Seawall

Seawall

By Christine Gelineau

My first trip to Mount Desert Island was the summer
I turned twenty, four Augusts after the August
my mother died. A camping trip with the friend
who would one day become my sister-in-law.
Our first day on the island we picked up
a hitchhiker, young guy from Bleecker Street
in the Village, visiting Acadia as we were.
Caution tells us we should never have
opened ourselves to him like that – how impossible
it is now to explain the generational trust we felt then,
what we read in one another’s clothes and hair.
The woman I would know for the rest of my life
and the young man we would never see again
roamed the park, contentedly, platonically,
while he took a veteran’s pleasure in showing us
where the sweetest blueberries clung
to their granite escarpment, where the mudflats
plump with quahogs were. None of us seemed
to know the skies well enough to have heard
of the Perseids, but he knew Seawall and on our last
night there we carried blankets out to muffle
the stony beach, and lay down in the dark, rocked
by the lapping of the unseen waves, easy together
beneath the shower of frolicking stars.

Christine Gelineau is the author most recently of the poetry collection CRAVE (NYQ Books, 2016).  Other books include APPETITE FOR THE DIVINE and REMORSELESS LOYALTY (both from Ashland Poetry Press).  A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, Gelineau teaches at Binghamton University and in the low-residency MFA at Wilkes University. Her poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared widely including in Prairie Schooner,  New Letters, The New York Times Opinionator, Green Mountains Review and others.

Featured image courtesy, Derek Wright.

Lifespan

Lifespan

By Marian Kaplun Shapiro

The curtain rises: Summer. Maine. A screen door.

luna moth    soft-glowing
            pistachio wings trembling       sound-
                   less waiting waiting one week    
                            (Is today day one?)      and

then what?

So quiet now.  The humans have blasted off,
freedom exploding like champagne uncorked, rocketing to     
golftennisbikingwaterskiinghikingswimming…
                                                                     except for                                                                

me. Sitting.  Keeping company with
the occasional loon. The lone duck.
                                                         The

lake.
     Mountain.
           Sky.
Cabin,
        a little ways uphill.                                                                                                                                     
One room for sleepingeatingwashingwritingreading. Family. After dinner
parlor games. Cards. Telling when-I was-your-age stories of our wild years
to the kids//grandkids who can’t quite take it in. Really? No, really?  They
shake their middle aged/ adolescent heads, preparing to facebook their friends
the moment they rejoin their iPhones at their nearby little rental houses.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          You and I
wait quietly. Together. We turn, almost as one, to find the luna moth
flickering almost imperceptibly like a Yahrzeit candle in its final hour.
We fall asleep, our dreams washed in gauzy green, weaving miracles
of timeless time where sky becomes ocean, where now becomes
forever….                                                           

                                                                                                   ….In the morning
she is gone. For where? The question is a nesting doll in which
each answer will reveal another mystery. It gets louder by the  minute.

Marian Kaplun Shapiro grew up in a housing project in The Bronx. She rejoices in her life as a psychologist in Lexington, Massachusetts where her house and office look out on the grass, the trees, the birds, and the clear sky. And in summer she returns with her husband, adult children and their children to Rangeley, Maine, where she writes, reads, walks, and canoes for three glorious weeks. She is the author of a professional book, Second Childhood (Norton, 1988),  a poetry book, Players In The Dream, Dreamers In The Play (Plain View Press, 2007) and  two chapbooks: Your Third Wish, (Finishing Line, 2007); and The End Of The World, Announced On Wednesday (Pudding House, 2007). Marian is a five-time Senior Poet Laureate of Massachusetts. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2012.

Featured image by cloud2013 / CC BY

Camping

Camping

By Martin Willitts Jr

1.

An ember in a smothered campfire
snap-cracked its last breath.
A movement of stars
hunches over the charcoal clouds.

The world closed in
like a tent.

The sum total of my life, this infinity
beyond stars where frightened lives
and smallness exist, overtook me.
There was no fear that was not my own. 

My heart is always restlessly disturbed.

2.

When in the landscape of dreams,
that quiet presence,
respond to the world
and all its fleeting assurances.

We are strangers even to ourselves.
We could burn and turn cold as coal.
We could go into storm-fields
trying to brush away low-hanging branches
like a person fighting sleep. And still,
we could be seething within silence
as snow reminds us firmly
it is time to hibernate.

3.        

To the west,
I knew a mountain by touch.

The sky is greying.
A freeze is coming,
arriving late.

Martin Willitts Jr is a retired librarian who has been a primitive camper and has visited almost all the national parks. He has 20 chapbooks, including the winner of the Turtle Island Quarterly Editor’s Choice Award, “The Wire Fence Holding Back the World” (Flowstone Press, 2017), plus 11 full-length collections including forthcoming full-lengths includes “The Uncertain Lover” (Dos Madres Press, 2018), and “Home Coming Celebration” (FutureCycle Press, 2019).

Balsamroot in the Columbia Basin

Balsamroot in the Columbia Basin

By Francis Opila

The night of the hard frost, the icy moon showers its cold light on the rock soil, the dawn brings red-winged blackbirds singing among meadowlarks. You wonder, what song do you sing on the edge of your love, as you thaw, opening to balsamroot in bloom, their sunny faces splash gold over the sagebrush steppe, along the basalt cliffs, desert parsley, prairie lupine, you know your way home, but you’re still adrift, deep shadows sink on the Columbia below, wind on the edge of the precipice, turkey vultures soar on thermals and gusts.

Francis Opila has lived in the Pacific Northwest most of his adult life; he currently resides in Portland, OR. His work, recreation, and spirit have taken him out into the woods, wetlands, mountains, and rivers. He works as an environmental scientist, primarily with water quality. His poetry has been published in Latitude on 2nd and Empirical. He enjoys performing poetry, combining recitation and playing Native American flute.

Featured image by BLMOregon / CC BY

Zebra Mussels at Lake Charlevoix

Zebra Mussels at Lake Charlevoix

By Mary Ardery

I turned inward as Indiana hills and cornfields transformed
into a blur of Michigan cherry orchards and skinny pines.
Nine hours with Mom, Dad, and two older sisters who preferred
 
music to talking. At the cabin, Cousin Sarah was eager to play.
All day we hauled treasures from the fresh water: bucket
after colorful bucket of zebra mussels. We pried them open
 
with our small fingers to collect the oozing reward—
the invasive species’ inedible meat. Such viscosity was kept
like a secret inside those striped shells known to slice soles
 
if one day you forgot your water shoes. It was an early study
of exterior vs. interior: a casing that draws blood
but when cracked the right way, yields to something delicate.

Mary Ardery holds a BA in English Writing from DePauw University. After living and working in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Asheville, North Carolina for two years, she has returned home to the Midwest to pursue her MFA at Southern Illinois University. Visit maryardery.com to see more of her work.

Featured image courtesy, Mary Ardery.

FIELD GUIDE TO SYCAMORE ISLAND, BLAWNOX, PA

FIELD GUIDE TO SYCAMORE ISLAND, BLAWNOX, PA

For Rick Duncan and Allegheny Land Trust

By Mike Good

Morels break into damp spring light

past the three-trunked sycamore

on the channel-side where river traffic

flows, past the great blue heron nest

rising above the pebbled shore. Coal

barges tear silty loam and leave river

rocks for the Allegheny to hawk

and swallow, where turkey vultures sun

their wings like black crosses on electric

trees, where cedar waxwings trill

inside the Indian cigar tree. Scratched

spicebush potpourri. Orange

impatiens exploding. Do not live

like the wolf spiders in the storage silo

dining on tadpoles, never knowing

the dredge spoils that rise above the jet

skis and the fishing poles, never drinking

the sumac tea that boils into red paint or

holding the delta of green cottonwood

leaves that twist and conspire, never

rising with the ailanthus toward

the canopy sprouting neckbeards

about girdled cambium

as our island

slowly deposits

itself down the river.

I could

open my eyes and peel

grapevines off softwood.

I could break down

at any second.

I could smell acrid water

pouring from the discharge.

I could see

myself burning in the sky.

 I could have been an eagle.

Mike Good’s recent writing can be found at or is forthcoming from Adroit, december, Forklift, OH, Rattle, Salamander, Sugar House Review, The Georgia Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Ploughshares blog, 32 Poems blog, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and elsewhere. He holds an M.F.A. from Hollins University and helps edit the After Happy Hour Review. He lives in Pittsburgh and works as a grant writer.

Yosemite

Yosemite

By Sara Eddy

I left behind a sad story:
friendships ruined,
love affairs sundered,
a stupid job, and
a new friend made
but left behind on
the last day in Seattle.
I took the bus south,
the Green Tortoise Bus,
with seats removed and
one big mattress where
latter-day hippies played guitar--
I took it south
to Joni’s California.
And there, from San Francisco,
I went east to Yosemite
and I felt ancient and undone
until I crawled into the belly
of a fallen sequoia,
felt the soft quiet
earthly dust beneath
my hands and knees, and
began the rest of my life.

Sara Eddy is a writing instructor at Smith College, in Northampton Ma. She lives in nearby Amherst with her two teenagers, the sweetest little lapcat, and four beehives. Her poems have recently appeared in Foundry, Surreal Poetry and Poetics, Panoply, and Damfino. Her poem "Ede Market Day" appeared in the anthology The Donut Book in 2017.

Featured image by mr. E  / CC BY