November 2015

Asking the Great Meadows a Question

            by Louise Berliner  

Evening primrose went crisp

and caught the fuzz

off the bulrushes; yes,

they went pale and skeletal

while the asters merely fizzed,

and the explosion of the bulrush    

soldier hats—shocking.

Even milkweed joined the rampage,

launching parachutes

while the waters rose

on either side of the dyke,

the geese and ducks

once again in charge.

As I lay in bed,

I thought I walked among the herons,

escorted down avenues

of blooming goldenrod,

by buttonbush, horse lettuce,

blue vervain, meadowsweet;

saw the burr marigolds

shining in the shallow flats,

the lotus still late summer green

with her fabulous floating platters

clouds for the fish below.

Now those elephant ears

listen under water,

and their seedpods hang

their little Munchkin hat heads

like old-fashioned telephone receivers.

Hello? Hello?

Is anybody there?

A solo honk cuts the air,

bare stalks rustle in response.  

I may not speak Goose,

but I recognize November.

What surgery did the seasons perform,

while I lay recovering in my bed,

the green going all kinds of color,

before surrendering to brown?

Louise Berliner plays with words, herbs, fiber, and vine. She has a studio at the Umbrella in Concord, MA. Her poems, articles, and short fiction have appeared in VQR, The Mom Egg, Porter Gulch Review, Ibbetson Review, Sacred Fire magazine, and plein air chapbook collections from Old Frog Pond and Fruitlands. She is the author of Texas Guinan, Queen of the Night Clubs, and when she isn’t writing or weaving can be found walking at Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge.

October 2015

Orpheus

by Leonore Wilson

He walks down the hill alone

away from me, with his bike

slung over his right shoulder

like a silver lyre, this man

who will pedal the eighteen miles

to the factory where he will mix

barley and hops and yeast

and water and watch as the alchemy

of beer cooks and the steam

rises out over the sunflower fields

and back pastures of the air force

town wishing he was on those wheels

again coming back through

the beneficence of buckeyes,

their flowery scent catching in his hair,

his sweat alive with the memory

of morning when we were

awakened by the same pure songbird

in the far canyon, the one hidden

we have yet to name, but

there steady as sunlight

and mist as we sidle up face to face

and our sleepy eyes open

as if we were the only dependable gods

on earth lending

our entire breath to the day.

from Western Solstice, published by Hiraeth Press

Leonore Wilson is the author of Western Solstice and Tremendum, Augustum, and has published in Quarterly West, Madison Review, Third Coast, Poets Against the War, and other journals. She has taught at universities and colleges throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and won fellowships to the University of Utah and Villa Montalvo Center for the Arts. She lives on her family cattle ranch in Napa, California.

September 2015

Raspberry Picking at Old Frog Pond

     by Heather Corbally Bryant

Already the smell of Concord grapes punctuates

The night air—the mornings are cooler now, and chill—

Grass still green again now after summer’s burn—

Darkness comes more quickly, without hesitation.

We walk along a ridge and through an abandoned quarry

Past layers of ferns and darkened mosses.

The water reflects black from marble gathered

From underneath—beneath now stilled currents

Where the river used to flow. Afterwards, we follow

Signs to yet another pond where rows of raspberries

Grow side to side, reddening in the late August sun,

Almost full, dodging in between the buzzing bees

Busy pollinating for the next season while we pluck

Small jewels, plunking them in our baskets.

I am loath to relinquish this time, to return

To the routine of school, to realize that, as I watch,

My children are slipping through my fingers.

Heather Corbally Bryant teaches in the Writing Progam at Wellesley College. She is the author of a non-fiction study, “How Will the Heart Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War,” a novel, “Through Your Hands,” and several poetry collections. Her poetry chapbook, “Compass Rose,” is forthcoming from the Finishing Line Press in February 2016.

August 2015

The Mallow Leans toward the Sun

          by Helen Marie Casey

Songs of cicadas overwhelm silence until even the whispers

of trees grow inaudible. Beneath ancient canopies,

mottled oaks shake tired leaves, butterflies sail into and out of

darkest shadows. I am the one who slakes the thirst

of daisies, lilies, catmint. The chipmunk, the squirrel,

and the crow gossip. Impatiens would like to dominate. Weeds,

in wild abandon, shrug. Asters rise, too common for notice.

Sundrops, yellow luster out of season now, straggle and grow limp.

The Japanese maple, silent as a queen, keeps its purple secrets.

“The Mallow Leans toward the Sun” is excerpted with permission from Casey’s longer work titled “Maybe an Iris.”

Helen Marie Casey has lived in Sudbury, Massachusetts, for 35 years and has learned to love New England's seasons and heritage with an unanticipated passion. Her chapbooks include Fragrance Upon His Lips, a series of poems about Joan of Arc, and Inconsiderate Madness, a series of poems about Mary Dyer. She has also written a biography about one of Sudbury's artists, My Dear Girl: The Art of Florence Hosmer.

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.