The Bluebird Word

An Online Literary Journal for Poetry and Flash

Category: Poetry (Page 2 of 31)

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Words Will Have to Wait

24 October 2024 /

Poetry by Bonnie Demerjian

In summer poet gardeners are led astray by produce.
There will be no ghazals when peppers are plumping in the greenhouse,
no time for tercets when rhubarb is in season, when rhymes are tangled in pea vine.

Weeds fill the notebook, refusing to be shaped into neat couplets. They spread at will, their roots leaving scant space for pantoum.
Haibuns run amok. They choke potatoes with bland adjectives and limp verbs. They must be trimmed, but first, the lanky willows that overshade the onion bed.

Who could pen a sonnet when gilded squash blossoms swell, outshining every leafy green?
What lofty metaphor can equal looking upward into cherries hanging heavy, juiceful, nearly ready?
And, look behind, because the crows are poised for ripeness, too.

There’s no opportunity for poetry. Beans and beets, carrots and garlic are waiting, and not patiently.
Harvest now and glean from them words for tomorrow.

Bonnie Demerjian writes from her island home in Southeast Alaska in the midst the Tongass National Forest on the land of the Lingit Aaní, a place that continually nourishes her writing. Her work has appeared in Alaska Women Speak, Pure Slush, and Blue Heron Review, among others.

photography of small blue and brown bird
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If I Were a Bird

21 October 2024 /

Poetry by Wesley Sims

I’d be a bluebird,
loved for its song,
its bold blue suit,
its habit of lingering
on limbs long enough
to thrill our mornings.
More than handsome icon,
a creature comfortable
with itself
who knows how to sit
in silence and wait
for the muse to call the song,
confident the music will come.
A bird with the discipline
of a serious writer,
who gets up early
and gets at his task,
living out the wisdom
that the early bird
gets the pick—
of worms, and words.

Wesley Sims has published three chapbooks of poetry: When Night Comes (2013); Taste of Change (2019); and A Pocketful of Little Poems (2020). His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and he has had poems nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize.

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Auction Circus

14 October 2024 /

Poetry by Patricia Hope

Under the Big Top of lights and steel,
gaping doors open at each end, the noise
rivals a cage of monkeys, sentinels to jungle
chaos. The auctioneer chants his numbers
while the spotters yell – YEAH!
Like Simple Simon come to spend his penny
the bidders vie for the wares. One forty-four
gets one, 159 takes two, do I hear five? Who’II
go five fifty? In the back, another ring of action
takes place at the concession stand. A fly crawls

across the only menu, which is tacked to the wall.
One saltshaker is passed around. The hamburgers
drip grease beside crinkle fries steaming hot from
the fryer, banana pudding is served in Styrofoam cups.
Looky here, we’ve got an Elvis knife complete
with autograph, the auctioneer yells and someone
asks if they took it down to Burger King to be signed?
I look around the room. Elvis might enjoy a place
like this, then I remember his whole life was a circus
and I decide he’d opt for more solitude in his old age.

People mill around as cardboard boxes fill up,
and cards printed with bid numbers become fans.
While men stand in the doorway spitting tobacco,
another table of treasure is pulled into place.
The clock ticks, the sun sets, a slight breeze
wafts through the crowd, thinner now, some
succumbing to the drawn-out process. Serious
buyers move closer to the front ready for the REAL
bargains. The Elvis knife sells for seven and a half
in between an angle grinder and a “million-candlepower”

light (I wonder who got the assignment for that striking
job?) I suppress the urge to giggle but no one else
in the room seems to question the light’s power.
After all, the bidding has shifted to walking
canes and umbrellas. Bidders scoff them up,
eager for rain now, some using the purchases
to lean on as they leave, treasures tucked under
arms and in boxes. The building is almost empty.
The tent is finally folded and everyone slips
                                   silently into the moonlit night.

Patricia Hope’s award-winning writing has appeared in the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Guideposts’ Blessed by His Love, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Agape Review, Spirit Fire Review, Dog Throat Journal, American Diversity, and many newspapers, magazines, and anthologies. She has edited numerous poetry anthologies. She lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

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Imprint

11 October 2024 /

Poetry by Carolyn Chilton Casas

How much of my essence
is imprinted for perpetuity
on the objects I hold dear?

My favorite coffee cup
stamped with a dragonfly,
stashed on a higher shelf,
waiting to be filled with a favorite,
freshly ground roast,
frothed cashew cream stirred in,
cinnamon sprinkled on top.

The colored notepads where I write
to my heart’s abandon,
or the dusty keyboard
with its smooth, black mouse cupped
for hours in my right hand.

The special pruning shears
and gloves only I use
while speaking kindly to each plant
and flower I trim.

A fraction of my being
infused into items often touched.

The rose-gold, ruby diamond ring
my grandfather presented
to my mother’s mother
almost a hundred years ago,
her legacy, the one she placed
in my sixteen-year-old palm
days before she died.

Carolyn Chilton Casas writes for energy and wellness magazines in several countries. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies including The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal. More of Carolyn’s work can be found in her second collection of poetry Under the Same Sky.

willow leaves touching lake
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In My Father’s Backyard

7 October 2024 /

Poetry by David Athey

There is a weeping willow
in sunrise

wild with ravens
singing in the crown,

a raucous song, a tantrum
of cries; and there is

a hint of a wind
like a gentling hand

brushing branches away
like hair from sorrow;

and there is silence
in the crown when the ravens hush

and the willow begins—and here
is my father—to laugh.

David Athey‘s poems have appeared in many literary journals, including Iowa Review, Poet Lore, California Quarterly, Seattle Review, and the Wallace Stevens Journal. Athey lives in South Florida on a small lake with large iguanas. His books, including the Florida spoof, Iggy in Paradise, are available at Amazon.

vibrant red poppies in summer field
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When the Column Blooms

1 October 2024 /

Poetry by Jackie McClure

There are green things
we’ve planted here.
There are things that grew
which we never planted.

Had I weeded more
while my mother was dying
I would have never
discovered the poppies,
dormant in their seed-encased husks,
under the matting of grass,
masking an old garden spot.

So you see,
we did some good here:
ripping up squares
of thickly rooted sod
to unwittingly scatter
millions of seeds,
and, unknowingly,
we fed them.

When first they rose
above the weeds
in the new-broken soil
I was spending daylight
hours by my mother’s side,
urging her to eat,
helping her to move.

When I noticed they
were to be flowers,
she had gone home,
lonely, broken, and frightened.
It took longer to reach her.

When they burst
into scarlet bloom,
dwarfing the hearty weeds

I knew they were for her:
tall, lipstick-red poppies
garish, erect, unexpected,
floating
on the thin stems
upon which everything rests.

Jackie McClure writes poetry and fiction aiming to illuminate commonplace segments of our shared landscapes. She has an MFA from Goddard College and has published most recently in Humana Obscura and Hellbender. She lives near the Salish Sea in Northwest Washington State. Her preferred state of being is swimming.

footprints on snow covered ground in drone shot
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Footwriting

1 September 2024 /

Poetry by Russell Rowland

Hand it to the blank slate
of new snow—entire days could be written on it.

There’s plenty of page for me
and the child, with her closer-spaced footwriting.

If it’s a long walk we take, and we turn
to look behind, we discover
we wrote exactly that: “Love took a long walk.”

The tiny fieldmouse’s penmanship
is a fine hand, its thin tail writing a narrow line;
correct footprint punctuation—“I’m

easily overlooked, and thank you very much.”

A snowshoe hare leaves a lot of white spaces,
scrawling “Fox alert!” in haste.

Ethereal deer have a streamlined logo. It reads,
“No comment.”

Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, where he has judged high-school Poetry Out Loud competitions. His work appears in Except for Love: New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall (Encircle Publications), and Covid Spring, Vol. 2 (Hobblebush Books). His latest poetry book, Magnificat, is available from Encircle Publications.

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The Big Dipper

1 September 2024 /

Poetry by Lana Hechtman Ayers

This unseasonably tropic night in Oregon in June, fir and spruce trees
so thickly interwoven, barely enough space between branches
for shadow, let alone the glass teeth of stars, and I am orbited back
to one lime Jell-O and orange cream popsicle summer,
another unseasonable June, air thick as guttural slurs,
when everyone in all five boroughs flipped on their air conditioners
at once, sucking the power dry as thistle, lights dowsed in the great
28-hour black out, and New York City became a meadow again,
a pristine prairie, the streetlamp and skyscraper bruised sky
brighter than the red and green blinking signals of jet planes
that thunder-growled low over us from nearby JFK every night,
brighter than the scarce fireflies already flickering on extinction,
my daddy and me sweating and swatting mosquitoes
on the two-chair porch, he teaching me about the stars,
his hands spread above us thumb-to-thumb,
the rest of his fingers upright to frame the constellations,
and there he hung the Big Dipper for me,
the Big Dipper with its long ladle handle and rectangular bowl,
and perceiving this mystical silhouette for the first time
was a kind of epiphany, with my daddy retelling the many sagas
of the Great Bear Ursa Major from indigenous cultures
around the world, chronicling the true accounts
of how in our own nation this constellation
saved the lives of many slaves
who followed its stars north to freedom,
and I understood how our stories,
back to the beginning of man,
are made of such fragile connections,
dot to dot to dot, twinkling beacons of meaning,
how imagination is part dream,
part real-life experience,
that we can all slake our thirsts from this well,
dipperful by dipperful,
so that each time I spy the Big Dipper in the sky now
it is also the tender tale of a father and a daughter,
his patience and our laughter,
so much laughter I still feel its pulse
orbiting the fatherless galaxy of my heart.

Lana Hechtman Ayers, architect of the “Severed Sonnet,” has shepherded over a hundred poetry volumes into print in her role as managing editor for three small presses. Her work appears in Rattle, The London Reader, Peregrine, and elsewhere. Her ninth collection is The Autobiography of Rain (Fernwood Press, 2024).

green potted plant beside window
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House Plants Lament

1 September 2024 /

Poetry by Peter A. Witt

Potted I sit on the windowsill,
like a canvas painted with sunlight,
weaving patterns on my outstretched leaves,
it’s a good life, but I envy the vibrant
garden that grows outside, where
plants hear the twilling of house finches,
the buzzing of honey bees, and feel the cool
of early spring breezes, as arrowheads
of Sandhill Cranes migrate north
from their Texas winter homes.

Once my keeper carried my potted home
out to the patio on a rain-clouded day
where a gentle caress from nature’s hand
bathed the soil around my roots.

I drew the pure water into my stems,
it was refreshing after my usual diet
of salt-filled, chlorinated water drawn
from the kitchen tap. Alas, my roots
were never bathed this way again.

My owner thinks I’m happy; she sees
no bugs, no rot of my roots or mold,
no diseases, but she does not know
I feel like a prisoner in a gilded cage;
she thinks of me as nothing more
than a potted house plant with no
ambition to be something more.

Peter A. Witt is a poet, family history writer, active birder and photographer. Peter retired in 2015 from a 43-year university teaching and research career. He lives with his wife in Texas.

pile of books
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Hiding Behind a Book

1 September 2024 /

Poetry by Jennifer Campbell

These days, you will be the odd one,
everyone else’s focus flickering
to the flow of a billion pixels,
attention ebbing and flowing,
the vastness of that ocean
knocking them off their feet
while your face is a changing map
of parchment, a 90-degree bend
where your nose should be,
eyebrow birds arched above the action,
and should one of them wonder
what lies behind an abstract painting,
Achilles’ empty gold helmet,
or a stark black tree,
it will be impossible to say,
your concentration popped
into the present yet needing time
to pry the words on the page
from the countless incantations
they stir in each reader,
none of which stop you
from knowing where your body is
in this glowing moment
and what they are missing.

Jennifer Campbell is a writing professor in Buffalo, NY, and a co-editor of Earth’s Daughters. Her most recent book, What Came First (Dancing Girl Press, 2021), contains reconstituted fairytale poems. Jennifer’s work has recently appeared in Slipstream, The Healing Muse, ArLiJo, and American Journal of Nursing.

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