The Timberline Review: Connections 2020

By Willamette Writers

The Timberline Review is an all-volunteer literary journal published by Willamette Writers. Our focus is on showcasing emerging talent. This issue includes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from Jeffrey Alfier, Roy Bentley, Christina Butcher, Grace Covill-Grennan, KC Cowan, Linda Drach, Heather Durham, Ann Farley, Kim Cooper Findling, Del

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willamette Writers
• Release date: Jul 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781732042766

Book preview

The Timbeeline Review, Issue 9

Copyright

Editor-in-Chief Maren Bradley Anderson

Executive Director Kate Ristau

Associate Editor-in-Chief Rachel Barton

Fiction Editor Rankin Johnson

Poetry Editor Erica Gross

Nonfiction Editor Mohamed Asem

Copyeditors Jennifer Zaczek Kepler, Sarah Breeding, and Asela Lee Kemper

Proofreader Jane Hartway

Readers Mohamed Asem, Louise Barden, Jalyn Gilmore, Asela Lee Kemper, Sarah Lockhart, Don Messerschmidt, John Miller, Mary-Lynn Monroe, andArmin Tolentino

Cover Design Lee Moyer

Interior Design Vinnie Kinsella, Indigo: Editing, Design, and More

Editorial Correspondence: http://timberlinereview.com/contact/

Copyright 2020 Willamette Writers

ISBN Print 978-1-7320427-5-9

ISBN eBook 978-1-7320427-6-6

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Connections | Letter from the Editor

Dedication

Prologue: Alone Together | Nonfiction by Heather Durham

I

Nest | Woodcut by Peter Gentry

Hive | Poem by Daniel Edward Moore

The movies always get our rain wrong | Poem by Stephanie Striffler

How I Might Love a Mississippi Woman Who Abides the Summer Silence of Moon Lake | Poem by Jeffrey Alfier

I owned a little house by the river | Poem by Sharon Johnson

Enigma of Laurel | Poem by ky Li

On the Meeting of Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon | Poem by Roy Bentley

II

Nest | Woodcut by Peter Gentry

Pam Says I Love You | Nonfiction by Kim Cooper Findling

Early Morning in Dufur | Poem by Ann Farley

worn in | Poem by Grace Covill-Grennan

The Firing Squad Is Making a Comeback | Nonfiction by Barbara Liles

The Blessing of Egrets | Poem by Madronna Holden

Winter 1919, Lithuania | Poem by Vivienne Popperl

Glorious Ruin | Fiction by D. M. Kerr

Bigger | Poem by Eric Paul Shaffer

III

Monarch | Woodcut by Peter Gentry

To the Vapor and the Dusk | Fiction by J. D. Hellen

My third grade teacher isn’t squeamish dissecting a piglet | Poem by Ash Good

The Angel of Kindergarten | Nonfiction by John Hively

American Kestrel | Poem by Michael Hardin

South Chicago Redemption: Novel Excerpt | Fiction by Angelyn Voss

IV

Totem Wolves | Woodcut by Peter Gentry

Dimanche | Poem by Janice Rubin

The Lunch | Fiction by KC Cowan

call It what you want | Poem by Christina Butcher

There is a mouth that speaks before it stutters | Poem by Peter Grandbois

Honoring You | Fiction by Key Welton

Dark Sugar | Poem by Jenny Root

First Day without Radiation | Poem by Judy Wells

Widow Girl | Poem by Linda Drach

White Wolves, 1887 | Fiction by Samantha Pilecki

V

Animals | Woodcut by Peter Gentry

Some Kind of Crazy | Fiction by Alida Thacher

In Another Part of the World | Poem by Dan Manchester

Revelations at the Desert Fruit Stand | Poem by Peter Serchuk

Kitchen Dharma | Poem by Delia Garigan

Contributors

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Connections

Letter From the Editor

The literary journal you are now reading was published at the end of July 2020, five months after the United States began its lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and two months after the death of George Floyd. The poems, essays, and stories here were written and submitted well before most of us knew how seriously this disease was about to disrupt our lives or how the civil unrest would bubble up in our streets. The words of this journal, then, are unwitting records of what we, at my house at least, call the Before Time.

When Rachel Barton—the Associate Editor-in-Chief—and I read these pieces in April, in the early throes of the lockdown, what stood out to us was what we were already missing in our new normal of isolation: connections.

The first piece in this issue of the Timberline Review—Alone Together, by Heather Durham—sums up perfectly all that I miss about the Before Time: watching a performance on a warm day in a park with a crowd, riding a train without apprehension, and just being, existing, as a part of a cohesive community.

Today as I write this letter to you, all of us are still frustratingly isolated, even as our interconnectedness grows more apparent and more inevitable. We stand on the edge of a new story, as we put on our masks, march in the streets, or lie in hospital beds. In this, the After Time, we grow more together, even as we have to stand six feet apart.

I knew as soon as the country began locking down that the submissions for the next issue of the Timberline Review would reflect this moment we are in: a time of crisis, uncertainty, grief, anger, unrest, and change.

But, for now, we present you a slice of the Before Time, and we hope that by reading these stories, essays, and poems, you’ll understand who we were then, which might help us understand who we may become. Connections are difficult in 2020, yet the writing in this journal reminds us that the connections are still there, awaiting us.

Be well, readers. Be well.

Maren Bradley Anderson

Editor-in-Chief

June 2020

Dedication

Thank you to the Willamette Writers Board of Directors for continuing to trust me with the Timberline Review. The staff of this journal is entirely made up of volunteers, including the editor-in-chief position. If you like what you see here and want to know how it is done, consider joining Willamette Writers and volunteering to work on the next issue of the Timberline Review.

Prologue

Alone Together

Nonfiction by Heather Durham

You tuck into the last available window seat on the light rail train and snug your feet against the heater. Press your forehead against the cool window and look out into the predawn darkness. Only outlines are visible, line drawings of cottonwood trees along the river and chevrons of lighter sky among inky clouds. You drop your head and open your book.

You’re reading Nabokov’s Speak, Memory because you heard it was one of the first famous memoirs, and you love climbing into other people’s brains for a change. You’re often surprised to find how different you are from seemingly similar people and how similar you are to those who seem, on the outside, completely different. And here, you learn that even as a young child, Nabokov insisted on spending mornings alone, exploring, bushwhacking through the Russian countryside, butterflying. Yes, you think. Just like you. Nearly a century and half a world between your humble suburban Connecticut childhood and his affluent Saint Petersburg youth, and still, you’re the same. Mornings in the countryside, butterflying, alone.

Then you look up from your book and look around. Notice all the different faces, some in the glow of their phones, others tucked into real books—the whisper of a turned page—many plugged into headphones from which faint beats seep out. Hip-hop. Acoustic folk-rock. Baroque. Hugging backpacks and briefcases, clutching textbooks and travel mugs. Fifty people, probably, in your field of vision, and nobody is speaking. Not even the teenagers or the young girl in a private school uniform sitting on her father’s lap. The heaters hum and the train rumbles and all are hushed with the energy of morning.

As the train clicks onto the bridge crossing the Willamette River to the city center, the cotton candy–pink glow of sunrise spills onto our hair, our shoulders, flows over us like syrup, and one by one we look up, look out. The river flickers like firelight, and the mirrored skyscrapers flash red. We watch in silence, together.

The surprise of a brass band stops you in your tracks, as it seems to have stopped others who were probably on their way somewhere else but are now standing still—well, not still exactly, because the music is so absurdly cheerful it’s hard not to bounce along to it. This surprise sunny day in a long string of rainy gray already has everyone feeling giddy as Pacific Northwesterners do on such days, so the addition of the brass band is almost overkill, almost too much to take, and any minute any otherwise refined adult might burst out with a giggle or guffaw or some other unbecoming expulsion of pure joy.

You give in to it and sit smiling for a spell on a dry patch of red brick wall on the edge of the square. Beyond the band is a farmers’ market where you spy the fiery hues of ripe tomatoes and can smell the basil that wants to go along with it, perhaps on a crusty heel of bread from the bakery vendor down the lane. As you tap your foot to the bass drum, you search the familiar market with your mind and plan your moves. You know the vendors you’ll visit, know their tanned faces and weathered hands.

Tomatoes, basil, and rainbow chard from the tie-dye-clad organic farmer with the squinty eyes and dreadlocks down to the backs of his knees who moves in slow motion no matter how long the line. A baguette from the French bakery where the aproned women move lightning quick no matter how short the line. Fresh eggs, the kind with rich orange yolks that put the anemic yellow grocery store eggs to shame, and a tub of herbed goat cheese that costs more than your thrift store outfit from the fresh-faced artisan dairy farmer who will talk your ear off about his farm if you let him. You’ll let him. And maybe, today, from the flower vendor you’ve never visited before, a bouquet of red sunflowers for your yellow kitchen. It’s that