Current Issue 2026

In the depths of winter, vines go dormant,

subsisting on sugar from the year before

waiting for the cold midst to render.

Farmers prepare, plucking and pruning,

shaping a legacy, cutting carefully, laboriously

in hopes of a fruitful harvest.

January’s average lows of thirty degrees makes for

a strange sky, sad and poorly lit, nothing but gray

like clouds of ash that are afraid to land.

Fixed in mediation mulling over rain,

praying for wetness to wake up 

the long slumber.

Buds slowly break through, even a flower or two.

Hardly a sneeze but a long awaited beginning.

A name, a coupling, a cluster of crimson collection,

robust and daring in red and purple.

Skin so deep yet so delicate, confounding in

nature but all the more enchanting.

From gray to blue to sulfur, the sky is a light switch

piercing the fields with overabundance from debt back in winter.

The farmers are prepared, shading the precious

buds from sunburn, providing protection.

Everything is for their survival, their legacy years to come.

Forever planning, tweaking, creating the perfect yield.

Now comes late October, with the rolling fog.

The moment of mercy, of love and labor.

But wait, it’s not quite ready.

It still needs to age, maybe another decade or two.