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
― 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.
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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