Spokane poet Ellen Welcker explores the simple joys of being a parent:
"when you’re blue at the ocean it swallows you
you enter each other you merge
you become something old
barnacled
soft"
Category: Poetry
The Return of the Elwha King
Seattle poet Paul Nelson's ode to the runs of king salmon returning to the Elwha River after the dam is gone.
"He’s back! Belly full of planktonic diatoms, copepods, kelp, seaweed, jellyfish, starfish, bugs, amphipods & crustaceans so delicious served up at Sakura as sake..."
Icicle Creek
"It’s unnatural to see the tears of my children, husbands,
and then mine—all collected on the roof of my house."
A dreamlike exploration of desire and mortality from Seattle poet E.J. Koh, from her collection, A Lesser Love.
Two poems by Montreux Rotholtz
". . . sweeping the porch
I felt it the rye and salt
dry-roasted
wallop of honey wind. . . "
Read two new poems by Seattle poet Montreux Rotholtz, whose poems pay precise attention to language.
Three poems from “Field Theories”
Portland poet Samiya Bashir's poems entwine science and love, the Second Law of Thermodynamics and aging, blackbody curves and real, live Black bodies. The three poems here are from her 2017 collection "Field Theories."
The Uranium Files
Photographer Dan Hawkins and former Washington poet laureate Kathleen Flenniken witness the toxic legacy of nuclear sites in Washington: Hawkins' obsolete process involving uranium gives his images a reddish tint; two poems from Flenniken's collection Plume shed light on radioactivity lingering in the Columbia River.
Lyric for a day like today
A new poem by Washington state poet laureate Claudia Castro Luna:
Imagine every spoken word/as part of a very large scaffold/that when we hear “hold” and “please”/steel decks, posts and leveling jacks/
shift this way and that