Jeff Bernstein

By Any Other Name Would They Taste As Sweet?

We had a decades-long romance
with a hybrid that only appeared
for one month each year
in the dead of winter.

Tangerines and grapefruit married
to beget offspring shaped like bells
with inverted stem-end necks,
miniature versions of the vessel
used by the best distilleries,
but sweeter than candy.

How did my mother find Honeybelles
in the first place? Was it profligate
to take the cream of the crop
and juice them for breakfast?

A lifelong New Englander, Jeff Bernstein watches the seasons turn from a hillside in Central Vermont. He would most have liked to have been, like Thoreau, “an inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms… [a] surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes.” He is the author of two chapbooks and a full-length collection published by Turning Point; his new collection, “The Ancient Ways,” will be published in 2024 by Aldrich Press. He was Runner-Up in the 2023 Concrete Wolf Louis Poetry Book Award and received an honorable mention in the 2023 Homebound Publication Poetry Prize.

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