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The Books We’ll Never Read

15 February 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Francis Conlon

Sometimes the jacket stands alone,
A book cover with title embossed,
The text itself seems a weighty tome,
Whose message long ago was tossed.

Yet, I love a place with books,
Of course, there’s a fine library,
With small study spots in the nooks,
And, study of old thoughts contrary.

Is there a place—a writer’s cemetery?
Old thoughts and books gather about,
Ideas antiquated little scary,
In grumbling whispers but no shout?

So dusty is the old collection,
Stacks with volumes musty,
Nothing overdue in this section,
Just old spirits and grammar fusty.

Francis Conlon is a retired teacher living in Salt Lake City, Utah.

that’s enough

13 February 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Corey Bryan

I’d walk again through icy rain
to eat a chicken salad sandwich on
the world’s driest bread with you
just one more time.
I’d pretend to like seafood and say all
the right things like, “shrimp are the blue collar
workers of the ocean and it feels bad to eat them
but this cocktail sauce is way too good”
and stuff my face.
I’d support everything you
say no questions asked even if you do get a
tiny bit conspiratorial after the third glass
of the house red.
I’d tear down those reality tv show posters
they hung up on Boulevard
which cover your favorite piece of graffiti.
I’d cook you dinner
and buy all your favorite ingredients like
watermelon radishes and dinosaur kale and all the
other vegetables that sound crazy like that.
I’d watch all those shark
documentaries you love and
the more I think about it the more I think I’d
punch a shark in the nose, saddle him up
and take off for Lisbon where you are
now and say to you
“I hate shrimp and watermelon radish
and red wine and graffiti and I especially
hate dry bread
but I love you and I think
that’s enough.”

Corey Bryan is a fourth year student at Georgia State University majoring in Rhetoric and Composition. He is currently writing daily poetry prompts, along with some original poems, with a friend of his at poetryispretentious.com. He has one poem forthcoming at Sage Cigarettes Magazine titled “her kind of love”.

Thumbing a Ride

12 February 2023 / Editor

Fiction by Alison Arthur

She shifts uncomfortably in the deeply upholstered seat. Perhaps she should not have accepted the ride, but it’s too late for second thoughts now.

He pilots the car down the country road, the sun escaping below the horizon in the rearview mirror. There is a smell. Mints and something else she can’t quite place. Perhaps shaving cream or soap. Desperation? Can you smell desperation, she wonders?

The conversation is cordial, but cautious. He wants to know where she is going, where she came from, why she is on the road thumbing a lift. She answers politely, but minimally, not sure of her situation. But he seems more paternal in his concern than intrusive. She begins to relax, sinking into the plush upholstery, her sense of dread subsiding.

He tells her he is a distributor for car parts, traveling between stores. Often with only his own thoughts to occupy him, he is happy for some companionship. When they stop for gas, he returns to the car with packaged sandwiches and juice that he shares with her. “You look a little hungry,” he says with fatherly concern. The conversation is lighter now, and she dozes for a while, hunger satiated and fear assuaged.

When she wakes, it is dark. She is unsure where they are. A backroad with no street lights, swirling mist caught in the headlights in the chill night air. Noticing that she has stirred, he chuckles and says, “Nice to see you are feeling so comfortable. Guess you have decided I’m not a serial killer.”

She straightens herself in her seat, shaking off sleep, and turns her face to him. “Oh yes, quite sure,” she replies. “After all, what are the chances there would be two of us in the same car.”

Alison Arthur is an emerging flash fiction author residing in Nova Scotia, Canada. Read earlier work from the August 2022 Issue of The Bluebird Word.

Feather Meme

10 February 2023 / Editor

Special Selection for One-year anniversary issue

Poetry by Marianne Brems

Hikers before me have left feathers
stuck in the cracks of a wooden trail marker
at a junction.
Small feathers with downy barbs
flutter in the fall breeze
where delicate shafts may not hold.
Large feathers with curled edges
and sturdier shafts sit deep and solid.

As memes they stand
to carry the import of one road taken,
not another,
on this day, not that.
This small family of Kilroy was Here
gather in good company
to speak to a public not yet come,
inviting them to leave their own mark
across a waiting space.

Marianne Brems is the author of three poetry chapbooks from Finishing Line Press. The most recent, In Its Own Time, is forthcoming in 2023. Her poems have also appeared in literary journals including Nightingale & Sparrow, The Sunlight Press, The Lake, and Green Ink Poetry. Website: www.mariannebrems.com.

small

8 February 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Michele Johnson

1. Not large, comparatively less-than, insignificant (see also: slight, tenuous, negligible)

You were small to begin with. During freshman year, your health professor has everyone perform a skinfold test to calculate their BMI. He announces yours in front of the class. The room is filled with desks and the increasing distance between them. His voice sounds far away: You’ll have babies soon. Eat for them.

2. Minor in influence or power, unlikely to cause problems (see also: secondary, inferior) 3. Humiliated, as in (H)e made me feel small.

You are so small that men hold the door for you. This is called chivalry, a code of conduct named after a kingdom built high in the sky on an invisible pedestal. In the center of this kingdom is a town populated by little women who are seemingly never hungry, owing to a litanous supply of apples, which are espaliered along well-swept streets. The women navigate (never prune) the canon of sturdy trellises. Sticky, sweet juice drips from their chins.

You’d think it difficult to travel to, but Chivalry is actually harder to return from. A (M)an you used to worship blamed altitude sickness.

4. Operating on a limited scale 5. Young (see also: underdeveloped, stunted, child-like)

It’s obvious now; you’re getting smaller. After lying in bed for six weeks, there’s a full-inch discrepancy between the tips of your protruding hip bones and the salvation in your womb. Your left hand rests on a Ziplock bag warm with a few tablespoons of foamy yellow bile. Your husband offers to buy anything you might keep down. When he returns, he doesn’t tell you he stopped for General Tso’s chicken and ate it in the car. He doesn’t have to. You lose a few more tablespoons of yourself to the Ziplock bag.

Days later, the nurse tells you if you don’t eat we’ll have to put you in the hospital. Her breath stinks of fermented apples. You wonder why she’s scolding you as if you were a child.

6. Weak (see also: fragile, frail, ashamed)

Signs and Symptoms of Hyperemesis Gravidarum:

Severe nausea and vomiting
Weight loss of 5% or more of pre-pregnancy weight
Food aversions
Extreme fatigue
Confusion
Anxiety/depression
Increased ~~salvation~~ salivation

Though there’s no proven cause of hyperemesis gravidarum, researchers suggest several possibilities. These include genetics, rising levels of a hormone called human chorionic gonadotropin, and increased estrogen and progesterone. If you weren’t so small, you’d add to their list:

eating affected apples
altitude sickness

7. To dwindle, as in * . . . smalled till she was nought at all.^{^[1]}

Years of altitude sickness (?) give you intestinal metaplasia, putting you at high risk of stomach cancer. Your physician instructs you to take smaller and smaller bites, which you do because you love your husband and five children (They, too, have sworn off all varieties of apples).

You somehow lose another ten pounds and wonder if this is how you will finally disappear.

^{^[1]} From “The Clock of the Years” by Thomas Hardy (1916).

Michele Johnson (she/her) (Instagram: @thelyricalwild) is an emerging writer living in the Cascade Mountains of Washington state with her husband and five unschooled kids. As an introvert, she enjoys exploring both the Pacific Northwest backcountry and her vast inner world, and she sometimes confuses the two.

The Hip

6 February 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Dawn L. C. Miller

Her ashes came to her grown daughters in a lovely box,
mahogany and rosewood,
accompanied by another box, containing
what had sustained her past the pain,
preserved her from disability,
entitled her to a parking permit.
It was her hip. Titanium and some ceramic.

Clarise and Susanne stared at it gleaming on the red velvet.
“It’s her hip,” murmured Clarise.
“Of course it is,” stated Susanne. “I can see that.”
“What are we supposed to do with it?” continued Clarise.
“Well, we can’t scatter it with her ashes. Someone might find it.”
They stared some more.
Together they debated all evening, agreeing on nothing.

The next morning it gleamed at them from the mantle.
Without looking at it,
in between angry silences,
and tears,
they talked.

The memories of places their mother had never been
floated into the morning light.
The seashore, when she stayed behind to take care of things at home.
The mountains she did not go with them to see:
no need to pay extra fare.
All the beauty and the music of far cities,
too expensive.
“Let’s take her there now!” they both said together.

And the journeys began.
Perched on a gunnel, their mother’s hip resounded with sea sounds.
Lost in the luggage for three days in Kenya,
Mother was found at last by a drug sniffing dog.
She rolled off into the snow at an Austrian ski resort,
but sat gleaming on a chair in the best restaurant in Paris
as her daughters laughed and toasted and remembered.

Dawn L. C. Miller has been writing poetry since childhood. Her poems have been published in Poetic Hours and Pegasus Review. She enjoys living on Maryland’s Eastern Shore with her two cats and orchids.

Dear Chair

5 February 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Susan Hodara

I never sit on you, but you sit beside me day after day while I work at my desk. I sit on the big black swivel-y chair, whose vinyl surface the cats pockmarked when they were kittens. I roll into and away from the desk as I think. You remain still; the only part of you not tucked beneath the tabletop is your gently rounded back.

You are my witness. You watch as my fingers graze my keyboard, flurrying then pausing. Do you notice that when I stop, my eyes travel upward to gaze out the window in front of me? There is much to see out there. Cars passing, neighbors jogging, the mail truck gliding up to our mailbox across the street. At night, the glow of flashlights dancing before dogwalkers. Wind, rain, snow. Our Japanese maple, branches bare now but soon to sprout crimson buds and later to obscure my view with its bouquet of fluttering red. Then I start up again – tap tap tap, the sound of unspooling words.

You are wooden, old-fashioned, sturdy. You are painted an unnamable color – part green, part gray, part ochre, flecked in places, scuffed, with three faded red blotches on the edge of your seat. I don’t know how they got there. I don’t know how you got here. Were you in this room when it was Sofie’s bedroom, when I came in here each evening to kiss her goodnight? I do know I chose you to be next to me, out of all the other chairs.

You are the only one who hears my telephone conversations, who watches as I get up and walk over to peer at myself in the mirror behind me. You see me shuffling between emails and articles and online shopping, interrupting myself when I can’t maintain a thought. You see me meditating, eyes closed, headphones in my ears. You see me sipping coffee from my red flowered cup in the morning, and then, after lunch, tea from the heavy mug I brought home from some town along the Pacific Coast Highway, swirls of blue and white with a sad chip at the top of the handle. Eating my salad out of a round stainless steel bowl, wiping my fingers on a crumpled white paper napkin so I can type as I chew. The food grounds me, as do the coffee and tea.

Your back is a curve of wood resting on six turned spokes. There is a slot carved out in the center, its inside edges smoothed, big enough to insert a small hand that might want to drag you somewhere or lift you up. But you never move. You wait silently when, sometimes in the late afternoon, I slip under the covers of Sofie’s old twin bed, still where it was when she was growing up. If I fall asleep for half an hour, I am pleased that I rested, assured that my brain will be more forthcoming in the aftermath.

You are beside me as I arrange my calendar, pay my bills, make my doctor appointments. Teach my Zoom students. Finish a writing assignment and hit send, then feel the freedom I’ll have for a few days before I tackle my next one. And, as I sit beside you, you are present while the deepest, most honest parts of my life unfold.

You are my “extra” chair, ready for a guest who might want to sit with me to keep me company or to look at my computer with me. But guests are rare at this desk; it is my place of treasured solitude. You are squat and unintimidating. Welcoming. Pushed into place, nearly hidden. Always there.

Susan Hodara is a journalist, memoirist and educator. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times and more. Her short memoirs are published in assorted literary journals. She is co-author of “Still Here Thinking of You” (Big Table Publishing, 2013). She has taught memoir writing for many years. Visit www.susanhodara.com.

beach sand — Photo by Josh Sorenson on Pexels.com

Reflected Light

3 February 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Wendy Bloom

I saw the light reflecting on a piece of something buried in the loamy soil
When I looked closely, I realized it was a piece of myself
That I had buried away for darker days

Filled with darkness and despair
In a world filled with the tragic
It had fallen out of me, and I thought it was gone forever
But it was lying right in front of me

I grasped it in my hand
This shiny piece of myself
I turned it over and over
And rubbed my fingers against its slick surface

I decided to swallow it
To bring it back home to the center of my emptiness
To fill this hole with something that glistened
And sang beautiful music to my heart

It became one with me once again
And I smiled as I heard it laughing
Because it had been seeking me for so long
And had finally made its way back home

Wendy Bloom is an emerging writer who has written numerous poems, short stories, and essays on a wide variety of topics since childhood. She has been published in her local newspaper and “Reflected Light” is her first published poem.

Resolutions

1 February 2023 / Editor

Special Selection for one-year Anniversary Issue

Nonfiction by Heather Bartos

I go out for a run on the morning of New Year’s Day. There’s a fog advisory and everything more than ten feet away is blurred, a smudge, too far in the future to bother with. The things I can see are chilly and clammy and gray.

On the way back, once my three laps are done, I walk over to my garden. It’s not much more colorful than the rest of the neighborhood, a shush in a silent library. I make a halfhearted promise that I’ll plant those buttercup bulbs I bought in October later today if it doesn’t rain. Working out here doesn’t sound too appealing.

My plants aren’t stupid. They know this is the wrong time, that more cold and dark is coming, and that the proper and logical thing to do is roll back over and go to sleep until it becomes the right time. Their new year is a few months out yet, when the days lengthen and stretch and the soil warms up. The calendar date today means nothing to them.

Instead of lingering in bed, in their warm nests of blankets, the humans around me are ready to take on New Year’s resolutions. They are facing the gray skies with grit, with new gym memberships and steely purpose. They will wrestle time to the ground, pin it down, make it produce. The holiday feasting is done, the gifts are unwrapped, the decorations and lights are gone. There’s no cheery distraction, only the worship of discipline and sharp resolve, our egos feathered and puffed on full display, challenging ourselves.

The plants are probably wiser.

But I’m a human being, and I make resolutions. I take them seriously and make charts and boxes. And you know what? More years than not, I meet them.

“I’m growing taller this year than last year,” says the peach dahlia. “Really. I’m going to do it. Just watch.”

“I’ll make more buds this year,” says the lavender. “I’ve learned my lesson, being so close to the street during that last ice storm. Gotta plan ahead.”

“I think I’m going to hire than personal trainer and drop twenty pounds,” says the vine maple.

Of course, they are silent. They know not to make promises. They know that they are at the mercy of the weather, vulnerable to insects, dependent on the hummingbirds and the bees and the butterflies.

And so are the humans. We like to think it’s all about us, all up to us, our own striving and effort and conquests, as if time and the future are uncharted territories and all we have to do is conquer them and bend them to our will.

I can’t imagine subjecting my garden to the kind of discipline humans go through. I can’t imagine coming out here and screaming military chants at my tulips.

“Booyah! Man up and do it again!”

“Bloom faster, damnit! Hit the ground and give me twenty!”

There’s a cheering and encouraging that goes on out here on quiet afternoons and early mornings, but it’s one based on reverent observation, a parent watching their toddler learn to walk, listening as babbling becomes words.

And if we think it’s all up to us to sculpt this blobby future into something fitter, something more shapely, then it’s all on us when we don’t succeed, and that may not be true. If we take all the credit when we succeed, that only reinforces that we think we’re in charge instead of looking at how circumstances shaped either outcome.

We are not at the center, as much as we delude ourselves, pressure ourselves into thinking and wanting to believe otherwise. I can plant the buttercup bulbs, but a million little connections have to happen in order for them to grow, and I’m in control of very few of them.

Should we even bother to plant anything, then? Should we bother to make goals if so many other forces can interfere?

Of course we should. It’s our partnership with whatever creates us, whatever mysterious forces lead us forward. It’s our hand extended halfway, into the fog, where we can’t see what’s out there. But no plant ever bloomed because it was screamed at, starved, or otherwise subjected to extreme measures. Human beings are no different.

So I’ll go plant those buttercups. Even though I didn’t get to it yesterday because I was napping on the couch, I resolve I will do it today. I’ll extend a tentative hand out to whatever may want to hold it.

Heather Bartos has published essays in Fatal Flaw, Stoneboat Literary Journal, HerStry, and The Bluebird Word, and upcoming in McNeese Review. Her fiction has been in The Dillydoun Review, The Closed Eye Open, Tangled Locks Journal, and elsewhere, and won first place in the Baltimore Review 2022 Micro Lit Contest.

leafless tree on grass field — Photo by Johannes Plenio on Pexels.com

Rooting

30 January 2023 / Editor

Fiction by Elodie Barnes

The wind is strange tonight. Sharp-edged, soft-howling. Icy tendrils carrying pinpricks of stars from the north. Leaves lie half-rotted, frozen mid-tumble. The soil is hard, unyielding, the solstice opposite of summer’s rich dampness. I soaked it up then, drank in the warmth under skies that darted with birds, their feathers inking songs onto blue that then faded with dusk. I can hear them rustling now, no longer singing, as uncertain as I am. Their claws grip my branches; branches that are naked now from the onslaught of winter, but no longer tender, no longer bloody with bursting buds and the rough scratching of owls. There is no skin left. Still, this wind makes me shiver. None of us are used to wind coming from the north.

At one time, I barely knew the wind at all. I was a child, knowing only that one day I would be gifted a seedling. A seedling that would grow as I grew, each of our bodies mimicking the channels and contours of the other until one day there would be no difference. One day I would take root in a place called home, a place from which I could never stray. I didn’t want it then. I didn’t want a home away from my mother; she never settled, so why should I? I never questioned the small plant of my mother’s that always sat on our kitchen windowsill, green and sickly and yet still trimmed every year by my father. Pruned, shaped, stunted. A tree smothered to a sapling.

She comes, sometimes, and I try to offer her the shelter I never could as a child. A blanket of branches, a waterfall of sunlight cascading through leaves. She talks, and I no longer understand. There are some words I remember – home, strong, love – but I don’t know whether those words came from her or me, and I’m even less sure of what they mean now that the north is gusting, ripping against my roots on their weakest side. The side that faces backwards; the side that knows there are too many questions about survival I never knew I needed to ask; too many questions I never dreamed she would have the answers to. Like why the winds suddenly change direction. What to do when home no longer feels safe. How to hold on, when it feels like winter will never end.

Elodie Barnes is a writer and editor living in the UK. Her short fiction has been widely published, including in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology. She is Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, and is working on a collection of short stories. Find her online at elodierosebarnes.weebly.com.

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