Good morning everyone,

It’s already beginning to feel a lot more like fall, and I hope you’re enjoying it as much as I am.

Hilary Russell’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Poet Lore, Boulevard, the Carolina Quarterly, Slant, the George Washington Review, and other poetry journals. He is the author of Giving up the House, a chapbook (Mad River Press); The Anthology of American Poetry (Wayside Press); The Portable Writer (Wayside Press). He has read his work at Villanova University, Pace University, The Folger Shakespeare Library, Arrowhead (the home of Herman Melville in Pittsfield, MA), and many other venues.

Forts

When Bennies, LSD, and co-education laid`
low our all-boys boarding school, the kids
ran
to the mountain above campus, felled trees,
and stole sheets from the piles of plywood
meant for the new chapel no one wanted.
On Sundays the campus sang with
chainsaws.
At night we feared fires sparking through
smoke holes and half-built chimneys up
into dead needles, branches, and boughs.
No one knew much except it was all over
for the WWII vets who still ran the place.
Frightened, they locked their doors.
The headmaster, a bird hunter, made us
lock up our guns, then went up the mountain
himself with his black lab, Cap, who zig-
zagged
ahead, flushing drinkers, lovers, smokers,
and acid droppers hopelessly tripping
beyond the old soldier’s muffled laughter.

April Apples

Coming out of the back room’s cold
my wife is like a kid. She’s rooted
out a dozen York Imperials asleep
in balled-up sheets of newspaper.
Not Macs, Princesses, or Pink Ladies.
They’ve rotted. These sweeties are heirlooms.
Still firm, smiling, red cheeked
strawberry blondes, girls who out-walked
their boyfriends, captained champion
ball teams, loved rain, wore lipstick
thick, poked their heads under car hoods,
charged batteries, changed tires, loved
their dads. Big family girls right here
in the kitchen dripping and singing
in the dish rack, real keepers.

Mid-November

More and more
We rely on the east wind
To blow our leaves west through
The half-collapsed split
Rail fence my downwind neighbor
and I put up forty years ago.

Brian O’Shea’s Fall Work

We start into his woods
to see the cairns he’s balanced,
and his Galsworthy walls of
tidy, 15-to-20-foot limbs
and saplings switch-backing
through his hard and softwood city.
We walk his trail that winds
like water down to the creek
where more stone buddhas pray
until heavy rain will heave them down.
“That’s the point, Hil. It’s all part of it”
Soon he’ll be working with ice.

Irene Willis, Poetry Editor