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lapis lazuli

13 July 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Chris Talbott

Today I saw the bluebird—
no, really—lapis lazuli:
Krishna’s blue, medicine Buddha,
Mary’s robes, the sky kasiṇa—
the one we call happiness—
It flew from the ground
in front of me,
straight out and away
into the noon-time woods,
into the aspiring trunks,
the newly fleshed leaves
lit from above

Originally published in The Bluebird Word in March 2022.

Chris Talbott has been writing poetry on & off for many years. After a career as a business writer, he worked at the non-profit Barre Center for Buddhist Studies for a decade. He continues his study & practice, along with writing poetry.

Succulent

10 July 2025 / Editor

by Heather Bartos

Jade plants will never win beauty contests.
Snub-nosed, squat, solid-thighed,
Pudgy limbs and squinty little blossoms.
But deep roots and thick flesh
Gather what guarantees survival,
What grants longevity.
Absorb every drop of hope,
Each ray of encouragement,
All words of praise.
Slice a leaf, snap a branch
And it will heal itself whole again,
Scar and stump the only sign.
Its own replenishment, resource, retreat,
A deep, wide wealth of well,
A barn full of grain for swallows in the snow.
Current life from yesterday’s rain,
From last summer’s sun,
Dense from receiving and holding of the giving.
How amazing to hold within and inside
Memories of kindness
To shade and shield from the heat
To insulate and inoculate against the cold
Until without and outside
Become a friend once more.

Originally published in The Bluebird Word in February 2022.

Heather Bartos writes both fiction and nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in Fatal Flaw, McNeese Review, HerStry, LitroUSA, and elsewhere. Her flash fiction and short stories have appeared in Baltimore Review, Ponder Review, Rappahannock Review, Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith, and other publications.

Life and Love as Seen Through My Plum Tree

7 July 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Michele Tjin

The delicate popcorn balls of flowers have appeared again, the herald of a new season. The arrival seems earlier each year.

The plum tree was already a mature specimen when we moved into this house. That first July, one of the first things we did was to pick up the rotting fruit off the ground. I whispered to the tree and my pregnant belly that in a year or two, there would be small hands to help harvest the fruit.

How does this tree of the family Prunus salicina know when to emerge from winter and make slivers of leaves and dainty blooms?

How do I know when to kick off this curtain of chaos and confront hard issues, difficile confligit?

Other signs of life and hope in my backyard: tiny sparrows and hummingbirds dancing around the flowers of the plum tree; songbirds trilling. The harshness of winter is behind us.

Despite not watering and pruning this tree, not giving it any real love or attention, it continues to be dependable and prolific.

I look forward to the perfume of plums ripening in my kitchen. Nothing is as wonderful as biting into the amber flesh and allowing the clear juice to run down my chin.

After a few weeks of non-stop eating, I’m satiated. Yet others tell me they can’t get enough of this fruit.

Don’t you forget about me this year, a friend says.

If you want to come over and climb a ladder, help yourself, I answer.

If I climb a ladder to bridge the chasms, will it be worth it, or will I fall?

In the summer, this tree is weighed down so much by its fruit that it needs to be propped up with a stick, a visible reminder of how much goodness this tree gives.

I imagine the tree’s complex network of roots searching deep underground to find a source of life-giving water to nourish itself.

How do I nourish my spirit when it’s dry and withered?

Things this plum tree has witnessed: birthday cakes and birthday parties. A kiddie pool that lasted just an afternoon one summer. A bounce house that winter. Another bounce house the following winter. That time we dyed socks. My efforts at being a backyard gardener. Dinners outside. Ants. The neighbor’s cat. That stray rabbit. People who once came over frequently but no longer visit because of quarantine, new seasons of life, or small conflicts that festered and coalesced into something bigger, something that doesn’t have a name or shape anymore.

Or maybe it’s just a lost connection. I’m not sure anymore.

These blossoms are fleeting: in just a few weeks, they will be torn apart by the wind. Their fragile nature and impermanence have always struck me, like they’re a metaphor for something.

My hands and a pair of smaller ones will collect the plums in four months when the green small marbles deepen into crimson globes, and we’ll give much of our harvest away.

After the summer, after a period of cold and reset, this tree will bloom once more the following spring and offer me hope again. Where will I be in a year?

[Originally published in The Bluebird Word in March 2022.]

Michele Tjin is an emerging writer who writes others’ stories by day and her own by night. When she is not writing, she aspires to be a better backyard gardener.

Mid-Summer Saturday

4 July 2025 / Editor

Fiction by John Sheirer

2:10 p.m.: He awoke with an insect crawling inside his left ear. 2:05 p.m.: Darkness. Only darkness. 2:04 p.m.: He was surprised to notice the unscuffed red paint on the underside of the wheelbarrow. 2:03 p.m. The leaves rustled in the swaying treetops even though there was no wind. 2:01 p.m.: Sweat stung his eyes as he leaned on the sledgehammer handle. 1:38 p.m.: He split the first chunk of wood, beginning the pile for that night’s neighborhood firepit gathering. 1:36 p.m.: “Of course I won’t overdo it,” he assured his wife as he stepped from their air conditioned home.

[Originally published in The Bluebird Word in November 2022.]

John Sheirer lives in Western Massachusetts and is in his 30th year of teaching at CT State Community College Asnuntuck in Enfield, Connecticut. His latest book is the award-winning short story collection, Stumbling Through Adulthood: Linked Stories. Find him at JohnSheirer.com.

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summer season

1 July 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Erin Lorandos

you
pulled the folded
pocket knife from even
older denim
as you looked towards
the horizon of this life –
saying nothing

and now you open
the knife with one hand
deftly pushing the blade
out and away –
one thumb resting
against that sharp edge

for just a moment
my eyes are pulled to
your left hand –
that’s palming the red,
delicious apple

so fresh
the tree limb
still sways in protest

[Originally published in The Bluebird Word in March 2022.]

Originally from Wisconsin, Erin Lorandos is a librarian and writer living in Phoenix. Some of her recent poetry can be found in Drifting Sands, The Avocet, the 2021 Poetry Marathon Anthology, and in The Purposeful Mayonnaise.

Julia

28 June 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Pama Lee Bennett

I’m standing beside a gurney in the emergency room, a gurney on which my great-aunt, age 104, is lying. Some preliminary tests have been done. A doctor we haven’t seen before enters and stands opposite me across the gurney. He doesn’t address her but begins talking over her to me.

“She appears to have a kidney condition, but I’m not sure we can do much to help her at her age.”

I look down at her, and back to him.

“Doctor, I’d like you to do for her whatever you would do for me, or yourself, or your own mother.”

“Well, your aunt is very old. She is probably at the end of her life.”

I think to myself, wait for it, wait for it.

My aunt looks up at him sweetly and says, “Doctor, I would like to live. But if I die, it’s all right.”

The look on his face: priceless.

He mumbles that certain procedures might injure her delicate body, but he can order some medication. I say, “Ok, I can understand that, but let’s do what we can.”

He leaves the room.

He can’t know that she walked on her own and lived on her own until 100. That she loves to play Skip-Bo with family members every week. That she reads voraciously and still keeps in touch with former students from her days as a one-room school teacher. That she hushes me in conversation if Tiger Woods comes on the golf channel and she wants to watch him play.

I can’t know that nine months from now, she will die suddenly and quietly of natural causes one afternoon, just short of 105.

I can’t know that. But neither can the doctor.

Pama Lee Bennett is a retired speech-language pathologist living in Sioux City, IA. She has taught English at summer language camps in Poland and at a school there in 2019. Her work has appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal, Evening Street Review, The Bluebird Word, The Penwood Review, and others.

Sword Play

25 June 2025 / Editor

Fiction by William P Adams

When Jimmy started first grade, his mother paid a sixth-grade boy a nickel a day to walk him to school each morning. He felt like a baby—other kids his age walked to school alone; why couldn’t he? After a week’s worth of grousing and complaining, Jimmy’s mother relented and released the boy from his lucrative bodyguard job. Jimmy was now free to travel the cement sidewalks of 26th Street to school unencumbered.

Space travel was huge in the 1960s, and Jimmy had a space-themed lunchbox adorned with planets and rockets. One day, he dropped the thermos, shattering the glass interior, and his mother then gave him a nickel a day for milk—since she wasn’t paying the kid anymore, it was a wash.

Jimmy developed a scheme since he had a nickel a day for milk. Some days, he’d go without, stop at the Dime Store after school, and buy a nickel’s worth of chocolate stars at the candy counter. He’d eat them after school or squirrel some away for later consumption.

The scheme worked flawlessly, and Jimmy decided to bring it to the next level. He went without milk and chocolate stars for a week and accumulated 25 cents come Friday. On Saturday, after breakfast, he had permission to walk to the Dime Store and left with the five nickels jingling in his pocket. A dashing rubber sword, painted silver, with a bejeweled scabbard had been calling out to Jimmy during previous visits—the price: 25 cents. Upon arriving, he made a beeline for the object of his infatuation, and it was displayed on the toy shelf magnificently—the only one left.

Jimmy picked up the exquisite weapon and marveled at his good fortune, thinking how lucky he was. He walked on air to the cash register and placed the five coins on the counter. The clerk smiled and jokingly admonished Jimmy to be careful, rang his purchase, and Jimmy left the store in jubilation, imagining himself aboard a pirate ship with piles of booty and swag.

When he arrived home, Jimmy brandished the sword dramatically before his parents like the swashbuckling pirates he’d seen at the neighborhood movie house. They wanted to know how he managed to acquire it because Jimmy received no allowance, and his mother could account for every coin and bill in the house. Jimmy couldn’t lie; it was a sin. He spilled that he’d saved his milk money for a week and bought the sword with the five nickels. His mother was upset that Jimmy went without milk and strongly suggested he march back to the Dime Store and return the faux blade.

But his father was inwardly impressed with his son’s creative business acumen, and after a short parental commiseration, they decided Jimmy could keep the sword if he promised to include milk with his lunch each day from here on out.

Jimmy agreed and immediately leapt aboard the imaginary Pirate vessel, sword flashing with the Jolly Roger waving above.

William P Adams is a retired baby boomer living and writing near Seattle. His short fiction, poetry, and memoir excerpts have appeared in Bright Flash Lit, CafeLit, Macrame Lit, Rockvale Review, Sea Wolf Journal, X-R-A-Y Magazine, and elsewhere.

The Hydrangea

22 June 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Celine Bach

The hydrangea hangs heavy,
a secret soft as shadow,
its petals pulse in quiet hues—
blue to violet, like a bruise
that lingers, unnoticed.

Roots reach beneath,
hidden hands clutching
at the hush of earth.
Grief grows in its gentle folds,
strong in its silence.

No sun can coax its bloom—
only time, only the weight
of waiting, weaving slowly.
Then, the garden whispers,
color spilling, soft and strange.

Celine Bach is a writer and poet based in New York City. She has won numerous awards in regional contests and is currently working on a new poetry collection.

Neah Bay

19 June 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Ursula McCabe

Gull noise was always abundant
for the Makah People
even when they labored over
red cedar baskets
in their plank houses.

They lived by beaches
lined with purple-blue mussel shells.
Summer sunsets turned the sea
melon colors and behind their camp
ridges of conifer crowns
glowed hunter green
from the yellowish cast.

Since ancient times
Makah peoples have had the ability
to navigate places where
they cannot see land.

And even now when they return
to the rocks closer to shore,
there are the gulls—
calling them home.

Ursula McCabe sold wine in Portland, Oregon for many years. Her work can be seen in Piker Press, Oregon Poetry Association’s Verseweavers, Lit Shark Magazine, The Bluebird Word, and The Ekphrastic Review. She likes the ocean, forests, lots of birds, and shopping at thrift stores.

No Small Thing

16 June 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Lana Hechtman Ayers

from the size and shape
I can surmise

that it’s a lady bug plodding
across my window screen

black polka dots &
flame orange autumn wings

though only this bug’s
dark underbelly faces me

I know for certain
beauty is out there

ready to be seen

ready to fly off

Lana Hechtman Ayers has shepherded over a hundred forty 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 newest collection is The Autobiography of Rain (Fernwood Press, 2024). Visit her online at LanaAyers.com.

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