Tag: reflection (Page 3 of 5)

Some Days

22 July 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Carole Greenfield

Some days it feels like I will never be free from dread,
never escape the darkness, always be lugging those bushels
of rocks, the weight I drag behind me.

Some days it feels like I will never have time to say thank you,
never have heart to share love, never know grace to let go.

Some days it feels like I am trudging through a swamp
filled with skunk cabbage and quacking of frogs
and when I stop to listen I know their voices
are pure silver, a chorus of answers and questions.

Some days I remember all I need is to stand still
and let the quiet rain of their chirps, squeaks and creaks,
the half-notes of their small hearts fall into and over and through me.

Carole Greenfield grew up in Colombia and lives in New England. Her work has appeared in such places as Amethyst Review, Humana Obscura and The Plenitudes. Read her poem “Trace Fossils” published in The Bluebird Word in October 2022.

piano keys — Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash

For Sale: Kawai Upright Piano, $1,250

12 June 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Angela Kasumova

Available now! A Kawai Upright Piano, in excellent condition, beautiful walnut finish. Purchased new eight years ago by a father for his daughter. She’d been taking lessons for six years and practicing on a broken, hand-me-down piano, but when her father started having an affair, new things suddenly materialized. Like a computer, to replace the typewriter she struggled to write school papers on, and then a few months later, the piano. The daughter treasured this piano, its timely arrival allowing her to finally take pleasure in playing her most practiced and favorite pieces: Daydream by Tchaikovsky and To a Wild Rose by Edward MacDowell. And though she only played it for a year or so before she stopped lessons, it was the one thing she absolutely had to bring with her when she and her mother eventually fled. It moved with her from her semi-rural childhood house to an urban apartment, and finally to the condo her mother purchased upon her divorce, where it resides now. It’s been gently used these past few years to play Christmas songs or figure out melodies the daughter and her boyfriend enjoy, like Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, which is much harder than it sounds. It breaks this daughter’s heart to be selling this lovely instrument, but she needs extra money to pay for student health insurance, and this is the only item of value she owns. She doesn’t know how much she’ll miss this piano or how much she’ll regret letting it go. She doesn’t know how she’ll wish she’d found another way. Financial worries and unprocessed grief cloud her vision, but perhaps her loss may be your gain. See above: excellent condition, beautiful walnut finish.

Serious buyers only, please.

Angela Kasumova is a lifelong writer and reader with over a decade of experience working in the fields of mental health and education. She lives with her husband and sons near Boston, Massachusetts.

Winter, Snow

28 May 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Luke Nadeau

I am a child of the North,
At the first signs of fall,
It’s like a switch flips,
I’m eager

And by the time those soft, white flakes fall to the ground,
My heart grows tenfold

My skin readily turns pink in that winter chill,
Curious,
That my face should flush the color of spring buds.
When the warmth of longer days is long forgotten,

I recall playing in the snow as a kid,
Making snow angels, snow men,
Doing cartwheels in the snow in my bathing suit,
Then jumping right back into my friend’s hot tub,

But somehow,
In the theater of my mind,
I am not cold

My chest, rather, is warm,
I find solace in these snippets of my past,
Where the biting chill of winter cannot reach me

I wrap myself in the coat of my memories,
Let the scarf of tethered dreams wrap around me,
Keep me safe

With any luck,
I shall never freeze

Luke Nadeau is a student studying Creative Writing at Anoka-Ramsey Community College living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. When they aren’t putting pen to paper, or hands to keyboard, they are trying desperately to find their next big CD.

assorted color stained glass window — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I learned self-destruction from a cartoon

23 April 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Esther Sadoff

All morning, sweat springs from Arnold’s brow
as he awaits the beatdown at the end of the day:

a pummeling between him and a huge kid
and everyone knows who’s going to win.

I’ve been lowered a few rungs by self-deprecation.
Folded myself into impressive origami-smallness.

I’ve thrown in the towel, waved a white flag, and run
for the hills but in this episode of Hey Arnold!,

Arnold actually starts to hit himself in the school yard,
a dizzying kaleidoscope of faces spinning round,

but what stands out most are their egg-shaped
eyes vacant and hungry for action.

Arnold gives himself such an insane beating
that he scares the bully into submission.

I’d like to think of myself exactly like that:
two sides of the mirror fighting each other,

a reflection that won’t quit, myself standing over
(or under) my other self and declaring it some kind of win.

Esther Sadoff is a teacher and writer from Columbus, Ohio. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Little Patuxent Review, Jet Fuel Review, Cathexis Poetry Northwest, Pidgeonholes, Santa Clara Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, among others.

Feather Meme

10 February 2023 / Editor

Special Selection for One-year anniversary issue

Poetry by Marianne Brems

Hikers before me have left feathers
stuck in the cracks of a wooden trail marker
at a junction.
Small feathers with downy barbs
flutter in the fall breeze
where delicate shafts may not hold.
Large feathers with curled edges
and sturdier shafts sit deep and solid.

As memes they stand
to carry the import of one road taken,
not another,
on this day, not that.
This small family of Kilroy was Here
gather in good company
to speak to a public not yet come,
inviting them to leave their own mark
across a waiting space.

Marianne Brems is the author of three poetry chapbooks from Finishing Line Press. The most recent, In Its Own Time, is forthcoming in 2023. Her poems have also appeared in literary journals including Nightingale & Sparrow, The Sunlight Press, The Lake, and Green Ink Poetry. Website: www.mariannebrems.com.

beach sand — Photo by Josh Sorenson on Pexels.com

Reflected Light

3 February 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Wendy Bloom

I saw the light reflecting on a piece of something buried in the loamy soil
When I looked closely, I realized it was a piece of myself
That I had buried away for darker days

Filled with darkness and despair
In a world filled with the tragic
It had fallen out of me, and I thought it was gone forever
But it was lying right in front of me

I grasped it in my hand
This shiny piece of myself
I turned it over and over
And rubbed my fingers against its slick surface

I decided to swallow it
To bring it back home to the center of my emptiness
To fill this hole with something that glistened
And sang beautiful music to my heart

It became one with me once again
And I smiled as I heard it laughing
Because it had been seeking me for so long
And had finally made its way back home

Wendy Bloom is an emerging writer who has written numerous poems, short stories, and essays on a wide variety of topics since childhood. She has been published in her local newspaper and “Reflected Light” is her first published poem.

Later

14 January 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Robert Nisbet

By now he was washing his feet
with difficulty, ached a lot
most mornings, but always he walked,
first with the dog, then, when she’d gone,
striding alone round his domain.

It was a tour of inspection, decades
of shift and character and happening,
remembered and re-created.
Most treasured of all, the Common,
its cricket pitches and its trees.

His initials and Moira’s were carved,
fading, blurred but readable still,
in the mighty oak beside the seconds’ pitch.
His sons, the crowds, the matches,
once, the breathless pleasure
of his granddaughter’s single game.

Walking back, through unexceptional streets,
he would trawl his shoal of recollections,
alliances and families, time’s dole,
how Moira married the aircraftsman,
but that didn’t in the end gainsay
the good of all that happened otherwise.

Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet, a now-retired English teacher and college lecturer, who wrote short stories for forty years (with seven collections) and has now turned to poetry, being published widely in both Britain and the USA, where he is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee.

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

yuletide carol

10 December 2022 / Editor

Special Selection for the 2022/2023 Winter Holiday Issue

Poetry by RC deWinter

last christmas eve
it was just us
misfits in a jigsaw world

neither of us believe
so we sent words
backandforthandbackandforth
about ourselves
how we’d lived
who we’d loved
what we hoped for

it was so much better
than being alone on a night
we’ve been conditioned
to expect should be
merry and bright

with song and candles
food and drink
the smiling faces
of the families we never had

so we faked it and it worked

eventually an ocean of regret
washed away the lighthouse
i don’t see you shining out there
in the northern night
and i’m thinking
you’re not even looking for me

this christmas eve
i’ll be sitting in that same chair
holding that same phone

listening to nothing but the wind
singing a frigid dirge
down the chimney
rattling windows
rattling bones
remembering you

RC deWinter’s poetry is widely anthologized, notably in New York City Haiku (NY Times/2017), The Connecticut Shakespeare Festival Anthology (River Bend Bookshop Press, 12/2021) in print: 2River View, the minnesota review, Plainsongs, Prairie Schooner, Southword, Twelve Mile Review, York Literary Review among others and appears in numerous online publications.

abstract bubble clean clear — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The Holding Tank

20 November 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Ron Theel

It was one of those old hotel restaurants. The kind that lets you select your “fresh seafood” from aquariums grouped near the entranceway. I went past it daily on my morning walk but never considered eating there.

Today I stopped. A large fish was swimming erratically near the surface of a small, rectangular tank. I needed to have a closer look. Growing up, I always had aquariums. I liked the challenge of creating and maintaining my own aquatic world: balancing predators with scavengers, separating egg-layers from live-bearers, maintaining the correct pH and temperature levels of the water.

This aquatic world offered a refuge from my father’s athletic world. He played high school football and enjoyed participating in boxer fighting while in the army. “You have to play a sport,” he demanded. “All high school boys play sports.” My pleasure came from the chess club and the debate team. My father’s world remained unexplored.

I recognized the large fish as a sturgeon. For a fish fanatic, the signs would be hard to miss.

An elongated, torpedo shaped body with lines of bony, armor-like “plates” that stretched along smooth, scaleless skin. And that distinctive, rounded nose punctuated with two tiny barbell whiskers to help locate food.

The tank was too small for the sturgeon. Too short as well as too narrow. The fish was too large to turn around by simply swimming in the opposite direction. The top of a sturgeon’s tail fin is longer than the bottom. This distinctive feature enabled the fish to flip itself over by using the top of its tail, enabling it to swim in the opposite direction. It was the only way to reverse direction since the width of the tank was so narrow. Swim about two body lengths, bump the end wall of the tank, flip, and change direction. The motion reminded me of the technique a freestyle swimmer uses to turn around when arriving at the wall of a pool.

Over the next two weeks, I frequently paused at the fish tank. The sturgeon always followed the same turning pattern. Bump the end-wall of the tank. Flip. Reverse. I felt an overwhelming sadness. There was no choice for the sturgeon whose life had to follow this endless, compulsive pattern.

I wished that the fish would somehow disappear. Go belly-up. Be plated-up. Perhaps a miraculous rescue by an animal rights activist. But there was no such drama.

I’ve come up against walls many times. Learning how to live with epilepsy. Bump, flip, change direction. A broken marriage. Bump, flip, change direction. A bankrupt business. Bump, flip, change direction. There are often bumps along any journey. But I’ve been fortunate. People were always there to hold the net for me, to help me change direction and get on with my life: family, friends, therapists, doctors, nurses, and many others. I thank God for all of them.

One morning, I decided not to watch the sturgeon. I’d seen enough. That evening, I returned to the place where I thought I would never eat, the place I came to know as the “fish tank restaurant.” I looked straight ahead as I entered and seated myself. There was no need to read the laminated menu resting in front of me. The waiter approached and asked, “Are you ready to order, sir?”

“Yes,” I answered. “I’ll have the sturgeon, please.”

Ron Theel is an educator, mixed media artist, and freelance writer living in Central New York. His work has been published in Lake Life and Rustling Leaves Anthology.

What the Old Want

28 October 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Steven Deutsch

Not much—
friends
and family
I suppose—
for short visits
involving meals
at restaurants
with tablecloths,
or something sumptuous
simmered for hours
over a low flame.

How about a week
without a visit
to a doctor
or a single
medical test.
No MRI or EKG
or CAT scan,
or even
a tube of blood
with my name
in magic marker.

Time
is in free fall.
Like riding
an elevator
held by a single
strand of steel
down from
the 93rd floor.
Bring kindness.

And, when all
else fails,
a recliner—
well worn
in all the right
spots.
A coffee
straight up
and the book
I loved best when
I was young.

Steve Deutsch has been widely published both on line and in print. Steve is a three time Pushcart Prize nominee. He is poetry editor for Centered Magazine. His poetry books; Perhaps You Can (2019), Persistence of Memory (2020), and Going, Going, Gone (2021), were all published by Kelsay Press.