Friday, October 24, 2014

October 2014

FEATURED POET: Terry Martin earned a B.A. from Western Washington
University and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Oregon. She’s been fortunate to make her living reading, writing, and talking with students for 35+ years. An English Professor at Central Washington University, she is the recipient of CWU’s Distinguished Professor Teaching Award and the CASE/ Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year Award. Her poems, essays, and articles have appeared in hundreds of publications and she has edited books, journals and anthologies. Her first book of poems, Wishboats, won the Judges’ Choice Award at Seattle’s Bumbershoot Book Fair in 2000. Her second book, The Secret Language of Women, was published by Blue Begonia Press in 2006. She lives with her family in Yakima, Washington.  Check out her latest release The Light You Find at Blue Begonia Press

Howling Like a Coyote

Are you authorized to speak
For these apple trees
Felled by roaring chainsaws
Acre after acre?
Are you able to explain
What the orchard means to do
With hundreds of stumps
Left in graveyard rows?
What it intends to make
Of this emptiness?
What do you know
About the fierce whirring
Of windmill blades on blue days,
Pickups parked along the irrigation ditch,
Smudge pots rusting away in weeds?
Who gave you permission
To look at beer cans and
Tumbleweeds rolling through?
At the For Sale sign in the widow's yard,
Faded laundry flapping on her line?
Ask yourself if poems are enough,
Or if you'd be better off
Slinking into the sagebrush
And howling like a coyote? 

― Terry Martin

Root Canal

The even heaviness of the lead apron
presses down, down.
Then he enters, minty breath and aftershave,
tips my chair back again, shines a bright light,
props my mouth wide open,
shoots in novocaine,
begins poking and prodding and pulling
and I’m as surprised as he is
when tears begin pouring down my cheeks
but, mouth propped, can’t tell him why.
Am I hurting you? he asks, alarmed.
I shake my head ‘no,’ signal him to continue.
I can’t tell him that the body remembers
what the mind longs to forget
and for a moment I’m you.
Surgeries, chemo, radiation,
and finally hospice, and the buttery light
of your living room where, in those final days,
you depended on me to do for you
those things you used to do for me.
The stuttering drill mocks me.
Should I stop? he asks again.
Embarrassed, I shake my head.
Keep going, I want to say.
We’ve all got to just keep going.
Instead, I rub the pastel hem
of my paper bib like a prayer.

― Terry Martin

WRITE YOUR POEM:
When was the last time your best poem came from your eye doctor?  All of us accept our blink of an eye photography.  All of us accept our blink of an eye letters in email. 
The thing is the  photograph all came to us because of a French artist and chemist Daguerre.  In 1832 he finally completed the developing process through a happy accident. He started the process after meeting someone through his eye doctor.  

Here's the thing.  It was a slow artistic process.  It was a slow collaboration. Cooking for hours for your family.  Long drives in the desert with your friend. The poem is a daguerrotype of words.  It creates an image through slow development.  A poem offers that chance. What memories do you craft.  Check out Liz Dolan's poem in her upcoming release from Cave Moon.  Her and Terry have crafted daguerrotypes of love.  Write your poem.

The Spelling Lesson

Teach your brother to spell
Sister Caritas said.
So each night Michael and I
fifteen months apart, sparred
at the enamel table over
 i before e and double b’ s.

How I relished folding up
my sleeves like Sister,
tossing my braids
as if they were a veil
and stabbing his decieve,
occassion and bubles
with my red pen.

He’d rip the papers to shreds
and convert them to confetti.
Each session ended in poisoned barbs,
You dumb ox, I’d hiss.
Ass kisser, he’d sneer.

Today through a trach,
my brother spits out muddled syllables
his left side paralyzed, his lips trembling.
When I massage his neck and shoulders
I test him still,
Where are my fingers, I ask.
Here,
           here
                    or there?
Liz Dolan


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