Tag: impermanence (Page 1 of 2)

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On the Deck

1 November 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Theresa Wyatt

in my cushy chair it is the end of summer.
The community noise of lawn mowers moves chipmunks
underground for hours & hummingbirds toward the lake.
Grass outside the gate is yellow from drought.

Parallel thoughts generate questions – will it be cool enough
to sleep with the windows open – will roaming creatures
slow the spices’ heart rates – will the apple crop yield both
sweet & tart, and did the Farmer’s Almanac discern
a mild winter? Dry leaves stand ready to turn.

When winter comes,
I’ll look out at roped chairs without cushions,
the covered air conditioner will be soundless, lawn mowers
will hibernate. Apple pies and sauce will be stacked neatly
in the freezer – pesto will be tightly sealed.

When it comes, I’ll go out on the glistening deck
frosted with crystals – cardinals will bear witness
while Tai Chi arms caress the wind breathing
through the fence – all of us & everything
finding new rhythms in between the white.

Theresa Wyatt is the author of The Beautiful Transport, a Moonstone Press 2022 chapbook finalist, and Hurled Into Gettysburg (BlazeVox Books, 2018). Her work has also appeared in New Flash Fiction Review, Spillway, The Ekphrastic Review, and The Healing Muse. A retired educator, Theresa resides near Buffalo close to Lake Erie.

Peregrine

1 July 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Stephen J. Cribari

Two years ago we had peregrine falcons here.
They bred in a nest under a nearby bridge
That spans the Mississippi River. I
Stood riverside the day the three chicks fledged
Dropping from the bridge’s understructure,
Falling in a wild, flailing descent
And finding just before they hit the river
What wings mean, solving the secret code
That opened a doorway into the halls of the sky.

A month later curious I returned.
The empty nest, but there up in the sky
High up in the sky a black speck
Like a piece of protein floating across the eye
But reaching speeds that edged beyond my vision.
Like a thunderbolt loosed from the sky it bolted down,
Leveled to a plane above the river,
Screamed through the bridge’s latticed understructure
Then turned as bolting horse will dead stop turn

And flaring into the bridge’s latticework
Settled on the beam where its nest had been.
And there it began to preen, as if nothing at all
Let alone something utterly extraordinary
Had just happened. And I thought of you.

Stephen J. Cribari has been writing poetry for over sixty years. In a parallel life he was a criminal defense attorney and law professor. He resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Still Life (2020) and Delayed en Route (2022) are published by Lothrop Street Press.

Photo by Vijayalakshmi Nidugondi on Unsplash

Her September Familiar

1 April 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Sharon Whitehill

Now is the season when hummingbirds vanish,
daylight dwindles, and the leaves fall,

a strange season of endings and losses,
colors fading to gray with a blackness behind.

A particular sorrow for her, this heartache,
even if shared by many, akin to the sky grief we feel

at losing the stars, even the brightest invisible now
everywhere but the most rural night skies.

Though more personal, too: a growing awareness
of how fragile her loved ones, family and friends,

this lingering grief for those absent, now or forever,
her people. As precious and ever-present as the invisible stars,

essential to her as signal fires in a storm,
yet everything seems, everything is, so precarious.

Each year it comes, this melancholy, her familiar,
not with the surprise of a window thrown suddenly open

to weather but as her September companion.
Until one day, down the road, it departs to the rattling call

of sandhill cranes overhead, a flurry of cedar waxwings,
and a pair of fawns still dressed in their white polka dots.

Sharon Whitehill is a retired English professor now living in Port Charlotte, Florida. In addition to poems published in various literary magazines, her publications include two scholarly biographies, two memoirs, two poetry chapbooks, and a full collection of poems. Her chapbook, THIS SAD AND TENDER TIME, is due winter 2024.

Summer’s End

1 February 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Vicki Addesso

for Cathy

It’s now, this evening, and like this summer, I have grown older. Yes, summers grow old, and come to an end. On this last day of August, September’s eve, I sense autumn’s approach.

The mammoth sunflower growing all alone by the young maple tree in front of my house bobs its heavy head and sighs it seems to be getting dark earlier and earlier. It has never seen a summer before, does not know summer must end. Or that this is its last, its one and only. The bulbous center is bursting with fresh sunflower seeds, and come early morning I will watch the goldfinches come to pluck them out, and the bees indulge. The golden-yellow petals are many and flutter in the tiniest of breezes yet remain put. That stem, so thick and straight and tall, sways for the wind in storms and refuses to break. Before the flower at its top bloomed, I thought of Jack and his beanstalk. Could I climb the stem and find a giant in the clouds?

The lonely sunflower, from leftover seeds I dropped next to the baby tree after running out of room in the backyard gardens. Only this one of the dozen or so seeds casually tossed into the dirt grew. The backyard has many other sunflowers, autumn beauties and sunspots and Little Beckas that had bloomed a couple of weeks earlier. Some are still vibrant, others wilting. They will not wither in loneliness; they have one another. But that sunflower out in front of the house, it rips at my heart, knows nothing of its fate. Its single solitary life that will fade as this summer ends. Trees, shrubs, other plants and other creatures share a world in our front yard and have more, some many, summers ahead of them. No worries, sweet sunflower, I whisper through the window screen. After the crispness of fall, the cold of winter, the promise of spring, I will plant more seeds. Summer will return. There will be sunflowers again.

What is this evening for me? It’s crickets. Their sounds fill late summer nights. It is leaving the bedroom curtains open as the sky darkens. Sitting in my quiet room with no lamp lit, listening, watching the light leave. It’s letting the emotions of memories set butterflies to flutter in my belly and goosebumps to rise on my skin. Letting my mind wander and visions to appear. Suddenly I am a child again. Chasing fireflies. Air on so much of my skin, warm, the breeze soft. Swatting at the mosquito on my elbow, sweating, and not caring. Looking back at the house I grew up in, I see the porch light come on. Tilting my head back to glance at the sky, I get dizzy with the sensation of falling up instead of down. Then my mother’s voice calling me inside. I am young but I know it must end.

When did I realize, at what age, did I learn of endings? As a baby, did I notice that the cold of March — the month of my birth —began lifting? That the sun stayed longer, warming my face as my mother pushed me in a stroller? Then, the heat of summer. The slow creeping back of early sunsets. A chill in the air. My first winter. Was I two years old, three, or four when I knew things would come to an end?

When did Eve, that second of the first two human beings, realize that everything was changing? For the first time, one season flowed into another, and nothing was sure any longer. Already banished from the paradise of the Garden of Eden, she now witnessed the utter destruction of all that was familiar. Was she frightened? Or was she too busy to notice? Being mother to the entire human race certainly must have kept her busy.

So amusing how I, and others, even after years of watching our star come and go, shift in the sky, making us alter our clocks, still say, Wow, it’s getting dark so early now, as if it’s something new. As if we were children. As if it were the first time. As if we were sunflowers.

And so, it will happen again, just as it has every year, all the years of my life — the end. These edges of the seasons are my favorite time. The end slides into a beginning. For the time being.

Now I sit, at my desk, the open window in front of me. It is dark outside. The screen of my computer bright. The crickets singing their song of summer’s old age, the sound of it so familiar. The sound of longing. Realization and acceptance. It is the song of ending, reverberating through space and time. It is falling upwards and flying away.

Vicki Addesso is co-author of the collaborative memoir Still Here Thinking of You~A Second Chance With Our Mothers (Big Table Publishing, 2013). Publishing credits include: Gravel Magazine, Barren Magazine, The Writer, Sleet Magazine, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, and more. She was nominated for a 2023 Pushcart Prize.

Last October

18 July 2023 / Editor

Poetry by John Surowiecki

The mountain laurel is as green as the
maples are orange. Deer visit as if on cue,
hoovering the seeds we left for doves
and newly arrived juncoes.

Anything to do with spring and summer, with lilacs
and irises and that wistful pneumonic yellow,
is long gone, escaped in the raw humidity of

night. The wigs of dead leaves
are already caught up in scattered whirlwinds.
It’s clear we don’t have much time together.

Rainwater that leaks from the driveway gravel
has pooled in unlikely places,
not the swales that engineering has intended.
The silence between a breath and the breath that

follows it seems to last forever. October
is no longer with us: you’ve taken its place.
It needs a new face, yours, a new voice, yours.

It needs your swallows and mourning gnats
your own phrase on the fiddle which everyone can hear:
you, the season of leaving, have your music too.

John Surowiecki is the author of fourteen books of poetry. His latest, The Place of the Solitaires: Poems from Titles by Wallace Stevens, was recently published by Wolfson Press. John is the recipient of the Poetry Foundation Pegasus Award, the Nimrod Pablo Neruda Prize, the Washington Prize and other awards.

On Observing My Daughter At Breakfast

7 May 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Clarence Allan Ebert

My daughter wears a hand-me-down shirt
tie-dyed with the stars, three sizes too big.
Her clothes arrange themselves
in psychedelic constellations.
Her face is a yellow rose through the light
of honey dollops dropping in milk.
She has never tripped and has no band-aids.
She makes no fuss and sleeps with a night light
She is barely aware I love her so much,
oblivious to her own impermanence.

Clarence Allan Ebert celebrated his 70th birthday recently and pledged to maintain some Baby Boomer relevance in the world through the fine craft of poetry. Read his poem from The Bluebird Word‘s January 2023 issue.

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

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Trace Fossils

22 October 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Carole Greenfield

Small children do not wait for pain
to make a lasting mark. They give fair warning;
we have time to wipe off tears, mop up trouble,
kiss a bruise, pronounce it healed.

But love leaves an impression that won’t be kissed
away. An imprint left in something soft hardens
and congeals. What passed through fire once
is tempered, then annealed.

Children trace their fingers over fossils, guess
at what’s revealed: evidence of ridges, indentations,
life long over, heart’s rush sealed.

Trace fossils: fossils in which evidence of organisms, rather than the organisms themselves, are preserved.

Carole Greenfield grew up in Colombia and lives in Massachusetts, where she teaches at a public elementary school. In the last century, her work appeared in Red Dancefloor, Gulfstream and The Sow’s Ear.

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The History of Everything

14 August 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Alexandra McIntosh

My mom took Lamaze classes before she had my brother. The instructor—in neon pink 80s workout gear—told the expectant mothers to focus on something and breathe through contractions. My mom chose my dad’s gold chain. She practiced watching it in class, breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth, leaning against him while the instructor counted. The chain flashed in the fluorescent light of the delivery room while she brought my brother into the world. I love the pictures of them in the moments just after— feathery Farrah Faucet hair slick against her temples, her tired smile, my dad’s eyes beaming above the gold and the tiny body of my brother.

These days my mom and I do yoga together. She likes it because of the breathing, like Lamaze; she reminds me often that you can breathe through anything. In downward dog I look under my armpit to watch her body next to mine, and imagine my small life folded into hers in the months before my birth.

My friend Brad wants to visit the hospital room where he was born. I’ve never thought of this, though I live close to my own birth-hospital. When my mom’s colon ruptured spontaneously my senior year, I did loads of homework there in the plastic chair next to her bed; and before my grandpa’s death, I spent five days and nights by the big window in his room, looking out on a gravel-covered rooftop, the wooded hillsides, the church steeple on a distant ridge. Brad thinks the room number should be on the wristband his mom keeps in his baby book, along with a plastic bag and the stump of belly button that fell off a week after she brought him home. I tell him he should paint the room—he’s a painter. A self-portrait I call it. He likes this idea.

He tells me about his grandparents from Kentucky, the house they lived in by the railroad track, his grandma who held him when he was born and died a week later from cancer. He shows me a picture of her and her sisters in the 1930s in front of a mural of a swimming lady, the sisters playfully pointing at the lady’s nipples, their faces bright with laughter. He’s been busy lately, teaching classes and restoring old houses, but yesterday he painted a picture of his sister’s puppy: a Christmas present commissioned by his mom. He scrapes colors off his fingers and says it felt good; it had been days since he’d opened his box of paints, and even the smell was nice.

When I can’t write I take Grizzly for walks, let him sniff the patches of grass browned by frost, high-step through the pile of oak leaves in the church yard. I imagine the symphonic alertness of his smelling, and wonder if he pictures deer and squirrels, the neighbor’s corgi. Three birds alight from the boughs of a dead honeysuckle bush and I think of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem written decades after the Industrial Revolution—a time that Brad reminds me brought forth a renaissance of arts and crafts. In those years of soot Hopkins wrote, “but for all this, nature is never spent./ There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”

I’ve repeated this to myself so many times it evokes a collage of memories: the classroom where I first heard it, the university cross country trails I walked as I tried to memorize the poem. Later, the patches of chicory and black-eyed Susans tangled along the road by my first apartment. A hillside in Spain. The sun above the swimming pool in my hometown. The condensation on a bottle of water my grandpa handed me after I cut his grass. Sweat under my tee shirt sleeves, summer skin peeling. The backyard singing its bright insect song.

How humbling to know that each one of us came from the body of another. I think of this great symphony of connection, of birth and death and birth, of pain and joy, this great and marvelous history of everything, this dearest freshness. And I think of our small roles in it, of my mom preparing to welcome it in those 80s birthing classes, of her practicing her breathing, of my dad practicing with her, his smile above a gold necklace, of all the hair my brother was born with, thick dark hair, and the baby his wife will have in August.

Alexandra McIntosh lives and writes in Kentucky, her favorite place in the world. Her debut book of poetry, Bowlfuls of Blue, is available from Assure Press. You can find links to her publications and pictures of her dog on her website AlexandraMcIntosh.com.

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A Woman and a Waterfall

2 August 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Robin Greene

We found a spot to park near the Moore’s Cove trailhead, along highway NC 276 that meanders through the Pisgah National Forest from Brevard to Waynesville.

Our plan was to take the short but rather vertical hike up to the impressive waterfall this autumn afternoon before returning to our home in Hendersonville, about forty-five-minutes away. We’d been out looking at raw land that day, thinking to purchase a couple of wooded, undeveloped acres for a second home, and we’d been previewing possibilities.

At the car, my husband decided to take his hiking stick, leave his phone and his jacket, while I decided to take nothing. I usually carry my phone to snap photos, but my pants pocket wasn’t deep, so I left it in the car.

On the trail, we met people, families mostly—kids scampering up the trail or complaining about the difficulty of the hike. There were babies in carriers, and moms and dads loaded down with backpacks. Late October, the leaves were turning and falling, and already the forest offered more winter than summer views.

Then, arriving at the waterfall, there she was. Very pregnant and almost naked. Barefoot, standing on the slippery stones just in front of the waterfall. She had a woman photographer snapping photos, and a man, probably her partner, stood out of frame, but by her side.

She wore a sheer robe and some kind of thong that didn’t cover her backside. Her large breasts bulged from what appeared to be a bikini top. Her dark skin was smooth over her enormous belly, and I thought she must be eight or even nine months along.

Then, I noticed the crown, a gold-colored tiara on top of her head.

Behind her, the large waterfall cascaded dramatically across the rocks, and hikers gathered in small groups to admire the spectacle of her. They also snapped photos. Something I, too, would have done—and, at that moment, I regretted not having taken my phone.

What had inspired her to do a photo-shoot here? What had inspired her to be so naked, so vulnerable on the wet slippery rocks? And the crown—what was her thinking about that?

I had no answers. But I, along with the crowd, watched her for a long time. A black woman, a pregnant woman, a woman barely dressed on a cool fall day, standing against the wild backdrop of a large and powerful waterfall.

As I stood there, I thought back to my own two pregnancies, which resulted in two boys, now grown men. I thought about this woman’s upcoming childbirth, imagined her struggling through contractions, and then nearly exhausted, finally pushing her baby out, into the hands of a doctor or midwife or perhaps her partner. I thought about the next decades of her life as a mother. Like the waterfall behind her, they would be an onslaught, an unstoppable rush.

She had paused to capture the moment. She probably felt like a queen—like so many women about to become mothers.

On the hike down, I found a quiet place to sit and think about this woman, this stranger, who was not a stranger because I recognized her. How she felt like royalty, something special. How her nearly-naked pregnant body was part of the larger naked world. How a woman might feel that the momentous events of her pregnancy and upcoming childbirth might shift the universe.

And now, at my desk, thinking back at the image of her, I feel both joy and sadness at my own journey of motherhood. As women, we are powerful—opening our bodies to allow another human being to enter the world. And we are powerless, as there’s so much about this human being that we won’t have the ability to control.

And after giving birth, our lives are never the same.

So, I take this moment to pause and to thank this anonymous woman for reminding me of the powerfulness and powerlessness of womanhood, of motherhood, and of the inevitability of change. And although I’ll probably never know her identity—and even without a photo to remind me—this woman’s image remains.

Robin Greene is the author of five books, and she regularly publishes her short work in journals and magazines. Greene is co-founder and current board member of Longleaf Press, and she now teaches writing and yoga in Western North Carolina.