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How the Poems Land

1 November 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Kersten Christianson

We share the wind in this early morning hour,
the new leaves of the Japanese Maple, crimson,
skin-soft, fibrillate in genial breeze, fluctuate
in tandem with fish kite, murmuring wind chime,

and to the south, a poet friend meanders her rocky
shore, her dogs advance and retreat, loop to follow
each new scent revealed by tide and temperature,
while she gathers words among popweed, shell

debris. Poetry exists in breath, without formula.
Its thoughts gather like sea foam, words emerge
with the surface and bob of harbor seal’s head,
its eyes scanning shoreline, until poetic lines

land in a whisper-whoosh of baby waves shuffling
into the space between. The spring has been a dark
October, rain repeated by rain, yet the leaves green,
red-breasted robins frolic, the poems need writing.

Kersten Christianson derives inspiration from wild, wanderings, and road trips. Her newest poetry collection, The Ordering of Stars, will publish with Sheila-Na-Gig in fall 2025. Kersten lives in Sitka, Alaska. She eyeballs tides, shops Old Harbor Books, and hoards smooth ink pens.

Photo by Carlos Andres Gomez on Unsplash

The Brightest Stars Burn Fastest

1 November 2025 / Editor

Fiction by Richard Gotti

Your oil paints and soiled rags, my unfinished story. Your newspapers in plastic sleeves, my underwear limp in the dryer. Your cats on the kitchen table nibbling the birthday tulips we forgot to bring. Your daughter at her father’s house crying to go with us. The new moon rises.

We drive east eating turkey sandwiches, the moon roof open to the March-chilled air and Etta James singing How Deep is the Ocean— the ocean we’re seeking this first weekend of spring. Then the Cape Cod Canal’s charcoal waters, white-veined from lights on the Sagamore Bridge. On Route Six four lanes dwindle to two. Dunes grow. Suddenly harbor lights glister beyond like blue stars scattering light in the invisible turbulence.

Richard Gotti’s short fiction has appeared in Chautauqua, Literature Today and The RavensPerch. A finalist in the Lost in Words international fiction contest, he co-authored the nonfiction book, Overcoming Regret. His plays have been performed in New York’s Hudson Valley and Finger Lakes.

Hood

1 November 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Shaymaa Mahmoud and John Brantingham

My people immigrated here
from a little town near Nottingham Forest
and in the high romance

of childhood, I decided
that I must have Robin Hood’s
blood inside me

whether Robin Hood existed or not.
And if he did, I suppose I do
and probably the sheriff

of Nottingham and Little John
and whatever heroes and villains
and royalty and peasants,

and I suppose none of this matters.
This was just a boy dreaming
that he could be heroic,

and I don’t want to be a hero
anymore. My dead whisper to me
that to be quiet and kind is enough.

Shaymaa Mahmoud and John Brantingham are a father/ daughter writing team with hundreds of publications and over twenty books between them.

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.

The Bluebird Word

Page 5 of 62

How the Poems Land

The Brightest Stars Burn Fastest

Hood

The River God’s Daughter

Lessons Woven in Time

A Walk Through Burchfield’s “Haunted Twilight”

May We Still Sing?

In a Mirror Clearly Now

Charles Reznikoff Appraises the Zinnia

Lessons from Sunflowers

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