Stefanie Kirby
That evening stars
fell as snow
cocooned by chirping
branches and the leaf I’d mistook
earlier for a little brown bird
with breaths like the feathered flight
of gathering cumulus at dark, marking
the last time you’d be wreathed
in heartbeat and blood.
I radiated warmth as a second skin
of flakes melted into a thin
sweat for your small soul.
By morning, flurried drifts
rose barren
arctic,
still.
Poetry Contributor
Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud ‘War Poetry for Today‘ competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Rhysling Award. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including: Apogee, Firewords, Capsule Stories, Gyroscope Review, and So It Goes.
Fiction Contributor
Nicola Ashbrook has been writing for a year or two. Her flash fiction can be found in a variety of places online and in print anthologies, including with Bath, Reflex, Emerge Lit Journal, Capsule Stories and Storgy. When she isn’t writing, she can be found wrangling two boisterous boys and an overly-friendly Boston Terrier.
This past spring, N&S opened for full-length manuscript submissions. Despite the chaos across the globe, we were thrilled to receive thousands of pages of poetry and other genres to consider for 2021-2022 publication.
We are so grateful to each and every author who sent in their work—compiling this list was made incredibly difficult by the quality of each and every manuscript. With every batch of submissions we receive, we’re faced with the inevitable heartbreak of having to turn away work that speaks to us. We truly wish we could accept all of the below titles and more!
As always, manuscripts were reviewed without identifying information, so it was especially exciting to find that a few of our former contributors were the authors behind these works—and even more so to discover several names that are entirely new to us here at N&S!
From the following manuscripts, we’ll choose our final selections which will be published by Nightingale & Sparrow Press through 2022.
Larkspur Queen and Other Songs – Megan Leonard
Life is But a Moment in Time – Essie Dee
Maybe Birds Would Carry It Away – Christopher Woods
Mothership – Emily Uduwana
Out of Time – Aiden Heung
River Ghosts – Merril D. Smith
Sea Me – Adwaita Das
STRANGERS IN LOVE – Rebecca Ruth Gould
Too Much World, Not Enough Chocolate – Peggy Landsman
We Could Be Lovers – Kim Malinowski
Nightingale & Sparrow Micropoets: The Top Ten – 2020Publication Date: 29 December 2020
Nightingale & Sparrow Press
14 Pages
In the leadup to each issue of Nightingale & Sparrow Literary Magazine, the N&S editorial staff selects a series of micropoems to feature on social media in the days leading up to each issue’s launch. While these pieces aren’t published in the magazine issue, they’re posted to the N&S site alongside the issue’s web archive.
To further give back to our micropoem contributors, we’ve decided to publish yet another microchapbook of micropoems. Featuring the “top ten” N&S micropoets of 2020, we’re thrilled to share the 2020 edition of Nightingale & Sparrow Micropoets!
The top ten micropoets of 2020 were chosen by the N&S staff.
View all of our micropoems by issue here.
What Lasts Beyond the BurningPublication Date: 15 December 2020
Nightingale & Sparrow Press
Genre: Poetry
A. A. Parr is a writer, artist, and entrepreneur who calls both Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto home. She holds a Specialised Honours BFA from York University in Theatre (Devised Ensemble Creation; Playwriting) with a double minor in Psychology and Cultural Studies. She is also the Founder and Managing Editor of Type A Media, publishing fresh, diverse perspectives in arts and culture from Northern Ontario and beyond. Most notably in this role, she edited and contributed to the anthology Isolated Together: Northern Ontario perspectives of life in a global pandemic.
Her ongoing poetry series written for and about strangers, “I Wrote You This Poem”, is published on Channillo.com. Her creative works have been seen on stages, in galleries, and in print throughout North America over the past two decades. In her work, she seeks to explore difficult themes in an attempt to shine a necessary light into our darkest crevices. Her most cherished role, of course, is raising two beautifully inquisitive little artists of her own.
For more information on A. A. Parr’s creative works, please visit her website at www.aaparr.wixsite.com/ourghosts
Maggi McGettigan
“There’s something about being in the woods, away from it all, that is healing. I promise. Nature knows how to explain things, how to help understand things.” Dana is a poet, and also an optimist. I am neither of those. Nothing will ever help me understand what has happened. But I can’t keep living in my townhouse that reminds me of what I used to be, walking by neighbors with their pity-filled, knowing eyes, wandering around with the aimless desperation of one who was left behind. So, I go to Dana’s cabin in the woods, armed with wine and books, in the hopes that Dana is right.
From the rocking chair on the front porch, I watch the woods for answers, for understanding. I have been here a few weeks, and even in that short time, so much has changed. I am amazed at how much life can thrive even in the deep shade of thick forest. The fiddleheads have become little ferns under the tall pines. Where there was only a hint of color— a pop of purple crocus, a drip of buttercup yellow— now there are all shades of wildflowers beginning to emerge. While I don’t feel healed, I feel distracted, and that is something. Nature has allowed me to focus my gaze outward because my interior would be too much to bear.
Although sometimes, even distraction is upsetting. The geese by the small pond are pairing up, mating for life, while I am no longer a part of my pair. The birds call out to each other, making nests for their young, while the nursery in my townhouse grows only cobwebs and dust. In these moments, I curse nature, the natural order of things, the familial organization of the forest. How can there be so many signs of life, while I am plagued by death?
One morning, there is a knock on the cabin door. I assume it is Dana, coming to check in, so I rush to open it with my toothbrush dripping behind me and no pants on. It is not Dana. It is a handsome stranger. I slam the door on his outstretched hand. He knocks again. “One sec,” I shout, already running to spit out toothpaste and acquire pants. I look in the mirror, wish I didn’t, and run back to the door.
“I’m so sorry,” I say as I open it.
“No worries,” he says. “Would have called but I didn’t realize anyone was here until I got here, saw the car. And the lights. You keep these outside lights on through the night?”
I glance in the direction he is waving. “Yes,” I say. “I have to admit the dark scares me a bit, out here at least.”
“Ah,” he says, nodding but judgingly. “Well, might confuse the animals. They need to know the dark to know the light. No matter. Anyway.”
“Anyway.” I wait. He looks around. He seems to get distracted by something in the woods, maybe something he sees or hears that I do not. “Can I help you with something?”
He snaps back. “Right. Yes. Well. I’m Sam. I live up the road. Or through the woods, depending on mode of travel. I study them. The woods. I’m a botanist.” He stops, as if checking for understanding.
“Cool,” I say. Always been a great conversationalist.
“Right. I’ve been tracking the progress of a nurse log on the property here, I wondered if you mind if I spend some time with her today.”
“Sure, right. Whatever. Fine.” I start to close the door. If he is here to murder me, I should at least make it more difficult.
“Wait,” he says, so I stop. “Do you want to come?”
“No,” I say, without thinking.
“It’s really fascinating. And if you are up here, in the middle of the woods, I assume you are fascinated by such things? Else why would you be here?”
“My husband and daughter died in a car wreck six months ago.” It just comes out. I’m not sure I’ve said it like that yet, so directly. He doesn’t respond. But he doesn’t look uncomfortable. He doesn’t give me awful pity eyes. He is waiting for me to continue, as if that isn’t the end of the story. As if there’s more. “And I got sick of everyone staring at me and being weird. And Dana said nature is healing or something, I don’t know. So that’s why I’m here.”
For a minute he says nothing. “You should come and see this nurse log.”
I laugh. It is a crazy, weird, guttural sound that I haven’t heard myself make in months. Had he not heard me? Is he not fluent in English? This is the part when people get awkward and back themselves out of being with me, of having to deal with this impossible tragedy of mine.
“Really,” he says. “So much to be learned out here. Dana is right. Besides, what else are you doing today?”
We walked along an overgrown path, and Sam chattered about the trees and plants we passed. “What fascinates me about nurse logs the most is that they are actually more alive when they are dead. What I mean is, when trees are growing upright, they are only about five percent living matter. When they fall, they contain five times as much! And they do so much for the life around them, letting in more sunlight, providing protection from soil fungi, and nutrients, it’s just amazing.”
“Amazing,” I responded, though I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about.
The nurse log was out by the stream that fed the small pond by the cabin. I had walked along it several times but never paid much attention to the enormous fallen tree that marked our destination. It was the size of a car and covered with thick green moss, patches of mushrooms, and all different kinds of grasses and plants. This must be a nurse log. Sam emptied his backpack while I took off my shoes and put my feet in the water of the stream, something that has always brought me comfort. As a child, I would pretend you could toss your worries into a river and it would carry them away for you. I closed my eyes. I listened to the sounds of the water maneuvering its way around the rocks, around my feet. I felt the chill of it on my legs. The birds and bugs around me continued their conversations as if life had not been interrupted by my presence.
“Wow,” said Sam, so I walked over. He pointed to a thin little sapling that seemed to be growing right out of the dead log, its roots a tangled mess that clung to the rotting bark. Clinging for life.
“Cool,” I said.
“Really cool,” he said, and smiled. He looked up at me and smiled again. So, I crouched down to listen. What else did I have to do today? “This is one of the biggest nurse logs I have seen. Beautiful old girl. This sapling here, Eastern Hemlock, will help decay this old tree, but the old tree helps her too, gives her nutrients, protects her from soil fungi that can get to little seedlings. And look, these mushrooms are flourishing. I wasn’t sure, being so big, how things would grow together. But this shows, like, no matter how big the tree, how hard and traumatic the fall, nature takes over. The tree is not gone but changed. It provides life for a new microcosm, a new world. It has given itself to this new world.”
He is now facing the log again, lifting up leaves and rocks and dirt, making notes as he talks. “The forest has it all figured out. It doesn’t stop when one of its own is destroyed. It doesn’t stare at it as if it is now rendered useless. Think of rotting leaves, just dead garbage, right? Absolutely not, they gift their nutrients back to the soil. Even animal carcasses, when not used by other animals as food, will give their body back to the dirt and the dirt becomes better for it. There is no life without death here.”
I wanted to cry. But before I could, a chipmunk ran right in front of us, knocking us both backward in surprise. I laughed again, but more naturally, less gutturally. Sam laughed too.
“Nurse logs, huh. Is that all you study?”
“Actually, I saw you went right to the stream. As it happens, my next project focuses on rivers, creeks, and streams. Fascinating to me how the water you just stepped in will never return to us here. Or will it? See, it is off towards other adventures, a bigger river, maybe the sea. It brings with it the pollution, the debris, of the places it has passed through, never to return. Or does it? It’s a water cycle, right? So how can we tell…”
I let him talk as we both moved closer to the stream. I put my feet back in and closed my eyes. Not healed but distracted. And that is enough, for now.
Cheryl Skory Suma
Before
Before the fall, I did not appreciate the power of memories. They were of the forest’s shadow, easily eclipsed by the echo of my forward footsteps upon the broken parts of my now.
***
After
Once I’d become my shadow’s shadow, I saw memories through new stalker’s eyes. I became the observer, concealed behind a forest of lost snapshots of me.
***
Before
My memories were too aggressive. Painfully thrusting themselves to the forefront or tugging me backward to a past best left behind. Even the innocent were more of a distraction than something I cherished. I was focused forward.
***
After
Post the fall, I wished only to travel back in time; to turn around and scoop up those lost comrades. To hold them under my cloak, both the innocent and the pained, lovingly cocooned together. Without exception.
***
Before
I saw memories as slithering, living things. Like earthworms wriggling out of the ground to chase the rain’s song, memories had a sly way of slipping in and out of my consciousness, of gleefully appearing without warning to disrupt my present. The cruel ones were experts at waiting to pounce, cunningly curled up in the darkness until the time was right to show themselves—to remind me of all the burdens and hurt they cradled.
It wasn’t their fault. Like me, memories were at the mercy of time. Time changed us both, without consideration and with few concessions. Memories found a way to embrace time’s wreckage. As the moss that finds new life upon the fallen oak’s shattered trunk, my memories had morphed into something new. They demanded I support their vision even though they’d managed to recklessly color themselves with experiences and emotions that were never part of their beginnings, or mine.
Memories were such a negative presence in my life that I took them for granted. Until I fell.
***
After
Until a patch of ice on a blustery, snowy day. Until a misstep that birthed a head injury. In that instant, a large company of my memories and I parted ways. They flung themselves free, to scatter like mirror twins along with the swirling snowflakes that danced upward into the sky, riding the wind as I lay on my back, watching until my eyes blurred and the last stragglers melted on my lashes.
Suddenly, I became a mess of “Couldn’t” s. I couldn’t wash my face without vertigo shoving me over. I couldn’t write without leaving out expected prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions. I had trouble finding simple words or replaced the desired word with something that sounded or looked the same but wasn’t. I couldn’t smile and say, “Yes, that was a great day,” when my family told a story—a story from a past where I’d lived and loved, but now couldn’t remember.
A large piece of me was left behind on that ice, sliding sideways until coming to rest roadside. No matter how much I’ve tried to retrace my steps, I never found what the snowflakes so merrily coveted. My memories enjoyed their new freedom and chose not to return.
No more past stories to be tainted by time, no thoughts snaking in the basement, no happy memories swinging defiantly in the gallows. Just clean, crisp, nothingness. A decade long hole in my life. The head injury decided which memories were worthwhile and which were too heavy to carry on, and it didn’t care to sort through the good and the bad—it dumped them all. It had its own forward focus.
The encampment that once sheltered my memories now burnt to the ground, I began to feel invisible. Most of my memories were truly lost, although some would occasionally pass by to whisper in the ears of my loved ones, allowing them to share their version of my lost stories. Hearing it second hand didn’t feel the same; the stories didn’t engulf me the way the memories did when they still wriggled around within me. They were not mine. They were not real.
I hungrily looked at photographs from those lost years, hoping to tempt back that nagging tickle. To feel memories’ insistence for acknowledgement—so they could validate that I had a past worthy of remembering. When this failed, I would flee to walk circles around the block. Determined to go anywhere the quiet photographs were not, but with nowhere to go.
***
After the Shadow’s Gift
Post the fall, the initial deficits and memory loss forced me to sell my business—I had to leave behind the healthcare company I’d founded. Nor could I return to my previous career as a Speech-Language Pathologist. I had to find a new voice.
In my career, I had worked with TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) patients. So I knew that if I wanted to heal, I should exercise my brain through math, word puzzles, reading. This led me to reconnect with my first love, writing. It took five years, but eventually, I found acceptance. I found ways to embrace my reborn self and the lessons of my head injury. Diving back into writing was only the first gift.
I discovered that I could leave unkind slithering thoughts in the shadows; it was in my power to forget them. I could use the absence of their biases to move forward free of the burden of past hurts. As new memories were born, I could allow them to wriggle through my consciousness and poke without competition at my future present—I could birth my own forest of recollections to echo new life choices.
I learned to slow down and appreciate life’s gifts more. This was a new me—one with a past full of holes. Perhaps, a trail of holes was just fine and dandy. It was the wholeness I could make of today that mattered.
These choices, this acceptance of my reborn self—it ensured that my new memories and I could cast our own shadow, instead of only belonging to those we’d left behind.
Liana Tsang Cohen
The night I signed my divorce papers, my daughter and I drove an hour into downtown Manhattan for our first taste of Turkish Delight. The documents had arrived in the mail, an unceremonious stack in a nondescript envelope, as I was settling down for my third dinner of poached eggs that week. Otis was always the chef in the relationship. In the old days, back when I still felt a flutter in my belly at the thought of him, he would cook extravagant meals for us on Sunday mornings: piles of plush French toast sprinkled with strawberries and powdered sugar and bowls of jook, the rice porridge he’d grown up eating, with soy sauce, ginger, and flecks of pork, and we’d wash it all down with steaming mugs of coffee.
The arrival of the papers was not unexpected. Otis had been gone a month, just long enough for his side of the bed, compressed into the long, angular shape of his body, to regain its former flatness. The decision to separate had, for the most part, been mutual. There’d been no blow-out fight, no torrid affair or surrender to alcoholism or drug addiction. The aloofness in our marriage had been building for a while—it started after Ariel left for college. It should’ve been easy to be in love or at least be content with just the two of us in the house, but, instead, the things we loathed about each other, those little annoyances we’d learned to ignore, began popping up like whack-a-moles. I hated that he never made the bed even though he always left for work after me. He hated that I never removed my hair from the shower drain. Over time, I started noticing that he’d stopped calling me during the day to check in or kissing me before bed at night. One morning, I woke up and he was already awake and staring at me, which told me something was wrong even before I looked in his eyes and saw that he wanted to leave.
The pen was bleeding a small, angry circle of ink onto the line for my signature when Ariel came into the kitchen, rubbing her eyes sleepily. A second-year law student at Fordham, she’d trained herself to take 20-minute “power naps” during study sessions. Having made the journey to Yonkers the night before, she’d spent most of the day preparing for an upcoming exam in the cramped quarters of her childhood bedroom. After Otis left, she’d started visiting me more frequently, appearing at the front door on Saturday mornings with her hair in a tangled braid and her arms hugging a stack of textbooks. I knew it wasn’t convenient—but I couldn’t bring myself to ask her to stop.
“Mom?” Ariel’s eyes caught on the papers as she approached me cautiously. “If you don’t want to sign them now, you don’t have to. Gosh, look what you did. Do you have any Wite-Out here?”
I released the pen as she went over to the kitchen drawer. When she returned to the table, however, she didn’t have Wite-Out. Instead, she held a worn copy of C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia. She flipped through the yellowing pages, her face aglow with nostalgia.
“Do you remember that scene…?”
“You mean the one where he eats…”
“The Turkish Delight!”
“God, I always thought it sounded so good.”
“So good.”
It turned out that, although neither of us remembered the book very well and hadn’t seen the movie in years, there was one image we both remembered perfectly: Edmund, the misfit middle child, devouring the magical Turkish Delight given to him by the evil white witch against the frigid backdrop of Narnia’s forest. It was the treat so ripe with promises of grandeur and clout that its taste alone had convinced him to betray his sisters and brothers. I wondered what it was like to experience something so powerful, so transcendent, that it made you want to throw everyone away just to have a bit more.
“Let’s go get some.”
“What? Now?”
I nodded, certain. Ariel assessed me for several moments, evidently trying to figure out if this was a “Mom is being cute and impulsive and I should support her” moment, or a “Mom is off her rocker and should probably seek professional help” kind of deal. She must have decided on the former option because her face broke into a slow smile.
“Okay.”
We grabbed wool sweaters and hats, and I retrieved the car keys from my room. When Ariel went to lace up her boots in the foyer, I picked up the pen and signed the divorce papers.
Outside, the moon was a cold, hard orb, like butter that someone forgot to take out of the fridge before serving. Ariel offered to drive, and we took our respective positions in the old Honda—or “Leslie,” as Ariel called it after watching a bit too much Parks and Recreation in high school. The dark homes and yellowish streetlights sped by in the night, too fast for my eyes to catch hold. Ariel drove in silence. I leaned my head against the frosted window and imagined spreading the moon on a slice of bread.
The international grocery store was near closing time when we arrived. We headed straight for the back, where a balding man with a large birthmark on his cheek lifted tender pieces of our treat from their place behind the glass case, nestling them gently, like infants, in a bed of wax paper. We brought the package outside and ate our dessert with gloved hands on the front stoop of the store.
The Turkish Delight was soft to the touch, yielding to the pressure of my fingers. It melted on my tongue, forming sweet puddles as powdered sugar collected across my lips, like snow. The gummy interior clung to my teeth and the roof of my mouth, like an embrace. It was the food of gluttony, of pure selfishness, of me, me, me. It was the exact opposite of anxiety and loneliness, of impersonal pieces of paper with hard, sharp edges. As the little squares warmed me to my core, the world of goodbye’s and poached eggs felt impossibly far away.
Neither I nor Ariel said anything as we ate. Her eyes were big and watery, and she gripped each piece with all five fingers of her right hand, like how she used to hold her food when she was a child. Sirens screamed as an ambulance sped by. A group of drunk teenagers clambered past us, chattering over each other. All around me, the city twisted and pulsed, but I felt peaceful. Resting my head against my daughter’s shoulder, I let my heart compose an ode to Turkish delight.
