Page 51 of 71

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.

The Lamp in the Room

28 January 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Melissa Knox

The bell-shaped white lilies, stretching upward, concealing tiny light bulbs, charmed me. With the delicacy, though not the colors, of Art Nouveau, the lamp softened the room. There was a little white plug. I wondered why it wasn’t plugged in yet.

The furniture was white and mostly square, except for a small black leather sofa near the bed. Between it and the bed, a laminated white bedside table held my husband’s toiletries bag and plastic bottles of pills. The window, which didn’t open, looked out on the white, rectangular buildings of the university hospital. Beyond that, the road filled with pitched-roof German houses, tidy, so much neater than ours. From that road, I figured, he and I could walk to our house in six minutes. But he was never going to walk that road again.

“Oh, look at this pretty lamp!” I said, as the nurse wheeled him to his bed. He cast a blankly sad look at the lamp.

My husband knew what the lamp meant before I did. It didn’t charm him, I now think, because he’d correctly identified it. Where I just saw lovely design, he, raised Catholic, had seen many a virgin-and-child scene strewn with lilies, symbols of life after death. His tumor markers had vaulted up, after a few weeks of dramatic descent. His doctors couldn’t pull any more rabbits out of hats. A few days earlier, he’d had one last immunotherapy. The doctors said it had no side effects. My husband and I sat on his white bed and read the plastic bag listing the side effects, one of which was sudden death.

“It’s just death!” we joked. We spoke of the children and their triumphs, chatted about the one who’d gone vegan for a week and now demanded steak, discussed the wet spot in the left-hand corner of our guest room and how to repair it, held hands. “I couldn’t have asked for a better wife,” said my husband. What came out of my mouth was, “Please send a message to let me know you are okay.” I wished I could have taken that one back. It fell into the whiteness of the room.

The lamp was lit when I returned around one in the morning with my middle child. The room was white, but my husband was yellowing, his lifeless face looking surprised. He’d fallen forward so quickly he knocked over the nurse who was stabilizing his breathing. Just like that, what I knew would happen astonished me when it did—and now the white seemed the blankness of unknowing, the move toward “that undiscovered realm from which no traveler returns,” which we cannot describe—it’s white. Waiting for us to draw on when we get there? Or just nothingness? The room couldn’t tell me; the lilies gleamed—the lamp plugged in, the light shining.

Melissa Knox‘s recent writing appears or is forthcoming in Counterweight, Areo, Parhelion and ACM. Read more of her writing here: https://melissaknox.com

Hiding from the Moon

26 January 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Ben Westlie

On your porch in our stupor
I kept turning to leave
your voice clung to me
holding me like my shadow.

I don’t know if I trembled
from the bitter temperatures
or how your heart kept speaking out
of turn. The green glowing in your irises

like small cauldrons. The yearning bones of your face.

I should’ve hidden from the moon
so there could be no shadows to latch onto.

I should have blamed my drunken blood.
I prayed for deafness upon my heart.

I should have sprinted down your porch stairs
until I reached another state.

My kind of love wasn’t in any of your mirrors.

Your face is what I see when snow becomes
stars from moonlight. When I hear the creak of old
wood on porches. When I see unruly auburn hair.

I turned around to the begging
of your face. A friend is all you wanted.

The moonlight made me beastly.
A feral creature raging and starving.

Ben Westlie holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Publications: Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25 edited by Naomi Shihab Nye, The Fourth River, Third Coast, Atlas and Alice, the tiny journal, Trampset, ArLiJo, Otis Nebula, WhimsicalPoet, DASH, MUSE, Speckled Trout Review, and Superpresent.

Stealing a Night from the Stars

24 January 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Clarence Allan Ebert

Chilled dusk shrouds the afternoon warmth. The sunset’s
pretty purpose draped in blue-haze. Night is coming on fast.

A firecracker bursts in the mouth of a frog. Shy stars crawl
out & realign their constellations. Water spirals down a polished

drain, pink with fresh blood. Curiosity cakes dry mud on loose
laces. Western clouds shaped like brains twin-mingle around

the chimney’s billow. Wafting through the boy’s flared nostrils
the ticklish smoke of parched brick. Peach-colored petals spoking

from a gerbera’s heart, droop under crystal dew. Blind
nightcrawlers slither desperate for longer lifetimes

beyond the flashlight’s halo. In dawn’s first amber wink
on the juniper and spruce the boy’s bait is hooked, a coffee can

of worms in hand. Wading from reed-bank to muddy pond, every
freckle on his cheek praying for another hot breath of sunshine.

His fishing rod in hand, he tosses the line. He’s a brave sum of all
his skinny parts, patient, though his heart’s on fire, anxious

for the bobber’s bob on the still black water. Here, where he caught
a twenty-four-inch bluegill worthy of a tale he’d tell.

Clarence Allan Ebert lives in Silver Spring, Md. He first published a poem in 1978 and since then hasn’t sat at the old oak writing desk in the parlor because he raised four children and spent his time litigating matters. Since COVID, he’s back in the parlor, writing away.

The Blur

22 January 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Joan Potter

Every day when I take off my glasses to brush my teeth, I see my blurry face in the mirror above the sink. I close my eyes before I start brushing so the mint spray won’t hit my sensitive eyes. But when I’m finished and put the glasses back on, the bathroom, the kitchen, the whole apartment is still fuzzy.

My eye condition, macular degeneration, was diagnosed three years ago, and is gradually getting worse; I know it can eventually lead to blindness. At two o’clock in the morning, when I tend to wake up awash in anxiety, I start thinking about what my life will be like as the blurriness, the distortions, the wavy lines and blind spots, keep getting worse. What if I can no longer read, or stream movies on my iPad? I wonder what people do all day when they can’t see.

I’ve been receiving treatment – regular injections into both eyes. It’s not as bad as it sounds. Searching online, I read about aids for people with what is called low vision. There are magnifiers of various sizes, voice-to-text software, text-to-voice software, and other devices I might have to use someday when my world gets foggier.

I try to avoid telling people about my diagnosis. When I do, I feel embarrassed, apologetic, and strangely ashamed. My sons know, of course. They drive me to the supermarket and Target and help me find things on the shelves. They watch me carefully when I’m walking with them to make sure I don’t trip over a bump that I didn’t see. I’ve told a few friends so they’ll understand why I can no longer drive to their houses or take long walks.

One of the first symptoms of this condition is the inability to make out faces of people seen from several feet away. It’s almost impossible for me to recognize acquaintances who are across a room or heading in my direction when I’m walking down the street.

Sometimes I see a friend, Lisa, coming my way. On warm days I know it’s her because she always wears a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, revealing her many tattoos. But one day her sleeves reached her wrists. I didn’t wave and smile as this figure walked toward me; when we were face to face I explained why. Now, whenever I bump into her downtown, she comes really close to me and announces, “I’m Lisa.”

Two weeks ago, a smiling woman waved to me in the library parking lot. I responded with a tentative gesture but couldn’t figure out who she was until she had already driven away. A couple of days later I squinted at a man relaxing on a bench in the sun near my apartment building. I thought he might have been one of my favorite neighbors, but it was too awkward to approach him for a chat, in case he wasn’t.

So far, the worst experience was when I didn’t recognize one of my closest friends, a woman I’ve known for twenty-five years. She was walking toward me on a downtown street. From the little I could make out, she appeared to be happy to see me. Hers was a face I had looked at hundreds of times. And yet, she had to do what Lisa had done, stand close to me and say her name.

For days afterward, I was haunted by the scene. Not only that I couldn’t see her face, but that I imagined she saw me as pitiable, a version of myself – once energetic and independent – that I’ve been trying to conceal.

Joan Potter‘s personal essays have appeared in several anthologies as well as such literary journals as Persimmon Tree, The RavensPerch, Bright Flash Literary Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Stone Canoe, New Croton Review and others. She is the author of several nonfiction books.

A Windy Day on Sans Souci Drive

21 January 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Gordon W. Mennenga

There go the garbage cans
And my neighbor’s loose-lipped lover
Duck! here comes the Public Library snowing pages
And oh those unwilling Clydesdales galloping sideways
Next the organ from St. John’s Church humming a flirty mystery hymn
A police car celebrating being quick and blue
Some little things: a wig without a woman, a man without a damn
Uncle Frank’s rabbit hutch then Uncle Frank

Did I see truth chasing gossip?
A cart and then a horse?
A shoal of minnows swimming the wind to big water
A flock of hallowed words
A herd of No Trespassing signs free at last
Six senators chasing their reputations
Then naked notes of happiness, regret and ecstasy
A rapturous tillerless sailboat
Bubbles of existentialism staying low to the ground

Algorithms and syllogisms galore
Smokey riffs from Nina, from Chet, Dinah and Billie
Boredom blown to ashes
Sid, the cardiologist, wearing a nice pair of loafers
Herds, coveys, caravans, gaggles, packs and pods
Me, I’m lifting off, not clinging but joining.

Gordon W. Mennenga has had work featured on NPR and published in the Bellingham Review, Epoch, Citron Review and other literary journals. He earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

A Birthday Meteor

19 January 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Jeff Burt

When the last bird-wing rose
and the bottom of the open window
became a bed for a creek of cold air
to enter the room, I saw a streak
of acetylene on the western edge of darkness
and found between my sixteenth-century Shakespeare
and my twenty-first century Einstein
a tussle between the optimistic flush of good omen
and scientific swagger that pronounces
a romantic stone a rock,
and I looked over your shoulder,
felt both lucky and fated to be with you,
and eyes lifted, wandered in the early stars
brushing against galactic wonder.

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, with his wife, alternating between dreams of fire evacuation and dreams of floods. He has contributed to Gold Man Review, Rabid Oak, Williwaw Journal, and others. Read earlier work from The Bluebird Word’s March 2022 Issue.

The Bluebird Word