Oscillate Raw

Summer 2023, FORUM Magazine

The Drumlin Poets
IN APRIL 2022, during National Poetry Month, Vivian Faith Prescott offered a workshop class through 49 Writers called “We Hold Our Poems: Bringing a Poem to Life.” After the class, a handful of participants wanted to continue to meet via Zoom, so the Drumlin Poets, named after a glacial term, was established. There are six poets from different locations across Alaska: Wrangell, Seward, Anchorage, and Kenai who meet virtually once a week. The group focuses on writing to a prompt using various forms, sharing their first drafts, some workshopping and critique, and they also develop innovative poetic forms. Mostly, the Drumlin Poets group is an opportunity for poets to practice the art of being a poet and to encourage one another.

The Word-Stitch
This poetic form grew out of the Sitka Alaska writers’ group, Blue Canoe Writers. Vivian Faith Prescott is one of the founding members. The form was named by Sitka poet, Kersten Christianson.

How to word-stitch: Each writer in a group selects two favorite words to contribute to a list. During a meeting, the words are chosen at random from other poems or texts. Writers can also take turns sharing a complete list of 8-12 favorite words to inspire their fellow writers’ next poem/prose. Writers are instructed to use as many words in the list as possible in their poem (or prose). “Cheating” is allowed, meaning you can use the words in a title, or separate compound words, change or add suffixes, or if uninspired, look for a synonym or an antonym. Word-stitching is highly generative. The reward for using all the words is a “Gold Star,” which is a self-affirmation for doing the work. The accompanying word-stitch list was comprised by the Seward poet Justine Pechuzal.

THE ANNUNCIATION
by Ray Ball

Smudge ochre on the canvas. Depict the angel’s
Halo vibrating with the velocity of an oscillating fan.

Outside the window a raven croaks
As it joins a trash can jamboree.
The scavengers seek the sour, the raw,
The spilt milk of breakfasts past.

Create a scene: honeysuckle and bougainvillea climb
        lattices.
The virgin in blue is as serene as the thawing sea.

Tires screech on bare streets.
An annunciation of spring.
The earth is expectant with tulip bulbs
Beneath the melting snow.

Shape the distant landscape along the river. Tree limbs
Still, but hint a gentle movement of leaves.

FADING GRACE
by Eric Gordon Johnson

The screech of owl off the limb
on the hum of milk-white wings
out over the darkening valley to the west 
and into the slow velocity of the sun 
as light oscillates down through a lattice 
formed by the evening’s jamboree
of sour smudged and ochre clouds.

HOW TO TRAVEL THE RAINFOREST
by Vivian Faith Prescott 

First, pack saltines along with smoked salmon spread 
mixed with chopped pickles and onions
because your father likes it that way.

This is the only way to travel now, oscillating 
between beats of drizzle and deluge—
The velocity of your father’s decline
means you’re mapping these lingering days.

Let these dwindling days convince your 83-year-old 
cancer-hospice-father to drive you in his old
blue truck out Pats Creek Valley
on the logging roads.

The old muddy logging road passes waterfalls 
rushing down hillsides, and ochre-milky
ponds, and muskeg hummocks latticed
with flattened dead grass.

Dead limbs, fallen from snow’s weight, crisscross
the rutted road, and the robin’s jamboree
flutters and flits here and there.

Here and there, you look through a windshield 
smudged with muck and forget something 
sour and raw is pressing on your father’s
bladder and time itself.

Time wings itself into the truck’s cab with
the screech of the blue jay’s holler
through the open window.

The window into the hum of earth opens,
spills you back to the present and you
stop for lunch, share crackers and 
salmon spread with the dog
sitting between you.

Between you and the rainforest, all is not well,
and yet it is—everything is soddened
with both unfurling and decay. If you could
gaze right now into that tiny dome of raindrop,

that single raindrop, hesitant and trembling
on the tip of a hemlock needle, you could
see every moment—magnified.

That moment beside the truck, beyond windworn 
bullpine and beard moss when you are sure of it—
that there’s a marten den in the hollow
of an old growth spruce and a trio of kits
is huddled there for warmth, covered with fine hair,
eyes ready to blink open.

SCATTERING
by Justine Pechuzal

Yesterday my father cupped a chick in his
hand and I smudged night into the aurora borealis. 
He is so far away. The distance between us hums.
I draw landscapes he will never see again.

Today I am on skis, sinking like a overladen ship 
into spring's slow, milky melt. His legs, which used 
to jog laps around our neighborhood, idle in a
wheelchair, limbs stiffening into a sinew lattice. 

Way back when we lived in the constant jamboree
of three young girls, two working parents and
other support scattered across continents,
I feared the strength that held us together.

Now mom frets about his fiber cereal, oscillates
between praise for the visiting Frank Sinatra
impersonator and sour remarks about his
home care. I know, mom, it's hard to let go.

This evening, I'll take the kids on the waterfront
path, the baby walking teeter-totter steps, her brother
zipping past ochre beach grass on his new pedal bike,
and me, gasping somewhere between velocities.

It's a raw deal, this life. You are either owl/
car brakes/hungry child screeching to attack/be
heard/attended to, or a chick, happy to sit in the
warm palm of an expectant stranger's hand.  ■