July 2015
Vulture
by Mary Pinard
You can wear a body down to bone. Bold
beak, featherless head, even your feet are bald:
you are made for deep passages, final journeys.
Cathartidae: Purifier. No stranger to the lonely
roadside, no stranger to the field of battle—all
our endless wars—you do extra duty for the dead.
And yet you make the distant sky alive: your high
teetering glides and brush-like wing tips draw our eyes
open to new light, to heights far above this earthbound life.
Mary Pinard teaches in the Arts & Humanities Division at Babson College and lives in Roslindale, MA. Her collection of poems, Portal, was published by Salmon Press in 2014.
June 2015
In the Works
by Moira Linehan
Clamped crosswise in the heron’s bill—a sunfish,
squirming to get free. At least an hour
the great blue had stared into the pond,
watching for it to show. Will now stand as statue
until it stops. But even then, won’t eat,
will first lower the fish back into the water
to make sure not a tremor of breath’s left.
Or is it to rinse death’s smell from its scales?
What’s ever clear? A bird’s daily devotions,
like this one: flip the fish lengthwise, slide it whole
down each inch of its long elongated
throat. An afterlife, already in the works:
fish into heron. And I, too, the bird
lifting wings, lifting them, lifting from this
narrow yard. I, too, taking to the sky.
Moira Linehan is the author of two collections, If No Moon and Incarnate Grace, both from Southern Illinois University Press. She lives in Winchester, MA.
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.