Page 6 of 46

The Birdhouse

1 June 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Christine Andersen

for the sparrows

In retirement,
my partner built a birdhouse from cedar
to withstand the New England winters.
Twelve inches high,
four by four at the base,
hinged roof for cleaning.
The entrance hole measured 1¼ inches
seven inches above the floor—
no perch for crows or magpies
to devour eggs or hatchlings.

He hung the birdhouse on a giant oak
facing east from prevailing winds
to be bathed in sun on brisk mornings,
shaded in the afternoons.
The wood was left unpainted to blend
into the October landscape.
He had thought of everything
in the way a man researches,
makes detailed lists, follows specifications.

The wait for a pair of sparrows began.

Today I lift the roof
and clean out an abandoned nest
for new mates to move in.
My partner has been dead
more than a year now.
He never saw the first sparrows
or watched their young fly free—
the one thing he didn’t plan for.
The one thing we never saw coming.

I close the top
and search the empty sky.
New sparrows will arrive in due time,
become part of my love story.

Christine Andersen is a retired dyslexia specialist who now has the time to hike in the Connecticut woods with her three dogs, pen and pad in pocket. Publications include Comstock, Awakenings, Evening Street and Gyroscope Reviews, Slab, and Glimpse, among others. She won the 2024 American Writers Review Poetry Contest.

I drove him back to the airport

1 June 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Penelope Scambly Schott

hoping he wouldn’t tell me, his old mother,
that I ought not to still be driving.

I didn’t turn the car key until I couldn’t see
his blue shirt through the revolving door

and then I drove the 100 miles back home
past cliffs we had just passed together.

Here is his unfinished coffee still in the cup.
I will go lie down in the guest bed

before I strip off his wrinkled sheets.
I will imagine they are still warm.

Penelope Scambly Schott’s most recent book is Waving Fly Swatters at Angels. Forthcoming is gOD: A Respectfully Divergent Testament. Penelope is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry.

Washington Heights

1 June 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Leslie Lisbona

Two weeks ago, Aaron moved out of our house and into his first apartment. It is 20 minutes away in Washington Heights. He is 25 years old, and this is a milestone I should be proud of.

When he was born, I gazed at his pale skin and dark hair. I felt like I had been given a prize, or I had won the Olympics, or I was as strong as a woman from the Amazon.

I also couldn’t stop crying. My sister, Debi, didn’t understand. “You are a mother,” she cooed. But I cried because I loved Aaron so much. The loving was an ache. I could not live if anything happened to him. When someone else carried him, I leaned closer, hovering.

When Aaron was two-and-a-half and a big brother to five-month-old Oliver, his father and I separated and eventually divorced. Val would take both children for the weekend, and I spent hours panicking that they weren’t within reach. I was wretched; I couldn’t stand to be alone in my apartment without them.

Every mother thinks her child is beautiful, but Aaron really was. At four, his eyelashes were full, with eyebrows that defined his round face, lips that were heart-shaped and impossibly red. Whenever he laughed, you could see a space between his two front teeth.

When he was six, his father moved back in with us. We were living in a rental building in Queens. Aaron wore red Pumas and jumped in the air to show Val how high his new sneakers made him go. When he was eleven, he and Oliver watched as a judge married us for the second time in our living room, and then we all went out for breakfast. Our boys were the only witnesses.

At 16, tall, thin, with thick wavy hair, he said he wanted to go away to college. I prepared myself, thinking I would come undone when he left, but he was so happy when we dropped him off in Albany that I was okay.

Shortly before he graduated, we moved again, to a house in New Rochelle, and we got a dog. “Why are you getting a dog?” he said. “I’ll be gone soon.” I had to explain that the dog was not for him.

Then the pandemic happened. Aaron moved back home. His graduation was on Zoom. He wore a borrowed cap and a gown that was too short. I baked a pound cake, and we toasted him in our backyard.

The only job he could get was at a supermarket, behind the deli counter. He was cold, his feet hurt, and he was berated daily. After that he had three more jobs that were backbreaking or demeaning. Finally he found a job he liked and a girlfriend he loved. He saved the money I told him he needed to go out on his own. It took four years longer than he had planned. I was grateful for this bonus time, to have him under my roof a little longer.

I’m glad he has moved out – it is as it should be. But I will miss having coffee with him in the mornings and lunch together a few hours later. I will miss hearing his voice as he talked on his phone in his room. I will miss the times he asked me to shave the back of his neck. Or the walks we took together on the wooded trail near our house as the dog ran between us.

Since he left, I have found reasons to go into his old bedroom. I changed the sheets, mopped the floor, discovered his lost slippers in the back of his closet, and dusted his model cars.

The day he moved out he came back to New Rochelle to drop off the rental truck, and then we decided to have dinner together. The next night he came over for Hannukah and presented me with a card and a gift. Two days later I went to his apartment because he forgot to pack his medication. The next day we dropped off a piece of furniture and then had pizza in his neighborhood. Later that week he came home to see Oliver, who had returned from his semester in Italy. That night he slept in our house, and the two boys were together the following day, laughing the way they did when they were little and so happy to see each other. A few days after that we all went to eat Persian food at Ravagh in the city for Val’s birthday. The next day we met in Queens for another birthday party at my sister’s apartment. I know there will be countless more soccer games to watch on TV with Val and Oliver. And dinners of zucchini souffle, majedra, and macaroni au gratin.

“Aaron,” I said, “I see you more than ever!”

“I miss you,” he said.

I didn’t lose him. He just doesn’t live with me anymore.

Leslie Lisbona recently had several pieces published in Synchronized Chaos, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, The Bluebird Word, The Jewish Literary Journal, miniskirt magazine, Yalobusha Review, Tangled Locks, Koukash Review, and others. She is the child of immigrants from Beirut, Lebanon, and grew up in Queens, NY. Read Hell’s Kitchen, a companion piece to this essay published in The Bluebird Word in March.

Bookmark

1 June 2024 / Editor

Poetry by John Hoyte

I grabbed it from the bookcase, to read before bed.
The Problem of Pain, a two shillings and sixpence
Fontana paperback, from my college days.
It tackles the question, If there is a loving God,
why does He permit pain?
I chose it to see if C.S. Lewis’s writing
still resonated for me.
A bookmark fell out.
The Grand Hotel, Taipei, Taiwan.
Pain came surging back, engulfing me
in sorrow, though bitterness had gone.

The year my wife died had been a year of devastation.
To get away, Lisa, my daughter, and I flew
to Taiwan on a business trip.
We stayed at The Grand Hotel, and felt like royalty.
External opulence, internal grief.
I look back over thirty years.
My daughter’s daughters are in college
and I have just turned ninety-one.

I went to sleep in gratitude, thinking of my daughter
who has stood by me with love, grace and courage.

John Hoyte is a retired engineer, artist, and explorer.

Spring

1 June 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Nancy Byrne Iannucci

My cat ran when Hedwig’s Theme began.
I thought cats were in tune with all things witch
and supernatural. Or can he sense the change?
House finches are all the teeth-chattering rage.
He spent the afternoon trying to destroy a toy hummingbird in celebration.
He fell asleep with the bird beside him like a teddy bear.
Hedwig’s turn will come when the mood shifts the sun,
the day loses light, and the night howls for the owl.
But for now, spring is here, filled with frantic nest building.

Nancy Byrne Iannucci lives in Troy, NY with her two cats: Nash and Emily Dickinson. She has been published in multiple literary journals and is the author of three chapbooks: Temptation of Wood (Nixes Mate Review, 2018), Goblin Fruit (Impspired, 2021), and Primitive Prayer (Plan B Press, fall 2022). Visit www.nancybyrneiannucci.com or on Instagram: @nancybyrneiannucci.

Swing

1 June 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Rachel Beachy

Pushing her swing back and forth
with the baby on my chest
I do not know
the day the time or how
to finish a thought
all the hours go into something like this
returning to baseline
a pendulum swinging from
mess to order
hunger to fullness
chaos to calm, repeat.
And all along
they are growing —
I see it now
her hands wrapped tightly around the chains of the
big girl swing
she could not reach last week
how I watch her flying forward and yet
going nowhere at all
these days
thank god
thank god
how they always come back
to me.

Rachel Beachy is a graduate of the IU School of Journalism (2014) and worked in broadcast radio/tv before several years in marketing. Since 2020, she has worked from home and has enjoyed finding an enthusiastic community of writers and readers. She resides in Louisville with her husband and two daughters.

Logging the Land

1 June 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Nancy Kay Peterson

The 40-acre coulee was
mostly woody slopes
and for the health of
the younger trees
had to be logged,
just like carrots
and beets have to be
thinned to thrive.

She hated even thinning
killing vegetables,
and crashing tree falls
broke her heart.
She hated the buzzing
crack of breaking timber
branches and stumps piling up
ruts trucks were making.

But ruts would fill in
and become trails
she could hike to explore
for wildflowers and ginseng.
And decaying trunks
would support fungi, mushrooms
and prized morels.

So she steeled herself
to the pillaging of the forest
tried not to think like a tree
tried to fall gracefully
into acceptance.

Nancy Kay Peterson’s poetry has appeared in The Bluebird Word, Dash Literary Journal, Last Stanza, The 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). Visit www.nancykaypeterson.com.

The Horses

1 June 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Kandi Maxwell

I miss the horses. Those wild Mustangs that filled the fields near the old, abandoned house. I imagined the house, as all that was left by the time I visited was a stone chimney. In spring the large pasture bloomed yellow with stink weed. I loved those tall, ruffled leaves and yellow flower heads. The plant is actually named Tansy Ragwort—an invasive, noxious weed, but who couldn’t love them with a nickname like Stinking Willie? I savored Willie’s weedy, earthy smell like a sweaty man who worked the land. I never saw those Mustangs eat the plant. Instead, they ate the hay thrown off an old truck and onto the ground by a rancher.

I visited in the mornings before work. I’d bring a lidded cup of coffee that was always too cool for my liking, but I willingly gave up the heat for moments. Snatches of wild. Dust. The soft, high-pitched neigh, or whinny sounds the horses made while feeding. I drove to the old road in my Nissan truck. Pulled into a pocket of packed earth and parked. Opened the truck bed and sat on the tail gate. Sipped cold coffee. Soaked in the soothing smells of hay and horses and dirt.

I was an idiot. Knew nothing about horses, but there was an attraction, and I wanted to be near them. I knew enough not to touch them. They were wild, after all. Still, sometimes I walked into their pasture. Got too close so I could take photos. I look at one now. See numerous paint patterns in colors like copper, red, black, and white. Long tails touching hooves. Noses buried in hay. Their black shadows on the golden morning landscape.

Later, when my husband and I moved onto thirty acres in north-eastern California, we had six horses. Lloyd is my second husband. He had owned horses for years before we married. Knew how to handle them. How to ride. We adopted a wild Mustang with colors of black, white, and reddish brown. She was stunning, but never ridden, though Lloyd managed to halter her for brushing and hoof trims. There were evening runs. The horses seemed to instigate this play—walking towards the dogs who waited by the fence. When the horses and dogs were almost side by side, they ran. Horses on one side of the fence, dogs on the other; joy emerged through sounds of hooves hitting the ground, horses neighing, dogs barking.

After twelve years, we sold the place in Modoc County to return to family in the Sierra foothills. We were down to two horses when we moved. We sold our rideable, paint quarter horse. Oreo, the Mustang, was given to a trainer who specialized in wild horses. We no longer have horses, so I yearn to hear them running— their drumbeat, the song of wild.

I live about an hour from where the stone chimney stood and the Mustangs ran. Both are gone, the land covered over by apartment buildings and new homes. Across the street is a medical complex, a few restaurants, more new apartments. So much lost in all this new. I’ve come to an age where I’m often distraught by changes I don’t want to see. Wistful of an imagined simpler life. I tell myself to be more present, but I resist. My future is shorter than the past, and I miss the horses.

Kandi Maxwell is a creative nonfiction writer living in Northern California. Her stories have been published in Hippocampus Magazine, KYSO Flash, RavensPerch, 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.

Because It’s Beautiful

1 June 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Beate Sigriddaughter

She does not believe in obedience to complications. When she plays her flute, she doesn’t play because it’s hard. She plays because it’s beautiful, like singing, even if it is ridiculously easy. Explaining this to experts is a challenge. Sometimes it takes days before she can resume reality with unassuming confidence. She is old enough to follow her own rules, but often still hesitates at the door of permission without knocking, and she still has trouble finding a safe haven for her longing. Once upon a time she woke up celebrating trees outside her window or the scent of cedar after rain and sparkles at the tips of junipers. She contemplates the lord of good intentions with a trembling candle in her hand, like Psyche looked at Eros long ago. Just like a simple tune, she finds him beautiful, and bravely whispers to herself: Let him sleep. He needs his rest, trapped in his fears. Every restraint, though, makes the future harder, like incessant rain as summer fades into the dreaded shapes of insignificance. She gathers scents and music, fragments of herself. People parade in her dreams, harmless like conundrums. Sometimes she dreams of perfume and all her misery is nothing more than being reasonably well loved. She readily admits she might have liked God but never got a chance. She never steals from others, not intentionally anyway. Now she must simply learn to master not stealing from herself.

Beate Sigriddaughter, www.sigriddaughter.net, lives in Silver City, New Mexico (Land of Enchantment), where she was poet laureate from 2017 to 2019. Her poetry and short prose are widely published in literary magazines. Recent book publications include a poetry collection, Wild Flowers, and short story collection, Dona Nobis Pacem.

The Laundry Laughers

1 June 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Sandra Marilyn

In the days before a washing machine came to live in my kitchen and car keys came to live in my pocket to further my isolation from the bus people and the laundromat people, I had enjoyed watching those folks. I imagined I could live inside their lives for just a moment, could learn their secrets. My family was fond of saying, “grow where you’re planted”. Since I did not stay where I was planted, I modified it to say, “learn where you land.”

On one of those laundromat days I sat on a hard chair feeling its plastic slat cut into my bottom and watching my clothes tumble in an endless circle. I was feeling a bit lonely and bored when the sounds of the people around me rose up to obscure my self-absorption. The couple in the corner were having a dust-up that sometimes threatened to become too loud for a public place but then was pulled back to an almost whisper. The old man by the front door was chatting with himself in an amiable way and chortling at his own jokes.

At the folding table next to me was a small extended family of women and girls just pulling their clothes out of the dryer and tossing them into a basket. The four young girls seemed to be in a range between eight and fourteen years. My scant Spanish caught just a bit of their jovial conversation about boys and school. Then one of the girls pulled a red sweater out of the pile and held it up for inspection. The girls were average sizes but the sweater had become so small it might have fit a tiny dog. The entire family froze for a moment, stunned by the mistake and maybe considered placing blame. They all stared intently at the tiny sweater and then wide-eyed at one another. Someone had put a wool sweater in the wash when it should have gone to the dry cleaner.

My thoughts were about how much the garment might have cost, how pretty it must have been. Had it been a gift? Which one of them counted it as a part of the wardrobe that defined her style? I would have been extremely angry at the wasteful mistake, and I definitely would have expressed that anger noisily. I would have felt defiled by the intrusion of the clumsy mistake into the collection of things I cherished, things that defined my place in the world. I thought of my own sweaters folded perfectly and waiting for their turn to impress my companions. Just waiting to announce their cashmere luxury to a world that judged my success by my assemblage of stuff. My old left-wing sensibilities rose up to argue that the world needed my intellect, my creativity, my passion, and not my cashmere. And I believed that, but it was a heavy truth laden with responsibility and it struggled to rise above the material preoccupations that lived in the swampy bottom of my soul. The swamp was thick with southern expectations I would never meet. The useless notions about what would be appropriate displays of success grew moldy there on the bottom but steadfastly refused to rot and decompose.

The moment the family had stood gaping at the tiny sweater passed and the girls began a titter that rose steadily into a boisterous mirth. The pure notes of their young voices began to fill the room with their delight. Each girl took a part of the tiny sweater and began to pull, as if they could pull it back into its original size. They pulled and laughed and laughed and pulled and spun around in a circle of mad silliness, until they collapsed on the floor in a flurry of giggles. Their joy rose to the ceiling of the room and fell back down tickling even the grumpiest of the beleaguered laundry doers. Their hilarity swirled and danced around our heads, as captivating as a quartet of piccolos. And it carried them right over the abyss where materialism would like to have captured their sparkly freedom.

Finally, a mock stern glance from their mother, who had only just managed to contain her own giggles, called them back to the pile of unfolded laundry. Mother, grandmother, and the four girls returned to the seriousness of folding clothes but occasional bursts of laughter bubbled up and were sucked back in.

Oh, how I wanted to live for a bit longer in the life of that family of laundry laughers, how I envied them their joyful freedom. I often remember them when I am tempted to believe that objects will save me, that they will present me as I want to be seen, that they matter much at all.

Sandra Marilyn lives in San Francisco with her wife and a tiny dog. She believes it is her responsibility to continually reeducate herself, so she spends her days trying to pry open the doors and windows and searching for the words to describe the light that comes through the openings.

The Bluebird Word

Page 6 of 46

The Birdhouse

I drove him back to the airport

Washington Heights

Bookmark

Spring

Swing

Logging the Land

The Horses

Because It’s Beautiful

The Laundry Laughers

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