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Tag: love (Page 1 of 6)

My Wife Explains How My New Book is One Long Love Poem

Poetry by Steve Cushman

They’re all love poems,
Julie says, holding up my new book,
and I say, I don’t know about that.
What about the sad dog poems?
Love poem, she says,
The broken bones of childhood poems?
Love poem, she says,
The difficult relationship with my father poems?
She bites her lower lip. Definitely love poems.
And the ones about you,
which are sort of true, but also
an idealized version of our life?
Those, she says, are the loveliest of all.


Steve Cushman has published four poetry collections.

Lazy Man’s Pie

Nonfiction by Marilyn Paolino

What was Lazy Man’s Pie?

Just the other day, I was skimming the Beechwell cookbook, whose thirty-eight yellowed pages easily fit in my palm, when I spotted this pie with a friendly name. Lazy Man’s Pie shared the page with the French cherry and old-fashioned lemon pies.

The recipe looked familiar—except for the name and the stick of oleo. Oleo margarine was popular in the 1950s when Cooking Favorites of the Beechwell Community was probably published. The cookbook came from Aunt Judy’s attic. Before moving, she sent me several boxes packed with family photos, records, and journals dating back to the early 1900s.  

Of course! Lazy Man’s Pie was our family’s famous fruit cobbler, I thought.  


Dessert first. (Then back to my family project.)

I had a habit of reading cookbooks from back to front, starting with basic bars, cakes, and cookies. Eager to experiment in the kitchen, I began baking when I was nine or ten years old. Dad and I baked together on Sunday afternoons. Nothing fancy. I chose a cake box mix from lemon, white, and orange flavors that Dad liked best.

But we made cobbler from scratch. The recipe was forgiving, unlike pies that required practice to produce crusts with a delectable duo of texture and taste.


My parents were forgiving, loving people. During lunch celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary, my brother and I asked them what the secret was to a happy marriage.

 “There is no secret. It’s hard work,” Mom said, without hesitation.

Her answer left us to reflect on our own relationships. My brother married his high-school sweetheart, and I wed my soul mate decades later. My parents were strong role models who during their sixty-two years together treated one another with respect. They made married life look easy.   

Yet, family relationships were often fraught. I heard the hurt in Mom’s voice, some thirty years ago, when she told me my aunt and uncle opposed their marriage. They did so under a loving guise because they served as my father’s guardian, raising him as a son after both his parents died.  

Dad’s childhood lacked sweetness because he was orphaned at eight years old. Maybe that’s why as an adult, he craved sweets like fudge, pudding, cakes, and ice cream.

During the holidays, we made a rich chocolate fudge. We relied on the Fannie Farmer recipe, which called for a can of sweetened condensed milk (large) and four and a half cups of sugar.

However, ice cream was an every day treat for Dad. He heaped a generous glob of vanilla ice cream in his oatmeal and a tablespoon in his morning coffee. Usually, he ate a healthy diet, but kept a tub of “cheap” ice cream in the freezer. He lived for 89 years.

Mom grew up during World War II, an era of waste not, want not. She abided by the rule, making sure she ate food before it spoiled. In our house the running after-supper joke was, “Can this leftover be saved?” Yes, and the dish returned to the fridge. Anyone who raised doubts took a spoon and ate the last bites. Either way, we saved the food.


Before the family cookbook arrived, Mom and I had made cobbler after receiving more peaches than we could eat. Mom recited the recipe with ease: one stick of butter, one cup each of flour and sugar, a tablespoon of baking powder, a pinch of salt, and one cup of milk. We preheated the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and melted the butter in the 9 x 13 glass baking dish.  

Eager to get baking, we lined up the blemished to bruised fruit on the counter. We washed the fruit and removed the pits. I sucked off the flesh from the pits and thought, waste not, want not. We didn’t bother to blanch and peel the soft peaches whose sticky ripeness covered the counter and dripped from our hands.

In a large bowl, I measured and mixed the ingredients, and poured the cake-like batter over the butter. I plopped the cinnamon-sprinkled peaches in the middle of the pan. Do not stir, that was the secret. I confess, I’m tempted to swirl the fruit around, but learned to trust what I’ve lovingly prepared. Cobbler always tasted better when I used fresh fruit from the farmer’s market. But I have used store-bought canned fruit to satisfy my craving.   


In my kitchen, I chose the modest cobbler over pie because it’s welcome at every meal and won’t let me down.

People who claim it’s “as easy as pie” probably haven’t made one. In my hands, crust turned tough and chewy or soggy as if the fruit itself sobbed into the dough. My lattice came out lopsided. And my fruit slicing, layering, and arranging skills lacked pie-filling appeal.   

As we cleaned the kitchen, I tried to recall the last time dad and I made cobbler. We used canned cherries swimming in thick syrup.   

I checked on the cobbler in the oven as the scent of cinnamon filled the house. About forty minutes later, we had a bubbling, burbling celebration of fresh fruit. I cut a fresh-from-the-oven-corner chunk for each of us and added vanilla ice cream. The Lazy Man’s Pie, with its golden brown, bumpy crust and juicy peach filling, was easy to make, true to its name. We saved the jammy middle for the next day.

Warm cobbler topped with a dollop of ice cream takes me back to my childhood baking days those Sunday afternoons, savoring unmeasured lazy time—simple, sweet, and easy. Dad couldn’t have any cobbler with us that day, but he passed down his recipe for a joyful life: work hard, share love, and forgive all.


Marilyn Paolino is a writer who collects family stories and cookbooks. She had a career in public relations before leaving to write full time. Early in her career, she was a newspaper reporter who accepted all the leftover assignments. She lives in the Philadelphia area.

Landscapes

Poetry by Miguel Rodríguez Otero

we hear trains rumbling away
from homes we’ve known
neither of us yet fully awake
vaguely wondering where
they may be bound for
a coastal town
some place across the border
we are not yet aware
that we’ve fallen in love

but we don’t stir
we pray the clatter on the tracks never ends
each clack a word we haven’t uttered yet
a stitch that sews the wounds
we’ve come here to soothe

our bodies travel
they explore sentences and certainties
in this room that has taken us in
we throw away the passports
disregard seat numbers

we speak of books and oranges and wine
in foreign languages
often leave questions unfinished
conversation crumbles into shorter words

our talk travels too
and the keys on the bedside table
jingle as the train rolls along
our senses suddenly sharpen

one day we will cross that border
hop that freight and look at landscapes


Miguel Rodríguez Otero’s poems appear in The Lake, Book of Matches, The Red Fern Review, Wilderness House Literary Review and Scapegoat Review, and are forthcoming in Last Leaves Magazine and DarkWinter Literary Magazine. He likes to walk country roads and is friends with a heron that lives near his home.

At the Heart of It

Nonfiction by Sandra Marilyn

Lying in the bed next to you, the summer breeze softly poofing the curtains, the night is so quiet I can hear time moving by without us. My head on your chest. My ear to your heart that beats with the consistency of waves stroking the sand. I want to see inside you. I want to understand how it feels to live inside your body, to see how you manage the life that was fashioned by the uniqueness of your experiences, as different from my own as another language.

Another night voices with edges so sharp they could slice soft belly skin. All my fears, losses, demands, unfilled chasms, unjustified expectations, thicken the air that is already crowded with the sounds of every woman who ever cried before us in the rooms of this antique house. Women in long skirts moaned their sorrow faintly to harmonize with my own. My longing collapses me. Your heart is as closed as your rigid face. Your body backs away from my touch.

Another day you walk through the door after entertaining the neighbor’s blind cat and voluntarily washing the pots and pans they left behind when they rushed out to catch a plane. You sing a high-pitched nonsense song to the silly wag-tail dog, who listens with tall ears. You are gathering your tools to work in the sidewalk gardens you have created just for the joy of passers-by. Your heart is so big I wonder if it will burst through and float away, too huge to be contained. A surreal orb valiantly competing with the sun.

And today I sit in the darkened to gray room in the cardio wing of the hospital listening to the forever buzzing and clicking of the machines that will assess the competency of your heart, the viability of your life. The technician sits at a slight angle between you, reclining on the table, and the monitor where the graphs are changing every second, a festive march of flashing neon colors. Your heart is beating a percussive background in sync with the lightshow on the screen. I shift my chair to see the images over the shoulder of the technician, the images that have no meaning to me beside the riveting spectacle of their color and movement.

And then she finds exactly the right position on your chest and there it is. There is your heart, magnified and magnificent, pulsing on the screen. A splendid red-brown muscle. Squeezing, opening, squeezing, opening, squeezing, opening with a sensuous loyalty.

I was presented with the most precious thing, the most personal thing you could offer me. The very essence of your being, of your spirit, exposing itself to me. I remember the years of needing to see you better, to grasp your true meaning, to see inside your heart. And here in this room hidden away from the street noise and the sunshine, and the people forever grasping for happiness and meaning, I could see inside your heart.

As you lay almost sleeping, hypnotized by the sounds, soothed by the darkened room, unable to see what I saw on the screen, unaware of my emotional journey into your heart. My hand on my own heart, tears gathering, I had never felt closer to you, never loved you more.


In a world of isolated people, Sandra Marilyn cherishes the love that has sustained her. This love has been sending its roots deeper and deeper for decades and yet there is still more to learn, more to feel.


Read more of Sandra’s flash nonfiction essays on The Bluebird Word from October 2022 and June 2024.

Impossible Love

Nonfiction by Leslie Lisbona

Mom and I were talking. “I know what you mean,” she said. I didn’t have to explain much and somehow she understood. She got me in a way no one else did. She used to say, recalling Oscar Wilde, “Take away all my necessities and give me only luxuries.” But for me, having this mom—my mom—was everything. I didn’t need anything else but her.

I was unmarried and about to turn thirty. My boyfriend lived in Mexico, and if I married him, which everyone wanted, I would have to leave her and live there.
Mom and I sat side by side on the couch. I held Paul Auster’s book, Leviathan, on my lap. We had both just finished reading it. “I want to go to the Strand during the week,” I said.

“I’ll meet you there after work,” she said.

We both sighed simultaneously, and this made her laugh.

With my toe, I pushed the ashtray a few inches over on the coffee table. It sat unused and shiny since she had quit smoking. Still, her asthma came suddenly sometimes, and the furniture had a faint smell of cigarette smoke. She examined her nails and looked disappointed with them.

“Shall we go to a movie together?” she half-whispered.

“Yes!” I said, and I reached for New York Magazine to do research. I found My Fair Lady in the city.

“Let’s go now!” she said.

I ran upstairs to get ready. I felt like I was five and someone had handed me an ice cream cone. Afterwards, on the drive home on Queens Boulevard, we sang “I could have danced all night” as we both looked straight ahead.

It wasn’t long after this that I lost her—with no warning. Her not being with or near me was inconceivable. I married a year later, someone I really loved and who lived nearby. We have two grown sons. But the luxury of having someone who understands me so deeply remains elusive.


Leslie Lisbona has been published, most recently in Wrong Turn Lit, The Bluebird Word, and Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. In March, she was featured in the New York Times Style section. She is the child of immigrants from Beirut, Lebanon, and grew up in Queens, NY.

Maternal Fabric

Nonfiction by Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

The Christmas before she died, my mother gave seven-year-old Gwyn a mint-green Hello Kitty sewing machine. Believe it or not it’s a decent machine, she said, despite its small size and ridiculous color. The two of them spent the week making Gwyn’s first patchwork pillow, my mother’s gray chemo curls mingling with Gwyn’s untamed ginger. Gwyn took to sewing as I never had. Afterward I told myself if my mother were to die tomorrow, at least this happened, at least grandmother and grandchild shared days of fingering fabric and winding thread and loving what they both love.

She died that May. And one month later we needed fabric for Gwyn to sew pillow cases as a wedding present for her birth mom. Time was short so I took her to a tiny store just a mile north, a store we’d never been in because the faded mural of a quilt chipping off the exterior made me assume it would be filled with quilt kits and the cheap fabric my mother scorned. As soon as we walked in I knew otherwise. The shelves were saturated with color: bolts in batik, Japanese indigo, elegant floral cotton. It was my mother’s dream store. While Gwyn pranced between shelves I stood in the doorway, aching for my mother. Gwyn discovered the enormous bank of thread and pulled me over: “Look, Mama!” A tidy, exuberant rainbow, and she adored every spool. Gwyn’s delight soothed my sorrow. At least she’ll carry forward my mother’s sewing legacy.

Then, from the thousands of lovely artisan cloths, Gwyn chose a cutsie retro kitten print. In red, teal, and baby blue. My mother in me reared up—no, no, no! Wide-eyed cats pawing balls of yarn were the epitome of kitsch—beneath us, somehow. With every other fabric in this store Gwyn could make something beautiful. Except that Gwyn and her birth mom love cats. Gwyn was the seamstress. She knew what she wanted.

The fabric was perfect.

And just as suddenly I was grateful my mom was gone. She would have held sway in the name of good taste and reputation. For decades I’ve heard her voice in my head, sometimes heeding it, sometimes rebelling, but now her voice is disembodied. She’s dead. She’ll never see the pillowcases, which are adorable and of which Gwyn is terrifically proud. Her birth mom rests her head nightly on Gwyn’s love. The woman at the counter thumped the fabric from the bolt and snipped with long, black-handled scissors, cutting for us both a measure of freedom.


Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew is a wisdom teacher and writing coach dedicated to facilitating creative emergence. As a writer she elicits the spirit’s movement within stories; as a teacher she supports transformation within writers and on the page. You can connect with Elizabeth at www.spiritualmemoir.com and www.elizabethjarrettandrew.com.

Sparks

Poetry by Daphne Riddle

A night in September
surrounded by water
that’s when we first sparked

gentle as ever
I never felt better
meeting your light with my dark

your hands in my hair
that shirt that you wear
our love summed up in parts

the sparks aren’t there
and I wish that you’d care
I’m lost here in the dark

I look for you everywhere
and you just carry on
I’m questioning all those years
but all I really want
is floating in September

with all of the fish
and the stars
and the songs
and the sparks


Daphne Riddle is an artist from Southern California. She is a music student at CSU Long Beach and an active songwriter. She is largely influenced by her study of international art song and her career as a musician. Writing is her foundation to heal.

The Birdhouse

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

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

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.

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