POETRY

they say think of gravity it’s there how can you think of beautiful fields of dried wheat stop think of the palisades of the enchantments enchanting erratics water they say think of bald eagle eggs of truckers driving that way on purpose of nets in the columbia think of leahy junction coming from grand coulee the deer the coyotes the foxes think of random wetlands doing everything they can to stay green marking roads missing signs bracketing the long way white caps & waves so many blues now they are pausing at the casino somebody won

Tim Barnes

Ancestor Salmon for Joel and Angelina

1.

Ancestoring back salmon spawned long before the people came. Coyote knows their names but he won’t say them now.

The river never wonders of what it is made, a body the blood of the salmon—sockeye, coho, chum, we say—silvers in its veins.

A memory deep as birth draws them like a tide through their ancestors’ will.

2.

Dead bodies nourish the unknown and bones swirl like ghosts above the spawn. Father, I feel you in my hands as I write, as I swim through the air with the breath I pull from the streams of the wind.

3.

Coyote sniffs and knows in ways that puzzle the people— the salmon have come tracing the scent of their source.

We all go back to the place of our birth to be born again in someone else.

Gabrielle Barnett

Turnagain Ramble

In the season of dwindling light, sweet gale astonishes, russet, against swath of willow shoot, yellow, once the eye accepts all loss of leaf and the mind stops resenting dull, damp, drab, dreary, done. Here elaborate assemblages of tuft, panicle, and spike line wedge and riffle of tide impressed mud. Now swans fly like no other: weighted white startles as grey piles on grey.

Katie Bausler