Category: Poetry (Page 11 of 33)

Thrift Shop Santa

2 December 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Melissa Wold

Santa, my man. How did you wind up in this place?
Santa, my man. How did you crack your face?
Tossed amid dusty knickknacks, chipped china plates.

Did Mrs. Claus catch your paws on the photo gal at the mall?
Did Mrs. Claus without pause pack your bag? What gall!
Now you sit lost on a shelf without an elf or Ken or Barbie doll.

Santa my man, come on home with me.
We’ll boogie round the tinseled tree.
Santa, my man, come on home with me.

Did you take to bettin’ on reindeer races?
Did you take to bettin’ on penguins running bases?
Money squandered on plastic roses in cob-webbed vases?

Did you binge on Jim Beam at the corner bar?
Did you still white lightning in a mason jar?
Serendipity plunked you into a martini glass tucked in a boxcar.

Santa my man, come on home with me.
We’ll boogie round the tinseled tree.
Santa, my man, come on home with me.

Did you and the elves have a spat?
Did they pull your beard? Did you rip off their hats?
Letters flake off a weather-worn welcome mat.

Santa, my man, hang your head in shame.
Santa my man, fess up, who’s to blame for your flagging fame?
Ninety-nine cents buys you and a sea-shell picture frame?

Santa my man, come on home with me.
We’ll boogie round the tinseled tree.
Santa, my man, come on home with me.

Melissa Wold is retired from a career in student services area of higher education. She writes with a group affiliated with Mobile Botanical Gardens in Mobile, Alabama. She shares her poems with Rocket, her rat terrier. He is quick with his barking critiques. Read her first published poem in The Bluebird Word from November 2022.

Fear of Falling

2 December 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Suzy Harris

They say we have not seen this high-piled snow
for more than thirty years. For three days now,
few cars snow-crush silently down the roads,
and walkers teeter on ice-crusted sidewalks.

Just yesterday, as I walked past a bus stop,
the woman in front of me fell thud-hard.
Another passerby and I reached our hands
to her, hefted her back up, handed her
her glasses clattered under the bench.

I knew her – not the falling woman,
but the other – and after, we stood together
under the snow-blue sky, exchanging a few words
before setting off, she to the bus,
me walking toward home,
imagining myself pillow-padded,
light as breath-puffs, balancing on air.

Suzy Harris is the author of the 2023 chapbook Listening in the Dark about living with hearing loss and learning to hear again with cochlear implants. She has served as a poetry editor for The Timberline Review and several of her poems have won recognition from the Oregon Poetry Association.

The Radiator

2 December 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Charlene Stegman Moskal

My winter years speak softly.
The aroma of chicken soup
mixes with the slightly metallic
scent of steam hissing warmth from a radiator
in a pre-war building in Sunnyside, Queens.

I am looking out a second story window—
snow has fallen through the night.
My gravel playground transformed;
sleds zooming down a silent hill,
snowsuits, runny noses, frozen finger tips
in gloves with ice crystals to suck
until a pall overtakes the streets.
Cold loses its Macintosh Apple crisp bite,
angels melt into nothingness,
streets now perilous with black ice and slush.

There were magazines with pictures
of places that stayed white
dotted with dark green pine trees,
under skies the blue of my mother’s eyes,
where one ice skated on frozen ponds
ringed by white capped mountains;
places so dry, so cold that a child
would look pink-skinned healthy all winter.

I wanted to be that rosy cheeked girl
but I always returned to a second floor apartment
where the aroma of chicken soup mixed
with the slightly metallic scent of steam from a radiator
that hissed out familiarity, comfort and love
in a pre-war building in Sunnyside, Queens.

Charlene Stegman Moskal is published in numerous anthologies, print and online magazines. Her chapbooks are One Bare Foot (Zeitgeist Press), Leavings from My Table (Finishing Line Press), Woman Who Dyes Her Hair (Kelsay Books), and a full length poetry manuscript, Running the Gamut (Zeitgeist Press), Fall 2023.

Eleven Elves in Eight Elfchens

2 December 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Brian C. Billings

Stockings
hold two
for the children.
Four eyes keep watch,
judging.

Doorside,
one lounges
in our wreath’s
bedding of red bows.
Slacker.

Snap,
Crackle, and
Pop have a
friend in the pantry:
Quinoa.

Climbing
the tree
in the foyer,
one clings to a
garland.

Jesus
lies waiting
for his gifts.
An elfling offers him
peppermints.

Kitchen
candles nestle
in three laps
while the bread machine
bakes.

Guppies
rush past
a jolly figure
necklaced in a silver
ichthys.

Boxes
wrapped in
Santa paper camouflage
the final visitor in
scarlet.

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, Antietam Review, The Bluebird Word, Confrontation, Evening Street Review, Glacial Hills Review, and Poems and Plays. Publishers for his scripts include Eldridge Publishing and Heuer Publishing. Read his poem from March 2023 in The Bluebird Word.

Cordially (in Winter)

2 December 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Jennifer Campbell

Each driveway is a scuffed shoe,
tick marks revealing the extent
of our waiting.

Days when blue sky pokes through
the gray, cars fill the roads
with more color.

The gray days are what I want
to tell you about:
landscape, water, and horizon,
different smears of charcoal.

I hope this letter finds you well
is something I could say
if I were being impersonal,
but formality went out the window
with your last address.

We may freely speak
about the steak you fixed
to perfection or how it felt
to play pool after all this time,
experiences that are so real.

Yet someone who intercepts
this letter could imagine
I am speaking of the afterlife,
the imagery of travel a tool
to express how we keep moving.

Jennifer Campbell is a writing professor in Buffalo, NY, and a co-editor of Earth’s Daughters. She has two poetry collections, Supposed to Love and Driving Straight Through, and a chapbook of reconstituted fairytale poems. Jennifer’s work has recently appeared in Healing Muse and Paterson Literary Review and is forthcoming in Slipstream.

Expectations

2 December 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Peter A. Witt

Winter arrived, unpacked its undressed trees,
waters that slowed to an iced tea trickle,
sun that slept late and went to bed early,
harvest moon that had completed its job,
now a memory of witches riding broom
sticks across its surface. We settled in
for weeks of log laying, kernels that
popped with a buttery rhythm, holidays
celebrated with family, few of whom
could remember their meaning, snows
that filled the yard with carrot-eyed statues,
and a groundhog that despised its shadow.
We looked forward to snowdrops,
robins, and waxwings, all harbingers
that warmer days, gentle rains, baby
rabbits, and softer skies were ahead.
All this we could count on year-by-year,
written only in our expectations, played
out with joy, wisdom, and wonder.

Peter A. Witt is a poet, family history writer, active birder and photographer. He took up writing poetry in 2015 from a 43 year university teaching and research career. He lives in Texas. His work has been published in several online and print publications.

Echo

2 December 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Christine Andersen

When the pond froze over
my father and I went out
with our skates and hockey sticks
slung over our shoulders,
trudged through the snow
to the log where we laced up.

He swept the ice clean,
gliding behind a broom
in the brisk air
with the grace of a floating swan.

We spun circles
end to end,
sliced the ice
with newly sharpened blades
in flurries of low, white storms
deking,
zigzagging the puck—
a deft strike
then another
and another—

wooden sticks clacking
against the whir of our blades—
the puck— a lightning bolt
across the glittered surface—

I yelled,
I got this!
Watch out!
SCORE!

Score
score
echoed off the ice
like rumbling thunder
through the winter woods,
where 40 years after,
when I walk by the pond,
it echoes still.

Christine Andersen is a retired dyslexia specialist who hikes the Connecticut woods daily, pen and pad in pocket. The outdoors inspires many of her poems. Publications include Comstock, Octillo, Awakenings and Evening Street Reviews, Dash, Slab and Glimpse, among others. She won the 2023 American Writers Review Poetry Contest. Read her poem Wild from The Bluebird Word’s October Issue.

Feliz Año Nuevo/Happy New Year

2 December 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Amelia Díaz Ettinger

of course, most New Years
Eve, La Nochevieja, were spent
with mi Papá, at home or at La Casa
de España. Him in a tuxedo
to dance with me at intervals
between him and whichever
boy was my fancy at the time.

But mostly it was about the two
of us. Watching fireworks
from the roof of that club,
with its uncertain roots
forged on prejudice
and privilege.

Yet for me the pleasure of la Nochevieja
was staying at home in plain,
comfortable clothes,
with Papi throwing bucket after bucket
of water out the door
—a sacar los males del año

as if our sins and trifle peccadillos
could be washed away with rain

una Nochevieja, he smiled and said,
—pon un huevo en agua
and I did. Placing the raw egg
on a glass of water,
—En la mañana verás el futuro

but in the morning, the future in the glass
was a thin veil of clouded hesitancy,
just as the tide between the young
and the old year. It left no prophesy
of what we would lose, nor
what any New Year can bring back again.

Amelia Díaz Ettinger is a Latinx BIPOC poet and writer. She has three books of poetry and two chapbooks published. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies.

Perhaps

22 October 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Anne Leigh Parrish

We map disaster
Perilous seaways
Treacherous mountain passes
Forbidding terrains of all kinds

Do we hold it in common, or
Is there one map for you, and another for me?

We find ourselves on a tiny plot of land
In a strangely calm sea

How do we escape?
The map is blank
Faded and burned by the sun

We’ll draw a new one, you say
With clear paths and gentle views
No, I say, that’s a silly fantasy
You say, perhaps, but some call it faith

Anne Leigh Parrish’s new poetry collection, If The Sky Won’t Have Me, was recently published by Unsolicited Press. Her next novel, A Summer Morning, arrives in October 2023, also from Unsolicited Press. She lives in Olympia, Washington. Explore her writing at www.anneleighparrish.com and her photography at www.laviniastudios.com.

Photo by Vijayalakshmi Nidugondi on Unsplash

Framed Declaration

22 October 2023 / Editor

Poetry by John Zedolik

I thank father fish for my spine,
which with the earth allows me to align
and look straight up if I choose
into the sky in effort not to lose

my bearings and reconfirm my status
as one of capacity to focus on the stratus
and my semi-separation from the ground
rejoice in relative stability found

in the necessary inherited armature
support to compete with any furniture
remain myself and certainly discrete
while with lifetime gravity I must compete

John Zedolik recently published his third collection, Mother Mourning (Wipf & Stock). He has also published two other collections, When the Spirit Moves Me (Wipf & Stock), and Salient Points and Sharp Angles (WordTech Editions), which are available through Amazon. Additionally, he has published many poems in journals around the world.

Category: Poetry (Page 11 of 33)

Thrift Shop Santa

Fear of Falling

The Radiator

Eleven Elves in Eight Elfchens

Cordially (in Winter)

Expectations

Echo

Feliz Año Nuevo/Happy New Year

Perhaps

Framed Declaration

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