Secret Garden
2023-2024
Maine Song
By Marley Reedy
By Marley Reedy
memories cut across
the dream like roots and curl around
my wrist extending from my fingers till
I can wield them like
a sword. the roots are different people and places
one is on your porch with the tall grass
lounging and the sun the calico cat and the speckled hens
I’m apologizing always for the distance
for the sword I want
to be here
in this, a black and white photo
it’s warm here
another memory roots and I’m
on my back in a lake another in
your car another with my head
on your lap this one’s not
real I’m telling your dad about
beetles and the dream begins
to fall apart
I turn and cut a root then
another trying to hold them
dearly but my sword extends
like my fingers and I cut you
without trying
Letter to George Berkeley
By Taly Nudelman
By Taly Nudelman
If a tree falls
her mother will weep,
a cry like the flapping of wings
of crows who have made their homes
in its generous limbs;
her bark will flutter off like a moth
leaving exposed its worn-out heart,
rings like waves on the shore
to meet the accordion bodies of earthworms,
full of life from
the veins of fallen leaves
yellow dandelions in ragged patches
like ornaments around her roots
will sigh velvet petals,
a release that sets scrambling
slender spider legs,
their eyes wide as if to say
Yes, you are here.
I see you.
Dear Berkeley,
God is dead,
but the forest is watching.
A Rainy Day with the Creatures and They Tell Me Some Things
By Sam Ferland
By Sam Ferland
The creatures get rowdy on a rainy day.
They jump up and down for the
droplets to fall,
The water boosts off their glossy skin into the swimming rivers in
cracks.
Where the water would only soak my hair.
It is a day nonetheless–
I imagine them marching into my bed of leaves to drag me out/in
to the party.
Because if they didn’t I wouldn’t be (t)here with you.
I could have never made it,
to the place where the water falls because the weather is a character–
An evil one in my tale (like a witch), but not for them.
Falling down from the clouds... the
creatures told me are actually “pods of elixir”...
So even though I feel the cold rain soak my garbs,
I imagine they feel it warm even though it bounds off their skin;
Because they party and dance ...
They also question what it’s like to bees human
Sorry, the bees are their airplanes two
places they go.
Wherever I am and wherever they are.
Autopsy Tales
By Gracie Healey
By Gracie Healey
When the doctors look beneath my skin
They’ll find a myriad of curiosities-
A body possessed by light,
That wounds from the inside out
In great big masses of color.
My collar bones seal cages for the song birds in my chest.
(I hope they leave them open when they lay my soul to rest.)
My lives extend far beyond the one I’ve left.
The ancient blood in my veins, though cold in this body
Burn hot in decades past.
Dressed in the same porcelain, sun stained skin
Pulsing through the same, love trodden heart.
It bleeds secretly.
They would find novels in my cheeks
Trapped by last breaths
and cats on my tongue.
Hopefully they have enough room in their abstract for all of it.
I had some wonderful things to say.
So many butterflies in my throat.
Wings that matched the ink on my skin.
Great big masses of color.
Death is truly the mother of beauty.
Even the tungsten light of an operating room could not rob the glamor of the stillness that resides
on my face.
I’ll think of this as webbing my cocoon,
And as the doctors pry at what composed this breathing form,
I shall build another.
Hard to Find, Easy to Miss
By Arianna Delmastro
By Arianna Delmastro
On the beaches are smooth stones with fossils trapped inside
The stones fit in my hand
And in the stone fits 541 million years of geologic history–
541 million years fitting in a hand
The way profound things often can
Children on the beaches build sandcastles lined with seashells–
Shells that used to be homes,
That one day might be fossils inside of stones,
And they’ll fit into hands like they do now,
Only they’ll be bigger,
Because there’s nothing special about a shell until something fills it–
Nothing special about bone until it’s surrounded–
Until some geological event– some horrible or wonderful catastrophe– alters it
(Something like a mass extinction, or love)
For a fossil to form, the calcium must be pressed into the ground,
Held firmly, warmly, in the precise way that lets it integrate slowly with the rock.
Millions of years later, if everything remains [just right],
It will fit inside a stone–
A stone that can fit inside a hand
The way I fit into Us / The way profound things often can
Kayak on the Cobbosse (I Paddle and I Wonder)
By Lou Foust
By Lou Foust
It happens
As it does, every once in a while
That between episodes of whatever Netflix show I realize I’m
not good enough.
I haven’t helped enough
I haven’t worked enough
I’m not me enough.
And I feel stuck
Because it’s four o’clock,
And what can I do about it now?
So I walk my kayak down to the launch
And with that first strong push out on the water I wonder
How all the fish alive
Escape the sewage and waste we put in the water. I paddle, and I
wonder
As the point of my kayak cuts through the calm, glassy water I wonder
How different has man made this land?
And when did it all happen?
I paddle, and I wonder
As the lilies and the grasses lick the underside of my kayak I wonder
What they would have looked like, all of them, However
many hundreds of years ago
When they might have lived undisturbed.
I paddle, and I wonder
And as the loons pass me by and dive beneath the water
I wonder
How they mourn when their children
Are lost to the rising water.
Do they think there was simply more rain this year?
Or do they rightfully blame man, and call out a hundred curses from the water? I paddle, and I
wonder.
And as I see the launch again, I see birds,
Though I don’t know which ones,
Sitting on the wire
And I think, surely the birds like the wire,
They had nowhere to perch before,
And I stop myself and laugh
Because there were millions more trees, and a billion more branches before man cut
them down to put in the electrical lines
And just because I didn’t get to see it
doesn’t mean that wasn’t what the world was like before me.
As I pull my kayak back up on shore,
I wonder
How the birds feel.
Do they ever feel free?
I wonder.