10 Things I like about Cleveland: Part VII

I like the Edmund Fitzgerald Porter from the Great Lakes Brewing Company. It is heavy enough to suit my winter palette, but fizzy enough for me to enjoy during the heat of summer. The taste is rich, complex, smooth and somehow bitter. I like it in a bottle, in a growler or from the tap at the brewery.

10 Things I like about Cleveland: Part VI

I like the abundance of urban agriculture in Cleveland. We have:

• plots of vacant land you can buy for about $1,
• a diverse group of willing, committed people,
• hungry citizens in need of fresh, nutritional produce,
• free technical assistance,
• innovative urban gardening and urban livestock zoning policies,
• bottom-up DIY-ness and
• top-down support.

I can't wait for the upcoming growing season. The plan is to turn the entire yard into a garden this summer. We've made layers of comforter compost and are letting it prepare the soil this winter

Last spring, garden prep

10 Things I like about Cleveland: Part V

I like the Greater Cleveland Rapid Transit Authority--specifically the trains. I know that the RTA has raised fees and cut service. And I'm disappointed in that. However, I do like the convenience of taking the Red Line to University Circle, Detroit Shoreway Neighborhood, the Ohio City Neighborhood and the Airport. I like taking the Green or Blue line to Shaker Square.

10 Things I like about Cleveland: Part IV

I like the Ohio City Bicycle Co-op. OCBC is involved in so many community events include the Urban Harvest Garden Tour, Cleveland Bicycle Week, social rides and safety and repair classes. My bike got stolen this fall and I am riding an OCBC loaner bike until I can get another one.

10 Things I like about Cleveland: Part III

I like the People's University. I rarely purchase books, cds or dvds because the Cleveland Public Library has everything. CPL is part of the CleveNet Library Cooperation and the online catalogue makes reserving a book just as easy as ordering from Amazon.com. I get my books sent to the branch nearest my house.

10 Things I like about Cleveland: Part II

I like the Stone Cold Bikini Show. It's where I get my Indie Rock and Pop. Listen live on 91.1 FM-WRUW on Saturdays at 9am 10am, but if you're not up early enough you can listen online to the latest show anytime. The host Christine, is just as rad as the music she plays.

10 Things I like about Cleveland: Part I

I like the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge--the Guardians, the view, the river below

.

A poem to celebrate the chill

It's winter on Turtle Island.

Landscape with Mud Turtle

I'd have thought my life at halfway would look

half-grown, half-gone, or half-born,

But try as I might I can't get far enough off to see it.

Among the reeds, the rocking cattails,

the hollow seed pods of last summer's lilies,

I can't for the life of me get a long view. And why should I?

A doe drifts along the rise, fur fading with the season,

stiff and lithe by turns—the same one,

I know her by the scar, I see often browsing at the edge

where woods and marsh and graveyard lands converge.

What, I wonder, does she see? By what mark

would she know me from others of my species?

When I was a girl I used to lie down

in the pressed-grass hollows where the deer had slept.

I tried to dream myself a deer,

that wordless, that meant-to-be-there.

I pressed the rough, live ends of their antlers

against my forehead and wished.

Under the pond mud, half-frozen, dormant among

the dormant,

turtles breathe through their skins,

barely, not quite dead in their shells. Geodes.

Come spring, come stronger light, they thaw,

gasping at ice cracks, clawing at the slush and scum,

self-resurrected. It happens every year. Until it doesn't.

A pond turns marsh, turns meadow in no time flat:

silting in, not drowning all the windblown seed that falls,

letting the alder and pussy willow take root,

parching the pondweeds, deporting the turtles,

the snails that cling to the lily pads' undersides,

and the waterbirds that ate them.

A transformation before your eyes.

Where I skated in spirals one winter, beech trees grow:

Silver for silver, not everything lost.

Where red-winged blackbirds flew up singing

victorie, victorie, cardinals search the brambles for berries

and dogs off their leashes snuffle up rabbits.

After an ice storm, I found a wren stiff in the cold,

its russet specks and stripes magnified,

its eyes shut, its beak like something carved

and drawn on. I closed it in my hands

and, fool that I still am, blew through the gaps

between my thumbs.

JENNIFER ATKINSON

Witness

Volume XXII / 2009