magic Archives - The Bluebird Word

Poetry by Martha Ellen Johnson

“Grammy, let’s fly away.”
We are sitting on the top
step of the second floor
staircase. Down the hall
is her magical kingdom
bedroom. She’s wearing
fairy wings over her street
clothes as usual, a sign of
a theatrical life to bloom
in later years. “I can’t. I
don’t have any wings,” I said.
“Hold my hand. We can fly
together.” And I do. We
fly down the hall soaring
into another realm hovering
far above the ordinary, held
aloft by the imagination
of the most innocent.

Martha Ellen Johnson lives alone in an old Victorian house on a hill on the Oregon coast. Retired social worker. History of social justice activism. Old hippie. MFA. Poems and prose published in various journals and online forums. She writes to process the events of her wild life.

Poetry by Alexander Etheridge

In another season, another world—
that lost moment, we ran into nights
of shudder and crucible, autumn

and oceans—our love
barely risen out of its roots.
We stepped breathlessly

into a century of summers.
We watched eternal changes
of the magic aster flower

and the magic aspen tree
in the temple of dawns, open on all sides
to white spangled light—

Just before black asteroids
crowded our sun. The temple columns
cracked under ice, and thorny vines

choked the roads.
As the trees crawled out
to drown themselves in the tide,

we began our dying
in the black burning plains,
our few seconds of love gone

into a child’s book of fables.

Alexander Etheridge has been developing his poems and translations since 1998. His poems have been featured in Wilderness House Literary Review, Cerasus Journal, The Cafe Review, The Madrigal, Abridged Magazine, Susurrus Magazine, The Journal, and others. He was the winner of the Struck Match Poetry Prize in 1999.

Tag: magic

Let’s Fly Away

Fable of Love on Fire

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