A washed-out sign leaning into a ditch informed me I was “Entering Whiting.” I was driving north on Vermont Route 30. The year was 1992. Clapboard farmhouses and towering feed silos dotted the sprawling fields. The horizon burned in brilliant blotches of red and

Darwin really nailed it, didn’t he? Really caught that melody
that matches every lyric in the song of life.
The prime IF-THEN statement buried deep
in the basic program of existence:

“I feel like a princess,” was my reaction to life on board an ocean liner from Rotterdam to New York. It was July 1951. I was twenty-seven. I came to the U.S. with other Dutch “Fulbrighters” for a year of graduate study. To prepare us for academic life we spent the

winter very quick poem
out my window
white snow begins, again
another wondering winter blast

What do you use to stuff the crack under death’s door?

plain dirty laundry sweet sour and constant
the neverworn wedding dress
left hand gloves

New love is a form of madness. MRIs have proven that the brains of new lovers light up in the exact same area as those of people suffering from obsessive compulsive disorders. I read this in a weekly news magazine a few years ago, put out just in time for

It was the embrace of two women who understood. Maizie had spread the quilt across her bed and called her daughter to join her. She had been working on this quilt for almost twenty-five years but hadn’t shown it to Sunny until today.

I put her to bed, frail as a torn rag,
and tried to erase the images
of her rickety legs at the edge of the chair,
my hands under her bony seat,

You gave no sign of knowing
I was there
tucked behind pussywillows
at the riverbank

A tough woman
lifts dozens of buckets of feed
and does not wince
when the hot wire fence catches her

So they met for dinner
at a country inn and found
something like desire still
hovering between them.

By Meredith McKie Griffith We who live in this country never become inured from grief. Each time one falters it is the same: the raw incomprehension that this beloved could fade, or fail. You might think that after a lifetime of arrivals and departures, of birth and death, there would come a slow kind of [...]

He fed me
the root of a licorice fern,
sheep sorrel, a soup
made from stinging nettles.

“If net worth is negative,
enter zero.”
My daughter peers over my shoulder,
knows the weight of what can’t

“What’s wrong with you, Talley? You’re dead out there. On the floor? You know that? Dead.”
Talley knew. He knew it deeply, in the aching calcification of his bones and the sludge that had settled sedimentarily in his brain.

When we launched SHARK REEF in June of 2001, we saw it as a new millenium online zine from a rural grassroots community. We had no thought of how it might evolve or grow up but simply wanted to give serious local writers a place where they could see their work