (Canarium Press, 2014) won the Washington State Book Award in 2015. His other books of poetry include The Tangled Line (Canarium Press, 2009), and Dare Say (University of Georgia Press, 2002). He has also published a collection of his interviews with contemporary poets, Range of the Possible (Eastern Washington University Press, 2002) and an attendant anthology of work by the interviewed poets, Range of Voices (EWU Press, 2005). He lives in Spokane, Washington, and teaches at Gonzaga University.  He is serving as the poet laureate for the state of Washington from 2016-2018.

VIDEO: TOD MARSHALL-GHOST TOWN OPEN MIC

ARTICLE: TOD MARSHALL-INLANDER

HOW WE LEARN THAT WE ARE NOT ON OUR OWN

I don’t know what that sheriff thought of me

(shirtless, eight, holding the sheet metal screen

door, bracket and chain to keep it from swinging

busted in the last storm), as I lied to him

again when he asked if my folks were home,

except that his face showed he knew how things

would end up for me. “Come on, I know they’re home.”

The a/c labored in a window, evening

cicadas made racket.  Behind me, the TV

that was on when I answered the door, clicked off.

“Who turned it off?”  I looked him straight on. 

“My little brother,” I said, just as he

toddled in diapers from the back of the trailer,

and we stood side by side, guarding that door.

(First published in Crab Creek Review)

THAT ONGOING WORK

Most of us know only smoke:  dirty gauze, grey

weight on each cough of an hour.  Red eye

of the sun lingering, that slow arson

plotting with lightning, both hiding in clouds,

and worse:  most of us have occasionally cursed

the haze, rubbed watery eyes, mumbling my day,

my breath, my unburnt minutes.  We’re like that.  Try,

instead, to feel real heat, to hold hands open

and near hot embers, blue propane of a grill;

to see meat slowly sear, grease sizzle

into cinder. It’s okay if you fail. 

Just try.  And try, too, beneath blue skies when wind

clears smoke away, try to recall the blackened land,

and maybe try becomes a small act to heal the abundant ash, the pain.

(First appeared in Elizabeth Austen's blog)

WRITE YOUR POEM!

Shakespeare had stage blocking to get the attention of the audience with contrast. Sometimes it is the subject matter that shocks, like with farmworkers in Steinbeck's novels.  What does the poet have?  Not that much. It has to count.  

Note that Tod's first poem the screen door and diapers on his brother rivet the reader. Those tiny details are counterweights to whatever the sheriff is bringing to the front door.

What does your screen door do in your poem?  Notice there is no waxing eloquent in Tod's poem.  The moment is left with the eight-year old.  Economy of image and word.  

What can you cut out?  How can you focus your image?  Catch up to Tod around the state.  Write your poem.

洞月亮 April 2016

FEATURED POET: Michael Daley— was born and raised in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He later took vows and prepared to become a Catholic priest. Upon leaving religious life, he was wild in the streets, protesting wars and seeking a life of experience. He holds a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts and an M.F.A. from the University of Washington. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Hudson Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Rhino, North American Review, Writers Almanac, Raven Chronicles, Seattle Review, Jeopardy, Prairie Schooner, Cirque, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cascadia Review, and elsewhere. He is the founding editor of Empty Bowl Press, publisher of the Dalmo’ma series of anthologies among other titles; former Poet-in-Residence for the Washington State Arts Commission, the Skagit River Poetry Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and a retired English Instructor for Mount Vernon High School. His reviews and essays have appeared in Pacific Northwest Review of Books, Raven Chronicles, Port Townsend Leader, and Book/Mark Quarterly Review. In addition to seven chapbooks, he has published three full-length collections of his poetry: The Straits, To Curve, Moonlight in the Redemptive Forest, and a book of essays: Way Out There/Lyrical Essays. He has been awarded by the Washington State Arts Commission, Seattle Arts Commission, Artist Trust, Fulbright, and the National Endowment of the Humanities; recently, Pleasure Boat Studio published his translation of Alter Mundus by Italian poet Lucia Gazzino. Of a Feather has just been published by Empty Bowl of Port Townsend, a division of Jack Estes’ Pleasure Boat Studio, New York City.  Look for his work in the upcoming Cave Moon Press Anthology Footsteps to benefit homeless veterans.







Michael Daley-Site












WAR CRIMES

“Society is like a stew. If you don't stir it up every once in a while 

then a layer of scum floats to the top.”—Edward Abbey

The Senator was protecting, like a she-bear, 

that revered Dr. K., whose damned body, 

well past ninety and rotting in his slippers,

shuffled into the Senate to advise a subcommittee

underwhelmed by chanting protesters —

a Greek tragedy, his body wheeled in 

from a movie set—Dr. Strangelove.

The Chorus chanted names of countries

where Henry’s legacy arose, where 

countless human animals boiled in

or fled our poisons, our strafing, 

boots we crept in to make them safe.

When they chanted the name, “Vietnam,”

the Senator cried out. Once I had assumed 

he spoke with my own heart.

I lied to myself that he knew the city streets,

could have been my classmate,

might have walked the old neighborhood,

struggled with us, knew what work is. 

I blinded myself to his history of privilege.

He’d been chained to a wall in the prison hut, 

so why bow to this war criminal, 

frail seer led to testify before Creon

while the Chorus in pink was ushered offstage?

They may have felt it savage, compassionless, 

to hiss at the defender of détente, intervention,

hemisphere hegemony, and overthrow—once,

the brain of Nixon, our blood line to the Hapsburgs. 

When the Senator spewed his regal curse, 

no one spoke. Protestors had defiled his hall,

calm proceedings gave him meaning, 

an imagined hurt to Henry was a breach. 

But the Senator hurt me, ratted my trust. 

Not by sicking his slick and frothing dogs

to slime the staircase, but he whipped me 

with my own guilt, that beautiful 

inward machine. Pop indoctrination 

and other Media distractions halted, even

the Prisoner of War unmasked as drone

of the dictator class, outraged, was silenced

for the moment, and those clowns, the Chorus

whispered: “War Crime War Crime War Crime.”

Picture her swept into the arms of the suited guard, 

the Code Pink girl who rushes Henry

shaking like Voodoo her shiny handcuffs, 

the nauseated wife behind Schultz

flanked by two daughters in a trance—

the girl shoved away, pumps above the wreckage

of Kissinger her scrawled sign: “Cambodia,” 

the Senator cursing her, cursing all of us

dredges up from his own inmost filth:

“Get out of here, you low-life scum.”

FROM OF THE FEATHER

*

Across the lake in the darkness

is a light where a man sits at a table

eating a breakfast of oatmeal

and writing his first poem of the day.

When he looks into darkness

he knows the giant cedar is out there,

and the lake—last night a tub of dull moon—

hasn’t dried up, or changed

in any way apparent or important.

He sees one light, only this one,

where someone at a kitchen table

(with oatmeal, and scribbling)

doesn’t trouble what lies

in the dark between us.

WRITE YOUR POEM!

From Michael's last poem we question the role of the poet.  When he writes in the third person the reader is forced to sit at the table next to him and watch him scribble his poem.  So it begs questions. What is the color of Michael's shirt?  When you sit the reader down at the breakfast table in prose lines they start to look around the room and wonder.  Is Michael's oatmeal instant?  Does he use Folger's coffee, like your grandmother, or Starbuck's blend?

In the end, does your poem make you the lead singer of an 80's power ballad? Does your voice carry the poem or is it the images that carry the poem?  Michael has put us in the middle of that question but like all master poets he ultimately points us back to the words. The last line makes us forget that we don't care that he might wear a green, plaid Pendleton shirt with his DeKalb baseball cap tilted just a bit so he can concentrate.....write your poem.  

洞月亮 Cave Moon Press March 2016

FEATURED POET: Betty Scott is a poet and essayist. In the 1980’s she wrote a bimonthly column about family life for The Wenatchee World and this began her writing career.  

She was born in Santa Barbara, CA, and earned a BA in English Literature from UCLA, a teaching certificate from Central Washington University and a MA in English with a writing emphasis from Western Washington University.

As a longtime board member for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) of Whatcom County, she provided education and support for people encountering the complexities of our costly mental health system and for those who have lost loved ones to suicide. 
A former instructor at Whatcom Community College and Bellingham Technical College, Scott devotes her retirement years to writing and editing. She has several manuscripts waiting for publication. 

In her collaboration with singer, songwriter JP Falcon Grady, Scott searches for social systems that lead to nurturing and protecting children, adults and the earth. Together they perform poems that support bio diversity, as the earth’s blue print for its land, air, and water.  Beneath human constructs of science, politics, sports, philosophy, business, and religion is an abiding energy, a living spirit, often described as love, faith, forgiveness and generosity. In her poems, Scott imagines how a diversity of human responses can lead to a healthier planet. When they perform together, JP Falcon Grady sings the italicized parts of her poems. 

An Earth Year Blessing was previously published in Noisy Water: Poetry from Whatcom County, Washington, edited by Luther Allen & J.J. Kleinberg. 
The Playground was presented to participants at the 2013 Chuckanut Writers Festival in Bellingham. 

AN EARTH YEAR BLESSING

No man a salt shaker

No woman a sugar bowl

To pour, use up

And put out to pantry

No more darting of eyes

Or senator sneers

When Mama’s Boys pilgrim

To Great Mama’s pastures

To dance, step by step

With maternal wisdoms

To tango and waltz

Arms and heads in precision

Each footfall a grace

Restoring Earth’s faith

Mama’s troupes swaying

Singing and praying: 

Single Mama, Widowed Mama,

Earthly image of Great Mama

Hallowed be your name

Holy Sustainer of Life

Your people tend on you

Beloved Great Mama

On earth as we hope in heaven.

―Betty Scott

THE PLAYGROUND

In writing, it’s a well-known fact: 

letters are lizards with legs and tails

syllables bite like alligator teeth

and words blossom like magnolia trees.

No lie: in swamps and fields, the wind strokes

and ripples the tiniest wild flower

that under the light of a microscope

lives as complex as an orchid or rose.

It’s a fact: the cells of grasses and leaves

resemble living streams and arteries.

In marshes, hollow reeds are fiddle strings

that shadow the shallows and hallowed-winged.   

It’s the truth: people swarm, sip, and worship

our playgrounds during festival seasons 

as the heirs to brass notes float, fall, and rise

beneath the gumbo of moon and moonshine.

While the infinite and minuscule breed

while lizards, swamps and birds battle to breathe

the heated U.S. is rooted and twined

to nature’s rhythms and rhymes. Who rests?

―Betty Scott

WRITE YOUR POEM

It’s the truth: people swarm, sip, and worship

our playgrounds during festival seasons 

As Daylight savings pops up and people swarm malls like ants on a doughnut where do you find yourself with the poem?  People who love words find time and watch the people in the mall.  What do you do?  Is there just that one gesture?  That one phrase?  

We have cell phones to take pictures.  We need poets to write the words.  Write your poem!

February 2016

FEATURED POET: Nathaly Rosas Martinez was born in Minnesota, in the U.S., though she grew up in Mexico where she lived in Veracruz for thirteen years. In 2014, at age fifteen, she moved back to the U.S. only with her mother. She speaks two languages, English and Spanish. In her country she saw all kinds of food because her family likes to cook things like tacos, salsas, sopes, chileatoles y picaditas and they also like to cook new things. She hopes to go back to her Mexico in 2016. She is proud of her culture because she thinks that in her culture there are many special traditions. She would like to share her experience of being Mexican with the world. Two of the most important goals in her life are to go to college in Veracruz where she grew up and to support her little brother to achieve his dreams. Nathaly believes that food is our identity, our force, and that our cultural food is our principal source. She believes that each bite of our food has memories of our nation and that food is an important piece of our traditions. Nathaly also believes that food is the blood and soul of our ancestors and that every culture should be proud of their food. And she believes that making food is an art and a way of expressing our memories.

Nathaly Rosas Martinez is part of the book Stories of Arrival: Refugee and Immigrant Youth Voices Poetry Project.    

Check both of our poets from the last two months out Here


MY FATHER'S HANDS

I remember my father’s hands

Putting a red apple every morning

In my hands,

Wishing me a good day at school

Gently wiping the apple for me,

Sometimes I thought his hands had the scent

Of the perfume of my mother

She hugged me every time

Before going to work.

Sometimes my father’s hands felt like the soft hands

Of my brother holding my hand

On my way home from school.

How many memories can save a simple apple?

Sometimes the world revolves

Around this small apple

and we don’t know it.

This apple sometimes cries with me

When I remember all the things

That makes me smile

like the tiny arms of my brother.

Remembering the people in my life

my father, my friends, my family

they are waiting to be alive again.

—Nathaly Rosas

WHERE FOOD IS AN ART

I am from a place where

The food is an art and every bite

Is a spicy piece of our culture

Where the smells call you to enjoy

And the flavors take you to your memories

I am from where the trees grew up everywhere

Guayabo, naranjo, alamos,manzano and palmera*

And the children take the special gift from them

Naranjas y limas, limas and limones **

Where the grocery stores have fresh items

Epazote, elotes, manzanas,melones y granada ***

And bring us an exquisite dinner

Kneading and rolling, combination of flavors

Flavors that our indigenous ancestor gave us

Combination of oils and onions always mixed

Picante y salado **** gather and dance together

Our food is not only food

It’s a way to communicate our feelings

It’s a way to talk with our family

It’s our history, our identity

But now everything is not the same

The tortillas smell different, the salsa is not spicy

Our special gifts are mixed with chemicals

Our food enclosed in a plastic prison

Gradually, we will lose the essence even in our countries

The hands of our grandparents and our people were killed

The food of my family was thrown into garbage

The cookbook of my grandmother was burned

There is still hope

The gentle hands of my mother

Every day serving food

Our kitchen table will be in another country

And the people who ate with us

Are no longer here

But we will return to gather

In the morning lights

And the darkness nights

At the strong sound of the rain

My aunties give this wisdom to my cousins

My parents give it to my brother and me

to conserve our specials secrets.

* Fruit trees

**A pun in Mexico

***Epazote, corn,apples, melon and pomegranate

—Nathaly Rosas

WRITE YOUR POEM

Our food is not only food

It’s a way to communicate our feelings

It’s a way to talk with our family

It’s our history, our identity

Nathaly teaches us that to create in any "genre" whether it be cooking, writing poems or sewing a quilt that we use it to communicate.  Any of these shared art forms are a special code within themselves as much as the heroic couplet or the iambic pentameter.

Use Nathaly's lesson to us here to practice your poem.  "Our commute is not only a commute..."

Write your poem in a rain puddle.  Write your poem on the wind. Share it with someone today.