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TURTLE ISLAND QUARTERLY 25
Winter/Spring 2024
2 poems by LORRIE NESS, 2 poems by BILL GRIFFIN, a poem by PAUL J. WILLIS,
2 poems by ELEANOR KEDNEY, a poem by CHRIS ANDERSON,
a poem by KOLBE RINER, 2 poems by LIZ WEIR,
2 poems by JC ALFIER, a poem by JERRY SMALDONE
2 poems by LORRIE NESS
The Pond
was a cappuccino,
dolloped with frog egg foam.
It was partially cloudy then overripe plum.
It wore blossoms in the spring and a feather boa
after the coyote came to call. It was a chaos
of wings and runway. It was shattered by the eider’s plunge
and paddled back together with webbed feet. It was a siren song.
It was fog before mist, and star-pocked before dawn.
It was pewter sheen and invitation, motor oil
and irritation. It was swamp gas and bog.
It specialized in sunken keys, flooded waders and defeat.
It was a baptism, turned whole-body kiss. It was a curtain shutting
across the muck. It was the stink that never came clean —
the pond that visited our Maytag then never moved out.
It was cat-tailed and fox-drunk and brimming with the snot
from deer. It was a tongue-stippled turtle tea.
It was a rink for striders but an ocean to a paper boat.
It suffered a scum-capped adolescence
before it grew clear. Its guts were stirred by fish
then turned over with our oars. It was ice and hockey blades
then buried in snow. It was four inches thick
before it grew thin. It was an insatiable hunger
licking the dock. It was a diver’s delight
and a bullseye that could never bruise. It was a funhouse mirror
when we couldn’t face the truth. It was a warm welcome
for our poles’ angle, our ankle’s dangle.
It was chalked in pollen on a day without breeze.
It was the ripple of a dragonfly landing on my line.
It was one circle expanding around another —a bluegill’s mouth
whirlpooling just below.
Tornado Warning
Transformers blow and the cloudbank lowers,
flashing its bloated green belly. A pickle jar jostles
against the jelly in the door then settles
as the compressor sputters & stops. Hinges struggle to hold
the shutters against the walls. Flapping
crows funnel down, huddle wing to wing along a wire.
Outside the stillness of the house, the squall is churning
across the field. Heifers gather below a lone tree,
because the cattle that saw a bolt split the sycamore last spring
are no longer here to usher them away.
The chimney whistles a lullaby, and the sky lays down
along the ground. Winds switch,
rush backwards into the storm even as it advances.
It’s an approach/avoidance conflict. I face
the western horizon as the siren wails. You call my name
from the basement door, but I do not turn
from the window. I watch the clouds curl, the animals
hunker low. Just a few seconds more.
Lorrie Ness is a poet working on the east coast of the United States. Her works can be found in numerous journals, including Palette Poetry, THRUSH, Trampset, Poetry Online and Sky Island Journal. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. Her chapbook, Anatomy of a Wound was published by Flowstone Press in 2021 and her debut full-length collection, Heritage & Other Pseudonyms will be published by Flowstone Press in 2024.
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2 poems by BILL GRIFFIN
Inordinate Fondness for Beetles
The museum insects have kept their six
jointed legs, the decapods their ten, the too
numerous to count all theirs as well
and when they last flexed leapt crept
beneath a leaf, up a vine, flashed metallic
wingcover spectra, leafbrown spots,
did they ponder variation? was all
their desire to adapt? were they happy?
In the gift shop my grandson chooses
the collection arthropoda and wants to carry
plastic scorpion and centipede
in his pocket for our afternoon walk;
on the path a slug – he would love
to squish it, oh yes, but we kneel
and coax it onto my fingertip.
Unperturbed it extends slender
ommatophores and considers the boy
without judgement, and when
I replace it in the grass beneath
a leaf and suggest, He’ll be happy there,
the child I love nods.
Fireflies
Most often see a ghost when looking
elsewhere: the man
invites her to come find them,
this woman whose name he learned
only this morning and now can’t recall,
come join him at the edge of the trees
above the stream where pale ghosts
hover. Perhaps they will drift
up from hushed evening
when two people not a couple
step into darkness and the man
clears from his throat words
of apology or justification I know
I’ve seen them here
but the quiet is complete.
On summer nights back home
the man’s wife points to Taurus
and at the edge of vision
seven sisters show themselves
most often seen when looking
elsewhere, the Bull
so loud, the women subtle;
here night doesn’t fall, it hovers
behind them and gently
shoulders aside the last of day
to make space for breath
and one small blue nothing that enters
to perfect the silence.
There’s one, he breaks it
and she breathes Hmmm
or maybe doesn’t; they see two,
three, more visitations
that luminesce to inscribe
their secrets in long slow cursive
mostly seen when not looking.
The man juggles his next word,
drops it irretrievable, walks
back up the hill.
The woman remains.
Bill Griffin is a naturalist and retired family physician in rural North Carolina. His ecopoetry collection, Snake Den Ridge, a Bestiary, unfolds in the Great Smoky Mountains. Bill’s favorite quotation concerns the 20th century biologist JBS Haldane, who when asked if his breadth of scientific knowledge had enlightened him about the nature of God, stated, “God has an inordinate fondness for beetles.” Discover Bill’s microessays, photos, and a hundred Southern poets at http://GriffinPoetry.com.
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a poem PAUL J. WILLIS
Most Days,
my work is going to quiet places.
No one talks there but the trees:
sequoias speak the lowest notes.
You’d think they would be octaves
higher, given their reach,
but the resonations rise from deep
within their trunks, deep
inside the fire-scarred hollows
near the duff. So I walk among them
and listen to their reverberations,
the rumping and thumping
of double-bass boles beneath
the staccato twinkling of dogwood
blossoms against an impossibly blue sky.
I put what all the trees are saying
into my ear and hike back home
with my head tilted on one side
so the silence does not spill away—
water brimming in a spring,
ready to pour out the words.
Paul J. Willis is a writer, essayist, retired professor of English, and former poet laureate of Santa Barbara, California.
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2 poems by ELEANOR KEDNEY
Empty
Tell me how to empty myself of the day, every night.
Put down the carton of sun-spoiled raspberries
I waited too late in the season to pick.
Stop running my fingernail in the scratch
on a window I tried to clean with the wrong cloth.
My moan at the misaligned fireplace doors
that were perfectly placed
until I said yes to a little more adjustment.
Tell me how to empty myself of the night, every morning.
Release the memory of a fist breaking furniture
at 2:00 a.m. Waking
from the same dream I’m choking.
The coyote killing the rabbit
near the patio.
And let me tell you how to sip coffee or tea
while watching the sky open
into ribbons of bright blue.
Kiss the good gentle dog on the forehead.
Pray over your food for all that gave its life
so you may live.
I’ll tell you the night is passage
to a deeper self that can cross over to other realms.
Put a glass of water by your bed—
a nightmare can be quenched should you wake.
Remember the moon’s healing soft light
fills you when you’re empty.
The Helpers
The old dog was ready to die.
She no longer howled earshot
of a siren or barked at coyotes.
She stopped tossing a rawhide chip
into the air or playing chase
around the couch when I’d come home.
We lay on the carpet,
and I looked into her eyes.
They held an inner light.
That night, a Screech-Owl perched
on the backyard fence as we took slow steps
in the cool dark. Along the chain link,
under muted moonlight, a diamondback
rattlesnake in a resting coil—its body in a ball,
the rattle tucked. Jackalyn paused and stared
as though the snake wasn’t there,
already on her way to an unveiled place
I couldn’t see. I was less afraid of death.
Eleanor Kedney is the author of Between the Earth and Sky (C&R Press, 2020), a finalist for the 2021 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards and the 2020 Best Book Awards, and the chapbook The Offering (Liquid Light Press, 2016). Her book Twelve Days from Transfer is forthcoming from 3: A Taos Press (March, 2024.) An award-winning poet, her work has been published in various journals, magazines, and anthologies. Kedney is the founder of the Tucson branch of the New York-based Writers Studio and served as the director for ten years. Based on craft techniques utilized in her books, she developed and facilitates the “Writing Toward Forgiveness” workshop. She joined the board of the Tucson Poetry Festival in 2021. Eleanor lives in Tucson, Arizona with her husband, Peter Schaffer, their dog, Fred, and their cat, Ivy.
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a poem by CHRIS ANDERSON
The Pilot Whale
Riding my bike to school I see a whale
that has followed a boat into the locks.
It surfaces quietly, broad back glistening,
sleek and black in the oily water.
I was crossing over on a narrow bridge.
In the distance, the spires of the city.
I was on my way to the university,
to the books and the seminars and all I was
trying to be. But now something sleek
and black has broken the surface—
a Pilot Whale—caught, big as a pickup,
curving and diving along the steep walls
of the lock, until the level finally drops
and it can swim away, back out
into the broad, bright waters of the sea.
Chris Anderson is an emeritus professor of English at Oregon State University and a Catholic deacon. His new book of poems, Love Calls Us Here, from Wildhouse Press.
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a poem by KOLBE RINEY
stir
I think I was born a child / of the sea / born, like water / fluid— / once one way / then another / Each night / asked the sky / to teach me how / to hold myself / in place / teach me to become / immovable // She sent me a lover / to show me / to keep still / the way she taught him: / focused on the pleasures / The steam rising / from the lake / in summer / Us fighting rising / with it / our pale chests / like whales breaching / moon-drenched / moon-sharp / The spray of sweet-salt / from a steady prow / a light-dark fin / in its’ crest / The sound I hear / when I hit the water / same as stars / popping in my mouth / and it parting / around me / like smooth ripples / in green volcano / glass.
Kolbe Riney is a queer poet and nurse from Tucson, Arizona. Their work is featured or forthcoming in Tinderbox, Passages North, Stoneboat Journal, the Chestnut Review, and others. They were nominated to the Best of the Net and their manuscript, “mythic”, was shortlisted for the 2021 Sexton Prize. Learn more: kolberiney.wixsite.com/website
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2 poems by LIZ WEIR
Capitalism
In the barn owl’s
regurgitated pellet—
three bleached skulls
of lowly field workers
each worked clean
as an empty pocket.
The hungry owl
consumes small lives,
uses the best—
spits up the rest.
A Tip into Ample Time
Writers’ Residency, Mallard Island
A gift of five days—precious time
given as a gift to write. But—
brain stalls. Head, blocked.
Taut as hell, I stalk to the island’s point,
stretch out on sun-warmed rocks and listen
to the wordless being of other lives:
a blue jay shrieks harsh warnings,
restless Rainy Lake slaps against rock.
White pines rustle in brisk wind.
Ants, certain of their unwritten path,
reroute around me. At eye level,
their legs are like wires, backs
polished black, each intent,
upon completing the day’s work.
One tugs along a brown beetle
three times its size and struggles
to haul it over pine needles
lodged a cleft of rock.
Up I sit and, with a pine needle, lever
ant and beetle over the blockage
and pray for just such providence.
Elizabeth Weir grew up in England. Her first book of poetry, High on Table Mountain, was nominated for the 2017 Midwest Poetry Book Award. Her second book, When Our World Was Whole, was published at the close of 2022. Her poetry has appeared in Turtle Island Quartely, Adanna, Comstock Review, Evening Street Review, Gyroscope and North Meridian Review.
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2 poems by JC ALFIER
Street Evangelist
She wears a tee-shirt that reads Make Disciples,
fancies herself urbane and witty,
her spiritual intelligence running on feral.
At home, she hangs a tambourine
on an upper corner of a pierglass mirror
inherited from her aunt’s estate.
A clamshell on her vanity holds castanets
her preacher won’t let her play in church —
swears it’s just Heaven’s hunger for music
that drives her to make believers
among songless souls. This good-time girl
of worn-out elegance,
makeup a total rebuke to moderation.
When out in the dimmer provinces
of the night-struck city, and some wayward soul
casts a shadow she’s not had the pleasure to save,
she’ll beseech them, in the gospel’s sinewy pleas,
if they’re ready for the street-born
surrender to the reborn life.
Awaiting their reply, her neck cocks to one side,
strands of hair in a windfallen lilt,
her face bearing the soft countenance
of the figurehead on a spectral ship,
hoping they’ll show for tomorrow’s sunrise service —
her would-be disciple’s mind impenitent
but reaching back to childhood
where the sun prisms frost on a bedroom window.
September Moment for a Woman Who Loved to Keep Her Distance
With her brassy laugh and smoky innuendos
still hanging in my head, I need to walk alone the rails
of trains no longer trundling the turning earth —
Missouri Pacific or Baltimore & Ohio —
through switchgrass and scrub pine,
crossties crumbling like shallow graves,
bluestem and buttercup erasing ballast stones,
my footfalls striking their single chord
to un-vanish echoes of coal and sleeper cars.
This early frost sheening the foliage around me
explains how the moments could pass,
barely noticed, on the threshold between seasons,
like the scent of woodsmoke that reaches me now —
a blue glow just cresting the treeline,
trimming the sun to a rumor of light.
JC Alfier’s most recent book, The Shadow Field, was published by Louisiana Literature Press (2020). Journal credits include The Emerson Review, Faultline, New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Penn Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Vassar Review. He is also an artist doing collage and double-exposure work.
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a poem by JERRY SMALDONE
Moffat Tunnel
As I climb
I try to hear my heaving breath
chorusing to the wild rush of the river
just over the ridge of thick pine
A mile up the trail
burst into a cut clearing
assaulted by the loneliness
of a broken down cabin
these homesteads everywhere,
on cattle trails and windblown farms,
in dusty arroyos and on barren mountains
ten thousand feet up. They lived here...
to make a living two miles high?
I reach down among the
shaved timbers
lying like broken dreams
and pick up a rusty nail,
roll it in my hands
squeeze it
for life, for memory
the sting of settlers' luck
burned against my skin,
into my broken soul.
Longtime Denver poet Jerry Smaldone spends most of his time babysitting grandson Elijah, volunteering, working around the house, thanking God and contemplating world madness from the living room window. "As the body collapses, the soul expands."