Bill Carty

Washington Farms

I.

The suckling trees
rise in rows along the hillcrest
like the silhouettes of tangled candelabra.

II.

The soil beneath the orchard trees
was heavy with the sweat
of rain or soon after.
I'd meant for us to sit reposed
beneath the blossom boughs,
but she was less than pleased
with the reeking, rotting
apple pulp that oozed like
cool salt-river flats (or earthworms)
between her toes - for which
I was gently reproached.

III.

Audubon places Malus Sylvestris
between the Prairie Crab
and Allegheny Plum -
Johnny Chapman gets some credit
for the fissured, scaly bark
and pink-tinged blossoms.

Jon Larner-Lewis

Rainfall

Moths all over the ground
killed by the weight
of the water on their wings.
Sky like blue eyes
grayed down for a funeral.
Street wet and clean
like a body embalmed
ready for whatever comes next
beyond the gray.

We would sit on this same porch
watching this same rainfall,
all our crisscross thoughts
caught in our throats.
Dead leaves, lost feathers,
sticks, and soil
floating slowly down the gutter.

The storm has passed,
still rain falls
soft rain,
small drops you can't feel on your skin
but can see, pocking the puddles with tiny rings.
The clouds glow
as the sun tries to dissolve the sky
and dry the tearshine off the streets.
Maybe if we had sat a little longer

Holly Shaffer

Ms. Olumide Earth

Walking though the silent morning space, she says:
We are all flat like that.
I give you Ms. Olumide Earth,
he responds twisting into a bow,
a relative Picasso himself.
They look at the piece, at the room of the piece
splintered shards of wood layered
but not seeming so from a distance.
She says:
Go back
and he runs backwards out the door and through
the room and the next door,
but they still see one another just tiny-like,
and she says loud:
Well?
And he nods the affirmative.
Yes, my dear, you are quite flat.
And she splays herself like a fly on the wall on flypaper
and giggles.

Nomi Stone

Gift of a Red Feather Boa
for KO

Your red boa snakes through
three months of letting-go.
Crimson maraca dancers
sashay from my waist,
wasting kisses on the slush,
bloodying the New Hampshire snows,
visiting my bedroom carpet,
Florence's terra firma and back.

Molting, everywhere I go, I double up in feathers
skinny goose-necked cord scratching.
A giggling refusal to be anything but this
a temporary heap of gorgeousness,
a living memory, a loan
of your crackling plumage.

And just as you have been my relearning,
for this mind, unforgiving of the body
that contains it
for this body, in a shocked whirl
of marvel and release, I now let go –

feathers trailing joyously behind.

Benjamin Weaver

Night Smoking in Winter

Is rhyme a path to some description of what I've just seen? It is 3am. I've been up writing about the 1930 gangster film, Little Caesar. Earlier it was my plan, knowing that I might be up well into the night, to drag a chair out of my room on the fourth floor of South Mass into the little hall alcove under the fire escape window. There I would sit, reading about the origins of the Mafia and smoking my pipe. When I finished the paper, however, the importance left learning and turned gratefully and whole-heartedly to smoking. Still in shorts from our balmy room, I took up a jacket and wool cap and made for the alcove. Below the window, which opens out on hinges like a door, is a radiator that is always too hot to touch. Eight feet above the sill is a smoke detector. I did not want sirens and surly, bleary-eyed floor mates canceling my Cavendish. Instead of the chair, then, I propped open the windowpane, and minding the radiator, stepped up on the sill, into the night. Shielding the flame, I lit the pipe. The draw-puff, draw-puff struck a quick rhythm and I was pleased to find that the windowpane trapped the heat from the radiator in the alcove behind me, keeping my bare legs warm. Through puffs of smoke, I looked out onto Dartmouth. Not the Dartmouth sold on greeting cards in the bookstore for skyrocketed prices, but the ass of Mass Row in the snow. Illuminated. If ever there was an appropriate use of that word, it was here, to describe the car lot, sleigh-riding (gliding) out and away beneath me. It seemed something I'd never reach by climbing down the fire escape. The street lamps burned yellow and the floodlights white and the falling snow was only visible swarming around the points where each burned brightest. A great, bony tree clawed up a few feet or furlongs in front of me, its gnarl made elegant when viewed against the iron-blue sky of early, early morning. The Gold Coast hunched out to the sprawling left, while immediately below me (draw-puff, draw-puff) the Tucker building played farmhouse. Two snow-downed cars floated on squares of bare, black tar in the farmhouse drive. All the while, I, among the chimney sweep-stumbling, copper molded window wells, drew in cold air and snowflakes and then blew them out again as hot smoke in plumes. My tongue stung. A third-floor room in the Gold Coast winked on with a profile, then out again, a windowpane for my windowpane. Standing here, pigeon-perched and pluming, I felt closer to the old Ivy boy who I kept seeing in my peripheral vision but was only ever snowflakes around a street light . . . closer to him than Cambridge residence or a Harvard H could ever bring me. Draw-puff, draw-puff, draw-puff. I smoked and looked and smoked and smoked until the air in the bowl was cold and I realized that the puffs in front of my eyes were not smoke, but my breath in the still North.

Bill Carty

Ripley Creek

She told me about the moon:
heavy as an onion
balanced on a spoon –
its layers peeled away,
disregarded with a casual toss
until all that was left
was a bright white bulb, burning
reflections into the spring flood.

She told me how her body
was broken by the banks
of Ripley Creek – the sand,
residue of the onion peels,
scratching at her neck,
tearing her eyes.

On towards sunrise,
she told me how she relented,
was laden with the weight
of the moon: pressing, crashing,
yet quiet as dew fall.
Her eyes blurred in the moist
until all dissolved to the silence
that tossed and has tossed
infections into her sleep.

Allison Clancy

And She Was

the breeze
heavy with cricket song and dew
fails to dislodge a stray bang from her eye
which her hand brushes aside
letting drop ragged fingernails
bitten and ignored

they sink into the matted grass
which has marked her floral print shift with wet green spots
one for each buttock
and a streak where slim shoulder blades protrude

her ears strain
the drone of pickup on highway
cuts off when tires hit grass
and cracked leather boots sink into the softened earth
the crisp scent of cigarettes through the listless air

she presses herself to the ground
chest rising and falling with each broken breath
just clearing the fringe of the surrounding grass
she hesitates

then stands, making her way through the khaki dawn
her thin frame stark against the horizon
the blades of grass remain pressed with her silhouette
as if in recognition that she'll return
tomorrow

Nomi Stone

Unspoken Cruelties

The slick stomach of a spilled Guinness
shines the cobblestones. Streets of elbows
and corners, no unwatched step as
Dublin squints at our fumbling fingers, gauges
our off-key walk.
Your hand is a quiet parable
of where emptiness leads. I take it, but cannot
change the ending.
Your eyes, twin green apologies,
flush backwards and refill
their cloudy, unanchored eddies.

We weave through Sunday's market,
pausing at "four cabbages a pound."
Your thumb gentles the paper bundles
and circumstance puddles
around my ankles. I want to free this air between,
taut and unexplained;

instead, I smooth your fine, brown hair
with something that is not love, but
the tolerant gentleness born
of tomorrow's departure.