It was the watches I wanted, those radium dials
Glowing like bomb sights
When I cupped my palm.
Wisp
Of radioactivity—the hour hand;
Nether-wisp—the second.
For weeks my mother worked the counter at Kresge’s—
Her faded pink smock
As tight as a nurse’s—
As she laid out the bands in their false
Reptilian shines—
The cowboy tans, the avocado greens. This
Was Radium City
And my mother, Marie
Curie, scientist of jewels and hams,
The chunks of meat slapped
Like memory into the knife
And the iridescence sliced to pieces as thin
As winter sky, shaved uranium.
I had to stack them high to tongue the plugs
Of fats, the permeating salts.
The roll breaking in my hands like a ball of
Glass. And the stench of drugstore
Popcorn, its second perfume
Mingling with what my mother wore
As she shoveled out
The bags like spent carnival fortunes.
More money was one we wasted on ourselves.
Or new drapes.
One last snap of the Tupperware over the nightly concoctions
No one ever wanted to eat.
I’d go away and ponder mono/stereo
For the extra buck
In the lp bins, or keep an eye walking
Home for Tarzan—
Weissmuller in a shiny Olds or Cadillac.
And then wait out the summer hours pitching
A 9-inning game
In a chalk box the side of the house.
Ferguson Jenkins for 7 or so,
Then Abernathy for the submarine.
Next door a neighbor would peg out his pet
Skunk and I’d listen as it roiled
With thirst
Or hunkered under diving blue jays,
Their cobalts dipped
In the mouth of the sun
And set out like hour hands
To the shadowed yard.
The Cubs would lose.
Weissmuller never show.
The Mexican kids from Dempster would threaten
To beat my ass into the street
And leave me there
Dented and ringing as a hubcap,
Another rat-faced kid
Waiting for his mother to come home.
Pink smock.
Ham in a pocket.
Singing beyond the genius of the meats,
The radium dials, the gems,
The gold fish
And guppies in their clouds of hopelessness.
The kiss, the mother’s kiss, put like a cure to the child’s face.
Ọna Anosike is a writer, editor, and literary leader whose work sits at the intersection of storytelling, community building, and educational design. She is a published writer and the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the TONIC, a literary journal dedicated to amplifying bold, original storytelling from underrepresented voices. Under her leadership, the TONIC has grown into a curated space for emerging and established writers alike. She has served as a writing instructor, both at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and was chosen as a judge for the 2025 Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Prize for Undergraduate Literary Magazines.
Her editorial and mentorship work is grounded in a decade of experience as an educational consultant and program specialist, designing inclusive learning systems for schools and nonprofits nationwide. She is currently completing a literary short story collection and a young adult novel, with early agent interest. She holds an M.S.Ed. in Education Entrepreneurship from the University of Pennsylvania, an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University, and a B.A. in English from Northeastern University. She is also the founder of Inkwell Montessori, an authentic Montessori school opening in Somerville, Massachusetts, in September 2026.
Winners, finalists, and Editors’ Choice in each genre will be published in our Summer Awards Issue due out in August.
All winners, finalists, and editors’ choice will be cited in future advertisements and announcements.
Lambs in Winter: Sketches of a Vermont Life through Seasons of Change
Alexis Lathem, Bright Leaf, An Imprint of the University of Massachusetts Press, 215 pages, $24.95
Lambs in Winter is both a praise song to a small Vermont farm, and a Cassandra’s call to action. Alongside an exquisite picture of daily life on the land, the book puts that life in the largest possible perspective of wonder and consternation. We feel the marveling that the earth evokes in those who live close to it, as well as the advancing maelstrom which is already tearing at the farm and the planet. Anyone who cares about the fate of the earth will find wisdom on every page, as well as the strength to go on. That apart, the sheer beauty of the language is reason enough to read it.
Alexis Lathem, gardener and activist for the earth and for justice, chronicles her life with her husband on a small farm between the Winooski River and the Green Mountains, and shows the reader exactly how immense planetary changes have played out there. Our common predicament is as dire as that of a shivering lamb born in an icy winter rather than the grassy abundance of spring. Lathem documents our plight in painful but always beautifully rendered detail: “[Butterflies] will leave behind their names like the papery sheaths of chrysalises, taken by the wind and rain, when they are gone.” The poet’s care is also evident in the juxtapositions and conversations among the book’s chapters/sketches, which follow not in a single narrative but rather build images and thoughts gradually and imaginatively as we move through Vermont’s seasons.
Her sketches include the expected but never trite delights of a hike up a snowy mountain, then returning home to maple syrup reducing on the woodstove – but also a wrenching contemplation of the remorseless clearing of land and people in what the Abenaki call The Years of Darkness. Yes, the author plants her favorite vegetables in the exuberance of spring, but she also helps toss ruined junk out of inundated basements in the nearby town. No pastoral idyll tinges these pages rose or even green. The book amply describes calamities like the devastating flooding in Vermont and the wildfires in Canada, the injustices to migrant dairy workers and much more. Lathem brings us both the sensibility of a poet as in “One set of strings out of tune can wreck a whole symphony,” and the precision of a journalist and activist: “The Great Flood of 2023 dumped a year’s worth of phosphorus runoff into Lake Champlain in one week.”
Even so, Lambs in Winter offers hope. This stems to some extent from nature’s infinite variety and ingenuity, revealed on the page with a particularity that could only come from the pen of someone who lives on and by the land. Lathem’s radiant gratitude is ever present, as when she says “I might have prepared the soil, weeded, thinned, and weeded again, but this cannot explain it, the gifting nature of soil and water.” She feels this way even when at the mercy of increasingly tempestuous wind and weather. Some of the ups and downs Lathem describes would be familiar to any farmer in the last century, but she distinguishes between those traditional vulnerabilities and the chaos to which the land is now subjected. Her misery is palpable when she must pull up once-flourishing tomato plants after they were afflicted by late blight, bag them in plastic and take them to the landfill along with other disheartened growers. This is a climate change issue because late blight flourishes in the wet conditions which are far commoner than before, and it is carried by storms.
Lathem’s own story also fuels the hope the reader feels in savoring this book. Against the finely etched backdrop of the farm, she is the unlikeliest of gardeners and activists: a city person born to and bred by a professional musician mother to whom even a pocket park was alien. Even so, Lathem cast her lot with “the village and the country.” If she can turn to the earth and to activism, so can any of us. She found her way first to one farm, then another, until she settled with her husband in Vermont. The love story is subtle, but it is a discernible and sustaining thread for both writer and reader.
Among its many strengths, the book does not shrink from the bedeviling question of what our human role should be on the planet, now that we have destroyed or compromised so much. Even so, it is we, not the sheep, who know when they should breed so the lambs will be born at a life-sustaining moment in the year. The strategy presented here is “ecological farming,” a life close enough to the earth and its processes to ask the question of how to balance the domestic and the wild with integrity, and how to do as little harm as possible. “This is the meaning of direct action: we are not waiting on change but are building the future now. Maybe our noncooperation, our staying home, is the revolution. Maybe it is the most radical thing we can do.”
The book skillfully incorporates a wide variety of topics: an intimate depiction of life of caring for the land and animals, an indictment of the colonial and climate crimes that bear on that life, and ruminations about future action and where hope may lie if we humans get our act together. Lathem summons many other thinkers and writers to embellish and undergird her arguments and vision, from the Citizen Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer to anthropologist Loren Eiseley. Her literary references are specific and speak of deep reading of both prose and poetry over a lifetime. As those varied elements and voices are integrated, this world is rendered in all its remaining beauty with precision and love: “[We] watch for how the sunset will ignite the sky before it dims, how pale the wafer moon will be or how thick and viscous is its honey light. . .”
Lambs in Winter is an ode to the country life in 21st century Vermont, an elegy for a more predictable climate and time, and a powerful exhortation to acknowledge our own part in the calamity and to stop participating in it. Lathem does not let us or herself off the hook; even though “What I do on this land I do out of love,” she holds us all accountable, including herself:
“I say ‘we’ because I have to include myself, as a member of the culture that has done all this, as a member of the generation who has done more damage to the earth than any other in the history of the species, and who cannot say, as our parents’ generation could, that we did not know.”
While not all of us can bring a trembling lamb into our living room and bottle feed it, we can at least understand its plight and our own from the broadest view, and act with fortitude and imagination. This brave book lights that path.
