The Night We Called the Owls: Stories and Poems

By Luke Wallin

Luke Wallin's collection of five stories and twenty-one poems encompasses both nature and the supernatural. The collection is stitched together with Wallin's signature humor and thoughtful lens on the world. These are stories and poems to savor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ember Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798218214319

Luke Wallin

An Adams Media author.

Book preview

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Claire Massey who inspired this book.

Editors and publishers Sena Naslund, Kathleen Driskell, Charles Entrekin, Gail Entrekin, Heidi Varian, Flora K. Schildknecht, Eva Sage Gordon Ryali, Rae Bryant, Idgie, and Kaylene Johnson-Sullivan have my sincere appreciation and heartfelt thanks for publishing earlier versions of many of these works.

Berkeley Poets’ Cooperative Clean Pleasure (1985).

Canary (online) Canyon Deep (2018).

Dew on the Kudzu (online) The Night We Called the Owls (July 22, 2010); Grand Arms Holding Shadows (September 3, 2010).

Moon Milk Review (online) Monster (2010). Luke read Monster on the Wild Rose Moon Radio Hour, Moon Views Episode 1: Luke Wallin Interview, in 2021, available on YouTube. George Schricker and Luke wrote the song Monster, inspired by the story, which appears on George’s CD Back on Track, 2010, available at CDBaby.com.

Penumbra (Madrid, Spain) Bee Sky Blue (2013); the painting Holly and Cedar (2013).

The Louisville Review Crossing on Foot (2023); Cypresses in Dreams (2023); Native Sportsman (2023); An Elephant Might (2021); Collecting Butterfish (1996). Collecting Butterfish was included in High Horse: Contemporary Writing by the MFA Faculty of Spalding University (Louisville, KY: Fleur-de-Lis Press, 2005).

All Rise was written for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as Luke listened to her confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court March 21, 2022. He sent her the poem and received a nice nonpolitical note in return.

The photo with Cypresses in Dreams of Luke’s mother, Ruth McMullan Wallin, was taken by an unnamed friend, circa 1935.

The photo with Urban Coconut is by J. Smoke Wallin.

The photo with Trailing is by Claire Massey.

The photo with Bear Existential is by Marc-Olivier Jodoin. http://unsplash.com.

The Night We Called the Owls

Cypresses in Dreams

Out on the water, boy after school, you fished alone into sunset. Silence and bubbles, swirl of a gar, ancient things living around you.

Smell the fresh cypress, artesian well, lake swollen by the old river. Blue heron flying, touching cool surface, extending her feet, sliding down.

Come back, good Father, picking me up, end of a long sawmill day. Oh come back, Mother, once out there fishing, rain lightning chased us away.

Stringer of shell crackers, strawberry bream, silvery glistening white perch. Guard from the turtles, long water snakes, pull ’em up dancing and flashing.

Lonesome remember how empty you felt.

How god was so present so absent.

Paddle toward shore through the dusk of mosquitoes.

Remember the owls hooting loud on that water.

What They’re Doing Tonight

Some count their money, after getting-not-spending. Others swell with emotion before the flicker and glow of Netflix. A poet makes something with words. We’ll come back to her.

Slave children pound the ground for cobalt, required for electric cars. Someone scrapes the skull of a moose in her taxidermy garage. Someone tears out after a speeder.

Three people are planning to rob an old man.

One of them wonders what he’ll do to the others.

His mind drifts to what his old man did.

Let’s revisit our poet working with words. Do we need more poems? a luminary once asked. He said this gently, then shrugged as if he hadn’t meant to lay a trip wire.

Our poet wipes away the world and the title poet. Each word burns a little from deep time. She feels these embers, how they change as she moves them around.

Like Scrabble words they shine with concepts.