WWPH WRITES ISSUE 78
WWPH Writes 78…features Leona Sevick’s poem, STEADY, GIRL, about horses, wildness, love, and devotion that stays, and leaves, and shows us masterful imagery and metaphor. Briana Maley’s micro prose, HOW LIFE GOES SOMETIMES, is a meditation about her father, a kite, a beach, and a longing for summer never to end. However, even as it does end, “All of it was worth it,” notes this beautifully moving piece, and we agree.
Read on to our WWPH insider news at the end. Enjoy summertime!
Caroline Bock & Jona Colson
co-presidents, WWPH
WWPH WRITES POETRY
Leona Sevick, the child of a Korean immigrant, earned a doctorate in English Language and Literature from the University of Maryland in 2002. She won the Press 53 Award for Poetry for her first full-length book of poems, Lion Brothers, and her work appears in Orion, Birmingham Poetry Review, Blackbird, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Sun, among other journals. She was a 2018 Tennessee Williams Scholar and a 2019 Walter E. Dakin Fellow for the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and serves as an advisory board member of the Furious Flower Black Poetry Center. She is provost and professor of English at Bridgewater College in Virginia, where she teaches Asian American literature. The Bamboo Wife is her second book of poems.
STEADY, GIRL
They say the best ones stay forever,
no matter how skittish, how wild-eyed
and restless their stall mates, the horses
they’re meant to calm. Entering
the pen, the goats draw out
the twitching poison, work
quietly to free mile after mile
of glistening horsehide
from the hard tug of fear and longing,
the animal need to run in all directions
at once, to be nowhere and to be
everywhere in the world. See
the short gait that never matches
long strides, the strange rectangular
pupils, bright sideways slits
soothing these hot beasts
quivering with singular talents.
When she leaves you, remember
it’s no one’s fault. No love will
ever hold her, no devotion
will be nearly enough.
©Leona Sevick 2024
WWPH WRITES PROSE
Briana Maley’s short stories have been published in Fiction Southeast, New Flash Fiction Review, Little Patuxent Review, Lilith, and elsewhere. She received Lilith Magazine’s 2019 fiction prize, was the runner-up in the 2020 F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival fiction contest, and received an Honorable Mention in Bethesda Magazine’s 2021 short story contest. She lives in Takoma Park, Maryland, where she is working on her first novel.
HOW LIFE GOES SOMETIMES
A long time before my father died, we went to the beach and flew a kite. The wind pulled it out over the water and the clouds were dark and the waves were strong, stronger even than my father. I dared myself to let the coiled string unfurl, the spool barely controlled as it flopped in my hands like a grounded fish. The kite shone ruby red against the sky even as it grew distant. It was terrifying, and also beautiful, in the way that I would later learn that life can be terrifying and beautiful too.
I wanted my father to cradle the heavy lens of his Nikon in his hand and take a picture, but it was his tongue he clicked instead, and said there was no way to capture a scene like this on film, and the best thing to do was to take a picture with my mind. As he said this the string jerked free from my hands, stinging my tender fingers, and the kite darted headlong into the churning white waves.
I bit my lip to hold back salty tears. My father clapped his hand on my shoulder and told me this is how life goes sometimes, and I did not know what he meant. But now, like a photograph, I still see the kite against the sky, and I also see the moment when the kite was swallowed by the sea. I haven’t flown a kite since then, but I’ve had this experience again and again – of dangerous beauty, of dangerous love that gets ripped through my fingers and dies – and I think now that losing the kite was worth it.
All of it was worth it.
©Briana Maley 2024
WWPH NewS
Our award-winning titles are available everywhere books are sold. Our upcoming 2024 books are now available for pre-order. Support your local independent bookstore and your WWPH by ordering them from www.bookshop.org. And our classic ebooks are now on sale! 
Insider news...this September, we will be opening submissions for our new anthology AMERICA’S FUTURE. Stay tuned for more details! More insider news: On September 17th we will undertake our second WWPH LITERARY SALON at the National Arts Club in Washington DC. Caroline Bock and Jona Colson will host this free evening event featuring several other notable DC-based writers (soon to be announced!). It’s all made possible with a generous grant from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities. Keep reading WWPH Writes for more details on these exciting happenings!