Beneath a black willow, a wooden boat
stuck in sand & snakegrass appears
broken by years of work on water
that trembled with weather, ripe
& ready to diminish any net’s haul,
leaving you with rain in your ears ‒
marking the place where you stopped
irrevocably to listen to wind’s consuming
laughter that soon became your tears.
By M.J. Iuppa
M.J. Iuppa lives on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario. For the past eight years, she and her husband Peter Tonery have been committed to food sustainability. She has numerous publications (poetry, fiction, nonfiction and plays) in national and international journals as well as two full-length poetry collections Night Traveler (Foothills, 2003) and Within Reach (Cherry Grove Collection, 2010) and five chapbooks; her latest prose chapbook is Between Worlds Foothills, 2013. She served as the poetry adviser (2007-2012) for the New York Foundation for the Arts, and since 1986, has worked as a teaching artist in the schools, K-12 for a variety of agencies (RCSD, BOCES 2, Young Audiences, Genesee Valley BOCES, Project U.N.I.Q.U.E. and V.I.T.A.L. Writers & Books, and others) Currently she is Writer-in-Residence and Director of Arts Minor Program at St. John Fisher College. Her e-mail address: