Tag: nature (Page 4 of 7)

A Necessary Pause In Transmission

1 April 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Peter Devonald

Solace has a song for you, waiting, waiting, amongst the torrent.
If you don’t choose a day to relax your body will choose one for you.

Noise corrupts and absolute noise corrupts absolutely,
loud whirr of technology never stops, incessantly, ceaseless,

Instead sit in nature, listen, listen, to bird song and insects
reaffirm connections beautiful and obscure.

Take time to read, enjoy and endure your deeper self.
Be someone else, briefly, brilliant and captivating, memory.

Reconnect with friends, remember, remember, the times before
it all changed with vibrant neon, obsequious pleasures, glinting.

Recall the times before you weren’t connected to the miracles,
when simple pleasures were miracles enough to live exquisite.

You know what you really need, you always did, glimpsed
through endless noise and rain, you saw yourself, standing there.

The noise can wait a week without you, trust me, believe in me,
believe in silence, the seas, sagacious shift to embrace serenity.

Peter Devonald is winner of two Heart Of Heatons Awards, Waltham Forest Poetry and joint winner of FofHCS Poetry Award 2023. He has been published extensively and has two Best Of Net nominations. Poet in residence at HAUS-A-REST. Visit www.scriptfirst.com or https://www.facebook.com/pdevonald.

Blue Jay

1 April 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Liz deBeer

A blue jay landed in a planter by my window with something in its mouth. Not wanting to frighten it away, I froze, watching the indigo bird dancing around in a circle —tap, tap, tappity, tap —with what? A peanut?

Why the hell is a blue jay flying around with an unshelled peanut? Google knew: Apparently blue jays adore peanuts. Whole peanuts. In the shell, which they peck open, often gluttonously.

But this blue jay who landed in a planter by my window couldn’t crack the peanut shell. His head shook up and down, trying to puncture the peanut against the plastic planter’s edge: Tap, tap, tappity, tap again and again.

Finally, he turned to face me, peanut still intact. Looked me in the eye and spat out the nut before flying off.

I got up to inspect the planter by my window where the blue jay landed. Nestled among the roots of an almost dead pink petunia lay an unbroken cork-colored peanut hull.

Why the hell did the blue jay leave the nut, supposedly its favored treat? Was it merely a lazy blue jay who couldn’t penetrate the shell of a stubborn peanut?

Or was this a sign, this bird who landed in the planter by my window? A symbol of a guardian angel or my ancestors’ spirit with a message about longevity, fertility, or wealth?

Liz deBeer, an English teacher who resides in New Jersey, divides her time among many passions, including reading, beach walking, volunteering, and experimenting with different writing genres. Although Liz has published primarily in newspapers and teaching journals, she is working on writing YA novels and flash. Liz’s website is www.lizdebeerwriter.com.

This April

1 April 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Michael Carrino

Time can be a gentle quiz a dissonant tin drum
Songbirds are silent

It continues to rain Every village road is now
a branch of the river

The past is a vintage red wine
in some dark cellar

The future might only be
black grapes

wasting on a vine as another
ash-stained cloud

creates an illusion Beyond
the slate gray lake

every mountain must be burning

Michael Carrino was co-founder and poetry editor of SUNY Plattsburgh’s literary journal, Saranac Review. He has had nine books of poetry published, most recently, In No Hurry (Kelsay Books, 2021) and Natural Light (Kelsay Books, 2023), as well as individual poems in numerous journals and reviews.

Birthplace

1 March 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Alexander Etheridge

—for W.S. Merwin

Out under clouds in the broad wheatfield
is a certain breed of silence
where only the perfectly hushed
give voice
Wind through the stalks
A sound of colors blending everywhere
in fine webs of shadow and light

After hours here you can start to sense
God’s breathing
like slow shifts in the clockwork
of ancient life
Then you may leave your body

as you lie in the delicate wheat
to return and find yourself
new once more
as you were long ago

your eyes wide
in the freshly formed world

Alexander Etheridge’s poems have been featured in The Potomac Review, Museum of Americana, Welter Journal, The Cafe Review, Abridged Magazine, Susurrus Magazine, The Journal, and many others. He was the winner of the Struck Match Poetry Prize. He is the author of God Said Fire (2023) and Snowfire and Home (Belle Point Press, 2024).

And Yet This Life

1 February 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Lisa Low

Is still worth living;
even now the rain is falling, making
mud from dirt around the roots and filling
in the ragged spots where grass hardly
ever shows. Tomorrow, too, the sun
will bring its healing mix of heat and light,
and make the flowers grow, more firmly
capable, their fancy floral dresses
stiff, each new eye glazed with thick black stripe
of paint, each marigold more grandly
dressed, more rich with bright silk fabrics hung,
orange vests and epaulets . . .

Lisa Low’s essays, book reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Boston Review, The Tupelo Quarterly, and The Adroit Journal. Her poetry has appeared in many literary journals, among them Valparaiso Poetry Review, Phoebe, Pennsylvania English, American Journal of Poetry, Delmarva Review, and Tusculum Review.

Tanka for the New Year

31 December 2023 / Editor

Poetry by K.L. Johnston

cathedral of pines
capturing
light and silence
carpet of needles
shushing our footsteps
our breath
rising white
with songbird wings

K.L. Johnston is an award-winning haiku poet and author whose works have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines. She holds a degree in Literature and Communications from the University of South Carolina and is a retired antiques dealer. You can follow her on Facebook at A Written World.

green mountain painting — Photo by Jesse Zheng on Pexels.com

Artificial Lawn

12 August 2023 / Editor

Fiction by Amy Akiko

He flutters past concrete at the back of houses, knows the slabbed rectangles will not feed him. But look, up ahead, a square of green promise, his own emerald city of grass and worms and slugs and larvae. Swooping down, he prepares to peck into the lifegiving soil, but his beak is rebuffed by an unyielding ground―a manmade sheet of death for the fauna beneath.

Amy Akiko is an educator, journalism graduate and writer from South London. She enjoys creating various forms of fiction including poetry, children’s stories, flash and short stories. Her work is soon to appear in The Tiger Moth Review, and she is currently editing her first novel.

Last October

18 July 2023 / Editor

Poetry by John Surowiecki

The mountain laurel is as green as the
maples are orange. Deer visit as if on cue,
hoovering the seeds we left for doves
and newly arrived juncoes.

Anything to do with spring and summer, with lilacs
and irises and that wistful pneumonic yellow,
is long gone, escaped in the raw humidity of

night. The wigs of dead leaves
are already caught up in scattered whirlwinds.
It’s clear we don’t have much time together.

Rainwater that leaks from the driveway gravel
has pooled in unlikely places,
not the swales that engineering has intended.
The silence between a breath and the breath that

follows it seems to last forever. October
is no longer with us: you’ve taken its place.
It needs a new face, yours, a new voice, yours.

It needs your swallows and mourning gnats
your own phrase on the fiddle which everyone can hear:
you, the season of leaving, have your music too.

John Surowiecki is the author of fourteen books of poetry. His latest, The Place of the Solitaires: Poems from Titles by Wallace Stevens, was recently published by Wolfson Press. John is the recipient of the Poetry Foundation Pegasus Award, the Nimrod Pablo Neruda Prize, the Washington Prize and other awards.

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.

Tag: nature (Page 4 of 7)

A Necessary Pause In Transmission

Blue Jay

This April

Birthplace

And Yet This Life

Tanka for the New Year

Artificial Lawn

Last October

After the Blizzard

Magpie

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