An Online Literary Journal for Poetry and Flash

Tag: love (Page 5 of 6)

The Unboxing

Poetry by Jennifer Campbell

Recalling craftsmen
and cobblestone streets,
I may be the apprentice,
laying rice paper
between leather straps
in a protective shield.
I slide slips over leather pulls
and foam circles
over grommets
and buckles.

I give myself permission.

I leave no fingerprints
on silver. The scent
of earth lets go
with each fold and tuck,
wrap and smooth.

The finished product
grows incrementally smaller,
an act of love
expressed one too many times.


Jennifer Campbell is an English professor in Buffalo, NY, and a co-editor of Earth’s Daughters. She has published two full-length poetry books and a chapbook of reconstituted fairytale poems. Jennifer’s work appears in The Healing Muse, San Pedro River Review, The Sixty-Four Best Poets of 2019, and Paterson Review.

Never Too Late

Nonfiction by Nick Wynne

I had no experience with fatherhood, nor did I have the kind of experience with my father that would have helped me to be a better one. My father was an alcoholic, and I and all my siblings bore the brunt of that. He could be kind, but he could also be harsh and emotionally abusive. Despite his shortcomings, he and my mother made sure that we grew up with strong moral values and work ethic. Although we went through periods of severe economic stress as a family, they sacrificed to ensure that we were fed, clothed, and loved. Tragically, as a family we didn’t articulate our love for each other until after his death. It was there, but we didn’t express it.

I must confess I never really understood my father until I was in my mid-30s. Only then did I understand that he was a brilliant man who could have been anything he wanted to with an education but was forced to leave school in the third grade and work to support his mother and family. We, his own family, were five in number, and he worked hard to support us despite knowing that every job he took involved hard labor and minimum wages. Nevertheless, he persisted. It is no wonder that he took to drink to relieve his frustrations at not being able to provide more. Hard to understand, but understandable.

I do know that I never told my father I loved him until he was on his death bed. My brother Joe and I were in his room where he was in a coma. Joe left for some reason, and I was there alone with him. He briefly opened his eyes and looked at me. I felt compelled to tell him face-to-face, “I never told you this, you old sonofabitch, but I love you.” He blinked his eyes, smiled a little smile, closed his eyes, and died.


Nick Wynne is a retired educator and published author. He is a native of McRae, Georgia but lives in Rockledge, Florida. His latest book is Cousin Bob: The World War II Experiences of Robert Morris Warren, DSC. His website is www.nickwynnebooks.com.

To Thoreau

Poetry by Robert McParland

In your steps this day I look
Over this field, this flower spray
On sand I walk out toward the beach
Taking shells up with my hand
Here you stood that fateful June
Under this lighthouse, rhythmic sea
Like us you walked not knowing where
An ocean wave on light would turn
I see you now, standing here
Desolate, barefoot, on the shore
Your sad eyes scan the lonely sea
Remembering her, how they went down
Like a love sonnet in the waves
A sandbar claims the roughened tide
These summers now, journal in hand
My love too seems to have foundered on
Some waves that wash up toward a beach
Wood-creak crash, how we collapsed
The water broke upon our cries
Like you I walk in thought absorbed
Like water in sand between my toes.


Robert McParland teaches college English, writes songs, and has published several books on American culture and literary history.

The Place Between

Nonfiction by Susan Pope

Nothing but white. Walls, comforter, window shades, pale light leaking around the edges. Am I awake or dreaming? Is it night or day? I’ve lost all tethers.

The fury that delivered us here to Iceland spun out. In the calm, bird song. I slip from the warmth of my husband’s side, fumble for hat, coat, gloves, binoculars, and gently open the door.

“Where are you going?”

My eighteen-year-old grandson lifts his head from a pillow in the next bed.

“For a walk.”

“At 4:30 in the morning?”

He, at least, has come to rest on local time, while my body hovers between oceans and continents, time zones and eras. We pause between our home in Alaska and our destination, Paris, where we’ll join the rest of the family for a grand tour of Europe.


Moist air skims my cheeks as I hike a worn path to the lake. Steam lifts from the shore, drifting up from thick black mud. No other humans stir, but the birds sing, each in its own language. In the distance, whooper swans trumpet to each other, surely bowing and weaving their long, elegant necks in a courtship dance. Close by, Arctic terns, bodies sleek and silver in the luminous light, hover, swoop, snatch fish from the smooth water, and hum their raspy tunes.

I imagine a tall, sturdy Viking woman walking this same path. She’s slipped out of her sod hut, leaving her husband and children tucked beneath their sheepskin robes, on her way to fish for Arctic char or steal eggs from bird nests along the shore. She feeds her family.

By contrast, here I am, a small, American grandmother in a blue and purple hat, wandering with no other purpose than to spy on birds and guess their names.

This extravagant journey was my idea, a gathering of three generations before my teenaged grandchildren flee my grown daughter’s nest. I hope that a glimpse of the wider world will be my legacy to them. But, more honestly, the trip is a gift to me, as I turn seventy. If I can just hold my family close one more time…. What? They will love me? Remember me? Thank me? 

Eric Erickson, the developmental psychologist, believed that the task of the last phase of life is to reconcile integrity with despair. If we look back on our lives and feel a sense of accomplishment, then we will feel complete, that our life had value. If we look back and feel guilty that we have not met our goals, then we will feel hopeless. The ultimate goal in this phase is wisdom. But, I feel neither wise nor hopeless, nor ready to declare this the final chapter of my life. 

I reach a small clearing beside the lake. A weathered sign proclaims this ground—heated from the earth’s molten core—a sacred place. People once traveled here for healing. Now, it’s overgrown and neglected. Perhaps no one needs to make a healing pilgrimage anymore. I move to the center of the weeds and wait for a tingle of enlightenment. Instead, I feel only the warm ground at my feet and cool breeze on my face. 

My mother turned seventy the year my daughter turned twenty-one. Their birthdays were two days apart, so we held a double celebration, my daughter reaching adulthood, my mother, wisdom, or at least longevity. I discounted my mother’s life then. I tried my best to be nothing like her. She had no interest in education, career, travel, or anything broader than taking care of husband and family. By contrast, I layered my life with diplomas, careers, and travel to exotic places. It was never quite enough.

I turn back, heading up the hill to the old school turned tourist hostel. Just as I fumble for my key, the night clerk rushes to open the door for me. He must have been watching the crazy woman roaming among the birds. 

When I enter our room, it smells of sweat and damp clothes. Old man and boy man. I slide off my coat and shoes and slip back into the cocoon for a few more minutes, close to my men with their soft snores and grunts.

I don’t know if my mother felt wise when she died twelve years after her seventieth birthday. I do know that she was content to fiercely love the small cluster of people she kept close to her. Maybe that’s enough of a legacy for anyone to leave. 


Susan Pope writes about nature, travel, and family. Her work has appeared in Pilgrimage, Under the Sun, Cirque: A Literary Journal of the Pacific Rim, Hippocampus, Burrow Press Review, BioStories, and Alaska Magazine, among others. Her writing reflects intimate ties to the North and a restless pursuit of faraway places.

The History of Everything

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.

Places I Have Unexpectedly Found Tears

Poetry by Samantha Ashe

a spin class,
the final song
that one collective push
the recognition of each other
in this synchronized struggle

a Macy’s,
after overhearing an adult woman
refer to her mother as “Mama”
the softness of its sound
the summoning of sweetness
the remembering of my own

in traffic,
interstate 5 heading north
the woman by herself
a passionate steering wheel drum solo
head swaying
screaming the words
witnessing a spirit
unleashed

the bathroom,
in the middle of the night
the fifth ungodly night of no sleep
palms cradling my face
pleading to the sleep gods

in my daughter’s room,
watching as she tucks
each of her babies in for bed
the gentle timbre in her voice
the tactile tenderness of her hands
the hope
       that maybe
            she learned this from me


Samantha Ashe lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and daughter where she works as a personal trainer and fitness instructor. She spends her free time writing next to an open window or in the woods, chasing summits and sunrises.

House Hunting

Poetry by Lana Hechtman Ayers

We’re looking for something spacious
as the interior of a poem,
so roomy you can get lost in its images,
hallways that roam along
to unexpected turns of phrase.

We’re hoping to find something close
to all the conveniences—
fresh air perfumed with meter,
trees that tousle their limbs
seductively in breezes,
hills curvaceous as villanelles.

We’re searching for a place that fits
our personalities—a kitchen of clean
steam and courtesy, delectable soups
and sestinas bubbling on the stove,
a bath where unsullied truth
freely flows from all the taps,
a bedroom that masters
the art of moon phases and meteors.

We’re seeking a home we can fill with
blankets, dog fur, cat fur, the enjambment
of too many books.
A home that will hold steady looks,
silly askance glances,
even a few cross words once in a while.

A home that weathers moods well,
the way streams wear every broken rock
down to pebble shine.

We don’t mind winding avenues
of rhyme, and have no preference
about windows, so long as they’re
always wide and wise.

We don’t care for one-way stairs,
though being able to stare at a view
of empathy is essential.

We want a home in which light
is as bright as the scent of lavender,
a home where the sound of rain
on the roof is our hearts’ sonnet
as our arms reach for one another
in the night.

And we want a home where the silence,
however rare, is always and ever holy.


Lana Hechtman Ayers, MFA, has shepherded over eighty poetry volumes into print in her role as managing editor for three small presses. Her work appears in print and online in places such as RattleSnake Nation Review, and Verse Daily, as well as in her nine collections.

Sparrows I Have Known

Poetry by Catherine Coundjeris

My first memory is of song–
song in sunlight rapturous and bright.
Elusive bodies hopping in branches
and on rooftops, lining wires
and chattering back and forth.

In Boston to my delight,
by old Ironsides, they
came to rest on my table.
Perching on the backs of chairs,
begging for morsels.

With my brother in Oxford,
we noticed their variety
marveled at their language
photographed them on walks.

Now in Frederick, outside Walmart,
they sit on baskets, flit
between cars, and angle
for scraps still curling along
the macadam.

It is April and I remember
our trek through back roads,
looking for hawks and eagles
with sparrows for company.

I have seen them
beat each other up
at bird feeders.
We have my brother’s old
feeder but we need
to buy a post for it.

They come anyway and
taste the seeds
on our fruit trees,
alighting on the wildflowers
on the hill behind our house.
My brother would have enjoyed it here.


A former elementary school teacher, Catherine Coundjeris has taught writing at Emerson College and ESL writing at Urban College in Boston. Her poetry is published in The Dawntreader, Visions with Voices, Nine Cloud Journal, Academy of the Heart and Mind, Bombfire, Paper Dragons and many more.

Grateful Heart

Nonfiction by Allison Wehrle

The rose, its five-inch bloom too heavy for its stem, brushed against my leg. It hung over the edged garden bed onto the narrow walkway alongside our garage. I had planted this rosebush just a few months prior, sprinkling its roots with ashes as I emptied the contents of a paw-printed urn into their final resting place. It flourished quickly and now demanded my attention, just like its furry counterpart. I set my toddler down and knelt in front of the insistent plant, cupping the massive flower in my hands. Pulling the pruning shears out of my back pocket, I clipped the bowed stem along with a couple other blossoms, dense petals still unfurling. I brought the trio into the house and placed them in my grandma’s delicate bud vase.

Jack, our beloved black cat (who once shattered a mirror) lived to be 13 and passed on the Ides of March. I acquired him when he was just five weeks old and, as far as either of us was concerned, I was his mama. My constant companion, this fluffy soot sprite blossomed into a stunning feline, with plush fur, inquisitive green eyes, and a supple, panther-like tail. 

Our family – and square footage – grew considerably over the years: cat, husband, kids; apartment, condo, house. And with the house came a (postage stamp of a) yard. Finally, I could get my hands dirty and plant something other than the same boring annuals in a window box. Perennials. Pollinators. Vegetables. I wanted them all. But then I had a baby, who was too mobile come spring for me to do much gardening, so I stuck some petunias in a pot and tended to my offspring instead. We spent that summer on a blanket in the back yard, while the cats lounged on the deck.

Iggy, a big blue tomcat that spent his early years on the mean streets of Chicago, adopted me from the shelter where I volunteered at the time, not realizing that Jack and I were a package deal. He had the softest fur and the sharpest claws; the tiniest meow and the loudest purr; the meanest glare and the biggest heart. Both a lover and a biter, he was the toughest ‘fraidy cat I’ve ever known. 

Iggy assumed the alpha male role upon arrival. He bit Jack’s ears to assert dominance and to try and tame that free spirit. He chattered angrily at the birds outside the living room window, to show them who’s boss. But the night a mouse dared enter our apartment, Iggy dropped all pretense. He leapt onto the kitchen table, prancing around like a housewife from the fifties, leaving Jack to deal with the squeaky intruder. Despite their roughhousing, Jack worshipped Iggy. Iggy begrudgingly came to love Jack. They made such a great pair.

If cats had middle names, Jack’s would have been Trouble. Although it was acute kidney failure – not curiosity – that took him from us, it became clear early on that his nine lives would be nowhere near enough, given his penchant for mischief. Above all, Jack adored us, his family, and was happiest when we were all at home. Although he missed it by a day, Jack would have loved lockdown. 

Each summer, we made small improvements to the yard. We replaced the ugly, overgrown yew with a Japanese maple, thinned the hostas, and buried tulip bulbs among the boxwoods. Then came the year everything changed. 

Stuck at home, awash in postpartum hormones, suddenly unemployed and without childcare, my home felt more like a prison than a refuge and I longed to be outdoors. The neighbors had removed a large catalpa tree, sending a stream of sunlight flooding into our backyard. I wanted to plant a rose. A rose for Jack. The new baby hampered my gardening ambitions; the slow reopening of non-essential businesses (like nurseries) derailed it entirely. And so we spent another idle summer in the backyard, all except for Iggy, who was content to lounge in the doorway and sniff the warm breeze or snooze in the sunbeams.  

Not wanting to miss another planting season, I ordered plants online the next February. I chose Jack’s rose almost instantly, an exceptional, show-stopping hybrid with jumbo blooms in a velvety crimson. Even its name spoke to me: Grateful Heart. I debated whether to preemptively order a plant for Iggy, too, even as he lay draped across my lap, purring. Pragmatism edged out my guilt, as his health was steadily declining. Although the vet once declared him to be the “Timex of felines”, illness and old age soon won out. 

I kept coming back to Crescendo, a delicate tea rose with petals that morphed from white to blush to pink as they unfurled. I perused the recommended add-ons and selected a highly rated plant food that edged my total up just enough to qualify for free shipping, but decided against the bone meal, which seemed morbidly redundant. 

Back outside, I moved to the other rosebush. Planted the same day and enhanced with the same organic matter, for weeks it remained a cluster of thorny, lifeless branches. Had I not been so invested in its survival I would have likely given up when it first failed to thrive. But now, this late bloomer had rewarded my patience with a solitary, breath-taking rose. 

As I reached to clip the single rose from its stocky bush, I punctured my thumb on a razor-sharp thorn lurking just below the leaves. It was then I knew I’d chosen the right cultivar.  “Hi, buddy” I whispered, as I pressed thumb and forefinger together to discourage bleeding. Then, holding the stem by the scruff this time, I nestled Iggy’s lone flower into the vase, the perfect complement to Jack’s showy blooms.


Allison Wehrle is a former magazine editor, classically trained musician and aspiring essay writer. She lives in Chicago with her husband and two human children.

The Lost One

Poetry by Lisa Spencer Trecost

I look at the sky and see a cloud
So I talk to you but not out loud

You left me here on the ground
A place at times I cannot stand

I hear the noise as people speak
But for the one I listen I cannot see

I feel you in the vast blue sky
I feel you in the tears I cry

I taste salt air and remember when…
So I reach for you but touch only wind

You’re near but far, a heart without beat
While mine still races as I desperately seek
The one who is missing
Me.


Lisa Spencer Trecost is a heart-centered writer who loves to travel with her husband and dogs.

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