The Bluebird Word

An Online Literary Journal for Poetry and Flash

Tag: reminiscence

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The Basket

20 April 2025 /

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.

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The Sound of the Rain

12 April 2025 /

Poetry by Steven Deutsch

My grandmother liked nothing
better than to walk in the rain.
On days when most were calculating
how best to stay dry while getting from A to B
she would don her old gray raincoat
and even older brown umbrella
and walk a few miles down Church Avenue
past a hundred store fronts
to nowhere in particular.

She never wore a watch
and I often wondered
how she knew to turn back
or if she always would.
It would not have been that hard,
it seemed to me,
to find a better place to live.
I watched for her,
as if the watching were a magnet
to draw her back home.

I only walked with her once.
At first, I blabbered and struggled
to keep up—my stride
half of hers.
But I soon settled, realizing
the sound of the rain
didn’t need the accompaniment of my voice.
That very wet March Day
she took me into one of the corner candy stores
that dotted our path
for a burger and vanilla malt.
Grandma had tea with milk and sugar.
The trip back was half as long
and twice as quiet—in the best way
I could imagine.

Steve Deutsch is editor of Centered Magazine. He has published six poetry books of which Brooklyn was awarded the Sinclair poetry prize by Evening Street Press. He has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and the Best of the Net.

Photo by Jake Thacker on Unsplash

Reminiscence

8 March 2025 /

Nonfiction by Kandi Maxwell

My mother’s fingernails are perfectly painted a deep shade of red. She sits upright in her maroon leather recliner, a soft white pillow on her lap. Sunlight filters in through the sliding glass doors near the kitchen in her Southern California home. Outside are roses, geraniums, begonias. A small, green-grass lawn. I sit beside my mother. It’s lunchtime. Today, her caregiver has made a pretty plate of Wheat Thin crackers, each topped with cottage cheese and a dab of ruby-red strawberry jam in the center.

With her left hand, my mother holds her plate on top of the pillow. She uses her right hand to daintily pinch her thumb and forefinger on the edges of a cracker. Slowly, so slowly and carefully, she lifts the cracker to her mouth. She chews her cracker thoroughly before reaching for another. Her movements are measured, as she savors each bite.

When lunch is over, my mother naps and I chat quietly with my two sisters who are also visiting. The day is tranquil, as we reminisce about our childhoods. My mother, who isn’t really sleeping, occasionally throws her thoughts into the conversation making us laugh. Two days later, I fly back home to Northern California.

Although my mother had been suffering from heart failure, I didn’t know those moments would be our ending. I didn’t know how vividly memories of that scene would evoke my mother’s essence. Even now, four years later, when I miss her and need her familiarity, I picture her brightly painted fingernails; her unhurried manner; her humor. Her gracefulness throughout her physical decline and her strength in confronting mortality.

Kandi Maxwell is a creative nonfiction writer living in Northern California. Her stories have been published in Hippocampus Magazine, KYSO Flash, Raven’s Perch, Wordrunner eChapbooks, and other literary journals and anthologies. Her memoir, Snow After Fire, was released in 2023 by Legacy Book Press. Learn about Kandi’s writing at kandimaxwell.com.

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Pears

22 January 2025 /

Poetry by Barbara Santucci

Remember those golden d’Anjou pears
that arrived every Christmas Eve in a wooden box,
each flirty orb nestled inside brown shredded paper.

On Christmas morning, their gold
brightened frosty windows panes,
like ornaments glittering on the tree.

You sliced down to the pear’s core,
spread warm Brie over firm flesh
while warming your toes by a fire.

Now, lips chapped by January frost,
hunger for their subtle sweetness.
Dry cracked hands long to cradle their soft skin.

What would you give
for those golden d’Anjou pears
that arrived last Christmas Eve in a wooden box?

Barbara Santucci is a literary and visual artist. She explores the themes of nature, family, and self-reflection. Her poetry has been published in several journals: Plants and Poetry Journal, The Bluebird Word, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, and Macrame Literary Journal. Barbara has published three picture books. Visit her at barbarasantucci.com.

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