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The River God’s Daughter

1 November 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Angela Patten

Here I am on the river again
gliding my kayak past a row of turtles

their shells gleaming in the sun
like freshly washed dinner plates.

I turn to see a muskrat’s muzzle
parting the water like a butterknife.

Around a bend a heron stands
knee-deep in weeds and water

like my father in black rubber
boots fishing on the River Boyne.

Although he loved rivers and streams,
he hated the sea with equal fervor

distrusting its relentless waves
its monotonous unremitting motion.

But back to the heron and the mystery
of that bony beak, that frozen pose

that alien cranium with its opaque eye
the shriek and fluster of its wings

as it takes off creaking into the air
like an early flying machine.

Unlike my father, I loved the sea
and the cold consecration of salt water.

But now I am a convert to the river
that flows through marsh and mudflat

town and village, state and country
the wayward weather its only god.

Angela Patten is an award-winning Irish poet, author of five poetry collections and a prose memoir. Her work has appeared in literary journals and magazines in the U.S. and abroad. A native of Dublin, Ireland, she is a Senior Lecturer Emerita in English at the University of Vermont. Read more at www.carraigbinn.com.

Lessons Woven in Time

1 November 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Ron Theel

We learn by doing, and experiences can be great teachers.

Don’t get too comfortable as your life can change quickly.

One winter, we had an unusually warm early March. Everyone hoped for an early spring. A bitter cold front suddenly swooped in, bringing with it sleet and freezing rain. While walking my dog, I came across two robins, their backs frozen to the sidewalk, feet sticking up in the air. The promise of early spring vanished overnight.

Follow your heart and your passion.

One of my college roommates, Ben, was a gifted viola player. Ben wanted to pursue a career in music, but his father insisted that he enroll as a pre-med student. He became disinterested in his coursework and dropped out at the end of his sophomore year. Several years passed until one day I received a letter from Ben. He graduated from the Royal College of Music in London and was making plans to audition for the London Symphony. Always remember that your life is your journey.

Travel as much as you can. It will change the way you view the world.

I’ve been to China five times. Billions of people don’t live the same way we do and don’t share the same beliefs, values, and way of life that we do. You will realize what a tiny speck we occupy in the world and be grateful for the things we do have in America.

I do have some regrets. I wish I had been more of a “free spirit” earlier in life. On a beautiful morning, it’s okay to hit your “pause button.” Grab today. Spend a day at the beach. Hike in the forest. Claim your day. It belongs to you and to no one else. It took a progressive, incurable disease for me to realize this. No one is guaranteed tomorrow.

Don’t get trapped in the past. Be a forward-thinking, lifelong learner. I wish I had kept more current with our ever-changing technology and made more of an effort to adapt to an ever-changing world. Changes come so fast. Moving forward in life is about adaptation.

Remember that your life is your journey. Be sure to make the most of it!

Ron Theel is a freelance writer, photographer, and mixed media artist living in Syracuse, NY. His writing has appeared in The Bluebird Word, The RavensPerch, Beyond Words, and elsewhere.

A Walk Through Burchfield’s “Haunted Twilight”

29 October 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Theresa Wyatt

Who would not tremble here at the sight
of bat wings shrouding window eyes
where alien spirits traipse between
the charred and gobbled trees?

Stop, be still my tripping heart,
there is no subtlety to darkness when tarred
with heavy brush, my skin shades blue
and crawls with insect chatter.

Who can I trust to guide me through this field’s maze
unharmed? Surely not this twilight’s dripping web
and cackle. I need more time to cipher paths
and motives through these brooding indications.

Who waits behind those inky cave clouds?
Could there be a safer destination
where solitudes untouched bed down
below the yellow light?

Look up at that top window!
A small creature, an owl or cat –
is telegraphing auras –
Go slow.

[Editor’s Note: For an October treat, take a look at Charles Burchfield’s Haunted Twilight.]

Theresa Wyatt is the author of “The Beautiful Transport” (Moonstone Press) and “Hurled Into Gettysburg” (BlazeVox Books). Her writing follows the tug of history, nature, and art. Her poems have appeared in the Elm Leaves Journal, Norton’s New Micro, Spillway, and the Press 53 anthology, “What Dwells Between the Lines.”

May We Still Sing?

26 October 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Anne Makeever

Winter blows in late, its inevitability until now unsure. What relief
to watch a pristine obliteration of snow nearly bury the summer chairs
and limn the bare oaks that frame the cold cove.

I want to sigh over the softness, the muffling depth that quiets the day,
to feast on the fineness of black and white that turns O so heartbreakingly,
lavishly purple at dusk. Look, my eyes say, here’s beauty. I want to forget

that life is erasing. Bees, darkness, glaciers, monarchs can’t carry our weight.
The seasons shift, from white to green to orange, each a gift undeserved,
a psalm to savor.

Yes, my mother’s face was beautiful when she died, but the rupture remains.
Consolation comes in what will continue, in the scab that forms at the edge
of the tear then gives over to eventual scar.

Anne Makeever’s work appears in the Eliot Review, Plant Human Quarterly, RavensPerch, and River Styx. She holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where she also taught poetry and essay writing. She lives in Brunswick, Maine, with her partner and exuberant dog.

In a Mirror Clearly Now

23 October 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Judith Yarrow

for my sister

Sometimes, looking in a mirror,
I turn my head just so and
I’m brushing my sister’s hair.
Her same movement.

Conversations that started
when she was born keep on and on.
Antiphonal chorus. Me. Her.
Mine. Hers. I can sing all the parts.

We circled each other until at last
who chased, who fled, who followed,
who led, I don’t even know.
The mirror says, see how alike you are.

That long ago push her pull me?
Just the place we started—no more
separate than fingers on a hand.
connected at the source.

Judith Yarrow been published in two chapbooks and various literary journals, most recently in Hedgerow, RavensPerch, and Medusa’s Kitchen. She was the featured poet in Edge: An International Journal, and her poems have been included in the Washington State Poet Laureates’ collections. Find more of her work at jyarrow.com.

Charles Reznikoff Appraises the Zinnia

20 October 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Deborah H. Doolittle

These days the zinnias in the garden
awake at dawn and await the sun
to open up before them
like the one blossom they’d all like to become.

Let other flowers bloom as dreams
beneath other people’s windows
and rise up from their cultivated beds
in clumps of ordinary color.

These zinnias leap into the air
and broadcast their ambition across the lawn,
not a petal out of place
but has known the touch of dew.

Deborah H. Doolittle has lived in lots of different places, but now calls North Carolina home. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the author of Floribunda, and three chapbooks No Crazy Notions, That Echo, and Bogbound. When not editing BRILLIG: a micro lit mag, she is training for road races or practicing yoga.

Lessons from Sunflowers

17 October 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Nancy Kay Peterson

In thick morning fog,
tall, dark-eyed cyclops
with butter-colored faces
face eastward, patient,
sensing the unseen sun,
trusting in its rising.

We fear anything could emerge
from the earthbound cloud,
things undreamable.
We covet the one-eyes’
sun-bright faces that turn
confidently in the white unknown

with unwavering determination
and joy.

Nancy Kay Peterson’s poetry is in The Bluebird Word, Dash Literary Journal, Earth’s Daughters, Last Stanza, RavensPerch, Spank the Carp, Steam Ticket, and Tipton Poetry Journal. She co-published Main Channel Voices: A Dam Fine Literary Magazine (2004-2009) and has authored two chapbooks: Belated Remembrance (2010) and Selling the Family (2021) from Finishing Line Press. Visit www.nancykaypeterson.com.

Marie’s Wings

14 October 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Kandi Maxwell

“I want to fly,” my four-year-old granddaughter, Marie, says. “Me too,” I say. We’re watching a My Little Pony video. Some of the ponies fly. Her favorite is Rainbow Dash, a blue Pegasus with a rainbow-colored mane and tail. The pony’s wings are small, but Rainbow Dash can fly fast. Marie loves fast.

She also loves other real or imagined creatures with wings: birds, butterflies, and fairies. Marie is mesmerized by red-breasted robins or blue-bodied stellar’s jays as they flutter from tree to tree in my forest home. I watch as Marie runs beneath them clapping her hands, saying, “fly, fly.” Marie is also fascinated by the butterflies that hover over our lilac and rosemary bushes. She has a little green butterfly net, and occasionally she will capture one. Because of her autism, she’s speech delayed, but she makes happy sounds in her own language. She gently brushes her finger across one of the wings. I notice how the light catches the wings, creating a sparkling shimmer. After inspecting the butterfly, we find a place to re-home it in the large half-barrel filled with lavender, lemon balm, and thyme.

Later, on a trip to Mount Shasta, I find a little store that sells children’s red monarch butterfly wings made of a soft, light fabric. The winged cape has straps around the shoulders and loops around the wrists, allowing Marie to open and close the wings, her movements mimicking a butterfly. Back at my home, she dashes through the yard flapping her arms. “I’m flying, I’m flying,” she says. For a while, those wings are her favorite accessory. She wears her bright red cape everywhere we go.

Less than a year after I buy the wings, they are destroyed in the 2018 Paradise Camp Fire, along with her other cherished toys. In the years that follow the fire, Marie brings three grocery bags filled with her new special toys anytime she leaves home. She fears losing the things she loves, the purple dragon she had saved from the fire, her new little ponies, her fox, and kitten plushies.

Marie just turned twelve. She now has a good vocabulary with her own unique communication style, but talking about emotions is difficult. We don’t talk about the fire or the loss of her former home. But I know she’s had some healing. She no longer needs to bring three bags of toys when she visits, but the purple dragon always travels with her. And she still has the butterfly net.

On her latest visit, she captures a tiny, lustrous green frog. Marie tenderly holds it in her hand, while we walk it over to the half-barrel of herbs where she sets it free. Afterwards, she runs off with her net searching for butterflies through the soft spring grasses and up in the branches of the flowering apple trees. As I watch her run, I think about the traumas she’s faced at such a young age—the fire, numerous moves, COVID, and missed school years. The losses have been difficult, but like the butterflies, Marie soars. “Fly, Fly,” I say.

Kandi Maxwell is a creative nonfiction writer who lives in Northern California. Her stories have been published in Hippocampus Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Review, The Meadow, The Raven’s Perch, and many other literary journals and print anthologies. Learn more about Kandi’s writing at kandimaxwell.com.

Pulse

11 October 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Richard Levine

One morning alone, light came
and I understood everything
in the world belonged to itself.

The sky surrounded a heron,
and from a green curve in the creek
it rose on the broad majesty

of its loneliness and wings.
The noiseless blue paddling
of my pulse, timed it out of sight.

Above me, wind stirred trees
… is it any wonder stringed
instruments sing so sweetly?

Richard Levine, an Advisory Editor of BigCityLit.com, is author of the forthcoming Taming of the Hour: An Almanac with Marginalia from Fernwood Press.

Early Harvest

8 October 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Margaret Morth

The print date on the black-and-white’s border says “Aug 60,” and that might well be spot on. Film processing was an extra cost in a household that afforded no extras, and our family photos were taken with deliberation, usually by my father. A roll of film could sit in the camera for quite some time. But here the corn is far enough along that I’m checking it for ripeness, so I’ll call it: late July-early August 1960. At that time in northern plains summer when everyone’s taste buds hum in anticipation of the first steaming platter of yellow-gold corn on the cob.

I hadn’t considered before who took the photo. But now it seems obvious that it was my brother, two years my senior, using the little “Brownie” camera that had mostly replaced the bulky, fussy flash cameras of our 1950s photos, birthdays and Christmas. Dad didn’t want us handling anything that could break or get mussed up, but the Brownie—casual, inexpensive, ubiquitous in its time—was of another, easier-going state of being. And my brother, longer-schooled in how not to upset our father, had access to this companionable camera, and took it out into our little world.

My father and I, together on a summer day. That sounds simple, ordinary enough. Though for us this is a singular moment, and that it was caught out of time is extraordinary too.

I am a month shy of my seventh birthday. My long French braids are pinned up in the warmth of summer. Already evident are the long arms and large hands, mark of the big-boned paternal line that bred me. It’s hard to see, but my father is smiling slightly, maybe talking about the ear of corn I’ve singled out. My face is hidden but the set of my head and my hands about to enfold the chosen ear show an intentness, a seriousness about something important to get right. Dad looks relaxed, pleased even. That in itself makes this a moment apart.

It must have been a Sunday, otherwise he wouldn’t have been with us in the middle of the day and not in work clothes. Still, it seems notable that he’d spend his brief time of leisure with us like that, just hanging out. Maybe that’s why my brother snapped the shutter. Aware of rarity, he documented it.

Throughout my childhood and beyond, “relaxed” was not a word often connected with my father. Later in life I realized that he, like his siblings and parents, struggled with what people didn’t have words for back then. Moody, they’d say, nervous. He’s such a nervous one. That tribe are all moody, you know. The hounds of anxiety and depression stalked them throughout their lives and passed into generations.

But not on this summer day in 1960. I can almost hear him, his voice low and easy: That’s a nice one, peel a little from the top, just a peek. No wonder I was so intent, almost reverent.

Dad is wearing his American Legion T-shirt, white with dark blue accents. Years later I found the shirt in a drawer, long packed away. I asked Dad if I could have it. He seemed surprised but said sure, take it. It was worn pretty thin by then but still up for the beer runs, impromptu volleyball games, and happy hour bars of college life. It had a good second run. I wish I had it now, even the remaining tatters of it.

Since retiring from a career in the nonprofit sector, Margaret Morth is immersed in a long-held passion for writing. Her work has appeared in Under the Sun, The RavensPerch, and TulipTree Review. Originally from North Dakota, she resides in Brooklyn NY, her adopted home of many years.

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