Jill McCabe Johnson, finalist for the Sally Albiso Award
Tangled in Vow & Beseech
Tangled in Vow & Beseech vows to remember what we lose and beseeches us to embrace every
moment. Throughout, McCabe Johnson writes intimately about family, nature, and animals,
while also protesting the violences of religion, patriarchy, and racism. The lyricism of these
poems carries the speaker into the “clear slipstream of memory” to “river me home. River me
home.”
—Craig Santos Perez, author of from incorporated territory [åmot], winner of the National Book
Award for Poetry
Raptor
Today in a flutter of leaves
a sharp-shinned hawk balanced
with one leg tucked under
his freckle-feathered chest
on a fence post
at the edge of our garden.
To get a closer look
I crawled through the living
room and onto the porch
crept to the ledge
and quietly lifted my head.
The hawk turned
razor eyes toward mine
with a gaze that sliced
open wonder
and startled that other
wild bird flapping
against the fenced cage
of my chest.
Jill holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University and a Ph.D. in English
from the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. Honors include support from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, Artist Trust, and Hedgebrook, among others. Jill is editor-in-
chief of Wandering Aengus Press. Other publications include the poetry collections
Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown (Finishing Line, 2017), shortlisted for the Clara
Johnson Award for Women’s Literature, and Diary of the One Swelling Sea (MoonPath, 2013),
winner of the Nautilus Silver Award in Poetry. Jill McCabe Johnson lives and writes in the San
Juan Islands and can often be found wandering beaches and trails, learning what she can from
her close observations of nature. Visit Jill online at https://jillmccabejohnson.com/index.html
Visit Jill's page at Moonpathpress.com
Purchase Jill's collection from your favorite retailer:
Sarah Stockton, finalist for the Sally Albiso Award
The Scarecrow of My Former Self
With vulnerability and gorgeous, lush imagery, Sarah Stockton presents a portrait of a life not
defined by illness but circumscribed by it; a hybrid life of hospital visits and encounters with
crystal healers, coyotes, iguanas. Stockton’s poems of simultaneous rage and grace illuminate the
realities of the chronically ill.
—Jeannine Hall Gailey, author of Flare, Corona (BOA Editions) and Field Guide to the End of the World (Moon City Press)
Not a Delusion
a sonnet
Can we agree, doctor, that even an illness
with no discernable etiology is no one’s fault?
I’m not sick because of my sheer willfulness
and victim-blaming by the healthy is an assault.
Chronic fatigue and pain are not symptoms
of the morally/mentally weak. I’ll process past
trauma, family grief, socio-political conditions
and by the light of the moon hydrate and cast
spells, set limits, take anxiety meds, walk
and move and breathe, become my own lover
but when it comes to blaming myself I baulk—
my self isn’t a virus from which I must recover.
Joy is my true nature but this illness cuts to the quick.
Self-care is all to the good, yes, but I am still sick.
As an adjunct professor, Sarah developed and taught courses on spirituality, poetry, and literature
at the University of San Francisco. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Poetry
Northwest, Whale Road Review, Sidhe Press, Blue Mountain Review, About Place Journal,
Glass Poetry, The Shallow Ends, Rise Up Review, Crab Creek Review, Gone Lawn, SWWIM.org,
Psaltery & Lyre and EcoTheo Review, among others. She’s the author of the chapbooks
Time’s Apprentice (dancing girl press, 2021) and Castaway (Glass Lyre Press, 2022). Sarah’s work has
been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net anthology. Sarah is
also the Founder/Editor-in-Chief of River Mouth Review, an online poetry review which has
published new and established poets alike. The Scarecrow of My Former Self is her first full-
length collection. Sarah and her beloved husband live on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington
State, by the Salish Sea. Visit Sarah online at https://www.sarahstockton.com/
Visit Sarah's page at MoonPathPress.com
Purchase Sarah's collection from your favorite retailer:
