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Resolutions

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. 

Rooting

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.

Dusk

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.

Rain Drop

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.

Haunted Lake

Poetry by Sheryl Guterl

Local legend tells
a winter tale:
A southbound stagecoach

took a short cut
across the frozen water,
hit a soft spot, and sank,

taking passengers,
luggage, and horses
to the bottom.

True or not, it’s reason enough
for mapmakers to name
this lake Haunted.

In an early September morning,
cooled night air
meets summer-warmed water.

Cotton-candy puffs
of fog roll over the lake’s surface.
Eerie, vaporized visions of pines,

cabins, docks, and beaches
come and go.
Spirits rise from the waves.


Sheryl Guterl claims these titles: mother, grandmother, former English teacher, former elementary school counselor, wishful poet, Albuquerque Museum Docent, alto, bookworm. Presently, she is cozied in a New Hampshire cabin, surrounded by water, birds, tall pines, and myriad critters. She will travel back to Albuquerque for the cold months.

Sweet Moon

Poetry by Ursula McCabe

This morning I sliced into a cantaloupe
with ripe musky aromas.
Orange flesh unfolds as I split
the pock marked rind.
Opening up this soft melon
releases an aria of river floating times.

Years ago I rafted down the Salmon River,
an Idaho primitive wilderness area.
We returned home in a panel van
with too many people and a leftover cantaloupe
that had gone uneaten.

Six of us had drifted down the old river
through canyons with 100 foot basalt walls.
Rainbow trout practically
jumped in the boat, pink membrane mouths
puckering up as we slipped barbless hooks
out with our slippery fingers.

After churning rapids tumbled rafts
we warmed ourselves around campfires.
Flickering orange sparks skipped up to the stars,
where a fat round moon looked down.
That moon was as sweet and soft
as the cantaloupe I’m eating right now.


Ursula McCabe lives in Portland Oregon. Poems can be found in Oregon Poetry Association’s Verseweavers Anthology, Piker Press, The Avocet and Academy of the Heart and Mind.

What a Nature Poem Can Learn from a Love Poem

Nonfiction by Jesse Curran

Here I find myself: ten years into a marriage, seven years into two kids, two-plus years into a pandemic. Eros has gone dormant, a long winter of eating potatoes and squash and quietly reading books before seeking deep sleep. But it’s spring and I’m dwelling in things that used to be. I’ve been digging through the old file boxes, trying to find that poorly proof-read graduate paper. The one from the Romanticism seminar. The one about Shelley hugging the tree. About the roaring inside. About laying your body next to the earth. I was twenty-five and on fire, the libidinous pulse of poetry reached into every mundanity and exaltation of the day. For those years, everything was erotic. Everything was about connection. About a radical sense of continuity. About reaching through the loneliness. It was running and running and running and being not yet arrived. Whitman’s lusty oak. A Georgia O’Keefe poppy. It was the only subject. The tree-hugger was it: a symbol of the magnetic pull toward a forgotten union. Then something shifted. I turned thirty, I got married, I got pregnant, I got tired. For the past half dozen years, I’ve been working on the virtue of contentment—an often Buddhist and sometimes Stoic sense of equanimity. But still I burn. My god, I burn. I steep like compost at heat; a bowlful of watermelon rinds and coffee grinds and a bucket of crumbling oak leaves sparking something in the backyard. The tree is rooted in the earth. It does not walk. We move toward it and it stares back at us. I long for it to tear its roots, stretch its mycelium, and walk toward me. And sometimes in April, when the colors splatter, when the candy tulips and the dayglo maple leaves buzz with a heady fecundity, when a friend offers to take the kids back to her house after the school pick-up, when it’s suddenly quiet—sometimes, in April, verging on May, I take my seat on the porch and feel the maple shoots lean toward me.


Jesse Curran is a poet, essayist, scholar, and teacher who lives in Northport, NY. Her essays and poems have appeared in a number of literary journals including About Place, Spillway, Leaping Clear, Ruminate, Green Humanities, Blueline, and Still Point Arts Quarterly. Visit www.jesseleecurran.com

Afternoon by the Brick Pond

Poetry by K.L. Johnston

The fisherman left his folding
chair under the oak in leafy
coolness where occasionally
it’s borrowed to mind the pond.

Content to view its mysteries,
passed by, to watch the young parents
with their daughter discovering
mud, laughing as she finds something

startling that splashes and flicks
away. They scoop her up, strolling
on unmindful of fingerprints
and red clay. They pass the dragon

elm that is far from home, but thrives,
happy to be surrounded by
the wild natives, cinnabar heart
visible through its shrinking bark

next to sycamores flaunting pale
green and white skins. At their dark roots
the bumblebee sits unmoving
on the swamp sunflower, so tired

by afternoon, with few blossoms
left unvisited, he sleeps on
in the acute angles of stem
and sun while pollen shimmers,

a dust of fantasies on the
waters of the pond where carp rise
up from green and purple shadows,
grazing in brilliance, uncaring.

Fierce, the kingfisher darts by blue
and shaded. Not the most brilliant
or the biggest or most deadly
of hunters unless you are small
and a fish! a fish, a fish.


K. L. Johnston‘s favorite subjects are whimsical, environmental and/or philosophical. Her poetry appears in journals ranging from Small Pond magazine in the 1980s to work recently appearing in Humana Obscura and Pangyrus. She is a contributor to the recently published anthology Botany of Gaia.

Sunday Afternoon on the Eagle Trail

Nonfiction by Stacie Eirich

On a path towards peace, I wind my way past families, grandparents, children, couples, dogs, bikers — eclipse them and am surrounded by trees, stillness, and sun. Heat rises as I step past fallen leaves, pinecones, branches, roots, mud piles, marsh. Dry stretches crackle under my old tennis shoes, wet patches soggy with mud, leaving smears of earth on my calves.

At a fork in the dirt marked by wooden signs I read ‘Eagle Trail,’ follow the winged path deeper into the trees. Light shines through in spaces, dappling a canopy of leaves overhead, a crochet pattern of glaring green, rust red, burnt brown. I stop, listening to distant sounds of humanity, drinking in the moist scent of warmth. Only the breeze speaks, moving long grasses slow and tender. A rustle now and then, creatures scattering, hidden under fallen logs, months upon months of earth. A silent fluttering of yellow moth, I watch her fast flight. She could have spawn from the sun, she is so bright.

She lingers as the sun settles into my skin. Each step takes me further from the road, deeper down the path, zig-zagging past places where time matters. Into a space without, a space to just be.

There are signs of death among so much life, signals that nature runs a course and falls prey to a cycle. Not one destined by years or months, days or hours on a clock or calendar, but seasons of light and dark, warmth and chill, nourishment and hunger— the steady dawn and relentless night that comes. A tree may live hundreds, even thousands of years, but even it must rest. Like a giant trunk hewn from Earth, unmoored, with a pool of life underneath, even the greatest, oldest tree must sleep. (So many dead things amongst teeming life…the trail speaks to me of sadness and grief yet yields to acceptance and change.)

There is beauty in its space apart from us, in its perseverance to thrive. Wild iris, purple bulbs bursting from tall grass shoots in marsh waters. Ruby red Cape Fuchsia flowers droop upside down in bunches, their bleeding hearts like offerings beside the path. These are few but sparkle within a landscape of green, rust, brown. In the moss and algae covered waters swim turtles, their dark heads peeking up at blue bared sky.

I wait on the footbridge for a grandmother to lift her grandson to see them, exclaim how many he sees. Then he rushes past, small sandals clomping down the boards, grandma following. The turtles scatter as I bid them a quiet farewell.

I lift my face to the sun, breathe in—breathe out. Step forward, rising to meet the life that awaits on the other side.


Stacie Eirich is a writer, singer & library associate. She holds a Masters Degree in English Studies from Illinois State University. Her work has recently appeared in Art Times Journal, Avalon Literary Review & The Bluebird Word. She lives near New Orleans with three cats, two kids and one fish (www.stacieeirich.com).

Why the Rabbits Run

Nonfiction by Lindsay Dudbridge

When I first visited Madrid, just three months before moving there, my Spanish partner and I crossed the central part of the city, erratically dodging and weaving our way through people like bats catching flies. Panicked, I said, “It’s like we’re in New York City. This is too big. I don’t know if I can live here.”

I grew up in the Adirondack Park—with six million acres to explore. I trained for my high-school cross-country team in the footsteps of deer, bear, and coyote and recovered in rocky streams or still lakes set to the soundtrack of loon calls. Born into a life of “forever wild,” I wondered how I could ever replace soft pine and mud with concrete and stone, forests with buildings, and rugged with landscaped?

By the time I was wandering the streets of Spain, I was no stranger to cities. I had been living in the Washington, DC area for nearly 20 years. Though I always sought the wildish spaces, no matter how tiny—running thin strips of trails between backyards and strip malls. The last several years, I lived in the city itself, next to the large, forested Rock Creek Park. I mentally mapped the Park’s trails in ways beyond their intersections and where they led. If I ran up a specific hill at dusk in the spring, I could see nesting owls. If I kept running a little further along the ridge just before dark, I would meet volunteers setting up nets to capture and study bats. I knew where to see the woodpeckers, which rocks to avoid stepping on after a heavy rain, and which trees had fallen with the last heavy storm.

Madrid feels so different—like chaos. It’s an introvert’s nightmare: people are everywhere and everywhere is loud. So I run at the quiet time—the cusp of sunrise—when it’s light enough to not need a headlamp but early enough that it’s not yet considered morning by many here. I start out along the paved, well-lit river trail and head into Casa de Campo, which was once the King’s hunting grounds. There are few people, just a spattering of other runners and dog walkers at the lake near the entrance.

The damp days are my favorite, as a light fog nestles in among the tall pinyon pines. These days, I crunch along the dirt roads because the trails are covered in a heavy mud that cakes the shoes. As I jog along, some of the many rabbits freeze and others bolt, zigzagging to safety. At first, I wondered why they ran. The park seemed so tame. But one morning, I stopped in my tracks as a rabbit came tearing toward me. The fox chasing it slowed to a trot when it saw me, reluctantly turning and heading back into the field in search of more prey. How lucky to see such a thing. I felt guilty for interrupting its hunt and relieved for the rabbit. I continued my run, holding those conflicting emotions and watching the carboneros, so similar to the chickadees of home, flit from branch to branch.

I often feel like I will never fit into this new culture—the late dinners, the lack of personal space, the constant conversation. But these mornings, I can at least immerse myself in this land and understand why the rabbits run and where the foxes hunt. So I run, I learn, and I listen to my footsteps patting a rhythm into the earth. I can almost follow it, like a thread across the Atlantic to the forest where I’m from.


Lindsay Dudbridge is a professional editor from the US who has been living in Madrid, Spain since 2019. When not manipulating the written word, she is outside running, mountaineering, caving, and climbing.

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