WWPH Writes: Issue # 40

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WWPH WRITES THE HOLIDAYS! The second annual holiday special features winners of our prose and poetry contest, WWPH Writes the Holidays, judged this year by poet and WWPH press mate Brandel France de Bravo. Her prompt was to reflect on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s insight, “every word was once a poem.” Enjoy the words of winners Hildie S. Block and Melanie Weldon-Soiset! Our finalists Christie Chapman and Madelyn Rosenberg will be published in our first issue of the new year on January 13th. A special huge thank you to Brandel France de Bravo.

One of the main joys of being a writer/editor is paying it forward to other writers. Thank you for giving me this opportunity this year. Happy and healthy holidays to all our readers from DC, Maryland, and Virginia to the North Pole!

Caroline Bock, co-president and fiction editor

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WWPH Writes: Prose

Hildie S. Block is a writer/teacher whose day doesn’t start until after coffee. She lives in Arlington, Virginia with her family, a cat, a dog, and her pink axolotl! This year, her stories were in Gargoyle, BeZine, Café Lit, and Haunted MTL. She leads workshops at the Writer’s Center www.writer.org and on her own at www.hildieblockworkshop.com

Judge’s comment:

The author addresses the multiple meanings of the words “arrival” and “departure” while taking readers on a moving journey of loss and rebirth. The airport serves as a kind of bardo where the writer prepares to rise not from ashes, but with ashes. Congratulations!

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Arrival/Departure

No one is making you board this plane.
Birds circle overhead, trapped, like you, at standby. In a holding pattern. Listening and not listening to the garbled flight announcements.
Airports have a language all their own.
Luggage
Security
Gates

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Your boarding pass is clutched, wrapped around your latte like a sleeve, keeping the coffee warm and your hand from burning. The mask on your face is keeping the elixir of warming energy from your closed lips, your tightened throat, your churning stomach. So many gatekeepers. So much insulation.
You stare out the giant window, planes: arriving, departing.

Departure: To part company, leave, divide
Arrival: To touch the shore, journey’s end

Tucked in your carryon: human remains, ashes.
More amplified muffled instructions, yet you know in the end, this decision, like most decisions, is up to you.

Departure
Arrival
Delayed

Some things are out of your hands, your therapist said. Still, you have agency over you.

If you:
Check baggage
or
Travel light

If you:
Choose to look out the window,
Pick the aisle for quicker egress,
Imbed in the dreaded middle seat
(Nestled between strangers)

Delayed:
A year (almost two) since your partner died of COVID-19 instead of you. Over 2 years since you’ve seen her family. They’ve invited you to come for Christmas. You said “Yes, of course!” Your family doesn’t celebrate, but your chosen family did. Does. Shit.
Celebrate the birth. Beginnings.

Rethinking everything.
Grief, blame, shame.

“We know you have choices when you fly.”

Departure.
Arrival.

©Hildie S. Block 2022

WWPH Writes: Poetry