An Online Literary Journal for Poetry and Flash

Tag: love (Page 6 of 6)

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.

7:00 PM, JUNO

Poetry by Stephanie Buesinger

The turtle’s shell is plastic, his insides
spongy – we dug out the hard wires,
tossed out the batteries that made up his belly
left only the soft parts for you.

The first thing I bought from a TV ad,
his shell riddled with holes to project the night sky
you wanted only his squishy body, sweet face
even after I wash him, he smells like you.

They say – watch out
for alligators in shallow water
for poisonous frogs in deep grass, but you
always liked the roughness of shells.

Tonight, under the white moon, the mothers will crawl onto this sand to lay their eggs
Like me, sea turtles can hold their breath for a long time.


Stephanie Buesinger writes fiction and children’s literature and enjoys illustration and photography. With degrees from Wellesley College and the University of Texas at Austin, she has worked in corporate finance and economic consulting. Stephanie is the Blog Editor at Literary Mama. She lives in Florida with her husband, teenagers, and rescue pets.

lament

Poetry by Nicholas Barnes

when you stopped
               looking at ladybugs

like they were miracles

               like they shouldn’t be there

but they somehow were,

and you started looking
               at them like …

i’ve seen
               a million of you before,

that’s the day you died.

that’s the day you stopped
               loving yourself.


Nicholas Barnes earned a Bachelor of Arts in English at Southern Oregon University. He currently works as an editor in Portland, and enjoys music, museums, movie theaters, and rain. His poems have been accepted by Mortal Mag, Barzakh, and Something Involving A Mailbox!, among others.

My Eyes Are Small

Poetry by Walter Weinschenk

The portals of my eyes are small
But through them I see the Pleiades,
And when the atmosphere is clear
I see them staring back at me.

My ears are also small:
Narrow halls through which I heard,
One dismal afternoon,
The steady drum of Death,
His footsteps loud upon the stairs;
Steady at first, then tentative,
They slowly faded as Death retreated
For no apparent reason.

In the silence of the morning,
Some trifling sound – a chirping bird,
A broken twig, it doesn’t matter which –
Is loud enough to rouse
The mountain from his sleep;
He lets roll the snow
And it decimates a town
That took a thousand years to build.

And so it is that the enormity of love,
Too immense to understand,
Is born within the gentle press
Of pallid lips together,
And the touch of tiny fingertips
Across the boundless space
That lies between two sets of eyes.


Walter Weinschenk is an attorney, writer and musician. His writing has appeared in a number of literary publications including the Carolina Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, Cathexis Northwest Press, Beyond Words, Griffel, The Raw Art Review with work forthcoming in the Iris Literary Journal and Sand Hills Literary Magazine. Walter lives in a suburb just outside Washington, D.C.

Astronomers Estimate That There Are at least Seven Letters in the Word “Romance”

Poetry by Rich Boucher

Maybe I could be a bird
that will always live outside your window
and just when you need inspiration
I’ll just start talking
but you won’t be scared,
even though you were expecting birdsong:
you’ll be so shocked and then
this shock will blossom cracklingly
into inspiration; I wish I could tell you
what was whispered in my ear
when I asked why I existed
in kindergarten and a teacher leaned down
and actually told me the reason;
you can laugh at my fear of mailmen
all you like but when was the last time
you got a letter that wasn’t lying
when it said you should be happy;
mock my faith in the primary colors
but tell me you’ve never felt the intensity
of red and chose instead to call it a kind of blush,
tell me your shivers don’t call to mind blue,
swear to me you’ve never seen a yellow ambulance
and found yourself in complete agreement.
I’d love to meet the person you need me to be
and tell him that I might not be much
but at least I don’t have a degree
in the study of room temperatures;
romance is a word that has just enough letters
to spell itself and put me into a weird headspace
where I’m the one person who never learned
how to take sticks and turn them
into the because of fire,
but if you ever need someone
who can genuinely be afraid of the dark,
well, that’s something I can certainly do for you.


Rich Boucher resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rich’s poems have appeared in Bending Genres, Menacing Hedge and Stink Eye, among others, and he has work forthcoming in Boats Against The Current and Amethyst Review. Rich is BOMBFIRE Magazine’s Associate Editor, and he is the author of All Of This Candy Belongs To Me.

At Dawn Where Two Worlds Meet

Nonfiction by Hope Nisly

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
-Rumi

The light of early morning is magic, pure and simple and full of possibility. I believe this, even when I am rudely jolted awake by the ring of my phone and it is barely light out. A voice asks, “Can you be ready in five minutes? I’ll pick you up. I want to show you something.” Because the voice belongs to the quietest of my five brothers, the one who seldom displays strong emotion or succumbs to any hint of urgency, I respond quickly and without a clue of what might be coming.

Now here we stand quietly at the fence row of a neighbor’s farm. We are looking out over a convocation of bald eagles, at minimum forty, that landed in a field newly-covered with the aromatic debris from a farmer’s barnyard. I take a deep breath and hold it, as if any movement or sound might obliterate the tranquility of this early morning tableau.

In several weeks, this field will be covered with green shoots pushing up through the rich, muck-covered soil. This morning, however, it is covered only with majestic birds that swoop and peck at the dung, hunting for a mischief of mice or a labor of voles too slow to evade their talons of death. The eagles, so recently snatched back from the edge of extinction, ignore our curiosity.

In the pink glow of the rising sun, our shoes damp with dew, all hints of our political differences have faded into the shadows of this flood of early light.

Words are superfluous in this light. Side-by-side, we stand in silence and solidarity and hope, basking in this breath-taking view of these birds of prey. I am content to stand quietly in the lengthy early-morning shadow cast by my brother, this quiet man whose soul is full of love for all living things, who wants to share this with me just because I am; just because he is; just because we are.


Hope Nisly is a retired librarian living in Reedley, California where she gets up early to catch the full moon going down and watch the sun rising in its wake. Her writing has appeared in Mojave River Review, Fredericksburg Literary and Arts Review, and Persimmon Tree. Her stories have aired on Valley Writers Read, a program of the local NPR-affiliate station.

Life and Love as Seen Through My Plum Tree

Nonfiction by Michele Tjin

The delicate popcorn balls of flowers have appeared again, the herald of a new season. The arrival seems earlier each year. 

The plum tree was already a mature specimen when we moved into this house. That first July, one of the first things we did was to pick up the rotting fruit off the ground. I whispered to the tree and my pregnant belly that in a year or two, there would be small hands to help harvest the fruit.

How does this tree of the family Prunus salicina know when to emerge from winter and make slivers of leaves and dainty blooms?

How do I know when to kick off this curtain of chaos and confront hard issues, difficile confligit?

Other signs of life and hope in my backyard: tiny sparrows and hummingbirds dancing around the flowers of the plum tree; songbirds trilling. The harshness of winter is behind us.

Despite not watering and pruning this tree, not giving it any real love or attention, it continues to be dependable and prolific.

I look forward to the perfume of plums ripening in my kitchen. Nothing is as wonderful as biting into the amber flesh and allowing the clear juice to run down my chin.

After a few weeks of non-stop eating, I’m satiated. Yet others tell me they can’t get enough of this fruit.

Don’t you forget about me this year, a friend says.

If you want to come over and climb a ladder, help yourself, I answer.

If I climb a ladder to bridge the chasms, will it be worth it, or will I fall?

In the summer, this tree is weighed down so much by its fruit that it needs to be propped up with a stick, a visible reminder of how much goodness this tree gives.

I imagine the tree’s complex network of roots searching deep underground to find a source of life-giving water to nourish itself.

How do I nourish my spirit when it’s dry and withered?

Things this plum tree has witnessed: birthday cakes and birthday parties. A kiddie pool that lasted just an afternoon one summer. A bounce house that winter. Another bounce house the following winter. That time we dyed socks. My efforts at being a backyard gardener. Dinners outside. Ants. The neighbor’s cat. That stray rabbit. People who once came over frequently but no longer visit because of quarantine, new seasons of life, or small conflicts that festered and coalesced into something bigger, something that doesn’t have a name or shape anymore. 

Or maybe it’s just a lost connection. I’m not sure anymore. 

These blossoms are fleeting: in just a few weeks, they will be torn apart by the wind. Their fragile nature and impermanence have always struck me, like they’re a metaphor for something.

My hands and a pair of smaller ones will collect the plums in four months when the green small marbles deepen into crimson globes, and we’ll give much of our harvest away.

After the summer, after a period of cold and reset, this tree will bloom once more the following spring and offer me hope again. Where will I be in a year?


Michele Tjin is an emerging writer who writes others’ stories by day and her own by night. When she is not writing, she aspires to be a better backyard gardener.

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