January 2016
Wassail Bowl
a renga* in celebration of apples composed by Susan Edwards Richmond
the first icy snow
fell
like a flock of angry sparrows
now, branches steeled
against a steely sky
the orchard is asleep
all the sweetness of the berries
is driven deep in the ground
the farmers scan nursery lists
plotting spring
the list of apples
her father grew in their orchard
high on the shoulder of Mount Blue
the cool taste of promise
on her tongue-
Green Crisp
Snowsweet
Maiden Blush
maybe Rhode Island Greening-
starting tart but aging sweet,
listen carefully
to what the trees tell us, saying
pay attention to the changes
the knowing
when to flower, when to fruit
toast with spiced cider
wassailing the trees,
the fairies, the nature sprites,
the scent of apples to come
animates the senses.
*A renga is a Japanese form of “linked poem," composed of alternating three- and two-line stanzas by poets working in pairs or small groups. This poem links lines excerpted from complete works from the following poets: Polly Brown, Lila Linda Terry, Terry House, William Lenderking, Deborah Melone, Franny Osman, Cheryl Perreault, and Susan Edwards Richmond.
December 2015
To love a salt marsh in winter
by Dawn Paul
To love a salt marsh in winter
is to love the color brown
crumbling storm-ravaged creek banks
slick frozen mudflats
weathered rushes and reeds.
To love a salt marsh in winter
is to love the sound
of tide-jumbled ice chunks
in flooded creeks
surf thrashing the beach
beyond the huddled dunes.
To love a salt marsh in winter,
face the wind
watch the horizon long and low
as one lone harrier drops down
from the empty sky.
Dawn Paul teaches writing and interdisciplinary studies at Montserrat College of Art and has published two novels, The Country of Loneliness and Still River. Her poetry has been published most recently in the Naugatuck River Review and the Paterson Literary Review. She is also a frequent performer on the Improbable Places Poetry Tour and works with the Mass Poetry Festival.
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.