Tag: nature (Page 2 of 4)

After the Blizzard

20 June 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Wally Swist

The fox prints puncturing the surface
of the snow after the blizzard
score its whiteness—
the same four notes pressing themselves
over and over again, in a meandering line
across a page, that is more silence
than music, but is still a melody that
can barely be heard,
shadows filling the tracks beneath
the pine branches shifting in the wind.

But it is the sound of the bells
that not so much startles me
as it offers me solace, ringing
from a distance, this soft chiming of sleigh
bells, until as it gets closer, it is more
of a whistle, the notes becoming distinct—
making me aware of its velocity, now
in flight, the tinkling call of a white-throated
sparrow, streaking close to my ear, melding
its voice with the streaming winter sunlight.

Wally Swist’s books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2011 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition, and A Bird Who Seems to Know Me: Poems Regarding Birds and Nature, winner of the 2018 Ex Ophidia Poetry Prize.

Magpie

7 June 2023 / Editor

Fiction by Andy Larter

First of all I hear their harsh clacking. There they are in the cherry tree, two of them, thank goodness, ying-yang, bold and brash. I hold a cup in one hand, towel in the other and, despite their reputation as nest robbers, I love their brilliant whiteness, their dark, glossy tails and wings.

They cackle me back to that time we heard a thud on the window, the one I am looking through now. We turned to see what made the sound and there on the window was the shape of a bird like an old photo negative–vague, ghostly, wings and all. Yvonne locked the cat away as I prowled into the yard. Under the window, stark against the earth lay the bird. I thought it had died but it quickened in my fingers.

Dad said they were evil birds. Yvonne said it’s not all black and white. “Look at that green and blue shimmering in its tail,” she said. He pointed out the cruel dark bill, the way they frighten smaller birds. Mum told us how they often taunted Patches, perching and cackling just out of the cat’s reach. Yvonne thought them clever creatures. She brought a shoebox, some cotton wool and a couple of writhing worms she’d collected from her bed of herbs, placed it on a shelf by the window in the shed.

“I’m going to take care of him,” she beamed. “Make him well again.”

Back indoors I saw the image of the bird remained on the glass and I gazed through it to the yard outside. I took a photo of the pattern, saw that moment through the bird’s eye, tried to focus on what it had seen.

The following morning, when Yvonne went to the shed, the bird had gone. Dad said he had found it on the floor of the shed pecking at crumbs and dust. “I thought it best to let it go,” he said, “and it flew to the aerial. Another one joined it and they went away.”

As I watch the antics of the magpies in the tree today and listen to their bold, aggressive chatter, I shrug and salute them. Then a vision of her magpie reappears in my mind’s eye and, beyond that, some blurred movement in the shed.

Andy Larter is a retired teacher, who, since retiring, has taken writing more seriously. He has had a few pieces published in local magazines and a couple online. He probably doesn’t submit enough but some friends encourage him to do more. He lives quietly in UK with his wife.

Raindrops

16 May 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Diane Webster

From the sculptured
metal of the sunflower head
beads of rain
gather like ripe seeds
dropping to the earth
for next spring’s sprout.

Diane Webster‘s goal is to remain open to poetry ideas in everyday life, nature or an overheard phrase. Diane enjoys the challenge of transforming images into words to fit her poems. Her work has appeared in El Portal, North Dakota Quarterly, New English Review and other literary magazines.

Bellflower

30 March 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Charlene Stegman Moskal

for Barnett

You were a surprise—
planted in early spring

in soil too dry
to hold the essence of you,

but there you were
digging in

like the Bellflower
that has ridden the wind,

dropped gently or tumbled
into a dark, moist, earth-spiced bed

to carry the generations
that shaped its destiny

to grow , bloom, offer itself
to the world as a spark of color,

royal purple heralding the summer
against a background green as hope.

And here you are,
my own unexpected Bellflower

just when I was sure
the field had gone fallow.

Charlene Stegman Moskal is a Teaching Artist for the Las Vegas Poetry Promise Organization. She is published in numerous anthologies, print magazines and online. Her chapbooks are One Bare Foot (Zeitgeist Press), Leavings from My Table (Finishing Line Press) with a third from Kelsay Books in Fall 2023.

Trimester to St. Patrick’s

16 March 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Jeannette Tien-Wei Law

Ice morn, fog cloak, fierce gray snows
Ash trance, tree bones, stone mute crows
Steps swish, crisp blades, sham rocks crunch
Three leaves, talc coats, luck’s charm froze

Jeannette Tien-Wei Law was awarded the 2022 Newman Prize for English Jueju, an international distinction for original poetry in classical Chinese form, written in English. Currently an educator in Milan, Italy, her poetry has won acclaim in academic circles and a growing number of global publications.

Remember Me

18 February 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Lauren Oertel

I grew up near the redwoods.
Cinnamon-barked queens towered over us,
each containing their own majestic ecosystem.
They provided oxygen, a fresh earthy scent,
relief from the heat and noise of the city.
They whispered the soil’s secrets into my ear.
A few had been hollowed by fire,
or reduced to a stump.
Rings chronicled their long lives,
the history of what they had witnessed.

When I die, cut me in half
right across the middle.
See my rings.

Joys and terrors over the years
each reduced to a simple circle
that captures and carries it all.
They will honor the tears shed,
wounds healed.
The fine grain, nicks, and bumps,
all smoothed over with time,
turned into natural beauty.

When my body becomes a stump,
the rings will prove I was here.
Some of them will show when I stood tall,
lush with sprays of needle leaves,
umbrella-scaled cones.
My crown stretched toward the sun,
piercing the sky.
In those times I hope I gave you shelter
from the weight of daily survival.

That’s how I’d like you to remember me.

Lauren Oertel is a community organizer for Texas and New Mexico. Her work has been published in The Ravens Perch, Evening Street Review, and The Sun Magazine. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her partner Orlando and their tuxedo cat Apollonia.

Resolutions

1 February 2023 / Editor

Special Selection for one-year Anniversary Issue

Nonfiction by Heather Bartos

I go out for a run on the morning of New Year’s Day. There’s a fog advisory and everything more than ten feet away is blurred, a smudge, too far in the future to bother with. The things I can see are chilly and clammy and gray.

On the way back, once my three laps are done, I walk over to my garden. It’s not much more colorful than the rest of the neighborhood, a shush in a silent library. I make a halfhearted promise that I’ll plant those buttercup bulbs I bought in October later today if it doesn’t rain. Working out here doesn’t sound too appealing.

My plants aren’t stupid. They know this is the wrong time, that more cold and dark is coming, and that the proper and logical thing to do is roll back over and go to sleep until it becomes the right time. Their new year is a few months out yet, when the days lengthen and stretch and the soil warms up. The calendar date today means nothing to them.

Instead of lingering in bed, in their warm nests of blankets, the humans around me are ready to take on New Year’s resolutions. They are facing the gray skies with grit, with new gym memberships and steely purpose. They will wrestle time to the ground, pin it down, make it produce. The holiday feasting is done, the gifts are unwrapped, the decorations and lights are gone. There’s no cheery distraction, only the worship of discipline and sharp resolve, our egos feathered and puffed on full display, challenging ourselves.

The plants are probably wiser.

But I’m a human being, and I make resolutions. I take them seriously and make charts and boxes. And you know what? More years than not, I meet them.

“I’m growing taller this year than last year,” says the peach dahlia. “Really. I’m going to do it. Just watch.”

“I’ll make more buds this year,” says the lavender. “I’ve learned my lesson, being so close to the street during that last ice storm. Gotta plan ahead.”

“I think I’m going to hire than personal trainer and drop twenty pounds,” says the vine maple.

Of course, they are silent. They know not to make promises. They know that they are at the mercy of the weather, vulnerable to insects, dependent on the hummingbirds and the bees and the butterflies.

And so are the humans. We like to think it’s all about us, all up to us, our own striving and effort and conquests, as if time and the future are uncharted territories and all we have to do is conquer them and bend them to our will.

I can’t imagine subjecting my garden to the kind of discipline humans go through. I can’t imagine coming out here and screaming military chants at my tulips.

“Booyah! Man up and do it again!”

“Bloom faster, damnit! Hit the ground and give me twenty!”

There’s a cheering and encouraging that goes on out here on quiet afternoons and early mornings, but it’s one based on reverent observation, a parent watching their toddler learn to walk, listening as babbling becomes words.

And if we think it’s all up to us to sculpt this blobby future into something fitter, something more shapely, then it’s all on us when we don’t succeed, and that may not be true. If we take all the credit when we succeed, that only reinforces that we think we’re in charge instead of looking at how circumstances shaped either outcome.

We are not at the center, as much as we delude ourselves, pressure ourselves into thinking and wanting to believe otherwise. I can plant the buttercup bulbs, but a million little connections have to happen in order for them to grow, and I’m in control of very few of them.

Should we even bother to plant anything, then? Should we bother to make goals if so many other forces can interfere?

Of course we should. It’s our partnership with whatever creates us, whatever mysterious forces lead us forward. It’s our hand extended halfway, into the fog, where we can’t see what’s out there. But no plant ever bloomed because it was screamed at, starved, or otherwise subjected to extreme measures. Human beings are no different.

So I’ll go plant those buttercups. Even though I didn’t get to it yesterday because I was napping on the couch, I resolve I will do it today. I’ll extend a tentative hand out to whatever may want to hold it.

Heather Bartos has published essays in Fatal Flaw, Stoneboat Literary Journal, HerStry, and The Bluebird Word, and upcoming in McNeese Review. Her fiction has been in The Dillydoun Review, The Closed Eye Open, Tangled Locks Journal, and elsewhere, and won first place in the Baltimore Review 2022 Micro Lit Contest.

leafless tree on grass field — Photo by Johannes Plenio on Pexels.com

Rooting

30 January 2023 / Editor

Fiction by Elodie Barnes

The wind is strange tonight. Sharp-edged, soft-howling. Icy tendrils carrying pinpricks of stars from the north. Leaves lie half-rotted, frozen mid-tumble. The soil is hard, unyielding, the solstice opposite of summer’s rich dampness. I soaked it up then, drank in the warmth under skies that darted with birds, their feathers inking songs onto blue that then faded with dusk. I can hear them rustling now, no longer singing, as uncertain as I am. Their claws grip my branches; branches that are naked now from the onslaught of winter, but no longer tender, no longer bloody with bursting buds and the rough scratching of owls. There is no skin left. Still, this wind makes me shiver. None of us are used to wind coming from the north.

At one time, I barely knew the wind at all. I was a child, knowing only that one day I would be gifted a seedling. A seedling that would grow as I grew, each of our bodies mimicking the channels and contours of the other until one day there would be no difference. One day I would take root in a place called home, a place from which I could never stray. I didn’t want it then. I didn’t want a home away from my mother; she never settled, so why should I? I never questioned the small plant of my mother’s that always sat on our kitchen windowsill, green and sickly and yet still trimmed every year by my father. Pruned, shaped, stunted. A tree smothered to a sapling.

She comes, sometimes, and I try to offer her the shelter I never could as a child. A blanket of branches, a waterfall of sunlight cascading through leaves. She talks, and I no longer understand. There are some words I remember – home, strong, love – but I don’t know whether those words came from her or me, and I’m even less sure of what they mean now that the north is gusting, ripping against my roots on their weakest side. The side that faces backwards; the side that knows there are too many questions about survival I never knew I needed to ask; too many questions I never dreamed she would have the answers to. Like why the winds suddenly change direction. What to do when home no longer feels safe. How to hold on, when it feels like winter will never end.

Elodie Barnes is a writer and editor living in the UK. Her short fiction has been widely published, including in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology. She is Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, and is working on a collection of short stories. Find her online at elodierosebarnes.weebly.com.

grass during sunset — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Dusk

27 November 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Carol Barrett

Translucent colors of sky loll in the stream,
such reverie, this dusk in the high desert,
a pour of beauty into my humble cup.

I relish the taste, sipping that place where blue
and dawn pink merge, flick a gnat from my sleeve.
Just then something stings the wits out of me,

the nose of a bear bigger than a hornet, sniffing
my favorite bench, no doubt where a dog had lifted
nimble leg. I raise my knees and slowly stand

on the plank, the bear paying little heed, ambling
down the bank to plunge his snout and drink.
I consider running, but we’re just yards apart,

fleeting distance daunting. I stand my ground,
writing tablet clutched, futile weapon, await
his next move. Strange how you can

count the clumps of grass in such a scene,
hoping not to bloody them. Five. I hear
far-away doves, watch a spider descend

from a black twig. She makes it to a leaf.
The bear has had enough, climbs the bank,
leaves the path for needled footing,

disappears over a small rise. I come down
from my perch, thank the gods, head home,
remembering family camp at Spirit Lake,

how my uncle crept up behind my father,
snoozing in a hammock, and let out a blood-
curdling growl. My father sat bolt upright,

then brought his breathing back from the cliff
while my uncle laughed. Fear can knock a soul
to dust. Here, the shimmering red of sunset

is winding down. You, dear reader, must decide
if I made this racket up, or told the truth
to put the beast to rest. I alone know how

it all played out. And the bear, of course.

Carol Barrett directs the Creative Writing Certificate Program at Union Institute & University. She has two volumes of poetry and one of creative nonfiction. A former NEA Fellow in Poetry, Carol has published poems in such diverse venues as JAMA, The Women’s Review of Books, Poetry International, and Oregon Birds.

selective focus photography of plant with dew — Photo by Lum3n on Pexels.com

Rain Drop

16 November 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Mary Padgen Michna

The after rain
waits quietly
in perfect balance
with infinite patience
poised on a pine needle.

It is the one
who holds back
you know
there is one
in every group.

One who saves
the best for last
to bring its balm
to anoint
the unsuspecting traveler.

Mary Padgen Michna always wrote poems. When she grew up, she was more comfortable telling someone else’s story and worked as a journalist. After retiring, her poetry has appeared in Bullets into Bells and the University of Pittsburgh’s online publication. She received an honorable mention in the 2022 Passager Poetry Contest.