The Bluebird Word

An Online Literary Journal for Poetry and Flash

Lying in Wait

Nonfiction by Jennifer Pinto

My dog, Josie, is barking at the kitchen window, warning me of an intruder. I look out into the front yard expecting to see deer or perhaps a wild turkey but if there is danger out there, I can’t see it. She continues jumping and pawing at the glass so I look outside again, this time glancing downward at the porch situated just below the window. It’s a snake. Its three foot long body is nestled and expertly blended into the wicker of my favorite chair but its head is levitating skyward, peeking into my kitchen window. I think about how many times I sat in that chair oblivious to this danger. This unexpected interloper upends the sense of tranquility and comfort I normally feel in my beautiful yard. I’m not sure I will ever be able to relax out there again.


It’s 2004 and we were sitting at the kitchen table having family dinner when my husband reached for the salt shaker and yelped in pain. He tried to dismiss it as nothing but I knew acknowledging any sort of discomfort was out of character for him so I insisted he make an appointment with the doctor right away. I suspected it might be something as simple as a pulled muscle or a gallstone but I was wrong. This sudden sharp pain in his right side led to a doctor’s visit then an ultrasound and finally a biopsy that confirmed my husband had cancer. Primary liver cancer. The surgeon discovered a baseball-sized mass on his otherwise pristine liver. There were no symptoms, no warning signs. It’s likely these cancer cells were hiding in his body for years until the mass grew large enough to cause pain. I was a young mom with children ages eight, five, and three. It felt like the life I had envisioned had suddenly been turned on its head.


I shoo the snake off the porch with a long handled broom and watch as it slithers into the landscaping and disappears. I spend days searching for holes and researching ways to deter snakes. I eventually return to my chair on the front porch but feel like I’m in a constant state of hypervigilance. One afternoon the mailman comes to my front door with a stack of letters in his hand. I can’t deliver your mail today he says as he pulls out his cell phone and shows me a picture of my mailbox. There is a long black snake slithering up the stones encasing the mailbox and blocking the door. It is the same snake I had seen on my porch and now I’m convinced its home is somewhere close to my own. It will be months before I walk down the wooded path to retrieve the mail without a large stick in my hand.


My husband had a liver resection to remove two thirds of his liver. The healthy portion was expected to regenerate. The pathologist reported that while it hadn’t spread outside of the liver, there was some vascular invasion which meant some cancer cells had escaped into his bloodstream and could be lying in wait to cause a recurrence in another part of his body. There was no way of knowing if the cancer would appear again. I learned how to hope for the best while being prepared for the worst. We signed our children up for “Walking the Dinosaur,” a children’s cancer support group to help them deal with their feelings. My husband coped by buying me a new set of garbage cans with wheels so I could easily bring the trash to the curb and by writing out passwords and instructions for me on how to pay the bills.


The snake is like a shadow that follows me around, a vague yet niggling thought in the back of my mind. So when the HVAC man who is servicing our air conditioning unit knocks on the door and says, Do you know there is a huge black snake in your yard? I just nod and say, I know. He is a burly guy with large tattooed biceps and a long goatee. I’m surprised when he admits the snake is making him jumpy. I am no longer afraid of the snake although I remain vigilant. While I hope I never see it again, I’ve become accustomed to the idea that encountering the snake is always a possibility.


After his liver resection, my husband was scanned every three months for several years. When the scans were eventually put on a yearly schedule, he started to feel confident enough in his health that he allowed me to buy him new shoes and new clothes again. He had refused any purchases until he could be certain he would live long enough to get good use out of them. It’s been twenty years since he was first diagnosed and he remains cancer-free.


Just last week, in our basement, we caught a baby snake in a glue trap meant for mice. I’m horrified that a snake could penetrate our walls and get so close. It prompts me to stay vigilant. I remind my husband he’s due for his next scan.


Jennifer Pinto writes both fiction and creative nonfiction. She has three grown children and lives in Cincinnati with her husband. She enjoys drinking coffee at all hours of the day. Her work has been published in The Citron Review, SunDog Lit, Lunch Ticket, The Bluebird Word and Muleskinner, among others.

Gold Scattered on Grass

Poetry by Laura Hannett

The toad and crisp leaf are twins on the bricks.
Old milkweed pods flock with the sparrows.

Dandelions and finch, bright gold against green:
One swoops, and dips, and it seems as if
a flower’s been launched, a brash
and brilliant illusion of flight—

the moment winks at the indistinct edge,
catches you short

with the delighted confusion such mix-ups can bring,
living similes playing between wild things.


Laura Hannett is a native of Central New York and a graduate of Hamilton College and the College of William and Mary. Other work can be found in Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Neologism Poetry Journal, Verse-Virtual and Mania Magazine.

Following Fireflies

Poetry by KB Ballentine

A dream in midsummer lures
     each of us to those thin places
                       where we abandon our fear
     as sun and moon slip into their dance
of lights. We adore the mock-orange
                       sweetness anchored in our memories—
     ones we neglect through busy-ness.
Weary, we welcome this longest day,
                       grumble of darkness faint for now.
Soon, Hercules will usher Scorpius
     across the night horizon. But tonight,
if we listen, we can hear the dead speak.


KB Ballentine’s newest collection is All the Way Through (Sheila-Na-Gig Inc., 2024). She has eight previous poetry collections and was recently awarded Poetry Society of Tennessee’s 2025 Best of the Fest and Writer’s Digest November 2024 PAD Chapbook Challenge. Learn more at www.kbballentine.com.

At 6 AM

Poetry by Arthur Ginsberg

birdsong
pours through the open window.

I cannot know
if the suet I hung yesterday
fills them with joy,

or if, the handsome male in the maple
is wooing the female
in the condominium next door,

or if, it is simply
dawn that fills them with happiness—
nuthatch and goldfinch

perched on the feeder,
orchard bees swooning,
deep in trumpets of columbine,

the way I am lifted
out of darkness by a Mozart aria
to a place of rapture.

All these avian melodies
soaring from the throats
of feathered angels

that make a man want to fly.


Arthur Ginsberg is a neurologist and poet. He earned an MFA at Pacific University and has published five books of poetry. He teaches a course titled, “Brain and the Healing Power of Poetry” in the honors program at the University of Washington.

The Little Lizard That Could

Nonfiction by Priscilla Davenport

I’ve spent an hour trying to free the little green lizard. He’s caught between the window glass and the screen. Imagine the gecko you see on TV, but just a baby and in dire straits.

He’s tiny, about two inches long with a tail of similar length. He should be bright green and cavorting among grass and plants, but he has turned a grayish-green camouflage to match the screen he managed to invade but now is trying to escape.

Ideally, the screen is removed by opening the window and punching it out from the inside, but I can’t get the window open. These windows are an aggravation despite their supposed superiority, but they are no match for me today. If I can get the screen bent slightly from the outside, I reason, it will create enough space for the lizard to escape. I take a variety of unorthodox tools to the patio and start trying to bend the screen’s stiff frame. Finally, a garden trowel and a screwdriver prop it open, just enough, at the bottom of the window.

I go inside to watch the lizard work his way to freedom.

He’s at the top of the window. Now moving down the side. Getting closer. There, he’s almost at the opening. Oh no. He stops and works his way back to the top. Does he think the screwdriver and trowel are predators? Speaking of predators, here comes our indoor cat. The lizard’s sides heave after the cat flings himself against the glass. We don’t need this stress. I close the cat in the laundry room.

Back at the window, here comes the little captive again, inching downward. But there he climbs to the top again, and then in a circle. You’re making bad decisions, I tell him. I get it. My mind is a muddle when I’m panicked and battle-weary. But you’re so close. Stop and think. Don’t repeat your defeatist behavior over and over. This is your survival we’re talking about.

If I stop watching, maybe he’ll work it out. Maybe I make him nervous. I’ll come back later and hope he has returned to his rightful reptilian world.

If he’s still trapped, I’ll work on that damn screen again.


One hour later. The lizard is still there, frozen in defeat. You will not die today, I assure him. I take a hammer outside and use the claw to bend the screen’s frame out of its track and into a triangular-shaped escape route a couple of inches at its widest. The trowel and screwdriver drop away.

I go back inside, leaving the tiny creature alone again to figure things out. When I check back, he’s gone. Yes! I pump my fist in celebration and hammer the misshapen frame into a semblance of straight. A hard push gets it back inside the window track.


Six days later. I’m sitting in a patio chair when a lizard startles me by skittering across my lap and jumping to the table at my elbow. This lizard is slightly bigger than the captive. But could it be? How much do lizards grow in a week? The little guy settles on a table leg only inches from my hand, camouflages from green to brownish, and looks at me. I mean, really looks at me, our eyes locking. I talk softly to him, holding his dark eyes with mine. He blinks. I feel as if we understand each other.

He stays, looking around but mostly watching me, until I need to leave ten minutes later. I get up from my chair and turn to say goodbye, but he is gone.

I sit on the patio daily, but my little friend has not returned. An internet search tells me that small lizards like geckos can live for several years even in the wild, so with luck we’ll connect again. I’ll keep an eye out.


Priscilla Davenport has spent a lifetime with words, first as the daughter of an English teacher and later as a journalist and lawyer. Now retired, she spends time writing creatively and supporting animal rescue organizations. A story of hers was shortlisted for the 2023 International Amy MacRae Award for Memoir.

Annual Accounting

Poetry by Sharon Scholl

I wake to find a ray of light
was stolen from the bank of night,
filched in some dark, furtive way
and added to the bank of day.

In due time, day will repent
and by December will have sent
every ray of pilfered light
back into the bank of night.


Sharon Scholl is a retired college teacher who convenes a poetry critique group and maintains a website of original music compositions free for small, liberal churches. Her poetry collections Seasons, Remains, Evensong, and Classifieds are available via Amazon Books. Poems are current in Rattle and RedRoseThorns.

Tree Song: Redwood

Poetry by Joanne Harris Allred

This giant has held its yogi-gaze
for over three-thousand years.
A spiral gash scores the two-foot thick

bark where lightning blazed
through the feathered tiers.
One would need five yard-sticks

to measure its memory’s ring-span,
its top too tall to be seen
from the base where one must stand

humbled. This monolith of deep green
silence began as a dark pinhead, coded
magnificence in profound concentration.

Then, like a black hole, the seed exploded
into a galaxy. For centuries its attention
has stayed one-pointed, each bough

and twig focused right here, right now.


Joanne Harris Allred has three full length poetry collections: Particulate (Bear Star Press, 2002), The Evolutionary Purpose of Heartbreak (Turning Point, 2013), and Outside Paradise (Word Poetry, 2024). She taught at California State University, Chico for many years and lives in northern California.

Like a Tree Planted by the River

Poetry by Rochelle Shapiro

As if summoned by a dream to this bench
along the Mohawk where cherry trees weep
pink and white blossoms that spill into the river,
I hear a congregation of birds:
                                        an oriole whistles and chatters,
                                        a blue jay performs its whispery song.
                                        Hidden among the reeds, a bittern
                                        thrums its low heartbeat like words
                                        that take shape as if spoken before.

This is my cathedral:
a roof of sky, a river edged with sedge,
the swordlike veined leaves of Sweet
Flag, the white bell-shaped flowers
that dangle from the arcing vines
of King Solomon’s Seal,
and the Fiddlehead Fern
that curls like my granddaughter’s hair.


[Author Note: Poem title from Psalm 1:3]


Rochelle Jewel Shapiro has published in The New York Times (Lives). Nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, her short stories and poetry have been published in Prism, The MacGuffin, Euphony, The Iowa Review, The Atlanta Review, and more. Find her at http://rochellejshapiro.com, @rjshapiro, and @rochelle.j.shapiro.

I Sing the Poem “Nantucket”

Poetry by Michael Carrino

Flowers through the window
lavender and yellow

William Carlos williams

I sing the poem “Nantucket” to myself as if in a waking sleep
and the children far out on the slight hillside sing along

Through the high windows of my classroom I can see them
rush in circles free and content as some might ever be

One night soon it will snow    blanket the brown grass deep
become true winter and they will cherish it

My students are reading silently about anything they are willing
to read   turtle   bird   wagon   doll

rock   bell   shard of glass   pocket watch found in the attic
how long birchwood will keep you warm

Now I see her   the teacher   the one who guides her children
outside every morning   The teacher

I want to speak with about anything   breathe the wood smoke
on her wool coat   her long curling hair

In a moment I will   beyond any fevered dream   delight
my students with a startling recess

They will all imagine me gone sweetly crazy


Michael Carrino is a retired English lecturer at SUNY Plattsburgh, New York, where he was co-editor and poetry editor of the Saranac Review. His publications include ten books of poetry, the most recent Natural Light (Kelsay Books), and The Scent of Some Lost Pleasure (Conestoga Zen 3 Anthology).

In My Octopus Village

Poetry by Brian C. Billings

When I first moved here, I thought my
          neighbors were alarming. They jetted through the village
                    on furious missions for meals and mates. Changes
          came fast, bewildering my twitchy eyes with color
          that spiraled and streamed. I would hide whenever
                    waterways flashed. I wore shells and allowed tides
          to stroke my mantle . . . but now each ripple
makes me flush when brilliant consortiums rush by.


Brian C. Billings is a professor of drama and English at Texas A&M University-Texarkana. His work has appeared in such journals as Ancient Paths, The Bluebird Word, Confrontation, Evening Street Review, Glacial Hills Review, and Poems and Plays. Publishers for his scripts include Eldridge Publishing and Heuer Publishing.

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