April 2024

Ah, April!  Such a luscious month in New England that it seems akin to blasphemy to mark its start with a day to celebrate pranks and fools. Let’s, instead, look to April’s twenty-nine other days, each one ripe with nature’s promise and National Poetry Month’s poems. Let’s emulate poet Louise Berliner and “follow the tangle and the tendril” into the serious delight and enlightenment the rest of April has on offer.

 I follow the tangle and the tendril

tracing the leaf’s lineage

long before the bloom and the burst

back to the hard shell of a spit seed

nestling and nesting —

back to when a pip was part star.

What possessed me to climb my own thin thread

to that first touch of sky?

What impulse made green, made curl,

pushed twist and twine?

I didn’t stop at blossom or pink,

barely hesitated when it came to the fruit —

had to chase the pull to produce as if snake-charmed

even though sometimes I thought

I was the one with the flute.

By Louise Berliner

Louise Berliner tells stories through fiber and found objects, novels, poems, and essays. Her writing has appeared in VQR, Porter Gulch Review, Ibbetson Review, The Mom Egg Review, Sacred Fire, and various chapbook collections as well as the online blog, Dead Darlings. Her first book, Texas Guinan, Queen of the Night Clubs, written in part thanks to an NEH grant, is a biography of a Roaring ‘20s night club hostess famous for saying “Hello, Suckers!”. She has a studio at the Umbrella Center for the Arts. https://louiseberliner.weebly.com

March 2024

The first day of March marks the start of meteorological spring. Yesterday, on a stroll around the Acton Arboretum, I came upon a clutch of snowdrops, the first I’ve seen this season.  Their white petals, delicately edged in the green of summer grass, nodded to a ground still winter bleak and bare. All about us the world is awakening, from low to the ground to high above in the blue-lit sky.

On the Ground, Alone

By Dawn Paul

You catch the high wind above the sheltering trees

sift it through your outspread wing feathers

as though fingering a silk scarf

rock gently side to side, wings held at the perfect tilt

alert for the scent of something cooked by the sun,

or maybe just cruising the sky on this spring day

after the long winter.

When another of your kind comes kiting along

to drift by your side and you lift together on an updraft

I breathe deeply, fill my chest with air.

Dawn Paul is the author of  The Country of Loneliness, a novel, and What We Still Don’t Know, poems on scientist Carl Linnaeus. She has published poetry, fiction and science/nature articles in journals and magazines, including Orion Magazine, Comstock Review and Stonecoast Review. She has been awarded residencies at Shoals Marine Laboratory, Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference and Friday Harbor Marine Laboratories.  

February 2024

February is full of surprises. Just when you think the snow will never end, you awaken to a balmy thaw. The pond, once frozen solid, is suddenly set free in startled dishevelment. Yes, February is nature’s roller coaster ride: Unpredictable and fast - just like life.

Cattails

by Susan Edwards Richmond

One side: three stalks in an island of bent

and broken reed; on the other: six poles,

wave slightly, two naked, four rife with seed.

One completely plush and inside out,

the others turning. I can see the brown

densely packed grains, the tawny cream pulling

away; the shortest stalk has the largest.

Shook down quivers, but doesn’t break away.

I put my hand atop and squeeze, not down

at all but firm well-sugared cotton candy,

as addictive to finch, sparrow, and wren

as that confection once was to my children,

heads bright with golden floss spilling loose

trailing to each booth at the country fair.

Susan Edwards Richmond is the award-winning author of four books for young children, including Night Owl Night and Bird Count, winner of a Parent’s Choice Silver Award, the International Literacy Association’s Primary Fiction Award, and a Mathical Honor Book. Susan's five collections of nature-based poetry for adults include Before We Were Birds and Purgatory Chasm, both published by Adastra Press. A passionate birder and naturalist, Susan teaches preschool on a farm and wildlife sanctuary in eastern Massachusetts. She is happiest exploring natural habitats with her husband and two daughters, and learns the native birds wherever she travels.

January 2024

The first, fresh days of any new year are bittersweet. They find us, like that image of the god of doorways, gazing both forward into a waxing, beckoning future and back into a waning past of joys and sorrows which still cling like fragments from a dream. . .

Elegy in Flannel and Cotton

Louise Elisabeth Glück (1943-2023)

by Anastasia Vassos

The poets are dying.

The bone ladder falls to dust---

escapes memory.

Once, when G & I drove up the coast

to Bangor, time forgot

its forward step, & there---

I wanted to make the moon

remain. The eye polishing

the night, astonished.

Now stars bloom myopic.

Nothing to be done.

We grow threadbare.

& I, still dressed

in flannel & cotton, drowsy

from last night’s tumbled sleep

read old words, those rivers

of ice whose work it is

to carry the crates of the dead.

Anastasia Vassos is the author of Nostos (Kelsay Books, 2023) and Nike Adjusting Her Sandal (Nixes Mate, 2021.) Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets. Find her work in RHINO, Whale Road Review, Thrush, Comstock Review, Lily Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She speaks three languages, and lives in Boston. “Elegy in Flannel and Cotton" first appeared in The Orchards Poetry Journal, published by Kelsay Books.