Alexandria Peary

Alexandria Peary is the author of two books of poetry, Fall Foliage Called Bathers & Dancers (2008) and Lid to the Shadow (2010).  The latter was selected for the 2010 Slope Editions Book Prize.  Her work has also received the Joseph Langland Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Mudfish Poetry Prize and has appeared in The Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, The Gettysburg Review, jubilat, Massachusetts Review, Fence, Crazyhorse, Spoon River Review, Verse, Literary Imagination, and Pleiades.  She has published literary essays on Caroline Knox and Laura Jensen as well as humorous prose in New Hampshire Magazine and Brain, Child.  She is thrilled to say that she has recently been invited to blog for Mother Writer Mentor (www.motherwritermentor.com).  Her degrees include two MFAs (University of Iowa and University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and a PhD (University of New Hampshire).  She  is an associate professor in the English Department at Salem State University.

Wally Swist

Wally Swist has published seventeen books and chapbooks of poetry. A short biographical documentary film regarding his work, “In Praise of the Earth,” was released by award-winning filmmaker Elizabeth Wilda (WildArts, 2008). Also, he has published a scholarly monograph, “The Friendship of Two New England Poets, Robert Frost and Robert Francis” (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2009). A recording of a poem from his reading in the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, accompanied by jazz cellist Eugene Friesen, a member of Paul Winter Consort, is archived at npr.org. His forthcoming books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as a co-winner in the Crab Orchard Series Open Poetry Competition, and Winding Paths Worn through Grass, selected by Steven Schroeder and the Editorial Board of Visual Artists Collective.

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LILACS AS CHART / Alexandria Peary

The purple & white bars
rising and falling
are on mute
around the cellar hole

on mute
the long and short
eeee      ee
sounds rising and falling

near the word count
beside the cellar hole

those electronic and
embroidered
e’s

of the purple & white bars
rising and falling
in the dappled place

are joined now by the neutral,
black, and tan bars
that are on hold
in a flesh-tones graph,
the long and short o sounds

like paused petals

in the dappled place
in the spliced woods
strips of
birches and poplar

with grooves from
wagon wheels in the granite
near the double-decker
boulder:

it takes a decade
in the granite woods
for the petals to
descend, dove
-colored sounds,
lilacs
in September.

Ewa Chrusciel

Ewa Chrusciel writes both in Polish and English. In 2003 Studium published her first book in Polish. Her second book in Polish, Sopilki, came out in December 2009. She has won the 2009 international book contest for her book in English, Strata, which was published with Emergency Press in March 2011 in the United States. Her second book in English, Contraband of Hoopoe, is forthcoming from Omnidawn Publishing in September 2014. Her poems have been featured in Jubilat, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Spoon River Review, Aufgabe among others. Her translations of poetry appeared in numerous journals and two anthologies of Polish poetry in English translations: Carnivorous Boy, Carnivorous Bird and Six Polish Poets. She is a Professor of Humanities at Colby-Sawyer College.

Mary Ruefle

Mary Ruefle is the author of the forthcoming book, Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), and most recently, Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010). She has published ten books of poetry, a book of prose (The Most of It, Wave Books, 2008), and a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed, (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007); she is also an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries, and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the William Carlos Williams award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, and teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College.

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Ewa Chrusciel

***

Fashion a tale of walfisch; wolves turned into water-
kites. Astral liquids in measured strains. Confident
chiasmus             envelopes           in              dream—
stations         which is to             say     let   it    be  a  stone
that put forth its foliage to the Sea; shoots
and thistles; wild grapes wild grapes and gooseberries
take away its hedge           give it to grazing
and thorns and briers
cloud which puts forth
its foliage to the Sea
and turns into a bone

it will be a cornerstone
as far as the river
which is to say       wieloryb     or      balena
of radiance – ika moana  –    each of                lights
,       light,   rather            a spherical being;    a huge bulimic
duende
& knots               and you know              each
to its own peacocky  rain & bow

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BALLAD / Mary Ruefle

When the heel came off my shoe
I knew I was condemned to die.
I came into this world laughing
like one who had wept enough.
Hung in the 18th century
under a vague sun
for a pavane crime,
this morning I put my feet
on the floor and all that.
One by one thoughts came into me
and I left them there.
One by one they cried
please don’t murder me,
I am your offspring!
Which is what I said to the passerby
when the heel came off my shoe
and I knew I was condemned to die.

Thursday, April 5, 2012, at 7:00 pm, poets Lea Banks and Jeff Friedman will continue the fifth season of the Collected Poets Series. Mocha Maya’s Coffee House, 47 Bridge St, Shelburne Falls, MA. ($2-5 suggested donation)

Lea Banks (Photo credit: Jacquie Guimont)

Lea Banks lives in Conway, Massachusetts and is the author of the chapbook, All of Me (Booksmyth Press, 2008), a collection of poems. She is a poet, writer, editor, and budding entrepreneur. She is also the editor and publisher of Oscillation: Poetry in Motion, founder of the Collected Poets Series, former poetry editor of the Equinox, and editorial assistant for the Marlboro Review. She attended New England College’s MFA program, facilitated stroke survivors’ writing workshops, and managed her daughter’s modeling career. Her poems, “All of Me,” and “Hallelujah,” have been nominated for the 2009 Pushcart Prize. She was a finalist for the Pavel Srut fellowship in Prague. In addition, she won fellowships with Philanthropic Education Organization (2008), American Association of University Women (2007), and Yellow Fox Foundation (2006). Banks has been published in many journals including The American Poetry Journal, Poetry Northwest, Slipstream, Sweet: A Literary Confection, and elsewhere. Her works in progress include a provocative manuscript focusing on her experience as a stroke survivor and the Appalachian Project, a series of persona poems about Appalachian women musicians.

Jeff Friedman

Jeff Friedman received his B.A. in English from Macalester College and an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Iowa. He is the author of five collections of poetry: Working in Flour (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2011) Black Threads (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2007), Taking Down the Angel (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2003), Scattering the Ashes (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998) and The Record-Breaking Heat Wave (BkMk Press-University of Missouri-Kansas City, 1986). His poems and translations have been published widely in national and international literary journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Antioch Review, New England Review, Margie, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, and The New Republic. He has won two individual artist grants from the New Hampshire State Arts Council, The Carnegie Mellon University Press Open Competition, The Editor’s Prize from The Missouri Review and the Milton Dorfman Poetry Prize. He has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts the Vermont Studio Center and Yaddo. Friedman lives in West Lebanon, New Hampshire with artist Colleen Randall and their dog Bekka.

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THE MAJESTY / Lea Banks

It was the end of the summer
and all the yellow pollen smell
of an afternoon. Withheld wings
of longing clutched in my torso.

The middle of the day is furious.
The bees soldier on in the sunburnt grass.
Their gossamer simmer – like ladies
in saffron, all hoary and damp beneath
their breasts — teems in this waste of heat.

I painted tomatoes, found them of Prussian
red cast, untrained on sodden fusty hay.
I wrote string beans, tangled up in their
green finery, strangled like the twine they
were tied upon. A thin thread of fiery
flourish; tiny stamens tongued my ankles.

The golden feathers were hidden behind
an old rock. Goldfinch? Grosbeak?
Small, flaxen, pithy; the most beautiful
thing we had surprised upon in our
thousand year reign. You said most
likely chicken feathers blown carelessly
across the field. Well, I threw in the word
“carelessly” and thought Warbler? How
verbose and inaccurate we both were. . .

The cartilage of birds and bees signals
summer’s end. They were alive just a few
short moments ago. Under my massive feet,
I crunch their skulls and wings everywhere.

Peering through the open door of my bird
house, my helmet, my bee bonnet burst.
The swarm split open. Witness the royal
jelly strewn on my path. . . wildly, wildly.

(Previously published in Sweet: A Literary Confection, v3, Spring 2011)

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ROSH HASHANAH / Jeff Friedman

“This is a time for reflection,”
Rabbi Borax says in a mass email.
I hold my own service.
The moths clinging to the screens
pray to get in. The orchids open
their lovely legs. At the end
of the row, crows badger
each other over hymnals.
I cut the shofar loose.
My dog smells the blasts
and heads downstairs.
What kind of Jew am I?
The kind women at cash registers
glare at, the kind with scalloped
edges and frayed hair,
whose voice rises into prophetic zeal
over the slightest hint of a problem.
I smell tsimmes, brisket,
roasted potatoes, kugel.
I smell candles burning,
and apples dipped in honey
a thousand miles away.
No one in the community
invites me for dinner.
They probably don’t even know
I know I’m Jewish.
I remember floods,
earthquakes, bombings,
diseases, deaths—
the misery in 2010.
Why would anyone argue
over their Jewishness?
I flick the lights to get God’s
attention. I draw another glass
of wine from the box. I’m
my own shabbos goy,
carrying enough cash
to get in to a movie
and buy some popcorn.
This year will be another year
of war just like last year.
What should I pray for,
a little less blood,
another day on earth?
I bless my wife, my dog,
everyone I love
and everyone I don’t love.
I do not bless the new year of kings.
I bless the new year of new years,
the act of creation.
Let’s begin again.

Thursday, March 1, 2012, at 7:00 pm, poets Abbot Cutler and Diane Wald will continue the fifth season of the Collected Poets Series. Mocha Maya’s Coffee House, 47 Bridge St, Shelburne Falls, MA. ($2-5 suggested donation)

Abbot Cutler is the author of 1843 Rebecca 1847 (Rowan Tree Press, 1982) and The Dog Isn’t Going Anywhere (Mad River Press, 2001), and his poems have appeared in various anthologies and journals, including Ploughshares and Orion Magazine. He received a B.A. from Harvard University, and then an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College following stints in the Peace Corps, which he spent in Malaysia, and teaching junior high school in Brooklyn, NY. He just retired from Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, where he taught for over thirty years. He is a member of Slate Roof Press, a poetry collective in Franklin County, and lives in Ashfield, MA, with his wife, the photographer, Sarah Holbrook.

Diane Wald

Diane Wald was born in Paterson, NJ, and has lived in Massachusetts since 1972.  She holds a B.A. from Montclair University and an M.F.A. degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  She has published over 250 poems in literary magazines since 1966.  She was the recipient of a two-year fellowship in poetry from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and has been awarded the Grolier Poetry Prize, The Denny Award, The Open Voice Award, and the Anne Halley Award. She also received a state grant from the Artists Foundation (Massachusetts Council on the Arts).  She has published three chapbooks (Target of Roses from Grande Ronde Press, My Hat That Was Dreaming from White Fields Press, and Double Mirror from Runaway Spoon Press) and won the Green Lake Chapbook Award from Owl Creek Press.  An electronic chapbook (Improvisations on Titles of Works by Jean Dubuffet) appears on the Mudlark website. Her book Lucid Suitcase was published by Red Hen Press in 1999 and her second book, The Yellow Hotel, was published by Verse Press in the fall of 2002. WONDERBENDER, her third collection, was published by 1913 Press in 2011.  She works for animal welfare.

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WHAT HAPPENS / Abbot Cutler

is that the air is full of words and phrases no one
believes. Caverns and crevices groan open.
Small creatures tumble along the canyon floor
trying to get out of the way. The heart of the great
whale bursts onto dry sand at the sound waves
of the shiny machines coursing the oceans. The black
dog whimpers in the heat. We speak in whispers
in the hope they will lean closer, climb down,
climb down. But,
they are walking faster, they are climbing in
and out of black cars, they are having microphones
attached, they are brushing off any small insects
that land on them and never looking
where they step. They are gazing at the monitors,
looking to the sensors, the earphones, the memory chips.
If their eyes would turn toward us … and what
of the heart, the warm heart in its dark cave?
It’s right here in this box which the huntsman
brings into the vast hall, the glass and cement,
the echoing footsteps, the temple of figures.
He has the heart in a box and opens it
for the black queen, for the senators and congressmen.
They take pictures of it. Maybe one of them
will put a picture up on his refrigerator,
the heart of the beast far from the haven
where the maiden spins out her innocence
in pure threads. Maybe he will look at it
every day and learn to say what it says.

Praise the heart of the beast, lift it up
and the distances will begin to lessen,
lift it up and the little snails will continue
on their slow shiny trails, lift it up
and a million tiny creatures will glisten
in a cold Pacific cove, lift it up
and maybe it will be possible to begin to say
something that you believe in.

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A SILENT WIND OVER THE ISLET / Diane Wald

I’d forgotten you so liked art. And many things
advanced in those days to a point of consciousness
beyond any speech or understanding
the nerves could utter. Yet when I designed
the fine-blown glassware you impressed
upon each piece a delicate leaf, a hand,
a monstrous kiss that marked each one’s
relief from the next, an individual differing
so slightly from its kin, but greatly,
that every one-celled stem
floated its flower-house into a globe, a fishbowl end,
resting at last at level on the table.

Tigers love water. They sleep with their heads
towards the outside wall, and write with blue chalk
on the sidewalk. Outside blue. Eagerly I hand over
the lights to you, but soundless now,
as the man with his ear to the floor must be disowned
and drowned and downed by the giant. Once
you healed a woman twice. The color teal. The crayfish
glimmering in still pools and insect wings
of mica. And the hush. The awful stars. It all
comes back to me now in a wind-up of clouds
as softly they fall to your tie, to your shoulders.

How shall we move from one height to the next
except by the dark back stairs? A wooden linkage
creaks, a figure moves in violets and regrets,
pressing its face to the wall along the steps
so that the dreamers on the other side can hear
the contours of a presence at once kind and cold.
I remember you loved the hour without name
and every shade behind the purchased mask
with both its mouths. The clocks we found
moved backwards, moved in unison once a year,
and we’ve survived that moment in the mirror
as amber acquaintances. In the very end
you will be made to speak of me, you will
entirely forget, in every case, the distance
from the liquid to the rim, And you will then
believe we really did all the things we imagined.

Ellen LaFleche

Ellen LaFleche’s manuscript, Workers’ Rites, won the Philbrick Poetry Prize and was recently published by the Providence Athenaeum. Her chapbook, Ovarian, was published in 2010. She has poems in Many Mountains Moving, Harpur Palate, New Millennium Writings, and Naugatuck River Review, among many others.

Jennifer Militello

Jennifer Militello’s first collection, Flinch of Song, won the Tupelo Press First Book Award, and her second collection, Body Thesaurus, was named a finalist for the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award by Marilyn Hacker and is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. She is also author of the chapbook Anchor Chain, Open Sail.

Militello has been published widely in such journals as The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The North American Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, and anthologized in Best New Poets 2008. Her work has been awarded the Ruskin Art Club Poetry Award from Red Hen Press and the 49th Parallel Award from Bellingham Review in addition to grants and fellowships from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Writers at Work, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

She has taught at Brown University, The Rhode Island School of Design, and The University of Massachusetts Lowell, and is director of the creative writing program at River Valley Community College. She lives in Goffstown, New Hampshire.

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DYEING THE CHILD / Ellen LaFleche

Our best wishes for a happy holiday season and new year~

we’ll see you in February, when Ellen LaFleche and Jennifer Militello kick off 2012!

Mark Leidner

Mark Leidner is the author of The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover (Sator Press, 2011), a book of aphorisms, and Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me (Factory Hollow, 2011), a book of poetry. He grew up in Georgia and now lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Timothy Liu

Timothy Liu (Liu Ti Mo) was born in 1965 in San Jose, California, to parents from the Chinese mainland. He studied at Brigham Young University, the University of Houston, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

He is the author of Polytheogamy (Saturnalia Press, 2009); Bending the Mind Around the Dream’s Blown Fuse (Talisman House, 2009);  For Dust Thou Art (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005); Of Thee I Sing (2004), selected by Publishers Weekly as a 2004 Book-of-the-Year; Hard Evidence (2001); Say Goodnight (1998); Burnt Offerings (1995); and Vox Angelica (1992), which won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. He has also edited Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry, (Talisman House, 2000).

Translated into ten languages, Liu’s poems have been included in many anthologies and have appeared in such places as Best American Poetry, Bomb, Grand Street, Kenyon Review, The Nation, New American Writing, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, Virginia Quarterly Review and The Yale Review. His journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.

Liu is currently an Associate Professor at William Paterson University and on the Core Faculty at Bennington College’s Writing Seminars; he lives in Manhattan.

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THINGS TO CALL WATER/ by Mark Leidner

friend of the cup
void soda
idiot’s vodka
fool’s oil
pipe sap
tap wine
faucet gumbo
boiler’s tool
baby of snow
steam’s mom
hot dog blood
“Cannonball!” shrapnel
diver’s excuse
island ender
navy gravy
torpedo media
The Artist Formerly Known as Ice
Dances with Eels
Señor Osmosis
drowner’s woe
world launderer
arsonist’s boycott
Cousteau’s milieu
hydrophobe’s gutcheck
“intern at the cistern”
tempest gristle
Odyssey sauce
hemisphere paint
the ghost in the sauna
the condensed mists of time
zodiac milk
casino preserves
stork’s anklets
periscope’s necktie
rowboat wingspan
catfish litterbox
starfish cathedral
turbulence skein
stream bacon
river luggage
crystal chowder
geyser sperm
fin wind
mer-air
loose frost
dank fire
blue flower

Thursday, October 6, 2011, at 7:00 pm, poets Joan Houlihan and Patricia Lee Lewis will kick off the fifth season of the Collected Poets Series. Mocha Maya’s Coffee House, 47 Bridge St, Shelburne Falls, MA. ($2-5 suggested donation)

Joan Houlihan

Born and raised in Massachusetts, Joan Houlihan has been a teacher, technical writer, reporter, critic, and editor. Her books include Hand-held Executions: Poems & Essays (Del Sol, 2003), The Mending Worm (New Issues, 2006), and The Us (Tupelo Press, 2009). In 2004, she founded the Concord Poetry Center, and in 2006 she established the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference for advanced writers. She is also currently on the faculty of Lesley University’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program.

Patricia Lee Lewis

Patricia Lee Lewis was born and raised in Texas, where her three children were also born; for over 30 years she has lived and worked at Patchwork Farm Retreat in Western Massachusetts. She holds an MFA degree in Creative Writing from Vermont College, and a BA from Smith College, Phi Beta Kappa. Beloved mentor of many writers, leader of frequent writing retreats both nationally and internationally, she has also been the publisher of The Patchwork Journal. A grant in 2011 from the Massachusetts Cultural Council enabled her to help establish a writing program at her local library. Trained to teach English to speakers of other languages (TESOL), Patricia and friends volunteer in Guatemala. Her first book of poems, A Kind of Yellow, was awarded first place by Writers Digest International. Her second, High Lonesome, is newly released from Hedgerow Books/ Levellers Press.

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FROM DIRT, A STIR / by Joan Houlihan

From dirt, a stir put forth its mix, smell
of week and green-held bud, deep cups
sweet and sharp. Warmer started day.
Sun lay wider where us walked.

And ay had seeing out to hers – long cloth tied
with hemp, of smaller head than ay, and that head bent
to sounds from brae, hers hair a gleam-fall over him,
the weaker, full of noise for her and lifting up.

And ay would turn to watch the smoke
go high in thin and thinner twist
the way the sun must bring its burning home.

(“From dirt, a stir” from The Us ©2009. Reprinted by permission of Tupelo Press. All rights reserved.)

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KAYAK / by Patricia Lee Lewis

If the kayak had not filled my heart with its
small torpedo yellow and if ripples
had not speckled birch leaves with the rising
sun, and if your voice had carried from the pier
as through the one remaining seagull’s wings,
perhaps you would have kept your place beside
me in the sudden storm. But now, small shapes
surround my boat like shadows. Drowning

is the only sound, the cutting off of air
around your face, the silencing of movement
toward me now, dimming of the earth
away from sun. If courage falls, if love explodes

in yellow light, if what was there, the holding
and the gentle mouth, has turned its back,
the kayak learns the river,
and the heart the rushing cataract.

(“Kayak” from High Lonesome ©2011. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.)