Union

They’ll fire us after we’ve been
at the company a certain amount of time,
to bring in fresh employees who haven’t been
ground up yet, who haven’t been sliced up
and turned into meat with plastic covers
over us to feed to their customers yet,
who haven’t ‘burned out yet,’ as if the job were
a kind of fire, and we were the kindling, or as if the job
were a kind of crop circle and we were the corn
that teenage aliens doodle their graffiti on for a purpose
that’s beyond us, for a purpose we are told
to believe in, and I too am angered by employees
who tend too slowly to my ‘needs,’ who peer
mole-y eyed at me from stacks of paperwork at the
DMV, or who squeak mole-y voiced at me from
burrowing too long into the twisted tunnels of a phone,
angered at them for not being paid enough
to know English, or how to turn on my
cable, so I can watch rich beautiful people
with no problems fail to fix their personalities,
or watch an exposé on how people are
already hard at work doing nothing to fix
problems much bigger than mine, like wrestlers
paying for their own brain damage,
or a community developing cancer trying to
blow out their favorite flaming river,
but it’s easy to be bitter, and it’s hard to join
a union, to show up to the meetings,
sign your name to the list, stick your neck
far, far out from its shell, so others
will stick out their necks from their shells,
until we are a field of necks too numerous to
chop all at once without making a mess,
or until we are a field of throats blooming all the
same words at the same time, the way people
join together to pray–as if God were a
little distant and can only hear us if we’re all
speaking at once, and a little distracted,
so he can only see us if we stand on each
other and form a human pyramid in the exact
shape of a person struggling to build a pyramid.

Adam Scheffler is the author of A Dog’s Life, which was the winner of the 2016 Jacar Press Book Contest. His poems have appeared in Narrative, The Yale Review, The Common, The American Poetry Review, The Cincinnati Review, Rattle, Verse Daily, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and many other venues.

Cherry Tree appears under the imprint of the Literary House Press, the publishing arm of the Rose O’Neill Literary House, a cultural center with an almost 50-year-history of promoting the arts. Washington College undergraduates participate in all facets of the production of this print journal, though professional writers serve as genre editors and fill most senior reader positions. Although the journal is still growing, Cherry Tree has already received national recognition. Poems from three of its six issues have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Poetry (2016, 2017, and 2020). Poems have been reprinted on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily and have appeared in the Orison Anthology. Prose has been listed as “notable” in Best American Essays and appeared in Best Microfictions (2020).

Letter of Support for U. S. Citizenship

To Whoever is Concerned:
I’ve known them for years,

they laugh a lot, have learned
each other’s language.

I’m already bad at this—
I’ve never done it before.

I’m told to include a paragraph
imagining a future

in which he is deported.
Who am I to say what happens

when the state separates
people who love each other

to different continents?
Plato, the old fool,

said love is the pursuit
of wholeness.

(Rain smashes against my window,
the body of a confused bird.

Look, rain. Look, bird.
I have nothing for you. No answers.)

This is what would happen
if he were deported:

she would break—
not a neat and tidy half

like a sunned apricot.
The word I want is sundered.

The wind is particularly cruel.
I think the rain will never stop,

and when the waters rise high enough,
we’ll all float away,

this letter our paper boat.

M Jaime Zuckerman is the author of two chapbooks, most recently Letters to Melville (Ghost Proposal), as well as recent poems in BOAAT, Diode, Fairy Tale Review, Glass Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Thrush, and other journals. She serves as the associate editor for Sixth Finch and a senior reader for Ploughshares. She grew up in the woods but now lives and teaches in Boston.

Cherry Tree appears under the imprint of the Literary House Press, the publishing arm of the Rose O’Neill Literary House, a cultural center with an almost 50-year-history of promoting the arts. Washington College undergraduates participate in all facets of the production of this print journal, though professional writers serve as genre editors and fill most senior reader positions. Although the journal is still growing, Cherry Tree has already received national recognition. Poems from three of its six issues have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Poetry (2016, 2017, and 2020). Poems have been reprinted on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily and have appeared in the Orison Anthology. Prose has been listed as “notable” in Best American Essays and appeared in Best Microfictions (2020).

When the storm comes it is already too late

Suspended laundry decorates the buildings like gift wrap.
I traverse the city through color: silky yellow, red, nets of green,
rose, ripped denim, silver zari. Then sky and water
beleaguer the city, my feet disappear, I don’t know where I end
and where everything else begins—everything else is muck.
Trees renouncing their branches, windows protesting, the washing
falling like an avalanche. Cupboards, drawers, and folders choke
the street. Emptying, empty. I walk by a drain: the streets will swallow
our things. Our things will swallow the streets. I see no road signs,
no officers, no maps. Only the moon like an onion skin. Only
the fallen bark of giants. No old names, no new names,
no Calcutta, no Kolkata—it all disappears.

Even the vengeful ghosts of British officers’ mistresses,
my brothers trying to harness the flimsy lamplight, our school nurse
and her red medicine, the puchka wallas who fed the whole city,
the cooks, their threadbare mattresses, the security guards at their posts,
the property they protect—I can’t find any of it. I can’t find anyone.
Was I ever there? I careen with the wind till I reach Red Road. Driverless
cars thunder with the ancient earth. There is no direction but down.
A building gives up and lets its guts show. And the clothes are suddenly
clean and wet on my body, and I stand still just like that, shivering.

Urvi Kumbhat holds a BA from the University of Chicago and is currently an MFA candidate at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Her work appears in The Margins, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Apogee, Protean Magazine, and other publications. She grew up in Calcutta.

Cherry Tree appears under the imprint of the Literary House Press, the publishing arm of the Rose O’Neill Literary House, a cultural center with an almost 50-year-history of promoting the arts. Washington College undergraduates participate in all facets of the production of this print journal, though professional writers serve as genre editors and fill most senior reader positions. Although the journal is still growing, Cherry Tree has already received national recognition. Poems from three of its six issues have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Poetry (2016, 2017, and 2020). Poems have been reprinted on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily and have appeared in the Orison Anthology. Prose has been listed as “notable” in Best American Essays and appeared in Best Microfictions (2020).

Gun As Part of the American Wardrobe

My gun commands a room like a bombshell
red lipstick, compact inside a purse or tucked
in a jean pocket. Maybe she’s born with it,
but maybe it’s my gun. It sparkles like
a backward belt buckle saying Don’t Mess
With My Backside, don’t tell me how to
live my life. Accidentally, I leave my gun
in a bathroom stall while taking a leak.
Can you GPS my gun? Can you microchip
my kids? My gun helps me to see—I buy
them all online, it’s much cheaper and convenient.
I input a slip of information only obtained
by a professional. I help a man on the street who says
he lost his car. We both study a map on my phone,
zoom in and out with my fingers. I never leave home
without my phone. He might have a gun. He says,
tattoo parlor and I sleuth the case, solve the sudden
interruption and sigh that no one’s complimented my stylish
firearm. When I get dressed, it goes: underwear, bra,
shirt, gun, pants. Necklace, sunnies, socks, shoes. It’s not normal
to navigate this territory naked. No one can take away
my right to dress this way. At night, my gun is my other
pillow. It’s the long johns I wear in colder weather, my bling-up
over drab basics as ingrained as a freckle. Even models parade
the runway in designer guns. Critics note the fabrics
of untenable blood over our hands. In articles, they call it art.

Charlotte Seley is a poet, writer, and editor from the Hudson Valley region of New York, currently residing in Kansas City with her cat, Lord Byron. She is the author of The World is My Rival (2018, Spuyten Duyvil) and the chapbook Die Young: Letters to Ke$ha (2019, dancing girl press). Her work can be found in Barrelhouse, Wax Nine Journal, LEVELER, Passages North, Rattle, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and others. Find her online at charlotteseley.com.

Cherry Tree appears under the imprint of the Literary House Press, the publishing arm of the Rose O’Neill Literary House, a cultural center with an almost 50-year-history of promoting the arts. Washington College undergraduates participate in all facets of the production of this print journal, though professional writers serve as genre editors and fill most senior reader positions. Although the journal is still growing, Cherry Tree has already received national recognition. Poems from three of its six issues have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Poetry (2016, 2017, and 2020). Poems have been reprinted on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily and have appeared in the Orison Anthology. Prose has been listed as “notable” in Best American Essays and appeared in Best Microfictions (2020).

Groupon Cut & Dyes

In north Florida, my hairdresser asked
aaasawhere I was from, and I told her the Midwest.
Where are you from-from? she asked. I passed
aaasaon telling her: The Nation of Repressed

Emotions. Instead, I said I’m from West
aaasaof here. She paused. California? she asked.
Further west. She holds my hair against my chest
aaasaIn north Florida, my hairdresser asked

if I was adopted, snipping a vast
aaasaamount of my long black hair from my crest.
Your English is great, she remarked, and asked
aaasawhere I was from, and I told her the Midwest.

Not adopted, but thank you, I expressed.
aaasaI became worried: How long would this last?
This woman! And my hair looked a mess.
aaasaWhere are you from-from? she asked. I’d passed

another salon. Should’ve gone there, I amassed
aaasaregret. My hair will look bad, at best.
Turning the chair, I saw my new do, gasped!
aaasaTelling her: The Nation of Repressed

Anger. She promptly asked: Is this a test?
aaasaI paid and drove away and wept, at last,
with the radio on. Finally, I could rest,
aaasaI’ll grow out my hair, dye it back to black.
aaasaaaasaaaasaaaasaIn north Florida.

*

Marianne Chan is the author of All Heathens from Sarabande Books, which was the winner of the 2021 GLCA New Writers Award in Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, West Branch, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati.

Cherry Tree appears under the imprint of the Literary House Press, the publishing arm of the Rose O’Neill Literary House, a cultural center with an almost 50-year-history of promoting the arts. Washington College undergraduates participate in all facets of the production of this print journal, though professional writers serve as genre editors and fill most senior reader positions. Although the journal is still growing, Cherry Tree has already received national recognition. Poems from three of its six issues have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Poetry (2016, 2017, and 2020). Poems have been reprinted on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily and have appeared in the Orison Anthology. Prose has been listed as “notable” in Best American Essays and appeared in Best Microfictions (2020).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monticello Peaches

Jefferson planted over a thousand trees
in the South Orchard—eighteen varieties of apple,
six apricot, four nectarine,
and thirty-eight types of peach.
Lemon Cling. Heath Cling. Indian Blood Cling.
Vaga Loggia. Breast of Venus,
which Jefferson accounted for as the “teat peach”—
interlopers mistaken as indigenous.
Each cleft globe was a luxury,
yet so abundant they were sliced, chipped,
boiled, brandied, fried, sun-dried,
and extras fed to the hogs.

My first wish is that the labourers
may be well treated,
the Master wrote.
He created a system for tipping.
Once, James Hemings was whipped
three times over before the sun had set
behind Brown’s Mountain.

When Jefferson traveled to Paris
in 1784, he took Sally and her brother—
James, who learned the language,
who trained at pasta and pastry,
paid four dollars per month to serve
as chef de cuisine to the Minister to France.
James, who had to be coaxed to leave
a country where, in 1789,
slavery had been abolished.

 I hereby do promise & declare
until he shall have taught such person
as I shall place under him for that purpose
to be a good cook, this previous condition
being performed,
he shall thereupon be made free . . .
“For that purpose”: their brother, Robert.

In 1796, James was freed.
In 1801, James killed himself.
In 1802, Robert debuted macaroni pie
on the menu for Jefferson’s state dinner.
In 1824, a recipe layering pasta, cheese, and butter
appears in The Virginia Housewife: Or, Methodical Cook,
alongside Mrs. Mary Randolph’s marmalade
that specifies a pound of West Indies sugar
to two pounds of peaches—“yellow ones
make the prettiest”—and a hard chop
until flesh gives away to transparent pulp,
chilled to a jelly.

If one was accused of stealing or eating
beyond one’s share
the grill was secured
over the mouth.
This was considered the kind muzzle.
The unkind one settled an iron bit
over the tongue.

The groundskeepers knew we’d come
with our wreath to lay at Jefferson’s grave,
walking Monticello’s grass at misted dawn,
half-drunk and laughing.
We came every year.
There are two types of peaches:
one to which the stone clings,
shredding to wet threads,
and another allowed to lift clean.

“Freestone,” they call those peaches—
that most popular variety, the White Lady.

•••

One great benefit to living in a college community is the academic lectures and programs available to non-students. Online readings by guest authors at the Washington College’s Starr Center and Rose O’Neill Literary House have been especially welcomed during the crushing isolation and shutdowns of this past year.

A recent online reading by writers appearing in Washington College’s issue #7 of Cherry Tree: A National Literary Journal @ Washington College inspired the Spy to offer a partnership with the publication and its Editor in Chief James Hall.

Thankfully, the editors were enthusiastic about the project, so here we present our first of a biweekly Cherry Tree offering.

Cherry Tree debuted in 2015 under the creative hands of former Literary House Director Jehanne Dubrow and Assistant Lindsay Lusby and continues its mission under the editorships of James Hall and Roy Kesey to showcase national and international literary arts by emerging and established writers. Poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction are featured in each issue.

The name Cherry Tree was chosen as a sly invitation to ponder “the apocryphal story of George Washington’s ax, and (to) encourage writers to craft new and inventive ways to critique, to re-imagine, and to chop away at literary traditions…and to endeavor to serve as both a site of coalescence and protest and a vibrant archive of human thought and feeling.”

There’s also a thematic section in Cherry Tree—“Literary Shade”—introduced in 2016 to “respond to and challenge oppressive social structures.” It’s both an invitation and permission to pierce the obscuring noise of politics, cultural myths and media and speak personal truth to power

It’s here that we find poet Sandra Beasley “throwing shade” at Thomas Jefferson’s fondness for the peaches in his prodigious Monticello gardens. For the poet, peaches and the naming of them become a mantra recited in the shadows of cruelty and human bondage.

Here is Sandra Beasley’s poem “Monticello Peaches” from her new book of poetry Made to Explode, praised by poet Ada Limon as “a rare and vibrant exploration of whiteness and complicity when it comes to America’s history and traditions.” Made to Explode is published by W.W. Norton and Company and may be found at your local bookstore or online at Amazon.

Sandra Beasley is the author of Made to Explode; Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize; and Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a disability memoir. She also edited Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. She lives in Washington, DC.

Cherry Tree appears under the imprint of the Literary House Press, the publishing arm of the Rose O’Neill Literary House, a cultural center with an almost 50-year-history of promoting the arts. Washington College undergraduates participate in all facets of the production of this print journal, though professional writers serve as genre editors and fill most senior reader positions. Although the journal is still growing, Cherry Tree has already received national recognition. Poems from three of its six issues have been selected for inclusion in The Best American Poetry (2016, 2017, and 2020). Poems have been reprinted on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily and have appeared in the Orison Anthology. Prose has been listed as “notable” in Best American Essays and appeared in Best Microfictions (2020).

This video is approximately five minutes long.