POETRY & PROSE

Beginning in the spring of this year, Studio Channel Islands will offer a series of “Open Range” events – coordinated by Robin Wallace – where artists and writers are invited to work together in beautiful natural settings surrounding Camarillo. To inaugurate the Poetry & Prose section of our “Writers in the Gallery” Forum, the first three pieces use nature as a metaphor. The fourth poem was written to commemorate the losses sustained by the “Mountain Fire” that swept through the Camarillo area in November 2024, and the final two pieces were contributed by award-winning artist and writer Gerald Zwers.

We would love you to submit your poetry, prose, essays, photographs and book reviews to markwaldman3@gmail.com for next month’s WGForum. Enjoy!

We are the Leaves (Robin Wallace)

From bare sticks, we appear.
Unfolding everywhere,
We shimmer.

We feed the insects.
We drink the sun.
We dance together in the breeze.

When fall floods our veins
With the colors of sunsets,
We stay on our stems.
Fill the sky with delight.
Vigilant til the wind turns.

And then,
We lift and glide
With purpose.

Our bodies lay down
The warmth of summer
On the ground.
We are the leaves.

The Whisper of a Tree (Mark Waldman, inspired by Rilke)

I stand before you like a tree,

One of many mouths,

Brought to stillness by your will.

I am the calm between two notes,

Yet always in discord.

but in that silent moment, so dark and reconciled,

I stay there trembling like a song,

So beautiful.

February Flower (Robin Wallace)

What does it feel like,
February flower?

When you push back the petals
and peel yourself open?

You risk the sunlight
touching your edges,
then reaching,
all the way in.

What does it feel like
to hold yourself open
and welcome
the rain?

Hummingbirds and insects
and best of all,
the fumbling,
hungry bees,
who hover
and dive
into your delicate
scentedness.

The Mountain Fire Remembered (Mark Waldman)

I see the sycamore standing strong
in a community of his kin.
When her limbs may fall away,
That stoic tree
will not be crippled
or looked upon with pity,
but embraced:
A wooden saint
who transcends
the fires of nature,
only to surrender herself
to the fires of humanity enraged.

Seeds may burst from embers,
and buds may blossom
through charred remains –
tender, timid, but brave.
Not like me who will, one day,
wither into dust,
returned to acrid soil,
giving birth, perhaps,
to a single hillside flower
breathing in the sunlight
of another hopeful day.

And for those
who are blistered
by the Camarillo flames,
the trees will give their skin
to help rebuild burnt lives,
shedding leaves like so many tears unsung.

11461 (Gerald Zwers)

11461
She moved a little to one side
So a couple with two small children
Could walk by
Grey this floor
and grey these walls, 11461

And then she froze

Looking into the small room

…11461?

…Was it? She looked again.

. 1 .

…. 4 ….

…… 6 ……

. 1 .

Yes,
carved into the cold grey wall
the cement grey wall….11461
and she knew
this had been her father’s cell.

She was looking through the bars
on the weird, little, lonely Alcatraz rock
that she had seen only from shore
for so many of her childhood years.
But now an old woman,
and her father gone a decade,
she had decided to see the island in person.

And there, through the cold steel bars
was her father’s number
11461
Scratched into the cement wall of the cell
where he had spent the First World War
imprisoned as a conscientious objector.

I didn’t know the woman
or the man who was her father
I was in my backyard workshop cutting wood
and she was a voice on the radio being interviewed,
maybe she had written a book, I don’t really remember.

But the story burned into me and left a scar
not hers or his, but the story of passionate conviction
a belief so strong
that a man would leave his home and young family behind
to sit alone on a rock in the bay
and carve his number into a wall.

And sadly, I did not know
if I had a belief that strong.

…11461

Glissando (Gerald Zwers)

Inspired by the photograph “Tambor”, by William Hendricks
Note: A glissando is a musical technique that involves sliding from one note to another.

The persistent rhythm brought him slowly back from somewhere in the clouds. It was not the gentle rhythm of the rocking commuter train or the clacking rhythm of the tracks. Not the rhythm of the soothing, soft patting on the back of the sleeping child in the arms of its mother dressed in bright yellow. And definitely not the erratic, out-of-time tapping against the metal bar by the young man wearing the headset seated a few passengers to his left. No, the persistent rhythm that brought him back was a silent rhythm, felt not heard. Looking down he saw his own hands drumming steadily on his knees.

His hands were moving rapidly and vibrantly, alive in concert as if they were separate and independent life forms. They looked oddly foreign, although they had been wonderful best friends his whole life. They had held the bicycle handlebars as he explored the small town he grew up in and, years later, the motorcycle handlebars as he rode out of that same small town forever. They had signed formal contracts and written letters to friends. They had held glasses of wine, cooked meals, and gently caressed the faces and bodies of lovers. They had excitedly held high the keys to a new home and ever so carefully held a slippery newborn child. They had cut wood, hammered nails, and even built a staircase once. They had sewn patches onto blue jeans and buttoned tuxedos. They were good hands, the hands of a highly accomplished musician.
Now as he watched them dancing across his knees, he noticed that his fingers did most of the movement. His thumbs still throbbed and ached from last night’s performance. It was always the glissando that got him. That quick slide from a high note to a lower one, or low to high, hitting all the whole notes rapidly with the back of the thumbnail. On a piano it took much more force than on an electronic keyboard, and while he never noticed at performance time, after the adrenaline-fueled fog of performance cleared, he was always left with a throbbing, painful ache.
High note to low note, that quick hard slide. After the thrill and excitement of the performance last night there was his visit to the clinic this morning. It would be a full week away, but the next time he rode this commuter train it would be to get the test results. Until then he would wonder and worry.

For several long minutes he had been someplace far away, someplace vague and soft. But now he was called back by his own hands. He watched them move to a persistent rhythm that was not familiar, and he thought there had to be some important secret meaning coded deep within. If he only understood. Or maybe he just hoped for meaning where, actually, there was none.
“Damn,” said the woman across the aisle, smiling and pointing to her cell phone, “Caterers!” She looked straight into his eyes, as if he should know or care.

Distraction. High note to low, or sometimes low to high. Glissando.

“Untitled” by Sean Colletti

“Everyone knows that poets are born and not made in school.” – Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook

I was conceived when I was
seventeen. My parents were
Randy Cox—a high school
teacher ready to retire—and
John Donne. Two fathers
who got together one weekday
first period and spoke the
anticipation of me into
existence with goo-goo
spondees and ga-ga trochees.

I wasn’t born until years later,
my previous me unsure if this
would be just another flirtation—
another thing to try on and see
how it fits. The birth itself was
unceremonious, like dumping
a fish tank into the Pacific
and sniggering “Good luck.”

My fathers surrendered me to
the world, just as their parents
had done for them, and the world
fed me Infatuation, sickly sweet,
until my palate could appreciate
the more subtle tastes of Love.
The world fed me Grief and somehow
got it into her head that this had
become my favorite meal; so, she
fed me more and more, and it felt
impolite to correct her mistake.
Grief tasted bitter at first, of course,
but it soon began to take on the taste
of its surroundings, mixing well
with Motion and Conversation.

My first seminars took place
at house parties, my cohort
chucking ping pong balls into
red cups with the precision of
em-dashes and end stops.
I lived off takeaway from Pushkin’s
and gained the freshman fifteen—
not in bounds of weight around
the waist but in episodes of existential
dread. My dietician told me to switch to
Japanese, where the fat was always
trimmed and the images fresh.

You could say I graduated,
but I can’t remember it. All
I remember from that crisp
June afternoon was stopping
by the lake, seeing a goose
alternate between bathing
itself and raising its head
to the sun behind the clouds
and thinking I could die and
be happy, having seen this.

But I didn’t die. I lived through
adolescence, my limbs having
finally grown out of bony line
breaks and first-thought-best-thought
enamel falling out of my mouth,
replaced by better, edited thoughts.

And into adulthood I stepped,
all the pieces of me purposefully
untitled. I expect to know them
later, at the end of my studies—
at the end of all things—when
I might die and be born again
as the first line of a couplet, searching
for the other line to complete it.

CONTRIBUTORS:

Robin Wallace is a daughter, mother, sister, friend and wife to artists of many stripes. She became a lover of poetry while listening to her dad read Carl Sandburg at bedtime.

Mark Waldman is a neuroscience researcher, teacher, author of 14 books, and a founding member of the Bad Poet Society: “The deliberate attempt to write witty cringeworthy ‘bad’ poetry has shown me how to deeply savor the poetic works of others.”

Gerald Zwers is an award-winning artist, author, host of “Coffee for Creatives”, and the 1st place winner of an international breakdancing competition. Pretty good for someone who’s slightly clumsy, has no sense of design, and is…um …not so good at ..uh …some words putting together.

Sean Colletti is a poet from Camarillo, California. He received his PhD in poetry from the University of Birmingham (UK). His first chapbook of poems, Saeculum, was published by Bare Fiction in 2018.

Studio Channel Islands – 2222 Ventura Blvd. Camarillo, CA 93010 805.383.1368

Writers in the Gallery correspondence: Mark@MarkRobertWaldman.com

LEGAL DISCLAIMER AND SEPARATION OF ENTITIES: While “Writers in the Gallery” events are hosted at Studio Channel Islands facilities, the two organizations are separate entities with independent operations, management, and responsibilities. Neither organization assumes liability for the actions, content, materials, statements, or activities of the other.