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.
April 2014
Picking Up Pinecones
by Mary Ruefle
I light a few candles, so
the moon is no longer alone.
My secret heart wakes
inside its draped cage
and cracks a song.
After a life of imagining,
I notice the ceiling.
It is painted blue
with a border of pinecones.
I’ve spent my life in a forest.
Picking up new things,
will it never end?
from Trances of the Blast, published by Wave Books, 2013
Old Frog Pond Farm & Studio is sponsoring a free public reading by Mary Ruefle, as she receives the 14th annual Robert Creeley Award on Wednesday, April 16 at 7:30 p.m. The reading is at the Dragonfly Theater, R.J. Grey Junior High, 16 Charter Road, Acton, MA.
Mary Ruefle is the author of many books of poetry and prose, including Selected Poems; A Little White Shadow; and Madness, Rack, and Honey. She is the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Book Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award.
March 2014
To the Constant Season
Lunenburg, 2012
by Zachary Bos
Frost on the marsh grass this morning,
and a line of crows flying over.
Time for praising what fills the year
with transitoriness: the cold,
the scarcity of food, changing
in the angle of the sunlight;
for praising the iron cycles
the birds read as Time to move on;
for praising what makes the singing
of the music of the woods of
gladful songbird April nothing
like burnt October birdsong—like
the hink-hawnk of the coughing geese
enlarging and diminishing
as they come in vees and go, gone;
like the sound of the hawks leaving;
like clouds of straw-crowned chaffinches
alighting on branchtips, melting
into the brushwork of the bush
waiting hidden until duskfall
when they flock through the dark, going
to some elsewhere where they’ll be new
for a few days or weeks, passing
over or through, never staying,
never always here, always just
missed. Till… nearly here again. When
the lilacs bud bright again and
the beautiful birds, thank it all,
unmigrate, come back to unwatch
the constant burial of fall,
cover the skytop nakedness
with their numbers in returning.
Zachary Bos is a founder of Pen & Anvil Press, the publishing enterprise of the non-profit Boston Poetry Union. An alumnus of the graduate poetry program at Boston University, his poetry has appeared most recently in Bellevue Literary Review, Spare Change, Route 2, Oddball Magazine, and Found Magazine.
February 2014
Circling
by bg Thurston
Her belly is silent with colic, her legs stiff with age.
A ragged mane, half white, half brown sticks out
over a shaggy face, grey hair feathering her cheeks.
Her past unknown, she could be from Chincoteague—
the pinto pony I wished for when I was seven.
We walk in frozen circles, exhaling thick plumes.
Each time I stop, her legs crumple, her small body
thuds down on its side. Shrill nickers of pain escape.
I pour more soda and ginger down her throat.
The vet comes, shakes his head, injects Banamine.
I expect her gone by morning, but she’s there,
waiting at the fence for feed and hay and attention.
Her whiskery lips move over corners of the bucket
steaming with molasses, sliced carrots, and bran mash.
She snuffs at my pockets, hoping for more.
Published in The Wolf Head Quarterly, Summer 1998 Volume 4 -- Issue 3
The term “colic weather” refers to drastic temperature changes which can sicken horses.
After a career in high-tech, bg Thurston now lives on a farm in Warwick, Massachusetts. Her first book, Saving the Lamb, by Finishing Line Press was a Massachusetts Book Awards highly recommended reading choice in 2008. Her second book, Nightwalking, was released in 2011 by Haleys. Currently, she is writing the history of the 1780’s farmhouse she lives in. She teaches poetry workshops year-round, except in March when she is busy with lambing season.
January 2014
For Lola
by Lila Linda Terry
The orchard is asleep.
All the sweetness of the berries
driven deep in the ground
is alive in the frozen roots.
The warm juices are brewing even now
in deepest winter
under a cloak of white.
The farmer rests.
She can sleep in the morning
and doesn't watch the sky,
the soil, the pickers.
A frost does not matter.
She may allow herself a nap,
a crossword puzzle,
to read the pruning book.
She sits.
The world is white.
The night is deep.
Quiet presides.
Rest begets earnest labors.
The deepness of winter,
the crystalline icy night sky
will bring forth
summer’s rich sweetness.
Lila Linda Terry lives in Cambridge where she maintains a private practice in the healing arts. She is a certified Sage-ing leader and facilitates wisdom circles, groups which focus on cultivating wisdom from life experience. She grows a medicinal plant called the Light Root at Old Frog Pond Farm. She writes, "My hands are always busy...writing, healing, growing... This poem was written to honor a friend in the depth of New England winter."