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Reminiscence

8 March 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Kandi Maxwell

My mother’s fingernails are perfectly painted a deep shade of red. She sits upright in her maroon leather recliner, a soft white pillow on her lap. Sunlight filters in through the sliding glass doors near the kitchen in her Southern California home. Outside are roses, geraniums, begonias. A small, green-grass lawn. I sit beside my mother. It’s lunchtime. Today, her caregiver has made a pretty plate of Wheat Thin crackers, each topped with cottage cheese and a dab of ruby-red strawberry jam in the center.

With her left hand, my mother holds her plate on top of the pillow. She uses her right hand to daintily pinch her thumb and forefinger on the edges of a cracker. Slowly, so slowly and carefully, she lifts the cracker to her mouth. She chews her cracker thoroughly before reaching for another. Her movements are measured, as she savors each bite.

When lunch is over, my mother naps and I chat quietly with my two sisters who are also visiting. The day is tranquil, as we reminisce about our childhoods. My mother, who isn’t really sleeping, occasionally throws her thoughts into the conversation making us laugh. Two days later, I fly back home to Northern California.

Although my mother had been suffering from heart failure, I didn’t know those moments would be our ending. I didn’t know how vividly memories of that scene would evoke my mother’s essence. Even now, four years later, when I miss her and need her familiarity, I picture her brightly painted fingernails; her unhurried manner; her humor. Her gracefulness throughout her physical decline and her strength in confronting mortality.

Kandi Maxwell is a creative nonfiction writer living in Northern California. Her stories have been published in Hippocampus Magazine, KYSO Flash, Raven’s Perch, Wordrunner eChapbooks, and other literary journals and anthologies. Her memoir, Snow After Fire, was released in 2023 by Legacy Book Press. Learn about Kandi’s writing at kandimaxwell.com.

pink rose in vase centerpiece on brown wooden table — Photo by Lisa Fotios on Pexels.com

Book and a Bagel

6 March 2025 / Editor

Fiction by Alice Baburek

The old woman shuffled into the cozy and popular place. The line was longer than usual, yet she had no qualms with waiting. She held her prize possession against her sagging chest.

After several minutes, her legs began to ache. She tried desperately to rid her mind of the continuous pain. Finally, it was her turn.

“Good morning, Joan. I’ll have my usual, dear.” Her faded blue eyes still twinkled. A smile filled with yellow, crooked teeth. Her thinned gray hair tousled from the cold, blustering wind. But nothing could deter Elsie Mills from her rooted routine each morning. Nothing.

“Morning, Elsie. How are you feeling today?” Joan busily toasted the bagel twice and smothered it with melted butter. Just the way Elsie liked it.

“Every day is a good day when you’re alive!” Joan chuckled as Elsie waddled along to the register. “Coffee, please.” The tall young man handed her a medium-sized cup.

The second-hand coat hung to her knobby, arthritic knees. She fished inside the pocket. After several tries, Elsie yanked out a five-dollar bill. With a shaky hand, she gave it to the cashier. The other hand held the precious commodity.

Without saying a word, he took the money and gave Elsie the change. She abruptly shoved it back into her pocket. Change came in handy when taking the long bus ride home.

Minutes later, Elsie sat alone in the crowded cafe. The small round wooden table fit her nicely. She sipped at her steaming brew—roasted hazelnut, her favorite. With an everything bagel to her right and a hot cup of coffee to her left, she dared to open her escape from reality.

Today was an adventure like never before. Traveling the countryside on a wing and a prayer. Enjoying heaven’s delight as nature greets the foolhardy, leaving the chaotic world behind.

A warm summer breeze. The sun glistens off the white-capped waves as they roll onto the bronze sandy beach. Life at its purest moment.

Elsie let out a huge sigh. The Morning Café had emptied. She had been reading for hours. What was left of her coffee had become cold to the touch. The tasty bagel was long consumed in all its delicacy; how she yearned for younger days. When her life was no longer ruled by sickness and pain. When her mind was sharp and free from muddiness.

For Elsie, the enlightening sense of freedom came in books where imagination brought peace and serenity without physical restrictions and inabilities.

The frail woman leaned back and closed her grainy eyes. Suddenly, exhaustion reclaimed her body as it went limp. The book slipped closed. Her right hand fell by her side. Elsie drifted away into an endless sleep.

The paramedic checked her pulse once more. She looked up at her fellow EMT. Slowly, she shook her head. The two of them loaded the deceased woman onto the gurney. It was then they both noticed something quite strange. Elsie Mills was smiling.

Alice Baburek is an avid reader, determined writer and animal lover. Retired, she challenges herself to become an unforgettable emerging voice.

Photo by Linda Briskin (@linda.briskin) from Linda Briskin Photography

Muse

1 March 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Linda Briskin

Muse is elusive. She can be Calliope, the Greek goddess of eloquence. Or Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, or Clio, the goddess of memory. Sometimes she is Urania singing with the stars or Thalia chanting to the ferns as they uncurl in the spring.

The last time I saw Muse, I was trying to meditate while sitting on a rock in densely tangled brush in a Toronto ravine. Rippling water in the creek, filtered summer sun patterning the ground, and spirited bird conversations all distracted. Muse settled beside me, her breath sweet and warm, her eyes closed, our shoulders suddenly touching. She was humming. I joined her and together we offered a melody to the trees.

Perhaps I first met Muse in the library in a small white church perched on a hill, not far from my school in Montréal. I was eight. She was dressed as a librarian—brown tweed skirt, sensible shoes, glasses on a string. She never scolded me for surrounding myself with teetering piles of books in the far back corner. We didn’t really talk, but she saw me, her gaze intent as if she knew and approved of my obsession with words, my passion for stories, my delight in smoothing the cover of a new book. She always saved one for me: an invitation to a place where I could
disappear and perhaps find myself. A gift.

Decades passed and Muse has always been a presence, if inconstant and capricious. Sometimes I catch a trace of her in a discarded twist of striped ribbon, or a child sitting absolutely still on the stairs of a shabby house with a bright blue door. Perhaps a hint of her in an envelope decorated with elaborate calligraphy and abandoned on a park bench. Or in the reflections of clouds and trees in pools of water after a storm.

I’m certain I glimpsed her one summer while kayaking on Stony Lake. Although difficult to discern through the sun’s brightness, Muse seemed to float casually in the air, enveloped in almost translucent gossamer. Tantalizing, just at the edge of my awareness. Then she was in the water: a mermaid, her scales sleek, her locks glistening, her arms reaching out. Remember, her look instructed.

I do remember a dullish day in the interstice between fall and winter on a rare trip on the Toronto subway. I caught her reflection in a window. Her red felt cap had a peacock feather tucked in the brim, swaying with the clickety-clack of the wheels. Inspired, I wrote:

Lucy unearths the red felt cap carefully wrapped in tissue from a hatbox buried in the back of her great-aunt Mary’s closet. Mary was a milliner in her youth and made hats in her small store on St. Denis. Why did she keep this one, Lucy wondered.

No glimpse of Muse, not for many months now, not since the encounter in the ravine. But today at a gathering of writers, where I sit deep in a corner, she is suddenly perched on a stool next to me, vibrating with an energy both compelling and irritating. She is twirling her long braid—an annoying habit. She turns to me with an eager smile. “What’s your favourite word?” she asks.

“About you?” I reply, my voice curt, my stare hostile. “Unpredictable, fleeting, evanescent, temperamental, unstable, erratic, fanciful, transient, provocative, obstinate, uncompromising. You’re a shadow in a dark room, a slight movement in the wind, a musical note at the edge of what’s audible.”

Are you elusive because I bore you? The thought flits through my mind. I want you to be an enduring whisper in my ear, at my service. Constancy, loyalty—all that the world is not. I’m suddenly wild with urgency and desire. Then I start to laugh, hiccupping, almost sobbing. Who doesn’t yearn for such devotion? To be seen and known?

Muse tilts her head toward me, her light blue eyes intent. “Expectations and demands turn me inside out,” she says. “ I sink into silence and splinter into pieces. I’m ephemeral. I delight in winding myself in and around the green shoots of spring. I relish eavesdropping on the conversation at the next table in a café and lying down on a page of text—each letter a fascination. Keep me close, but let me twirl and flutter, and dance to the words I hear. I do whisper in your ear. Listen for it.”

Then we are humming, not quite in tune but together.

Linda Briskin is a writer and fine art photographer. Her CNF embraces hybrid forms, makes quirky connections and highlights social justice themes—quietly. As a photographer, she is intrigued by the permeability between the remembered and the imagined, and the ambiguities in what we choose to see. @linda.briskin and https://www.lindabriskinphotography.com/.

Season’s Farewell

27 February 2025 / Editor

Fiction by Kira M. Tjomsland

The lonely breeze moaned through the sepia grandeur of autumn decay. Muted rays of off-gold sunlight filtered through crisp crabapples; branches permanently withered from the memory of heavy harvests. Their roots were soiled with the rotting remains of their life’s work.

Deep in an abandoned hollow, where spiders spin tapestries of silk and antlers lay abandoned, the dragoness lifted her aching neck, tasting the breeze as it kissed her scales. Her eyes, gold laced with an aged fog, caught a brittle leaf twirling in helpless descent. Tucking her wings closer, the cold-blooded wyrm shuddered from the chill. She had to keep moving.

Her scales, once a brilliant suit of amber and bronze, were now dull brown. Her limbs shuffled with the gritty gait of arthritis—her heavy wings too tired to fly. Still, she pressed on, only pausing for breath when she reached the gaping maw of an ancient stone cave. For a moment, she stood at the threshold, feeling the flame in her breast sputtering and losing heat. Then she ducked inside, the blunted edges of her horns scraping the rim.

The dragoness tried to ignore the blanched bones piled up before her, empty eye sockets staring at the next priestess—the next sacrifice. She kept her eyes on the object before her, stumbling and falling before the altar just beginning to film over with a thin coat of frost. Prostrate and trembling as her own claws began to freeze over, she strained to look up at the stone statue crumbling to life.

Scales peered from the heartless gray, glacier-white and brilliant. Eyes opened, deep and blue as arctic waters, as a crown of horns clattered like freshly-formed icicles. Dappled wings stretched open—a plume of frostbreath whispering into the air, dancing with the beauty of winter’s birth—and the world went dark.

Kira M. Tjomsland is published in national journals including The Rectangle, The Westmarch Literary Journal, and Timada’s Diary. An avid bookworm and scholar, her adventures include a semester at the University of Oxford. Living with her husband in West Palm Beach, Kira is an editor for PBAU’s Living Waters Review.

Family Flock

23 February 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Danita Dodson

Daily I count turkeys on my land—
one, two, three, four, five,
six, seven, eight, nine—
willing this family unit
to stay together forever, wishing
to goodness that not one of them
will ever be lost from the circle
when winds blow or rifles rise,
hoping they’ll keep close to home
in the unknowns of shifting storms.

At twilight, they nest in the trees,
finding refuge in the folds of earth,
the sky a quilt of fading autumn light
that draws them near as one,
like a cabin’s warmth at day’s end,
kinship a shield against the cold.
And I pray for them as a brood—
one, two, three, four, five,
six, seven, eight, nine—
what I’ve prayed for my own family.

Danita Dodson is the author of three poetry collections: Trailing the Azimuth, The Medicine Woods, and Between Gone and Everlasting. Her poems appear in Salvation South and elsewhere. She is the 2024 winner of the Poetry Society of Tennessee’s Best of Fest. She lives in Sneedville, Tennessee. More at danitadodson.com.

Plumage

20 February 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Sam Barbee

The red cardinal, whose head-feathers
have fallen out, sits on the wooden fence.

He notices our yard full of movement, shapes
big and small imparting various shades –

blue sky with white clouds, zinnias.
Dogwood wavers with breeze he does not see.

Motionless, one coarse and knotted branch
cradles the nest he feeds. The birdbath

bends a murky prism, a reflection of scruff
on his grey-red tuft. Unlike full-feathered

finches, and pileated cousins pecking a maple’s trunk,
he can only imagine a proper bonnet of feathers –

not molt or baldness from mites. Not scar
of low-branch wound. Perches content without

storybook color or crest. His grandeur resets
the order. A quest for tranquil, preening wings

on the wooden fence. Sanctified to guard
against squirrels or Cooper Hawk carnage,

he flaps to the nest of hatchlings,
content with reimagined beauty.

Sam Barbee’s newest collection is Apertures of Voluptuous Force (Redhawk Publishing, 2022). He has three previous poetry collections, including That Rain We Needed (Press 53, 2016), a nominee for the Roanoke-Chowan Award as one of North Carolina’s best poetry collections of 2016; he is a two-time Pushcart nominee.

Walking with a Leaf in Winter

17 February 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Christine Andersen

I don’t know where it came from
since the tree limbs around me were bare—

the leaf was slight, brown,
jagged at the edges

like a scrap torn from
a paper bag,

but there it was beside me
drifting on a cold, slow,

February wind,
keeping pace

as if we were connected
by a slender thread,

an odd companion,
wafting,

remarkable as a sunset,
easy, debonair

falling away with a wink
too elegant for words.

Christine Andersen is a retired dyslexia specialist who hikes daily in the Connecticut woods with her five dogs, pen and pad in pocket. Publications include the Comstock, The Awakenings, New Plains and Gyroscope Reviews, Slab, and Glimpse, among others. She won the 2024 American Writers Review Poetry Contest.

Climbing Tree

15 February 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Ava Spampanato

The last time I sat in the hallowed out nook of climbing tree was a warm spring afternoon
The grass was dappled with buttercups
while cousins ran through sprinklers rainbow mirage
sidewalk chalk dusted knees
made wishes on dandelion cotton breeze

Each pappus packed with hopes of
Cotton candy castles
and pirate treasure

When our wishes got tangled amongst the leaves of climbing tree
My pollinated fingers grasped onto thick belly out branches
While the splintered brown bark aged my youthful step

I tried to grab each childlike dream and cup them in my palms
But the mourning doves claws captured each cotton desire
And her soft coos reminded us our days of childhood bliss were fleeting

Ava Spampanato is a surfer from the Jersey shore, and currently writes from South Florida. Her writing is inspired by the ocean and the natural elements around her.

In a far field

13 February 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Mark Clemens

for Charles Everett Clemens, 1922-1992

The ground
where my father lies
by now has settled some.

The clods
that tumbled moist
from a digger’s spade three decades past
by now have crumbled
as he crumbled some
between his fingers in the garden
so long ago.

The sod
that flourished green upon his grave
by now has withered at the fringe
and a few hard brown blades
bristle in the wind.

The flowers
though faded pale
and clasped dry against the coffin lid
are yet the flowers his loving flesh
laid white and fresh
within his final grasp.

And in a ruffling breeze beneath sun-shot clouds
where sparrows harry dumb black crows
birds feel free to light upon his plot
to hop and, pausing, bend eyes sidewise
for some grub from his piece of earth
one place like any other
down the mounded rows.

Good ground
the ground where my father lies.
lovely ground
by now.

Born in Missouri and raised in Iowa, Mark Clemens earned an M.F.A. from the University of Montana. Through the following years, he wrote part-time while working at newspapers, state agencies, and colleges. Now he writes full-time where he lives on the Quimper Peninsula by the Salish Sea in Washington State.

Spaces

10 February 2025 / Editor

Fiction by Christine Breede

My son has outgrown me. He leans down for a fleeting hug, then turns away; he’s already on his way out again. I stand with both hands on my hips, eyes following him, seeing a boy in a man’s body. Where are you going?

Maybe this is a story about destinations.

We are not talking, I say. Why can’t we sit and talk? What’s going on? I ask. My son is making plans with a friend on the phone, and I am asking him to speak to me—now.

Maybe this is a story about making plans.

I buy new books, schedule yoga classes and getaways. I see my friends, spend quality time with my partner, eat out and eat in, plant herbs, work more than I should. I’m energized in the morning and drained by nightfall when I see his room empty.

Maybe this story is about newness.

I am listening to my son’s voice change. I am watching him cook pasta al dente and call the hairdresser himself. He talks to my mother whenever we visit, making her laugh—until he stands at her grave, now speaking to her in a whisper. We miss her and her voice on the phone, unmistakable above all others. I feel the void and the void growing.

Maybe voices are the story.

I remind my son of when we took a gondola in Venice, boy and mom, and after a minute of rocking in the dark canal, before we even left the pier, he closed his eyes. I remember this, he says. What can you remember? I say. You didn’t see a thing. I know, he says, that’s what I remember.

Maybe remembering is the story.

Pictures from years ago pop up on my phone. My son looking at a pumpkin as if it were an oracle. His mister spy eyes under ruler-straight bangs no one understood but him. The two of us with ice cream cones and big smiles. My head leaning on his shoulder after a birthday dinner.

Maybe this story is about appreciation.

Everything about him is as it should be. I have a strong sense of his being. He has a strong sense of his being. But I don’t know where we are.

Maybe fear is the story.

I am watching my son grow big and myself grow old. It’s about aging with grace, someone says. Who the hell ages gracefully? It’s about aging with mischief, with bold beliefs, with a heart in the right place, I tell myself on a good day.

Maybe courage is the story.

His eyes are telling me his heart is in the right place. His stillness is telling me I need to listen. I watch him get ready to go out. I resist an impulse to go over to him, resist again. I feel the space between us and the space within me.

Maybe this story is about listening to space.

Christine Breede writes long, short, and very short fiction. Her work has been recognized by several leading contests. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2020 and has won the 2022 Bumble Bee Flash Fiction Contest. Working and collaborating with fellow writers is one of the things she enjoys most.

The Bluebird Word