Fisher Girl by Elizabeth MacDougal

Fisher Girl, to Herself

Ever continual's the sucking sway,
Rude serf indifferent,
To which it is the human wont to go.
Do not be led astray.

Come, two persons, many days, to know
How like two minds can be
How in concern, and humour, care and way,
In wiles. When like they go,
Hope's cell, the memory's tenement

Will make of nature signs, and see
With artifice, a glowing globe from dirt,
(Words, from the earthen lineaments)
Which overlooked is not itself, but stays
Infected by persistent memory
Who will not recognize, will not concede
That she is not creator, no,
Nor can in cadent crests restore
Old company.
Repent.
The current waves care not for your lament.

Fisher Girl, II
Brother of bones
broken
No good, but
broken
Broken
Will

Would he but out,
Quit the house
Stop with his company
Debauchery
Hungry mouth.

Comes home
choking
Tongue sputters,
choking
Choking
swill.


Fisher Girl, III
They rust white on weary shores
The organic caskets
With their leather strappings tattered
None wonders but once where they're off
to.

Fisher Girl, IV
It is not good
To live near a drawing mouth.
We harvest from its excess.
It harvests of us.

Fisher, V
As a rock, I would climb out of my ocean socket, if I had one, and leave it to the clams.
Off to Nevada.
Rather than be ground away.

Fisher, VI
how discrete
a pink
drowning anemone

Every Man, A Holy Man by Lucas Olson

Every Man, a Holy Man

Every man, a holy man

and every book, a bible.

For no man thinks himself as evil

or as the other, liable.

Every soul, a perfect one

and every spirit wholesome.

For purity, a subjective thing,

though subjectivity, loathsome

For is any man as pure,

in the eye of the beholder,

as when the eye's his own,

his thoughts his own to shoulder.

Evil isn't personal,

its a matter of the world.

Though however right they are

internally, its pearled.

Every man is doing good

but some may do it wrong.

Even if intentions pure,

it may be sad, the song.

For, Every man is a holy man,

no one man can do ill.

By his own rights he is perfect

but his ego, he can't fulfill.

Prompted Prayers by Sarah Zuidema

Prompted Prayers

The day was bumbling to an end.
The horizon became a taut blue line along a fast darkening ocean.
The sun's fleeing rays cast eerie shadows along lengthy sidewalks and glossy windows.
After the the day's buzzing white gyration,
The cooling fingers of a green dusk seemed to smooth the vicissitudes of life,
and wander through the city with an air of enthusiastic exploration.
The moon rose swiftly as one wide, ecstatic grin,
dragging with it the wearisomeness of night;
which ravenously consumed the gale of hysteria,
left behind by the now shattered golden sun.
Darkness, the abyss of ages,
covered the coast in a heavy molasses cloak;
stretching a somber silence throughout the once bustling city.
Somewhere in an alley, a match was struck.
The tiny flame sliced through the syrupy blackness,
revealing the faintest traces of the riotous colors of civilization.
A breeze weaves behind the towering silent giants,
its current nearly visible in the leadened air.
The small flicker shudders in virtuous recrimination.
The silent oppressor, agonized by indecision,
finally retires over the pink cliff,
plunging toward the ocean,
and leaving the stifling pollutant of disinclination in the street.
Merely by way of baffled commonsense does the math burn on,
permitting its master a glance at the sky above.
Even the stars struggle against the choking weight of darkness,
succeeding in naught but an opalescent speck here and there.
The tiny light wavered and twitched,
rapidly approaching suffocation.
Daylight leaves yearning for night,
But night's unyielding pressure bring fearful chattered prayers.

Creative Non-fiction by Amy Carpenter

Stories From My Mother

Have you eaten potatoes recently? I bet you have. Between mashed potatoes and French fries you’ve probably had at least three servings of potatoes in the past week. My family tends to eat more than that. In my earliest memories I can remember my mother peeling potatoes almost every night for supper. Her thumbs and hands are scarred from cuts and she would give me the carrot peeler to help her. I would stand on the kitchen stool slowly rotating the oblong root, taking off the brown skin and listen to her. Sometimes she would tell me stories about how when she was young, she knew first hand how this vegetable got out of the ground.

My mother would tell me stories about potato harvesting and my aunts and uncles pass down their experiences to me as well. “It’s thing of the past now”, says one of my uncles. Labor laws, machinery, outside competition and chemical pesticides have killed the Maine potato economy and the Maine potato harvest. Children no longer get three weeks off of school in mid-September to bring the harvest in. But they used to. My mother and my aunts’ and uncles’ schools started classes in the middle of August while muggy heat and mosquito swarms still dominated the days and nights. But the cold comes quickly in The County and very soon it’s time for the harvest to be gotten in.

If you were a farm kid, no matter how young, you helped pitch in. My mother started working in the fields at the age of nine for 30 cents a barrel. By her senior year of high school, the amount paid per barrel had only risen 20 cents. At least if you worked on a harvester you got state minimum wage-$3.35 an hour.

One of my aunts tells me, “The one day I worked on a harvester, I felt overwhelmed by the noise and vibration of the machinery and picking potatoes was like a nature walk compared to that.” At least if you worked in the field your greatest danger was a rotten potato in your knee.

“You could loose a finger on a harvester, working in the pit”, my mom said. No one knew anyone who really had lost a finger but there always was that threat.

“You wear layers”, my mom says. Undershirt, t-shirt, long-sleeved shirt and sweatshirt and long johns under your jeans but still you shiver in the early morning frost. Girls wore bandanas to hold their hair back, their ears tucked under the dingy paisley print to protect from frostbite. When I was young my mother would tie my hair up in a bandana with the tips of my ears covered when it was cold. She told me that that was how she wore her hair and I was proud to do the same.

It wasn’t just farmers and farmer’s children who harvested. “You could always tell the Townies apart,” my mom laughs. “They couldn’t pick as fast and always came in the morning clean. For us, we couldn’t get a bath until Saturday night and we didn’t have enough clothes to be wearing clean ones everyday.” Every night before dinner the children would wash their faces and hands like they were wearing white gloves and masks above their real identities.

When you got to the field the field boss was already there. He handed you your tickets, tough pieces of oaktag with a number corresponding to your name, and told you to mark your section. Potato rows were long and you worked across them, not down them. Then you got your basket, a woven wooden one made from brown ash straps. The local Maliseet tribe made these baskets and they held about one fourth of a potato barrel. One Maliseet man brought his entire family every day to the harvesting, all ten children, and he wouldn’t straighten up all day, working furiously for every last cent.

One of my aunts remembers, “Once in the field there are the smells – earth, decaying tops and diesel fumes from the tractor as it chugs by bringing up the first rows of picking for the day. When we were quite young, our Dad would have chocolate bars tucked in his clothing. As he dug the sections his children were responsible to pick, he would drop a chocolate bar into the row to raise our spirits as we came upon it leaning over our potato baskets.” Only the youngest of the children crawled through the dirt to gather the potatoes. Everyone else bent at the waist and got used to the pain by the second or third day.

As every barrel was filled and a ticket squeezed underneath the top band the potato truck would drive by, a young man driving, an even younger boy standing on the flatbed operating the hoists and rolling the barrels as they were brought up onto the truck. “One of the boys sang “You Are My Sunshine” to me every time he came around to my section”, my mom recounts. “I turned red every time which is why he kept doing it.”

And so it went until the crop was in. As it got later in the season my mother remembers crawling inside one of the cedar barrels and pulling another one on top of it to block out the wind. But after all these years, this is what they all remember.

“Autumn leaves… colors bright everywhere…running through the fields. In and out of the trees and up and down the nearby gravel pits. Yelling…screaming…dancing. Weary muscles, bent skeletons, tired, dirty and mashed potatoes for supper.”

These are the stories my aunts and uncles tell me. These are the stories that my mother tells me.