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Let’s Fly Away

30 October 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Martha Ellen Johnson

“Grammy, let’s fly away.”
We are sitting on the top
step of the second floor
staircase. Down the hall
is her magical kingdom
bedroom. She’s wearing
fairy wings over her street
clothes as usual, a sign of
a theatrical life to bloom
in later years. “I can’t. I
don’t have any wings,” I said.
“Hold my hand. We can fly
together.” And I do. We
fly down the hall soaring
into another realm hovering
far above the ordinary, held
aloft by the imagination
of the most innocent.

Martha Ellen Johnson lives alone in an old Victorian house on a hill on the Oregon coast. Retired social worker. History of social justice activism. Old hippie. MFA. Poems and prose published in various journals and online forums. She writes to process the events of her wild life.

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Laughter

26 October 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Sharon Whitehill

After Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Spring“

Nothing is so marvelous as mirth—
When breath, in spasms, splurges, spouts, and sweeps
Away all chance of words: attempts emerge in leaps
And gasps of sound, their content nothing worth.
More overwhelming still is laughter brought to birth
In formal circumstance; it can’t be quelled; it keeps
On bubbling up and out, like lava from the deeps
Wherein, suppressed, it flares from inner earth.

What human gain to all this greed and glee?
Our babies laugh unbidden, even deaf and blind;
Every era, every population, has its devotees.
Children learn to fake-laugh when they find
It wins them friends. Laughter is contagious as a sneeze:
Both speak our shared humanity, and we respond in kind.

Sharon Whitehill is a retired English professor from West Michigan now living in Port Charlotte, Florida. Her most recent chapbook, This Sad and Tender Time, appeared in December 2023; forthcoming in late 2025 is another entitled Putting the Pieces Together.

Words Will Have to Wait

24 October 2024 / Editor

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.

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If I Were a Bird

21 October 2024 / Editor

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.

The Things I’ve Carried

17 October 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Sherri Wright

The earless pottery pig my daughter Jenny made in third grade and another creature with kitten ears, a bunny tail and a slit in the top for coins. A ceramic cat I bought in Dubrovnik on a trip with my kids. A white glass bird my husband brought me from Finland. I have lived in many houses. I have moved many times. I have purged. I have decluttered. These things have always come with me.

I have carried a gold dragonfly pin with blue and green enamel wings and red jewel eyes my first husband gave me when he returned from a job interview and told me we were moving. The second chink in our marriage. The first was the previous year when I was pregnant and he told me he didn’t get a PhD to stay home and care for a baby. In that same jewelry box is a coral shell necklace set with nine-year-old Jenny’s penciled note, “Mom, I bought it with my own $$.” And my grandmother’s gold bracelet which she had before she was married (in about 1912).

From Ithaca to Minneapolis to Washington DC and Rehoboth Beach I’ve moved an antique desk with eight turned ball feet and six drawers that I found in a junk shop in upstate New York. My arms have worn the warm cherry grain dull and the knob on the door is gone. But the white porcelain vase in the shape of a girl’s head remains. It was filled with white daisies when my friends sent it to me fifty-three years ago the day my daughter was born. It’s perfect for pencils, scissors, an antique brass letter opener, and multicolored pens and has marked my writing space wherever I’ve lived.

A blue and purple silk print dress that I wore for my second wedding in my parents’ backyard. After 37 years it still fits and so does the marriage.

My spiderman bathrobe in black velour with a burn out design. My grandson named it when he was into action heroes and wore Superman pajamas as we read together in bed. Now, standing in the morning sunshine I see the burn out has taken over the thinning velour and the sleeves are starting to fray. The boy who used to snuggle next to me in this robe has turned twenty.

I’ve carried grainy black and white portraits of my great-grandparents and a picture of their general store from the late 1800s. Also, the handwritten poems my great-grandmother wrote mourning the loss of two infants during an epidemic. They carried these photographs from New York to Indiana to Illinois to Minnesota before my father was born in 1916. I brought them back to the East Coast when I retired. I see when I pull them from the trunk in my guest room that the chalky portraits are faded. The ink on the poems is faint, the edges of the paper tattered and fragile.

I am eighty-one. The things I’ve carried—the pottery pigs, the wedding dress, the dragonfly pin, the glass birds, the photos and letters—will outlive me. They have no monetary value. But will they carry any sense of me?

Sherri Wright belongs to Rehoboth Beach Writers Guild and Key West Poetry Guild. She lives in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where she practices yoga and volunteers for a local food rescue. Her work has appeared in The Bluebird Word, Rat’s Ass Review, Delaware Beach Life, Raven’s Perch, and Quartet.

Auction Circus

14 October 2024 / Editor

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.

Imprint

11 October 2024 / Editor

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.

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In My Father’s Backyard

7 October 2024 / Editor

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.

Hawaiian Sunset

4 October 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Alice Lowe

“You’re going to Hawaii with your ex-wife?” It wasn’t a question, despite the upspeak. The question mark underscored my befuddlement as I woodenly repeated what he’d just told me. A statement of fact, offered up nonchalantly like a gesundheit after a sneeze.

“Yeah,” he said. “Cool, huh?”

Garrett wasn’t my boyfriend, but that’s where we seemed to be heading. We’d worked for the same organization for two years, but in different locations. We didn’t see each other frequently, but we became friends. I met his wife, Willie (can you imagine naming a child Wilhelmina?), on various occasions. We can’t know what any relationship is really like, but they seemed like a happy and compatible couple, so I was mildly surprised when he told me they’d separated.

He and Willie had drifted apart, he said, saw different directions for their lives. I liked that he spoke respectfully and fondly of her, that they remained friends. Over the following months we started spending more time together, hiking in the nearby San Diego mountains, exploring quirky rural towns with musty shops full of bric-a-brac, driving to Rosarito Beach for margaritas and shrimp burritos. We shied from the label, but we were pretty much a couple.

Willie was a flight attendant, and as her husband, Garrett could fly with her at no cost when opportunities arose. She suggested the trip, his last chance, since their divorce would be final soon. “Couples go on honeymoons—this can be our sunset.”

I shrugged off my apprehension. Worse case, they’d get back together, and if so, good for them. My ego might be a little bruised, but I wouldn’t be broken-hearted.

He sent me a postcard from the Kona Coast, “thinking of you.” It made me recall a story my boss at one of my first jobs told me when I made a terrible typo in a letter, one that could have cost us an important client. He tried to assuage my guilt and chagrin by telling me about the man who went to a tropical resort on a business trip and sent a postcard home to his wife: “Wish you were her.”

He brought me a puka shell necklace and showed me pictures of palm-lined beaches and ominous-looking volcanos, himself and Willie sipping rum drinks with orchid blossoms floating on top from shaded decks with ocean vistas. He told me how they were fussed over by amused and possibly envious passengers and crew on the trip over after telling a flight attendant about their “sunset” voyage.

Never very fiery, our relationship gradually cooled. Still friends, we formalized its closure over beers and popcorn at a beach dive. As I recall, it was an overcast day, the sunset barely visible through the clouds.

Alice Lowe writes about life, literature, food and family in San Diego, CA. Recent work has been published in The Bluebird Word, Change Seven, ManifestStation, South 85 Journal, Eunoia, Tangled Locks, MORIA, and Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. She’s been cited twice in Best American Essays. Read and reach her at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com.

vibrant red poppies in summer field — Photo by Piotr Baranowski on Pexels.com

When the Column Blooms

1 October 2024 / Editor

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.

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