An Online Literary Journal for Poetry and Flash

Tag: perspective

Not Mary Oliver’s Linden

Poetry by Diane M. Williams

Mary Oliver drove through Linden,
Alabama, and wrote about hulking birds
of prey in a field outside of town.
I wonder what led her to that southern
town that I forsook years ago.
Now, years after her death,
it’s much too late to ask.

Yes, I remember black vultures
descending on rotting carcasses,
shiny summer grasses of field and roadside.
But my Linden, Alabama, is not
the detached visual image of Mary Oliver.

Girl, age twelve, brother and two sisters,
Damn Yankees from up north,
Dad trying to make a go
as a dairy farmer in the Alabama Black Belt,
Mom a hospital nurse.
We didn’t know to say yes ma’am no ma’am.

Summer whipped the sultry farmhouse,
tarantula mother birthed her babies on my bedroom wall,
black widows nested in abandoned buckets,
our home a tired reminder of neglect—
peeling paint and broken shutters,
our lawn a field of weeds,
Lombardy poplars loftily ringing the crescent driveway.

We sang wild dewberries into our pails
uncaring of copperheads and scorpions,
danced across meadows bringing cows in
for evening milking,
trudged gleefully two miles in sticky knee-high grass
brushing off ticks, sweat bees, grasshoppers
to the town swimming pool,
splashed away our poverty
with kids who didn’t know.

Girl, age twelve, I dreamed
the “Wayward Wind” with Gogi Grant
got kissed by a snot-nosed boy in a haystack
rocked with Elvis in the jailhouse on late-night radio
wept finding my dog dead in a roadside ditch
practiced French words with my Jersey heifer.

Passing through Linden, Mary did not know
that in that field where vultures
hovered and gorged themselves
lay the remains of my childhood,
the tattered fantasies
and memories of Girl, age twelve.

The forlorn house and tumble-down barn
long ago torn from the landscape,
now the ghosts of the Lombardy poplars
sing to the restless wind.


Diane M. Williams taught college French for many years, then joined the creative team at UT Knoxville as an editorial manager. Her poetry has appeared in One Trick Pony, Bluestem Magazine, Monterey Poetry Review, Black Moon Magazine, and The Avocet. Her poetry collection, Night in the Garden, appeared in 2020.

Next Lives

Nonfiction by Lillian Anderson

We arrange to meet up at this kitschy hole-in-the-wall tiki bar off Victory Boulevard. I haven’t seen Ben in over a decade, but that doesn’t stop me from recognizing him instantly. The contours of his face have changed subtly, more angular perhaps. But then again, so have mine. He’s an apparition from my youth, back when I wore roll-on body glitter and scanned the radio for existential meaning. My middle-aged self is austere by comparison, free of artificial fragrance and parabens and God.

We find a corner booth and discuss what makes this a tiki bar, settling on Polynesian appropriation. I look down at the menu, studying the list of tropical rum-based drinks as if there’d be a pop quiz on it later.

“Why the protective body language?” he asks over the music blaring from a corner speaker. I realize that I’m hugging myself. I drop my shoulders and release the tension that I carry in my pelvic floor, where my physiotherapist tells me women store their stress. I think of being in utero where my mother stored hers, and her mother before her and so on, like a Russian nesting doll. 

“This is strange, isn’t it? Life feels like a choose-your-own-adventure book sometimes,” I say, only you can’t go back a chapter when you fall knee deep into quicksand. We could’ve made it in another life.

“It’s weird to be human,” he says, and not for the first time, as we order drinks. Over Mai Tais, he tells me how he scattered his father’s ashes off the coast of Hawaii, making swirling patterns in the ocean with them, even putting some under his tongue. 

“Isn’t that carcinogenic?” I ask, somewhat aghast.

“Not in small amounts,” he says evenly, as if consuming our loved ones was entirely natural. I nod in agreement, an ash-eating convert.

I confess that I’m agnostic, but my son believes in reincarnation. “He wants to be a butterfly in his next life,” I say, the way some mothers brag about their kid wanting to be a doctor. “Maybe we all come back as butterflies. Makes as much sense as anything else.” I imagine us resurrected as two delicate insects with paper-thin wings.

I swallow down the last of my drink to temper my nerves, ice clinking against the glass. Ben calls me a primordial attraction, and I balk at this disclosure, my cheeks flushed with embarrassment. He remembers me at sixteen with thick wild hair in a green shift dress. It was purple though, wasn’t it? An iridescent mauve the color of twilight. That’s the thing with memories, they’re malleable like wet clay.      

We leave the bar after running out of things to say, our eyes adjusting to the punishing late afternoon sun. Ben reaches for my hand and our fingers interlock as he walks me to my car.

“I always liked your hands,” I say, turning them over to admire them.

“They can’t look the same as they did 20 years ago,” he says. 

But they do, I think. We’ve time traveled. 

I close my eyes, and I’m a teenager again, sitting on a beach towel in Santa Monica with Ben stretched out beside me, lying prone in the sand wearing red swim trunks. The summer neon sun is reflecting on the waves like shards of shattered glass.

“Walk on my back,” he says.

I let out a nervous laugh. “What? NO!”

“You’re all of what, ninety pounds? Come on, you won’t break me.”

I adjust my bikini and step gingerly onto his lower back, my heart racing. I can feel the topography of his back beneath my bare sandy feet, his skin slipping over muscle and sinew and bone.

I open my eyes to find two grown strangers standing in their place. I steady myself for another goodbye, but no one says it properly anymore. Instead, it’s a truncated bye or see you later or take care, as if people were made of porcelain (aren’t we?). I think of my dead brother and father, whom I never said goodbye to, wondering if I’d eat their ashes too to keep a part of them. Letting go of the living feels riskier, like walking away from a boiling kettle as it sings. Some endings are like that.


Lillian Anderson is an emerging creative nonfiction writer from Los Angeles. Publications include Scary Mommy and Beyond Words Literary Magazine.

House Plants Lament

Poetry by Peter A. Witt

Potted I sit on the windowsill,
like a canvas painted with sunlight,
weaving patterns on my outstretched leaves,
it’s a good life, but I envy the vibrant
garden that grows outside, where
plants hear the twilling of house finches,
the buzzing of honey bees, and feel the cool
of early spring breezes, as arrowheads
of Sandhill Cranes migrate north
from their Texas winter homes.

Once my keeper carried my potted home
out to the patio on a rain-clouded day
where a gentle caress from nature’s hand
bathed the soil around my roots.

I drew the pure water into my stems,
it was refreshing after my usual diet
of salt-filled, chlorinated water drawn
from the kitchen tap. Alas, my roots
were never bathed this way again.

My owner thinks I’m happy; she sees
no bugs, no rot of my roots or mold,
no diseases, but she does not know
I feel like a prisoner in a gilded cage;
she thinks of me as nothing more
than a potted house plant with no
ambition to be something more.


Peter A. Witt is a poet, family history writer, active birder and photographer. Peter retired in 2015 from a 43-year university teaching and research career. He lives with his wife in Texas.

New Shorts

Nonfiction by Leanne Rose Sowul

I was so proud of them: cream-colored denim with turquoise flowers, bright green leaves, and cuffed bottoms. The perfect length to show off my new, longer, sixth-grade legs.

At recess, we sat on the low ledge of the concrete court while the boys played basketball. We watched them, waiting for them to look our way. We fidgeted, hands pulling the weeds that grew up between the cracks, fingers brushing the pollen off buttercups.

Then, one of the girls said, “Hey, is that leg hair?” I felt the brush of her hand, running up my shin from ankle to knee. She was right—my leg was covered in soft down. I hadn’t noticed.

“Hasn’t your mom taught you to shave yet?” she asked. The others turned, looked, laughed. My face flushed. I looked at the other girls’ legs. Smooth, white, perfect.

The boys were yelling, laughing, piling onto each other. They’d swarm back into school with dirty knees, sweaty hairlines, and smelly pits. Still, girls would line the hallways, trying to catch their eyes.

I wish I could say that I stood up then. Told that girl off for touching my leg without permission. Made an impassioned speech about a woman’s natural body. Strode into that throng of boys and grabbed the basketball. Walked into the school dirty and sweating, happy and uncaring.

Instead, I pulled down the hem of my new shorts as far as they could go and tucked my legs underneath me. Instead, when I got home that afternoon, I asked my mother for a razor.


Leanne Rose Sowul is an award-winning writer with publications in JuxtaProse, Under the Gum Tree, Five Minutes, and more; she has performed her essays for “Writers Read” at Lincoln Center and in collaboration with Carnegie Hall. Join her “Good Character” newsletter on Substack for more.

Beyond Vision

Poetry by Suzannah Watchorn


Suzannah Watchorn is an English-Irish writer who grew up outside of London, UK. She now lives in the US, where she works as a writing coach and freelance editor. Her poetry and essays are featured or forthcoming in Eunoia Review, Nebulous, Sunspot Literary, Wild Roof Journal and Red Noise Collective.

Fish Tales

Special Selection for One-Year Anniversary Issue

Fiction by Foster Trecost

Boredom lurked like a silent companion, sometimes causing him to see things that weren’t there, sometimes causing him to miss things that were. Such was the case when he caught sight of something he’d never noticed before, though it had been there all along. He moved in for a closer look, so close his nose nearly touched the glass, and what he saw, in the language of his age, was an assortment of creatures, some big, some small. They moved about the confined space and he wondered if they were bored, too.

His brother, a bit older and much wiser, knew things and knew how to explain them. “Where’s my brother,” he asked. 

“With his friends.” The answer was always the same, just like everything else. But the creatures through the glass were trapped, they weren’t going anywhere and neither was he. 

“What are you looking at?” His brother had returned. 

“Them,” he said, then streamed a series of questions so fast, each was asked before the prior could be answered.

“Slow down. One at a time.”

“That one,” he said, pointing to a large figure hovering in the back. “Why is that one bigger than the others?”

His brother presented a different view: “She’s the biggest because she’s everyone’s mother. All the others are her children.”

“All of them?”

“Not the skinny one. He’s the father. He worries all the time, that’s why he looks sick. They’re just like us.”

He believed every word and should have because every word was true, or at least the truth as his brother believed it. He spent the following days matching his newfound knowledge with what he saw, and concluded, just as his brother had, that they weren’t so different.

“You still thinking about them?” asked his brother. “Don’t waste too much time. It’s hard enough understanding our side of the glass.”

“You’re right.”

“Not always, but most of the time.” The two boys laughed, then his brother said something he’d never said before. “Come on, let’s go play.”

“I can come?”

“Sure, the others are waiting.” They turned away from the glass. “You want to race?”

“Can I have a head start?”

“Okay, but you better take it now before I change my mind.”

Without another word he swam away, his fish tail all that could be seen, swishing from one side to the other, and his brother swam after him just as fast as he could.


Foster Trecost writes stories that are mostly made up. They tend to follow his attention span: sometimes short, sometimes very short. Recent work appears in Potato Soup Journal, Halfway Down the Stairs, and BigCityLit. He lives near New Orleans with his wife and dog.

Untitled

Poetry by Melissa Donati-Pizirusso

I am a helium filled balloon
Released from the hands
Of a little girl
Staring in wonder at the sky

A balloon that floats freely
Up
Into the wind
Caught in branches
Waiting for the next breeze to set me free

Descending then to the ground
And then picked up
By another breeze
Sending me to low points and then high
Low
High
Sweeping at the ground
Then dropping
Into a foliage of leaves
Waiting to be lifted again

By a breeze
That may never come
Or one that may bring me even lower

Until once again
I am picked up
by the hands of a child
that holds me like a treasure
to their chest.


Melissa Donati-Pizirusso is a Mom, Writer, and Assistant Principal. Her love of writing and poetry goes back to when she was a child writing numerous stories and poems on a daily basis. She is a graduate of SUNY Albany where she studied Sociology, Italian and Journalism.

Eagle Fantasy

Poetry by Michael Shepley

it was only just
an early morning dream

but for a time
I was an eagle

sharp hunter eye high
in a soft sunny sky

targeting a strange
shape shifting prey

running over the dun
furze of rounded hills

fast flitting slip of
snipped night sliding

quick as the wind
hugging ground like skin

when I woke knowing
it was only the hunt

for my own damn shadow


Michael Shepley is a writer who lives and works in Sacramento. His poetry has appeared in Vallum, CQ, Common Ground, The Kerf, Jonah, Blue Unicorn, Salt and a few others.

Fight for Bedtime

Nonfiction by Haley Grace

As a kid, bedtime was so exciting. Right before my eyes closed I would imagine flying dragons and dancing princesses. I drifted away to thoughts of bursting colors and beautiful designs.

As a teenager, the fairytales disappeared but my imagination still soared! Only instead of castles, it was faded blue locker covered hallways that smelled of old books and musky cologne. There were no flying dragons but bright yellow school buses with torn off lettering lined up outside. I would drift away to the false reality of an 80’s movie, where butterflies flooded my belly when my crush kissed me before the credits rolled. 

Now I am an adult, or at least in the eyes of society. There are no fairytales in my dreams. My brunette, blue eyed, 80’s curly headed crush is facing the other direction; avoiding a conversation we’ve had a million times. That place between sleep and awake is now where tears flood my eyes. It’s where ideas of doubt, fear, and anxiousness dance in my head. Imagination is now taken over by the fuzzy sounds of the TV I’m not really listening to. The only thing I’m dreaming of is a cigarette because nicotine cures a clouded mind.

No one tells you there is no imagination before adult bedtime. You slowly learn about stiff tension between you and your partner from a fight you swore you would never have. And a racing mind of questions. And lists impossible to complete. 

Maybe this is all inevitable.

But if you can: Fight for the dragons. Dance with the princesses. And let the kaleidoscope of butterflies take over as you kiss that curly headed kid.


Haley Grace is an Appalachian raised LGBT+ emerging voice just getting her start in writing. She graduated from West Virginia Wesleyan College with a degree in Communication and Literature. She is working on her Masters in School Counseling and enjoys writing about her adventures, heartbreaks, and observations of life.

© 2025 The Bluebird Word

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑