May 2015

Notes on a Mulberry Tree

      by Hilary Sallick

New swellings     green eruptions     each rise of spongy     tissue

emerging     from inside a brown skin    no longer container   

but pressed back     about a cluster the size of the tip

of my finger     giving so softly to my touch—

this history revealed along each narrow branch:   

the outer-most buds    still hard unopened     

then inches away      the softness     the tiny serrated

edges of leaves—

I’m trying to see it clearly    to understand more

this way of becoming     leaning into the low-hanging branches   

following     the path back to the trunk—

trusting    in the absence of words                                 

in each word’s eventual     unfolding

Hilary Sallick is an adult literacy teacher in Somerville, Massachusetts. She loves looking closely at language, poems, and the natural world—with her class and on her own. Her poems have appeared in the Aurorean, Salamander, The Human Journal, Atlanta Review, and elsewhere.

April 2015

After Another Spring Snow

by Jenna Rindo

 

She waxes brave,

leaves the dry heated air

and shabby furniture

to trespass the farm fields.

Acres of stalk-pocked dirt

soothe her undiagnosed

craving to eat earth.

She clicks into narrow skis,

leans into the bloated sky,

pushes across still frozen pastel acres.

She searches for danger,

certain each box elder border

will reveal coyotes that yip and howl

through crescent moon nights.

But the coyotes stand her up.

They wait for the dark,

pre-dawn, pre-Darwin

to clear the barbed wire

then feast on the Shetland lambs

still rooting to let down April’s cruel milk.

Originally published in Verse Wisconsin

Jenna Rindo worked as a pediatric intensive care nurse in hospitals in Virginia, Florida, and Wisconsin and now teaches English to Hmong, Spanish, Kurdish, and Russian students.  Her poems have been published in Crab Orchard Review, Shenandoah, American Journal of Nursing, Calyx, Bellingham Review, and other journals.  She lives in rural Wisconsin with her husband and children, a small flock of Shetland Sheep, Rhode Island Red Hens, and other less domesticated creatures.

February & March 2015

Walking with Walt

          by Ron Padgett

When everyday objects and tasks

seem to crowd into the history you live in

you can’t breathe so easily you can hardly breathe at all

the space is so used up,

when yesterday there was nothing but.

Ah, expansive America! you

must have existed. Otherwise

no Whitman.

It’s funny that America did not explode

when Whitman published Leaves of Grass,

explode with amazement and pride, but

America was busy being other

than what he thought it was and I grew up

thinking along his lines and of course now

oh well

though actually at this very moment

the trees are acting exactly the way they did

when he walked through and among them,

one of the roughs, as he put it,

though how rough I don’t know I think

he was just carried away

as we all are, if we’re lucky

enough to have just walking

buoy us up a little off the earth

to be more on it

from Collected Poems, published by Coffee House Press, 2013

Old Frog Pond Farm & Studio is sponsoring a free public reading by Ron Padgett, as he receives the 15th annual Robert Creeley Award on Thursday, March 19 at 7:30 p.m. (www.robertcreeleyfoundation.org). The reading is at the Acton-Boxborough Regional High School, 36 Charter Road, Acton, MA.

Ron Padgett is the recipient of the 2015 Robert Creeley Award . A finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, Padgett’s many honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Shelley Memorial Award, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and his work has been translated into eighteen languages. 

 

January 2015

Advice to a Son

          by Gary Metras

Even Grendel

had a worried parent,

brooding over the boy’s journeys from the den,

knowing his small needs

are huge and real,

his little temper touched off by what is not his.

Son of mine, you are not mine alone,

though I lay claim to you,

as you do me.

Know that we have rooted ourselves

this little while in each other,

that the roots are deep

and intertwined,

that I must twist them tighter

to save myself,

that you will pull and rip and tear them

as you can.

You, be a strong tree with searching roots,

be the self you cannot yet see.

And learn of Beowulf

before he learns of you.

Gary Metras has two new books of poems in 2015, Captive in the Here (Cervena Barva Press) and The Moon in the Pool (Presa Press). He is the editor and letterpress printer of Adastra Press in Easthampton, MA.

December 2014

Winter Squash

          by Charles W. Pratt

In bare December, the spirit seeks out matter.

You turn from the window and go down to the cellar,

Past braids of onions hanging from the rafters,

Sacks of potatoes and carrots, boxes of apples,

To stroke the hard smooth skin of the winter squashes,

Tawny butternut and ribbed green acorn,

Row after row on shelves, like words in Webster’s,

Waiting. You pick one up. Sun on your shoulder

Weighs as you stoop to plant, to weed, to water.

Cool and dark, you stand in the buried cellar

Forming your sentence, then climb back up to winter.

From From the Box Marked Some Are Missing by Charles Pratt, Volume I of the Hobblebush Granite State Poetry Series, Hobblebush Books. Book available at

http://www.hobblebush.com/pages/FromTheBox.html 

Charles W. Pratt taught English for more than 25 years, mostly at Phillips Exeter Academy, before he and his wife Joan bought a small apple orchard in Brentwood, New Hampshire, and became apple-growers. In addition to From the Box Marked Some Are Missing, he has two previous collections: In the Orchard and Still Here.

November 2014

Bright White Shine Across Water

          by Susan Edwards Richmond

Bobbles like buoys, my senses cry

bufflehead first,

as I walk to the point

the ragged shapes of bare limbs embrace,

my vision a peephole through woven screen.

Binoculars raised I see the unmistakable

dark bordered accordion crests

radiate from yellow eyes—

breasts from the side, inked

lines beside chestnut stripe:

drake mergansers and a hen,

then another rising on her webs,

shaking out buff headdress, wings. 

Four turn into eight, a magic

trick of doubling, until a ninth

tips the gender scale, female.

Alabaster and obsidian, tawny

and dun, chug and swerve, submerge.

A zephyr smacks the surface, wiper blade

swipes clean across glass.

Deep down in the damp reeds,

a quiet peep begins, then climbs

twig by tendril by needle of pine   

into the open waning light, song

sparrow emptied of its summer song.

Everything is still and straining

to be touched by late

late November sun, as the ducks

twirl and turn on their reflections

whether to stay or go.

Up the hill, another loose flock

spills from a truck, motor blowers in hand,

rounding up the year’s debris,

as if it had to be cleared—

as if it could—for the winter to come.

October 2014

The Final Taste

          by Barry Sternlieb

With bow season almost here,

two whitetail does become moonlight

searching for apples. Down near

the burly old trees they browse like

sisters, or mother and daughter. Quietly

I step out on the porch to get

a better look. Frost arches an ivory

back along midnight. My breath,

given body, tells me I’m destined

for the greatness of fallen apples

going bad on the lawn, this second

discovered by sudden muzzles,

crushed and swallowed, the final taste

of earth putting everything in its place.

Barry Sternlieb’s work has appeared in Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Southern Review.  The recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship, his collection Winter Crows won the 2008 Codhill Press poetry award. He is the editor of Mad River Press specializing in letterpress broadsides and chapbooks.

September 2014

Red-tailed 

          by Joanne DeSimone Reynolds                                                       

She of the troposphere.

Of ash-tipped cirrus-wings

pinning all that is current.

She of her own sun.

Attendant as any bridesmaid

who fluffs the gown.

Death as much her rapture

as love. The mischief

of her rapture.

Cumulus-breasted.

Reliquary of her own ivory

caging an egg of myrrh.

Envy her billiard-eye.

Her closed-beak prophesies 

—fresh-black

scribbling a clean field.

She, too, of the ancient

gyre-dive’s

lone confinement.

Her talents root prey

more succinctly

even as it mouth-squirms.

Swift of terra firma

she is ambition itself.

The story I read on the website about the red-tailed hawk capturing one of the farm’s chickens, prompted this poem. There are some beautiful, if graphic, photographs of the kill on the website, as well.

Joanne DeSimone Reynolds lives in Scituate, Massachusetts. Her book of poems Comes a Blossom was published by Main Street Rag in 2014.

August 2014

The Oxbow of the Connecticut

            by David Davis

The water lies in a loop curling back

upon itself so that the small figure

in the canoe can almost touch

the surface he will be gliding on

ten minutes from now, the way

time rises up in sinuous loops

over the scene, turning back toward itself—

I’ll be here three months from now

and that moment seems nearer than the bends of life

I will navigate to reach it,

and the events after that

will flow in this direction,

to the way we go out and come back,

a little bit farther,

and a little bit changed.

David Davis is a member of the Powow River Poets in Newburyport, is Poet-in-Residence at Massachusetts Audubon Society’s Joppa Flats center, and is currently editing an anthology of en plein air poetry.  His book of poems Crossing Streams on Rocks was published in 2013.

July 2014

Pondwalk

          by Ann Taylor

There’s nothing going on here

this overheated July afternoon –

no redtail, no snapper, no coyote,

no wind roughing into whitecaps,

no blizzard whitewashing the mountain,  

nor wobbly ducklings, goslings, cygnets.

Nothing but stands of Queen Anne’s Lace,

Purple Loosestrife, Yellow Butter and Eggs,

Cat o’ Nine Tails, new in lush brown.

Nothing but the silhouette of a Black Lab

poised like a figurehead on the prow

of a fisherman’s rowboat.

I follow the flight of one Herring Gull

across the one cloud,

itself dissolving into the hazy blue.

For the almost-children’s-picture-book

Monarch and a Honeybee competing

for a single nectarous blossom, I pause.

The evergreen trail home

is dusty, rusty green where

a red-eyed Cooper’s Hawk calls,

settles just above my head.

Back to me, he ruffles smooth shades

of slate gray layered in a subtle cascade.

“Pondwalk” also appeared in the summer 2014 issue of The Avocet: A  

Journal of Nature Poetry

Ann Taylor is a Professor of English at Salem State University in Salem, MA, where she teaches writing and literature courses. She has written two books on college composition, academic and free-lance essays, and a collection of personal essays, Watching Birds: Reflections on the Wing (Ragged Mountain/McGraw Hill). Her first poetry book, The River Within, won first prize in the 2011 Cathlamet Poetry competition at Ravenna Press, and her chapbook, Bound Each to Each, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2013.  

June 2014

Tim Dickey’s Nails 

by Marian Brown St. Onge

Marian Brown St. Onge retired seven years ago from her position as founding Director of the Center for International Partnerships and Programs at Boston College, where she also taught French and directed BC’s Women’s Studies Program. Her publications include more than twenty poems and several articles on women writers, cultural issues and topics in international education. Beyond her poetry, St. Onge is working on a biography of a World War II French Resistance fighter for which she received a Norman Mailer Fellowship award in 2009.

May 2014

Agnus Castus

          by  Cammy Thomas

Agnus castus, “chaste lamb,” long-limbed shrub

in my neighbor's yard.  Known from antiquity, it lifts

its purple spears to the hummingbirds.  The ocean

is not far, the air buzzing and salty, bees

from the hive up the hill buried in every bloom. 

Chaste lamb, Abraham's balm, monk's pepper

from the Mediterranean, it visits this colder climate

to shake our frozen muscles and remind us

to stay pure.  The bees may milk it, flavor their

honey with it, but for us, it's always upright.

Its leaves like hands, five on a bract,

a perfect, neutral green, a color-wheel

green, calm and plain.  They shift in the wind

as the bees come off and resettle.  The trunk

is slender and lit by low sun. 

Could I grow this pure, this straight,

this beautifully colored, so effortlessly--

just the sun and there I would be, reaching

without striving, watered by a benevolent

spirit who can appear and disappear

while I remain rooted, extending

upward yearly from my fertile bed.

Cammy Thomas’ first book of poems, Cathedral of Wish, received the 2006 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her second book, Inscriptions, will be out in October, 2014. Both are published by Four Way Books. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Appalachia, Bateau, The Classical Outlook, The Healing Muse, and Ibbetson Street Press #30. She lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, and teaches English at Concord Academy.