An Online Literary Journal for Poetry and Flash

Tag: writing

If I Were a Bird

Poetry by Wesley Sims

I’d be a bluebird,
loved for its song,
its bold blue suit,
its habit of lingering
on limbs long enough
to thrill our mornings.
More than handsome icon,
a creature comfortable
with itself
who knows how to sit
in silence and wait
for the muse to call the song,
confident the music will come.
A bird with the discipline
of a serious writer,
who gets up early
and gets at his task,
living out the wisdom
that the early bird
gets the pick—
of worms, and words.


Wesley Sims has published three chapbooks of poetry: When Night Comes (2013); Taste of Change (2019); and A Pocketful of Little Poems (2020). His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and he has had poems nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize.

Cordially (in Winter)

Poetry by Jennifer Campbell

Each driveway is a scuffed shoe,
tick marks revealing the extent
of our waiting.

Days when blue sky pokes through
the gray, cars fill the roads
with more color.

The gray days are what I want
to tell you about:
landscape, water, and horizon,
different smears of charcoal.

I hope this letter finds you well
is something I could say
if I were being impersonal,
but formality went out the window
with your last address.

We may freely speak
about the steak you fixed
to perfection or how it felt
to play pool after all this time,
experiences that are so real.

Yet someone who intercepts
this letter could imagine
I am speaking of the afterlife,
the imagery of travel a tool
to express how we keep moving.


Jennifer Campbell is a writing professor in Buffalo, NY, and a co-editor of Earth’s Daughters. She has two poetry collections, Supposed to Love and Driving Straight Through, and a chapbook of reconstituted fairytale poems. Jennifer’s work has recently appeared in Healing Muse and Paterson Literary Review and is forthcoming in Slipstream.

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