Tag: reflection (Page 2 of 7)

In a Mirror Clearly Now

23 October 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Judith Yarrow

for my sister

Sometimes, looking in a mirror,
I turn my head just so and
I’m brushing my sister’s hair.
Her same movement.

Conversations that started
when she was born keep on and on.
Antiphonal chorus. Me. Her.
Mine. Hers. I can sing all the parts.

We circled each other until at last
who chased, who fled, who followed,
who led, I don’t even know.
The mirror says, see how alike you are.

That long ago push her pull me?
Just the place we started—no more
separate than fingers on a hand.
connected at the source.

Judith Yarrow been published in two chapbooks and various literary journals, most recently in Hedgerow, RavensPerch, and Medusa’s Kitchen. She was the featured poet in Edge: An International Journal, and her poems have been included in the Washington State Poet Laureates’ collections. Find more of her work at jyarrow.com.

Orb

1 September 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Ed Meek

If you too could extrude silk
From your body to weave
A net of fragile filaments
Like gossamer wings
Arranged in a pattern
Of encircled squares,
Strong enough to entrap
Your prey with the aid
Of goo. Would you sacrifice
Your two legs for eight
To hang your clever work of art
like a hammock
between the plants,
Immersed in a world
foreign to man?

Ed Meek‘s book of poems “Great Pond” comes out in 2026 with Kelsay Books. He has had poems recently in Amethyst, Humana Obscura, and The Baltimore Review.

Annual Accounting

1 August 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Sharon Scholl

I wake to find a ray of light
was stolen from the bank of night,
filched in some dark, furtive way
and added to the bank of day.

In due time, day will repent
and by December will have sent
every ray of pilfered light
back into the bank of night.

Sharon Scholl is a retired college teacher who convenes a poetry critique group and maintains a website of original music compositions free for small, liberal churches. Her poetry collections Seasons, Remains, Evensong, and Classifieds are available via Amazon Books. Poems are current in Rattle and RedRoseThorns.

i am learning to be still

25 July 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Stacie Eirich

i am learning to be still,
to pay attention to each breath, its slow rise and fall,
to feel the soft spring breeze on my skin, its gentle rush and play,
to listen to the song sparrows in the air, cooing and calling
in the bright yellow sunshine of morn.

i am learning to be still,
to watch the dance of the butterflies, their colorful frenzy and flight,
to admire the grace of the bald eagle, silent and watchful from his perch,
to gaze upon the splendor of the mountains, their peaks rising against a vast expanse
in the warm orange glow of afternoon.

i am learning to be still,
to savor the taste of a tender strawberry, sweet and tart,
to let the rain wash over me in ripples, cool and refreshing,
to hear the harmonies of the juncos and thrushes, repeating and resonant
in the waning lavender light of evening.

i am learning to be still,
to seek a path of peace and wonder, intention and reflection,
to find the calm within each moment, blithe and smooth,
to experience the echo of the Earth’s heart, beating and thriving
in the endless blue waves of time.

Originally published in The Bluebird Word in April 2022.

Stacie Eirich is a writer, singer & library associate. A former English Instructor, she holds a Masters in English Studies from Illinois State University. Her work has appeared in multiple publications, and her latest book Hope Like Sunlight (Bell Asteri Publishing, December 2024) shares her family’s journey to fight her daughter’s aggressive brain cancer at St. Jude Children’s Hospital. Read more about Stacie and her writing at www.stacieeirich.com.

Photo by Vinandita Karina Nabilla on Unsplash

The Basket

20 April 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Bonnie Demerjian

has followed you everywhere, like a faithful dog, overfilled with things too useful to be filed where, perhaps, they’ll be forgotten, or thrown away to later regret. There are other things, fit for no category or home. Here is a slip of paper with the name of the plumber who’s not in the phone book. Who is anymore? The postal tracking slip for that package to your sister. You learned the hard way about keeping these. Raffle tickets bought in hope, expired, and baggage tags that traveled to La Paz one spring and Florence one fall. User’s manuals which will surely be consulted since everything breaks down sometime. There are vaccination records for cats and dogs long gone. You have their photos, but it’s so heartless to throw away these chronicles of their bodily care. Where else to keep her crayon drawing of a hummingbird once it’s migrated from the refrigerator door? At the bottom, a jumble of business cards for window glass, car repair, and a name tag on a string from your high school reunion. On it, a photo, you at seventeen to remind you of who you were. Are? Then, a penny, a bullet, and three keys to forgotten doors. It’s not big enough to contain a whole life, but what vessel could?

Bonnie Demerjian writes from her island home in Southeast Alaska in the Tongass National Forest on the land of the Lingit Aaní, a place that continually nourishes her writing. Her poetry has appeared in Tidal Echoes, Alaska Women Speak, Pure Slush, and Blue Heron Review, among others. Read some of her earlier work on The Bluebird Word, to include her flash nonfiction essay Three Scenes in Sunlight.

At the Dive Bar After Thanksgiving

7 April 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Olivia McGill

We were at a bar with my partner Sam’s friends. Cal showed up late in the night. I hadn’t seen him in a while but heard how things were going for him. His wife kicked him out for the sake of their seven-year-old daughter. He was crashing at his woodshop.

His dark hair was grown out and slicked back. He wore his normal outfit, basically an Ace Ventura getup with a Hawaiian shirt and teal pants. With his good looks, it used to seem quirky, almost cool. But now, the overall effect was nauseating. He was no longer parodying a slimeball. He was one. His shirt was unbuttoned halfway down his chest, and his normally tan, toned skin looked clammy.

Of course, the presence in people’s eyes is different when they’re on drugs. Distant. Wandering. But it was more than that. His eyes looked wider, slyer, his eyebrows more arched. I wasn’t shaken, per se, but had that subtle feeling that his arrival was doing something to my brain, somewhere deep in the engine room, where I couldn’t quite reach it.

“I like your sweater,” he said as he pulled at someone’s sleeve. “I love your hair,” he told me, his too-close gaze hooking into me as I tried to smile and turn away at the same time.

I tracked his movements as he hovered around the bar, bouncing from one group to the next, his unwantedness not registering for him. He slunk into the booth behind ours, and I tried to carry on a conversation but felt his presence above my head. He spilled a stranger’s drink. Then he slowly climbed over the booth wall, pried Sam and me apart, and sat in between us, his intense eye contact ping-ponging back and forth.

“Where’s your girlfriend?” Sam asked. Cal had a new girlfriend who looked like his wife but who was annoying. “She’s in Mass…,” Cal said wistfully, reminding me of my father. The self-pitying tone of the addict during the holidays. Just a few days before, my dad sent me a text asking, “what u doin for thanksgiving.” I knew it meant all his buddies were with their families.

I wanted to ask Cal about his daughter but didn’t, unsure of what it might trigger in him. I didn’t know how often he saw her. And anyway, it was clear that he was not identifying as a father at that moment. It was like I was watching a different angle of my dad’s life, the one where he parties and doesn’t think about his children. I was in the role of the friend instead of the daughter. It wasn’t happening to me. It was happening to another little girl. I thought of who the friends might have been. The ones who thought of me as they watched my dad stumble and wander.

I’ve been through a lot of therapy. Sam told me a while back that Cal’s wife is in AlAnon. That’s the one where you know an alcoholic or addict. I’m in the one for people who were raised by them. I wonder if their little girl will end up in the same program, working to undo all the damage being inflicted on her despite the efforts of the single mother.

The funny thing about having an addict for a father is you don’t usually have a clear picture of what you missed out on. And when you see it, fathers in white collars coming home at the same time every day, taking their girls on outings, talking with them lucidly, you think it’s “icky.” It’s “too tender.”

And then. After you’ve accepted what happened to you and grieved what you missed out on. After you’ve learned to stop expecting anything from him. After you’ve found your own source of stability, joy, and love and have seen a glimpse of who you are despite him. After all that, you end up at a bar and a friend shows up and it’s him. It’s your father, twenty-five years ago, woodshop and all. Just switch out the Hawaiian shirt for a cowboy hat.

And part of you can’t help but think, “Stop everything. We can’t let this happen again. There must be something we can do.” But everyone just shakes their heads and exchanges looks. And the daughter remains unmentioned. And you keep thinking, “Something should come of this.” And nothing does.

Olivia McGill is from Hell’s Kitchen and lives in Brooklyn. She writes for a consulting firm and volunteers with Showing Up for Racial Justice. You can read her work in Danse Macabre, Ant vs. Whale, and The Adult Children of Alcoholics blog. She is working on a book-length memoir.

Climbing Tree

15 February 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Ava Spampanato

The last time I sat in the hallowed out nook of climbing tree was a warm spring afternoon
The grass was dappled with buttercups
while cousins ran through sprinklers rainbow mirage
sidewalk chalk dusted knees
made wishes on dandelion cotton breeze

Each pappus packed with hopes of
Cotton candy castles
and pirate treasure

When our wishes got tangled amongst the leaves of climbing tree
My pollinated fingers grasped onto thick belly out branches
While the splintered brown bark aged my youthful step

I tried to grab each childlike dream and cup them in my palms
But the mourning doves claws captured each cotton desire
And her soft coos reminded us our days of childhood bliss were fleeting

Ava Spampanato is a surfer from the Jersey shore, and currently writes from South Florida. Her writing is inspired by the ocean and the natural elements around her.

September 29

1 February 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Lorelei Feeny

for Dad

Today might be your last full day on earth
but know that I’ll think of you
every time I go to the Dollar Tree.

And whenever John Grisham writes a new book
I’ll put your name on the waiting list
even though you said he always tells the same story.

I still have your pocket avocados growing in my apartment,
windowsills lined with trinkets
given to me when I was a little girl.

and after
all these months
i can release
my grief
held hostage

From endings, new beginnings.

Lorelei Feeny was born and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina. She loves words and learning foreign languages. Her dad inspired her to write poetry. Read his poem The Garden published in The Bluebird Word in July 2023.

Forever

8 December 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Susan Zwingli

I remember we came this way,
flirty, azure sports car filled to the brim,
old vinyl records, thick-lined winter boots, grandmother’s quilt
Full of the start of it all,
the beginning of everything
How is it possible that 30 years later,
I return this way, alone?
Is it just my imagination,
or does your laughter still echo in the winter wind?
Are those your footprints in the snow?
The sighing cornfields stir, crackled leaves rustling
All the endings press against my heart
Just then, a flock of snow geese startle
In feathered white waves, they lift upward, upward,
carrying my whispered goodbye, leaving a strange peace
I turn to leave, those old boots crunching snowdrift,
feeling new beginnings in my wings

Susan Zwingli has been published in the 2023 One Page Poetry Anthology and in the May 2024 edition of The Bluebird Word. She has a B.A. in English and a M.A. in Spiritual Formation. She lives in Richmond, VA, and writes about love, loss, survival, healing, and spirituality.

The Things I’ve Carried

17 October 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Sherri Wright

The earless pottery pig my daughter Jenny made in third grade and another creature with kitten ears, a bunny tail and a slit in the top for coins. A ceramic cat I bought in Dubrovnik on a trip with my kids. A white glass bird my husband brought me from Finland. I have lived in many houses. I have moved many times. I have purged. I have decluttered. These things have always come with me.

I have carried a gold dragonfly pin with blue and green enamel wings and red jewel eyes my first husband gave me when he returned from a job interview and told me we were moving. The second chink in our marriage. The first was the previous year when I was pregnant and he told me he didn’t get a PhD to stay home and care for a baby. In that same jewelry box is a coral shell necklace set with nine-year-old Jenny’s penciled note, “Mom, I bought it with my own $$.” And my grandmother’s gold bracelet which she had before she was married (in about 1912).

From Ithaca to Minneapolis to Washington DC and Rehoboth Beach I’ve moved an antique desk with eight turned ball feet and six drawers that I found in a junk shop in upstate New York. My arms have worn the warm cherry grain dull and the knob on the door is gone. But the white porcelain vase in the shape of a girl’s head remains. It was filled with white daisies when my friends sent it to me fifty-three years ago the day my daughter was born. It’s perfect for pencils, scissors, an antique brass letter opener, and multicolored pens and has marked my writing space wherever I’ve lived.

A blue and purple silk print dress that I wore for my second wedding in my parents’ backyard. After 37 years it still fits and so does the marriage.

My spiderman bathrobe in black velour with a burn out design. My grandson named it when he was into action heroes and wore Superman pajamas as we read together in bed. Now, standing in the morning sunshine I see the burn out has taken over the thinning velour and the sleeves are starting to fray. The boy who used to snuggle next to me in this robe has turned twenty.

I’ve carried grainy black and white portraits of my great-grandparents and a picture of their general store from the late 1800s. Also, the handwritten poems my great-grandmother wrote mourning the loss of two infants during an epidemic. They carried these photographs from New York to Indiana to Illinois to Minnesota before my father was born in 1916. I brought them back to the East Coast when I retired. I see when I pull them from the trunk in my guest room that the chalky portraits are faded. The ink on the poems is faint, the edges of the paper tattered and fragile.

I am eighty-one. The things I’ve carried—the pottery pigs, the wedding dress, the dragonfly pin, the glass birds, the photos and letters—will outlive me. They have no monetary value. But will they carry any sense of me?

Sherri Wright belongs to Rehoboth Beach Writers Guild and Key West Poetry Guild. She lives in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where she practices yoga and volunteers for a local food rescue. Her work has appeared in The Bluebird Word, Rat’s Ass Review, Delaware Beach Life, Raven’s Perch, and Quartet.