Tag: beauty (Page 1 of 2)

Full Circle

1 April 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Sheila Rittenberg

Nose

The first time I really saw it, I was ten or younger, looking into a hand mirror while standing in profile in front of a bigger mirror. My nose. It was hookish. Not just a kink. All of it. Short but bent. Like someone started something and forgot to finish.

I stared and stared. Until then, I’d believed everyone who’d said I was so cute, such a lovable face. And that was what I’d always seen in the mirror. Their praise lifted me in the mornings, tucked me into bed at night.

My sister had a straight, slightly turned-up nose. Not a ski jump. It was trim and neat, like a sweet goodbye or the perfect toast at a party. Flawless. My parents told me I had to be more like her, keep it up, and while you’re at it, be even better! I tried. I was at the mirror every night, searching. Would my nose change? Would it grow as I grew? I daydreamed myself into my sister. Compared my every move in sister terms – boys, friends, athletics. All beyond me. She was older. Teenage older. Cheerleader. Homecoming Queen. Agile figure skater and skier. Girlfriend of redhaired Bad Boy, Johnny F.

I faced up to the mirror always avoiding my profile. But that side silhouette was one of those things you can’t un-see. In frontal view, I was a little Irish girl with big eyes. Sideways, I was Barbra Streisand but without the allure, or the voice.

Mouth

When I was twelve and getting braces, the orthodontist told me my top lip would always look something like an upside down “U.” In the space from the base of the nostrils to the top lip there is a groove, he pointed out, and mine was too short. So my lip, whether I wanted it or not, lifted up above my teeth. My braced teeth.

“Start doing these exercises now,” the orthodontist warned as he showed me how to stretch my top lip down over my teeth, “or you’ll never be able to close your mouth.”

I looked up at him – mouth wide, elastic bands about to snap – and nodded. I didn’t care if my mouth was forever open. My bared teeth would be straight ones. No more taunts of Moose or Hey, Bugs Bunny as I walked the school halls. No more ducking behind opened locker doors.

The nose, the lip, and oh yes, the inclination to pudginess, were a lot to concentrate on. Every day. Between classes. During classes. After school. I walked the hallways, eyes racing from skinny girls to golden girls to those popular girls surrounded by friends and fans. Then home to my sister and the prom date she’d snagged, or the new cheerleading routine, or the simple certainty of her beauty. Her braces were long gone. One look at her and I’d well up. There had to be a reason I was inadequate. I just didn’t know what it was.

Brain

In university, I guzzled from the intellect of others. I, the girl from the suburbs, asked a million questions of new friends with cigarettes dangling from brooding faces. What’s behind Power to the People? Was Marx a good guy? What exactly is wrong with capitalism? We analyzed. We studied. Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, every lyric, joints passing freely, the room a sweet musty void. I joined the student occupation to protest faculty racism. Blankets and sleeping bags lay side by side, students strummed guitars, organizers hammered talking points through bullhorns. The world was at stake.

I’d show up at my sister’s in a bright gauzy blouse, torn jeans, beads and bangles, paisley bandana folded across my forehead. She and her blond bob and three kids, dog and harried husband, would’ve fit right into The Brady Bunch. I’d talk about the outrage of government. She was consumed with menus for the week.

The ’60s and You Say You Want A Revolution were calling. And I answered. I tackled slum landlords, drug use in high schools, inferior pay for corporate women. My parents thought I was radical. I liked that.

Heart

Babies. My babes. Now staring into infant eyes made me high. By my late thirties, pediatrician visits and weight gains, gurgles and chortles were all it took to be happy. I made baby food from scratch and talked nonstop to my little ones, explaining the world, even when all they could say was “Mama.” I played peek-a-boo and made goofy faces. I floated. Motherhood was a prize. First Prize. My sister made faces, strained ones, she too young with too much to care for.

I didn’t stare at myself in the mirror these days but I was okay with looking. I enjoyed the curls around my forehead, my skin, silkier than I’d known. I liked my blue-eyed moon gaze. A smile – no overbite – filled my face. All together my look was … well, evidently not so bad. The badass kid checking out groceries looked at me with desire. Same with the wild-bearded gas station guy, and the twenty-something cop who came to bash in my car window when I locked my son inside along with the keys. Maybe they’d been right long ago. Maybe I was cute, so lovable.

My face had made friends with my nose. I no longer tried to be just like my sister, or better. She was still older. I tried not to remind her.

Sheila Rittenberg retired in 2019 and became a member of the Pinewood Table, a critique workshop facilitated by mentors. She became a two-year Fellow at Atheneum, a masters level writing program at The Attic Institute in Portland, OR. Sheila writes short stories and “flash” creative nonfiction.

Birthplace

1 March 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Alexander Etheridge

—for W.S. Merwin

Out under clouds in the broad wheatfield
is a certain breed of silence
where only the perfectly hushed
give voice
Wind through the stalks
A sound of colors blending everywhere
in fine webs of shadow and light

After hours here you can start to sense
God’s breathing
like slow shifts in the clockwork
of ancient life
Then you may leave your body

as you lie in the delicate wheat
to return and find yourself
new once more
as you were long ago

your eyes wide
in the freshly formed world

Alexander Etheridge’s poems have been featured in The Potomac Review, Museum of Americana, Welter Journal, The Cafe Review, Abridged Magazine, Susurrus Magazine, The Journal, and many others. He was the winner of the Struck Match Poetry Prize. He is the author of God Said Fire (2023) and Snowfire and Home (Belle Point Press, 2024).

And Yet This Life

1 February 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Lisa Low

Is still worth living;
even now the rain is falling, making
mud from dirt around the roots and filling
in the ragged spots where grass hardly
ever shows. Tomorrow, too, the sun
will bring its healing mix of heat and light,
and make the flowers grow, more firmly
capable, their fancy floral dresses
stiff, each new eye glazed with thick black stripe
of paint, each marigold more grandly
dressed, more rich with bright silk fabrics hung,
orange vests and epaulets . . .

Lisa Low’s essays, book reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Boston Review, The Tupelo Quarterly, and The Adroit Journal. Her poetry has appeared in many literary journals, among them Valparaiso Poetry Review, Phoebe, Pennsylvania English, American Journal of Poetry, Delmarva Review, and Tusculum Review.

Late Aspen

22 October 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Burt Rashbaum

The aspen whispering,
color of late afternoon sun,
deepening in shadow
and the breeze’s
sibilance,
fading gold
washing bliss
upon us,
slowly coming
to sleep, to shed
their currency,
no urgency,
no memory
of spring.

Burt Rashbaum’s publications are Of the Carousel (The Poet’s Press, 2019), and Blue Pedals (Editura Pim, 2015, Bucharest). His poems have appeared in The Antonym, The Seventh Quarry, Storms of the Inland Sea (Shanti Arts Press, 2022), Boats Against the Current, The Ravens Perch, and Valiant Scribe.

photo of birds on concrete wall near city buildings during daytime — Photo by Negative Space on Pexels.com

Birds at Dawn

12 August 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Sarah Das Gupta

A blackbird sings at break of day,
the notes cascading, trickling,
over sunlit tiles.
On the old flint wall
a sparrow chirps, cheekily
to an awakening garden.
A pair of thieving magpies,
black patches over each eye,
chatter like pirates
from the dark yew,
planning a surprise attack
on the treasures of the bird table;
while ring doves coo softly
from an avenue of ancient limes.

Sarah Das Gupta is a retired English teacher from Cambridge, UK. She has had work published in many magazines/journals including Bar Bar, The Bluebird Word, Cosmic Daffodil, Green Ink, Waywords, Shallot, Pure Haiku, Rural Fiction, American Readers Review, Paddle, and others.

Some Days

22 July 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Carole Greenfield

Some days it feels like I will never be free from dread,
never escape the darkness, always be lugging those bushels
of rocks, the weight I drag behind me.

Some days it feels like I will never have time to say thank you,
never have heart to share love, never know grace to let go.

Some days it feels like I am trudging through a swamp
filled with skunk cabbage and quacking of frogs
and when I stop to listen I know their voices
are pure silver, a chorus of answers and questions.

Some days I remember all I need is to stand still
and let the quiet rain of their chirps, squeaks and creaks,
the half-notes of their small hearts fall into and over and through me.

Carole Greenfield grew up in Colombia and lives in New England. Her work has appeared in such places as Amethyst Review, Humana Obscura and The Plenitudes. Read her poem “Trace Fossils” published in The Bluebird Word in October 2022.

Beauty

5 July 2023 / Editor

Fiction by Paul Hostovsky

The way her hands danced across the braille page, it was a beautiful choreography to behold. Her left hand beginning each line, handing it off to her right hand halfway across the page, the right hand finishing the line as the left moved down to begin reading the next line. Left hand to right hand to left hand to right hand. Expert, fleet, like a concert pianist, or like relay runners in a race, the handoff accomplished seamlessly over and over, line by line down the page, page by page through the book, book by book through his entire childhood.

There was never a time when he didn’t know it. He’d learned it with his ABCs, fingering the raised dots with his tiny hands, sitting in his mother’s lap as she read to him aloud from the print/braille children’s books while he looked at the pictures. B was but, C was can, D was do. M was more. M with a dot five in front was mother. White dots on a white page, but they cast these tiny shadows so he could see them in the light. Like a country of igloos as seen from an airplane on a sunny winter morning.

Having blind parents was as unremarkable as having breakfast in the kitchen, having mail in the mailbox, having rain on rainy days and sun in the summertime. Lending his mother or father his shoulder–his elbow as he grew taller–was like offering his arm to the sleeve of his own jacket, like giving his hand to his other hand. He thought nothing of it, didn’t even have a word for it until he started kindergarten and the word got spat on the ground by some ugly mouths on the playground, older boys snickering and pointing, mimicking his parents as they swept their white canes back and forth, back and forth. Click sweep, click sweep, click sweep.

Those white canes. At home they leaned quietly against the wall like backslashes in the unpunctuated dark. Or else they sat folded underneath a chair or table like bundles of long chalk, a red one in each. K was knowledge. P was people. And the braille dictionary in seventy-two volumes was stacked practically to the ceiling, like a cord of wood.

His mother would stop reading, open her watch then close it, click, reach under her chair for her cane and open it, chick-a-chick, into a white line which she swept across an invisible line which she walked, out the door and down the street to the grocery store. Q was quite, U was us.

Braille was dots in a cell, lots and lots of cells. Each cell was a three-story building at dusk, the lights on in certain windows, not others. Each book was a city, where he and his mother looked through the windows, their fingers pressed to the panes.

Outside it’s beginning to snow. And each snowflake is a different character in the Complete Works of Beauty, which contains no mistakes that he has ever been able to find. And he has looked—he has looked his whole life—but has never found a single mistake.

Paul Hostovsky makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter and Braille instructor. His latest book of poems is Pitching for the Apostates (forthcoming 2023, Kelsay Books). Website: paulhostovsky.com

After the Blizzard

20 June 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Wally Swist

The fox prints puncturing the surface
of the snow after the blizzard
score its whiteness—
the same four notes pressing themselves
over and over again, in a meandering line
across a page, that is more silence
than music, but is still a melody that
can barely be heard,
shadows filling the tracks beneath
the pine branches shifting in the wind.

But it is the sound of the bells
that not so much startles me
as it offers me solace, ringing
from a distance, this soft chiming of sleigh
bells, until as it gets closer, it is more
of a whistle, the notes becoming distinct—
making me aware of its velocity, now
in flight, the tinkling call of a white-throated
sparrow, streaking close to my ear, melding
its voice with the streaming winter sunlight.

Wally Swist’s books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2011 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition, and A Bird Who Seems to Know Me: Poems Regarding Birds and Nature, winner of the 2018 Ex Ophidia Poetry Prize.

Photo by Richard Pasquarella on Unsplash

Shells

19 March 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Fred Miller

Like a federation of flowers
with slick, shiny faces,
they sparkle in the light from above.

And dance with tiny ripples
that lap up on the shore by my toes.
Are those conspiratorial smirks I see?

Could these new arrivals be laughing at me?
Maybe it’s a gurgling gathering of giggles or
woeful mothers weaving tales of youth lost at sea.

What’s with the frozen faces, I wonder?
And where on this vast planet have they been?
And where could these vagabonds be going?

No doubt, they slipped in on the morning tide.
Will they steal out when the new moon beckons?
Please pause and share tales of daring treks to afar,

And tempests you’ve chanced on the angry seas.
Paint pictures of huge fishes of the deep
you’ve encountered across the vast, blue sea.

And of melodies of whales soothing calves.
Peering up in silence, they gently nod.
Small waves kiss this congress tumbling about.

Another brings another and more as
they roll and toss and sway and nod again.
And in the blink of an eye, they are gone.

Fred Miller is a California writer. His poems and stories have appeared in publications round the world over the past ten years. Many may be seen on his blog: https://pookah1943.wordpress.com

Lines

9 October 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Christine Andersen

I don’t want to be the person
who colors outside the lines.

I want to be the one who lifts them from the page

scallops and twists and folds

until there is a butterfly
perched on my outstretched palm.

Be the one who blows the parting kiss.

Christine Andersen is a retired dyslexia specialist who hikes daily through the CT woods with her hounds. The changing New England seasons inspire her poems. Publications include Comstock, Octillo, American Writers and Awakenings Reviews, Glimpse, Dash, Months to Years and upcoming in Glassworks and Evening Street Press.