In the Grand Forest

by Anne Kundtz

for Gordon Hampton

Blackwater reflection touched
from beneath – tiny bubbles
break in rings that spread
out, overlap with others
in a quiet dance—
some aquatic creature, fly
frog or fish small enough
to call this pond world.

Every few minutes a plane
cuts across the sky.
Engines hold it aloft
dropping turbulence

over alder leaves and tips of fir
that rustle as if to soften
the sound before it falls to the pond.
Thick fists and fingers of bark
root into soil surrounded
by rings of salal and Oregon Grape
and the steady uncurling of sword fern.

I still my own breath
knowing that it is my kin
making all this racket.
I stand and bow.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Gordon Hampton, founder of One Square Inch
A sanctuary for silence in Olympic National Park

photo by J.J. Hummel

This Water

by J.J. Hummel

The sweat tickles
as it runs down my cheek
The surface of the water
a dark mirror of the sky.
My bow chasing clouds on the surface
always they stay just out of reach.
White jellyfish ghosts haunt the depths below me
while Kelp goblins with their bald heads and tattered cloaks patrol the surface.
A Loon calls to me at my left.
Seals with their grey spotted heads
and big puppy eyes
stare at me from a distance
before silently slipping under.
Only the sound of my blade
pulling the water
and my bow cutting it
with glistening crystal splashes.

My mind drifts
while my body paddles
driven by some engine room deep
within my hull.
Flying silently above the bottom.
Eel grass blowing in the wind
of the current.
A crab, thinking it’s hidden
is surprised by my alien presence above.
A bank of sand dollars
it’s vault spilled open
across the seafloor.
The wind and the current either help
or hurt
as they wish,
neither are at my command.

These islands
Their wooded bluffs
of sand and gravel
Their shores of rock
sand and shell
Wild
This water
My sanctuary

FINAL DAY

by Rebecca Christensen

At Ruby Beach
no red garnet retrievals
although we dug vigorously with our sticks

At Beach 4
no seashells or priceless pebbles procured
although we bent studiously to the task

At Kalaloch
we scrambled over monstrous driftwood mounds
and pulled our rain hoodies up, cloaking us.

On the final day, with no vacation left
an early dawn awakening
we looked up and out
and saw for the first time…

An eagle perched high in a craggy tree
the wide sky mottled with finger points of sun and liver-spotted clouds
the churning ocean bringing ancient waters to lay new patterns in the sand.

We were looking for nature to pocket and take away
but on that final day
it found us and took our breath away.

Mysterious Navigator

by J. Stephen Whitney

The blue sky connects the red clouds as the boat rises
from the ocean and hovers above the skyline.
The boy stands in the tide as it goes back into the sea
to find the place where the boat will drop when he leaves the shore.
A steam engine is mounted on the deck of the boat,
so it points to the moon behind the clouds
scattered by the boy’s curiosity before he came to the shore.
The smoke from the steam engine connects the clouds
so they can rain on the surface of the ocean
and raise the water level to the bottom of the boat.
A propeller that could not breathe, once the boat rose
from the ocean, drops from the bottom of the boat.
The boy carries the propeller to a place in the ocean
where boats grow tentacles from their hulls and attach
themselves to the water so the water can’t drift in and out
under the power of the golf ball moon that was driven
to a point on the blue web sky by the fathers
and grandfathers of the boy who had carved their golf clubs
from the heartbeat of the boy as he told them of the boat
floating above the skyline, hoping they would believe him

I Stand in the Strait

by Jayne Marek

A slight rush of sound as tide turns. I feel
my shins shift at its power rising. This
is what tidepool creatures wait for—

crabs suspicious in their rock shelters,
fingerlings gasping in too-warm shallows,
anemones knotted against drying air—

and I think of the first peoples who hunted
shellfish amid these rocks as they listened
for the whisper of danger as water rose again.

A pale shape bobs along shore—is it a driftwood log
with a broken branch, bleached, ravaged
by the relentless gnawing of salt time

that polishes everything down to bare shape?
The turning tide laps, sobbing. Now I see
it is the corpse of a doe. Legs stiff, neck bent

and a red streak at its throat, a bullet wound
that bled briefly before it congealed.
Some people hate deer for eating flowers

and yard plants. Some people say
there are too many deer. The doe’s eye is open
and cataract-blue, her body ghostly white,

skin hairless, already scoured, her legs frail
as a teenager’s. Hard to believe
that someone would shoot a deer and heave it

over the cliff into the Strait to let the current
sweep it away. But the current has kept it,
turned it to wax, and now rocks its young flesh.

She is the color of smoke on a winter day.
The color of oyster shells, lain open, blind.
It seems impossible.

I can do nothing for this deer that shocks me
with its naked death.
Along this shore where the first peoples lived,

built their shelters, prepared their seafoods,
white men came one day with guns
and burned the village to the ground.

I imagine a woman foraging at tide’s edge
who looked up, startled, at the sounds,
slipped and fell, weighted by her carry bag,

and joined the forever rise and fall of waves
that can be tender if they love a creature,
that chill and covet and overwhelm if not.

finding a mate

by Zoe Dickinson

every morning we pass the same duck
a male, standing on the same log
staring out to sea
alone
in the rain

but today, the first day I don’t automatically
grab my raincoat

today, the first open-air, green-breath’d,
blank-page-with-no-lines-on-it
day

today,
two ducks!

two pairs of webbed feet
grasp the log’s soggy arch,
the female’s herringbone brown wings
folded primly

we both laugh with relief
and I grab your hand

we don’t know it’s the same duck
I say

and you say,
let’s choose to believe it is

Some Call Me Chum

by Nancy Taylor

Nothing can stop me from returning
to my natal stream to spawn.
Take this year. I survived
a heatwave in the Bering Sea
where I couldn’t find enough food.
When I left salt water, the stream
I returned to got so darn warm
I had to wait in a nearby lake
for cooling rain.

Now I’m losing my metallic blue green
color of the sea where I fished
for four years. I’m growing cool fangs,
my body is staining in jagged black
and red lines, and my tail stripes silver.

Facts are irrefutable:
I’m aging at a time when I need
strength to jump high in the sky
to assess my plight,
be it boulders, culverts, or dams
impeding the path to my birthplace.
There, I’ll use my fangs to fight
for a mate who’s digging a redds,
where she’ll deposit her eggs.
There, I’ll leave my sperm, then
lay my body down.

Drea Dangerton: there are 8 billion of us on earth. ‘Nuf said.

Sue Hylen, a poet and photographer, finds her images with her pen and lens in those unexpected, juxtaposed moments with her six grandchildren or while cycling around Bainbridge Island.

Sue served with the Bainbridge Island Park District office for 30 years as the Cultural Arts and Events Manager, organizing a variety of arts and cultural workshops and other community events for 30 years.

For more than 25 years, Sue participated in the Bainbridge Island Writers Workshop facilitated by Nancy Rekow, where she began to find her muse. Published in 2001, Sue’s first chapbook, “Double Exposure”, features 23 poems with 15 black and white photographs. In 2020 Sue published “Lines from My Notebooks,” a collection of 34 poems old and new. Her most recent work, “Unravelling My Life Lines,” is a full-length book of 66 poems, with new poems and favorites from her first two books.

Anne Kundtz retired from teaching creative writing and 10th grade English just at the edge of Covid, in 2020. Her writing is informed by her passion for her life lived across the West, her 20 years with middle and high school students, the century-old house, and the gardens where she spends hours kneeling. She lives on an island across from Seattle.

Her poetry is published in Ars Poetica NW, Counting Stars (Haiku), Poems for Las Vegas, Under the Basho (Haibun), and Heart of Flesh Literary Journal.

Jayne Marek has published poems and photos in Terrain, Rattle, The New York Times, Catamaran, Spillway, Bloodroot, One, Salamander, Calyx, Bellevue Literary Review, Northwest Review, and elsewhere. Her seventh poetry collection, focused on the Pacific Northwest environment, is due in 2024 from Tebot Bach. Her photos have provided color cover art for Typehouse, Chestnut Review, Silk Road, Amsterdam Quarterly 2018 Yearbook, Bombay Gin, and The Bend as well as for four poetry books. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, near the wild and beautiful coast, where she writes, photographs, and learns about natural history.

Jeffrey Hummel completed a stand-up paddling project that lasted 13 months, paddling solo, unassisted around all 405 islands and significant rocks in the US Salish Sea. He completed 796 miles of paddling in 45 single-day trips. He explores the world in such sports as mountain biking, hiking, climbing, skiing, freediving and paddling.

Being out in the wild of open water was very meditative and allowed him to think about things in a new way. As he paddled, pieces of poetry started composing in his head, and he started writing them down, stopping every now and then to capture the lines on his phone.

Rebecca Christensen has been writing since the age of seven back in Rockville, MD with her first poem, Freedom, nervously read aloud to family and luckily greatly received. Rebecca continues to write. A published author of mostly poetry and short stories, she further fulfills her love of the written word with editing endeavors, having helped numerous other writers weave their works through to publication.

Long involved in local poetry events from Maryland to New York to California and now on Bainbridge Island and throughout Kitsap County, Rebecca remains true to the power of literature, especially poetry as art to be held in esteem as its own genre of creative exploration.

J. Stephen Whitney has published stories and poems in Timberline Review, African American Review, Third World Communications, Reed, Exhibition, Obsidian, Color: Story 2023 and Poetry Corners. He was also a finalist for the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future award. Before moving to Portland, he lived in Kitsap County and attended the Bainbridge Island Writers workshop.

Zoe Dickinson is a poet and bookseller from Victoria, BC. She has been published in literary journals such as FreeFall, Prairie Fire, and Contemporary Verse 2. Her first chapbook, Public Transit, was published in 2015 by Leaf Press, and her second chapbook, intertidal: poems from the littoral zone, is the 2022 winner of the Raven Chapbook competition. She is a manager at Russell Books and Artistic Director emerita of the Planet Earth Poetry Reading Series.

Nancy Taylor is a retired nurse practitioner who has dabbled in poetry for the past decade. Her interests are gardening, walking through forests and petting her two fluffy, mostly white Havanese dogs. She loves dogs so much she wrote a poetry book, Can We Keep Him, to benefit Kitsap Animal Rescue & Education (KARE).

Table of Contents, Issue #24, Summer 2024