Adult English Division - Honorable Mentions
Jillian Brady (Amherst) “Acquaintance”
Michael P. Doran (Springfield) “Equinox”
Jennifer Faulkner (Belchertown) “Old Man Ambling”
Richard Jordan (Hadley) “Summer, 1972”
Hsiao-Shih (Raechel) Lee (Northampton) “Letters From Home”
Carl Russo (Florence) “Pithy Sayings as Suggested by a Poetry Calendar OR They dreamed of collecting a dance from the Costume...”
Tania Steed (Springfield) “Abortion”
Susan Superson (East Longmeadow) “Stone Walls”
Acquaintance
There is always very little to explain,
The water chestnuts sat like crisp winter coins
on oversized broccoli, cold and unclaimed.
I posed with a fork in my right hand, my joints
ached, despite the bitter tea, a remedy
offered by my mother, a system of herbs.
As usual, out the window grows a tree.
The earnest wind tortures it with frozen breaths,
The ice that drowns the soil is like a sea.
Under the mute ice the grass curls and rests,
Like last year’s sailors who slipped beneath the tides
Dreaming now the dreams of whales, freed from death.
Watching the tree shudder is like watching slides
First this, click, then that, an arm stuck here or there,
A branch ripped from her body, exposed insides.
The discovered branch falls, and crashing declares
That wind is a criminal, a cruel surgeon,
Tossing limbs to the rigid ice without care.
It is too difficult to explain; this tin
fork, this marmalade dress, this dry wooden chair,
the window, even the walls, can be so thin.
Jillian Brady lives in Amherst with her husband and daughter. Sometimes she has weird dreams about old friends and places.
Equinox
I am bridged between times, numbered
To a familiar age when the course of rewards
And punishments stalls. The pulling
To the sea beneath clamps my feet
To a suspension. Colors slip
Into my weekend yard: Yellow-green
Crayon leaves keep to their kind's
Uncrossable outlines as the toy pink
Of the magnolia awaits curled in claws
Dun-flocked at twig tip, soon to split out
Under the stretching sun. Quick, the taint
Deepens in the creamy flowers, fit
To be scrapped like imperfect Dresden
Cherubs, shards to brown and melt
Into the gusted litter. I look around for dusk,
For the shade to meet me by the gate.
Michael P. Doran lives in Springfield, where he is helping to raise 2 teenagers and is currently teaching for the Environmental Center for Our Schools (ECOS) program. He received his BA in English Literature from Umass-Amherst and a BFA in Sculpture from Arizona State University. Having done little creative writing in his adult life, Michael was re-inspired to write poetry after volunteering in an elementary school classroom, and experiencing the students’ powerful writing.
Old Man Ambling
Old man ambling.
anchored by the cane at his hip,
moves painfully slow to the people watching
who stall their engines, cheer silently,
for his reaching the northern curb.
Today he is wearing white.
Spectators think he’s looking ill,
but it’s just that white
illumines his spotted, wrinkled rind.
Old man has been doing this every day
since the enemy ambushed his wife.
He sends letters to heaven
at the post office across the way.
Jennifer Faulkner has published several poems in literary journals and a textbook. She earned second place in the Springfield Library's 2004 poetry contest. By day, she is a communications manager for Baystate Health. Born and raised in Springfield, MA, she now lives in Belchertown with her husband and son.
"Summer, 1972"
My only job was to kneel in a field & flick
the heads off pink clover. Most of the older boys
were away & the President was not himself. Beyond
a crumbling gate, the field tilted into pine,
into birch. I was certain choppers hid among
low branches at dusk. In what was likely a dream,
Aunt Carol insisted Freddy had been captured
by salamanders. I'd fallen asleep on the job,
a clover stem between my teeth. A pinto came,
stood over me & swished away no-see-ums
with her long tail. Definitely a dream.
Cousin Freddy was never captured, but
by a swamp, orange salamanders thrived
beneath scraps of his fatigues. In time I learned
to love the chatter of Cracker Jacks in my head,
as the adults smoked & the nightly news loops droned.
Richard Jordan holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Massachusetts and is a faculty member in the Mathematics & Statistics Department at Mount Holyoke College. In his "spare" time he reads and writes poetry. His poems have appeared most recently in Concho River Review, Common Ground Review, The Pacific Review, Segue and Cranky.
Letters from Home
Your letters from home describe
the city’s smog and acid rain,
how grey particles cling to your face
and the white of your school uniform.
Reading your words makes me suddenly long
for a 25˚ C autumn day to sit with you
on the other side of the Greenwich meridian line,
where heavy fishing boats
return through orange and gold and crimson
to the port of Kaohsiung,
and we would listen to the mystical carbon monoxide
swirl through the air like long notes from a violin,
watch plastic bags
pretending to be jellyfish.
Hsiao-Shih (Raechel) is from Kaohsiung, Taiwan. She is currently a senior at Smith College, majoring in Spanish. After graduating she hopes to be somewhere warm. She enjoys cooking, salsa dancing, learning languages, and making arts and crafts. Her favorite writers include Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, Pablo Neruda, Ali Smith, and Haruki Murakami.
Pithy Sayings as Suggested by a Poetry Calendar
OR
They dreamed of collecting a dance from the Costume...
Love is like the fish
that became a popsicle
No matter how much you try
grey is not a shade of apple
You have to be serious when
you spin sizzle a bloom
There is no known match
between a squirrel and light
A nice snap of blue
fills out any collection
You can only play a flower and shell game
on the beach for so long.............
There is something quite natural
about a fire buttered cold
Not long afterwards; the hot colored sky
started to seethe ice
Easy grass can make a memory
cry on a cyclical stem
Even an artist will group
weather with a petal
Beware the orange and gold
just above medium fair
Whenever you take a pen in your hand
close down any open drawbridge
Time can be held in an open palm
when carefully bathed in exuberance
.... but the shed was completely empty by then.
Carl Russo lives and works in Northampton as an attorney. He is an avid photographer and lover of fine sound systems, and a founding CoDirector of the Florence Poets Society. Carl admires a wide range of poetic works from of Robert Frost, to Billy Collins, and is currently preparing to display his photographs of Christo’s "Gates" with his own poetry.
ABORTION
I can’t be no mother
I’m not mentally, emotionally, or physically ready
I’m not steady
My mind is shaky
A child will break me
Suffocate me
Lately I’ve been playing child games
My child’s name is mistake
I have so much at stake
I can’t be no young mother
I just turned legal
It’s the demons that got me screaming
I AIN’T READY
I AIN’T READY
I’m only 18 I AIN’T READY
Not yet a woman well not in the mind
I wanna resign from this position
A parent is not my decision
It’s gonna be a collision
I have to wait for his decision
And he wants it
But I can’t handle it
9 months
I can’t spare that right now
My tears are flowing right now
This is too big for me to handle
A life when mine ain’t even right
I barely know what I’m gonna eat tonight
This child this person in my stomach is bigger than life
And I can’t handle anything bigger than my life
Lord I surrender tell me what to do
Cause I’m lost
I can’t do it on my own
Only 18 wit no dreams
And I spent my last 10 dollars on jeans
An I’m supposed to do for something else
And I can’t do for myself
No job
No one to help
Baby daddy only gonna do what he want
But I can’t go out like that
I can’t take this no more
I gotta be a killer
I have to do the right thing
Cause I can’t fulfill this child’s dreams
Y’all might think I’m wrong
But this is right for me
Cause I can’t be no mother
Not me
Not today
I can’t be no mother
Not today
Tania Steed is a 2005 graduate of Commerce High School. She is a Springfield resident. Her hobbies include sports and reading. Her passions consist of writing and music. She writes because she loves to inspire young women and men to do the right thing and take care of responsibility. Another reason is because she gets to show her feelings that on the regular she wouldn’t have shown. Also because she gets to give it to people in her own point of view.
The spring thaw has begun in earnest so
he drives to the quarry to purchase the stones
to repair the wall.
He doesn’t know what makes him say it,
that they should be the size of a
child’s head, but the clerk finds no
strangeness in this description.
Now, with the stones mostly small and round,
he bends to his task, some sweat escaping
from the brow of his hat to sting
his eyes.
Each stone is hefted in curse-
“Damn heat! Damn gnats!”
until curses morph into keening question,
“Why?”, and sweat combines with tears
he tastes on his lips.
W
hy would a son who is born of these green hills
die in desert and in dirt?
It is a question no father’s brain can
bear.
Instead he strengthens the wall,
lengthens it-
a futile attempt to buttress
his heart.
Susan Superson is a twenty-five year teaching veteran. She is a two-time presenter at the National Association for Gifted Children and was nominated twice for the Disney Teacher of the Year Award. Last month she was one of the recepients of the ReMinder Publication's HomeTown Hero Award. She has been published in the East Longmeadow Harvest Anthologies, local journals and papers, as well as in Women Unlimited Magazine. An empty nester, Susan is currently working on a book entitled Shift Happens!
