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House Hunting

17 July 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Lana Hechtman Ayers

We’re looking for something spacious
as the interior of a poem,
so roomy you can get lost in its images,
hallways that roam along
to unexpected turns of phrase.

We’re hoping to find something close
to all the conveniences—
fresh air perfumed with meter,
trees that tousle their limbs
seductively in breezes,
hills curvaceous as villanelles.

We’re searching for a place that fits
our personalities—a kitchen of clean
steam and courtesy, delectable soups
and sestinas bubbling on the stove,
a bath where unsullied truth
freely flows from all the taps,
a bedroom that masters
the art of moon phases and meteors.

We’re seeking a home we can fill with
blankets, dog fur, cat fur, the enjambment
of too many books.
A home that will hold steady looks,
silly askance glances,
even a few cross words once in a while.

A home that weathers moods well,
the way streams wear every broken rock
down to pebble shine.

We don’t mind winding avenues
of rhyme, and have no preference
about windows, so long as they’re
always wide and wise.

We don’t care for one-way stairs,
though being able to stare at a view
of empathy is essential.

We want a home in which light
is as bright as the scent of lavender,
a home where the sound of rain
on the roof is our hearts’ sonnet
as our arms reach for one another
in the night.

And we want a home where the silence,
however rare, is always and ever holy.

Lana Hechtman Ayers, MFA, has shepherded over eighty poetry volumes into print in her role as managing editor for three small presses. Her work appears in print and online in places such as Rattle, Snake Nation Review, and Verse Daily, as well as in her nine collections.

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Fable of Love on Fire

15 July 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Alexander Etheridge

In another season, another world—
that lost moment, we ran into nights
of shudder and crucible, autumn

and oceans—our love
barely risen out of its roots.
We stepped breathlessly

into a century of summers.
We watched eternal changes
of the magic aster flower

and the magic aspen tree
in the temple of dawns, open on all sides
to white spangled light—

Just before black asteroids
crowded our sun. The temple columns
cracked under ice, and thorny vines

choked the roads.
As the trees crawled out
to drown themselves in the tide,

we began our dying
in the black burning plains,
our few seconds of love gone

into a child’s book of fables.

Alexander Etheridge has been developing his poems and translations since 1998. His poems have been featured in Wilderness House Literary Review, Cerasus Journal, The Cafe Review, The Madrigal, Abridged Magazine, Susurrus Magazine, The Journal, and others. He was the winner of the Struck Match Poetry Prize in 1999.

My grandmother in one sentence

13 July 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Reena Kapoor

When she died I was well into engineering college battling my own confusions, resisting demands on my loyalty from family, country, love and looking ahead with such desperation that I refused to bother with any kind of history, even that which surrounded me protruding from the earth in every stone at the shallowest dig, brimming over walls of old buildings awaiting renovation, bubbling up in street corners among hawkers of food, color and cloth in of one of the most history laden cities of the world so much so that part of the city had been named “New” Delhi – even this naming was by now history – in an eagerness to cast off the old and tell the world we were new and arrived and secular and departed from our native soil and brothers and concerns and even this departure came back to haunt us years later but we didn’t know it then in the same way that I didn’t know she would come back to me later in life so when at the sight of her body a shaking sob broke through my worldly concerns and forward-focused attentions, I involuntarily reached out to touch her face, causing all the micromanaging elders around me to yell, “don’t touch the body” for now she was just “the body” and not the matriarch she had once been, which they didn’t like to admit she hadn’t been in over a decade since she was forced to live not on her own terms but those of her children within their rules and fences and with Alzheimer’s merciless dissolution of her identity, the same one whose sense and strength had built and rebuilt all our lives when the fates had come knocking to extract usurious debts which she could be held responsible for only as much as any woman in a society that made it a habit of heaping responsibility and duty and tradition and religious stricture without agency at her door can be, but which were now all paid or abandoned in this final departure so all her beneficiaries could pretend to pay one last homage to her glorious past and her sacrifice, iron will and fearlessness, except at that age I wanted no part of this remembering because I had heard this ancient history umpteen times and knew it would devolve into a multilevel contest of tears and grief that uselessly distracted me from my singular focus of looking ahead to places my life was going to go where no one would want to know my tired history or even more tiresome stories of why my grandmother was forced to flee Peshawar, her home, her mohalla, her town of generational soils and how a woman who was barely fifth grade educated in a language and script whose use was confined to a daily reading of her holy book so much so that none of her children bothered to learn it and I most certainly did not except for the recitation of prayers that she taught my sister and I as children called paath which literally means “lesson” beginning with Ik Onkar (there is only one god) which I strategically utilized before school exams even as I was slowly turning atheist, something I never told her, I don’t think, but now in my middle age as I look for my voice and myself in the universe and wonder what I will leave behind, she often comes back to me and when I confess my atheism to her and that I have no use for religion and don’t find bliss in the paath she taught me, although I do remember it all, she simply ignores my protestations proceeding on to tell me qissas from her time and her journeys and when I marvel at her refusal to be cynical until the end, her kindness even to those who came to steal from her, and her steadfast attention to dharma in the face of insurmountable odds she simply smiles saying these are the only paaths I need remember.

[Author Note: paath = lesson; qissa = story; dharma = duty or the right thing to do]

Reena Kapoor grew up all over India. Her poetry collection Arrivals & Departures reflects this wandering sensibility. Work has appeared in Tiny Seed Journal, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Visible Magazine, Poet’s Choice and India Currents. EnActe Arts produced four of her plays in 2021. Visit arrivalsanddepartures.substack.com/.

before the sky

11 July 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Ken Cathers

you sit on the handlebars
I’ll pedal like crazy

we’ll be a great fabled bird
on a dirt road journey

hang onto the wind
my little one, hang on

nothing can
catch us now

we will be home
long before

the sky can open
and crush our joy
with thunder

Ken Cathers lives on Vancouver Island off the west coast of Canada and has spent much of his life working in the forest industry. He has been writing for several decades and has seven books of poetry. Several poems have appeared in Impspired (England) and the MacGuffin (U.S.).

The Greeting

10 July 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Leslie Dianne

I stop time
with words
and images
I shake
loose
sleepy syllables
and let them nudge
the atmosphere
I fill this space
with myself in another shape
and I am letting you know
that the
flicker of joy
that passes in the breeze
and tickles your memory
that gravityless pull that
makes you want to fly
is me
in a different form
greeting you
saying hello

Leslie Dianne is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, playwright and performer. Her work has been acclaimed internationally at the Harrogate Fringe Festival in Great Britain, The International Arts Festival in Tuscany, Italy and at La Mama in NYC. Her poems appear in Noctivant Press, Moida, Treouvaille Review, Constellate Magazine and elsewhere.

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Someplace Else

8 July 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Valerie Valente

Snails line the slick pavement
like a stagnant post-office queue
They probe the damp air
with gelatinous horns
as if they would enact
a slo-mo battle with the mist

I veer gingerly around them
as they forage in scattered directions,
blindly heading
someplace else
My eyes scrunch tight and I grimace
as I hear the inevitable
crunch of my misstep
A wayward journey swiftly ended
by the grime-laden sole of my shoe.

I pause to contemplate
my habitual direction,
a path so repetitiously followed
that my muscle-memory
just pulls me along
I point my face skywards,
feel the mist upon my cheeks,
and reverently turn towards
the silver moon’s beacon
With a tentative step
I abandon all direction,
blindly heading
someplace else

Valerie Valente’s first love was poetry; she has been writing since the age of nine. Valerie has self-published two children’s stories. She is now launching a creative writing workshop business, Kist Creative, which she hopes will expose people to the joyful, therapeutic benefits of tapping into their imaginative energies.

Sweeter Than Your Name

6 July 2022 / Editor

Fiction by Josephine Greenland

She can taste them as she puts the jars on the shelf. Plush blueberries, sweetened with sugar, exploding on her tongue like a thousand desserts. Her best batch yet, too good to be eaten, too good for the stale biscuits on the table. They could belong in a shop, in those shiny glass jars—gherkin jars she waited for the family to finish. Washed and scrubbed, to erase the brine residue. Polished so the glass can be used as a mirror. Labelled and dated, Blueberries by Ruth, July 1932, in a longhand rivalling her father’s.

‘Aren’t you done yet?’

Another face in the glass, battling her for room. Blonde and bright where she is red-haired and dull.

Mary, apple of father’s eye. Faultless, no matter what she does. ‘You promised you’d play with us.’

Us. Mary and the merchant’s daughter, who eats store-bought jam with a silver spoon, who makes Mary forget where she belongs. Ruth motions around her. ‘I have to clean up.’

‘Then let me taste!’

‘I’m saving the jam.’

‘Why?’

Because of the sigh of an empty purse. The smoke and liquor on father’s breath. The snatching of their savings when he wants more. The curses, the bruises. The suffering no mother should endure.

Ruth goes to the sink. ‘Because butter and cheese are running low.’ Mary’s been away too long, she wouldn’t understand why they can’t buy more. ‘And mother loves it.’

Mary’s eyes flash. ‘I bet father hates it.’ She edges up to the cupboard. ‘No one cares about your jam.’

Like a bird taking flight, she leaps and grabs two jars. Empties them out the window as Ruth rushes to pin her down. Their screams, like their bodies, twisting round each other.

And swarming over the jam outside, the ants.

Josephine Greenland is a Swedish-British writer from Eskilstuna, Sweden, with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Birmingham. Her debut novel, Embers, was published by Unbound in 2021. She has won and been shortlisted in five writing contests, and had work published in various online and print magazines.

Upwellings

4 July 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Chris A. Smith

The wind is wild and self-willed,
and I mark its passage through the trees,
shaking them like marionettes,
the neighbor’s rainbow flag snapping with each gust.
High-pressure systems, temperature inversions,
ocean upwellings, the Bernoulli effect—
the language of meteorology fills my head.
Still, there’s mystery in the wind’s rough grip.

Next to me on the couch a sleeping cat,
an ouroboros of fur, snoring lightly.
I scratch behind his ears and,
still half-asleep, he flexes his paws,
his tiny motor rumbling to life.
He’s warm, and smells of sleep,
whiskers twitching, eyes dancing behind his eyelids.
I watch the trees tremble, and try to imagine his dreams.

Chris A. Smith is a writer in San Francisco. Though trained as a journalist–he’s reported on topics ranging from African acid rock to killer asteroids to revolutionary movements–he also writes fiction and poetry. Find him at chrisasmith.net.

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Jukebox

3 July 2022 / Editor

Poetry by C.T. Holte

Most nights, I am a jukebox.
Tunes play from the stash in my head—
doo-wop to Debussy,
Bach to Beach Boys—
chosen by a mysterious mechanism
and repeated as many times
as the system specifies:
no Next button,
no Mute switch,
no Off to let me sleep.

The selection varies:
last night, the top hit
was Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus,
reprise of a piece I had sung recently
at a choral workshop;
tonight, perhaps a favorite or two
from American Bandstand
or Casey Casem’s top forty countdown.

Music and memory are amazing gifts,
even at the price of sleep interrupted
by random hours of Deck the Halls
at any time of the year.

C. T. Holte grew up without color TV and played along creeks and in cornfields. He has been a teacher and editor, and now migrates between New Mexico and a tiny New Hampshire cabin. His poetry is found in Words, California Quarterly, Months to Years, Pensive, and elsewhere.

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Paperboy

2 July 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Cosmo Goldsmith

From my bedroom window, overlooking
this tableau stillness of sheds and fields,
there is movement below
among the avenue of chestnut trees.

A paperboy ghosting through stippled shade,
luminous orange postbag strapped tightly
across his thin shoulders, first job perhaps,
so young he seems, restless and impatient,
eager to complete his round on schedule,
and keep in check the heavy tread of time,
those allotted hours and binding routines.

This is the crossover point he has reached
where suburbs give way and the fields begin;
a whole future unfolding before him
in misted prospects of treetops and hills.

And all I can do is watch and observe
from the opposite end of the telescope,
from the shrinking lenses of my vision,
for all my outlooks are gently receding.

The world out there belongs to him.

Cosmo Goldsmith is a ‘semi-retired’ English teacher with a passion for all forms of creative writing. He has taught in both the UK and Greece and still divides his time between these two countries.

The Bluebird Word