Nightingale & Sparrow

Author: juliette

  • Author Statement: Cemetery Music by Birdy Odell

    For as long as I can remember, I have contemplated death. Even as a child, I tried to make sense of it and observed the feelings and rituals associated with the passing of loved ones with a kind of peculiar curiosity. My younger self developed a sense of acceptance in these observations and I found it comforting. Death seemed ‘normal’, sad but not frightening.

    As I got older I began to think of funerals as an ordeal and nothing to do with the person who had died at all but simply a public display of grief. It annoyed me.

    I wasn’t sad when my maternal grandmother died. She had never been afraid to die herself, so I was ok with it. At her funeral, there was a little old lady in the back row who sang every hymn in a high warbling voice that lent a much-needed sense of comic relief to the occasion. I enjoyed the contrast. Grief was a state of mind alleviated by joy.

    I began writing poetry to sort through my feelings at a very early age as well. It has been my way of putting my feelings somewhere outside of my body where they could be looked at as a separate entity. And yet I have never written poetry to examine personal losses. Death is still more of a riddle to be solved than an expression of grief.

    In Cemetery Music I chose to pair poems about death with lighthearted images in attempt to illustrate the contrast I have so often felt. But in looking through my work later on I realized that there was still a lingering sadness. I felt that what my work was really conveying was the poignancy of memory and the mixture of happiness and sadness that resides there.

    To me, death is both a comfort and a terror and always will be.

    Birdy Odell

  • Nightingale & Sparrow Micropoets: The Top Ten – 2019

    Nightingale & Sparrow Micropoets: The Top Ten – 2019

    Publication Date: 19 November 2019
    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 2019, we’re thrilled to share the 2019 edition of Nightingale & Sparrow Micropoets!

    Print | Kindle | Digital PDF

    Contributors

    The top ten micropoets of 2019 were chosen by the N&S staff.

    • Flights – Barbara McVeigh
    • La Pietà – Angi Holden
    • By Any Other Name, Juliet – Britton Minor
    • Greensleeves Replies – Merril D. Smith
    • Revelation – Sarah M. Lillard
    • Life in Smoke – Zoe Philippou
    • Lace and Leather – Cynthia Cashman
    • I Am the Sun – H.R. Parker
    • Gargoyles – Megan Garner
    • The Garden – Meredith Faulkner

    View all of our 2019 micropoems by issue here.

  • C. M. Lanning

    C. M. Lanning

    Poetry Contributor

    C. M. Lanning is a transgender journalist in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She has been published in Nebo and Foliate Oak with her novel, The Last Fire Mage, under a publishing contract and due to be released next year.


    Works in Nightingale & Sparrow

    The Crows of Portland

     

  • Nate Maxson

    Nate Maxson

    Poetry Contributor

    Nate Maxson is a writer and performance artist. The author of several collections of poetry, he lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.


    Works in Nightingale & Sparrow

    Supplication to Flame

  • Ghost Trees at Midnight

    Ghost Trees at Midnight

    (nine years after the Bear Butte burn)

    Ginger Dehlinger

    Black-skinned bones
    these spectral spires
    shrouded in moon dust
    arms akimbo
    reach for the sky.

    Like zombies
    they prefer the dead of night
    company of spirits
    mask of darkness
    cool, bleak silence.

    Dead or half-dead
    missing limbs
    stripped of bark
    feet planted
    they refuse to topple.

    A legion of ghouls
    kissed by the devil
    scarred
    numb to the core
    magnificent in moonlight.

    Ginger Dehlinger

  • Thomas Zimmerman

    Thomas Zimmerman

    Poetry Contributor

    Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits The Big Windows Review—thebigwindowsreview.com at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His poems have appeared recently in Rune Bear, Panoply, and Hunnybee.


    Works in Nightingale & Sparrow

    New Moon

     

  • Patricia Budd

    Patricia Budd

    Poetry Contributor

    Patricia Budd, a Navy Brat, grew up reading everything in sight, including lots of Science Fiction. Thus her habit of writing on any scrap of paper handy. She is a retired computer engineer, moved to Maine in 1994 and received her MFA from Stonecoast in 2006 at the age of 70. Her poems have been in MARGIE, Anderbo, The MacGuffin and the Maine Review among other journals and websites.


    Works in Nightingale & Sparrow

    Warnings and Admonitions

     

  • Letter from the Editor – nevermore

    Dear Reader, 

    I’m incredibly excited to share this very special Halloween issue of Nightingale & Sparrow with you!  Halloween has always been one of my favourite holidays and, as a big fan of Gothic literature and art, this was the perfect time to invite submitters to send us their best Poe-esque work.  

    Of course, this issue is also special for another reason— it’s our very first with an expanded staff!  The N&S team tripled from the last issue to this one and I’m so grateful to each and every member of our staff. Each member of our “nest” is a volunteer, yet puts in so much hard work to make this the best possible publication.  

    With that in mind, I’d like to extend a big thank you to our editorial, production, and social media teams for their efforts in the past several weeks.  Especially with the first Nightingale & Sparrow Press book going live (congratulations to Lynne Schmidt on the publication of her chapbook, Gravity!), it’s been all the more critical to have a great team on board to ensure the issue arrived on time and at our usual high quality.  

    And, as always, it’s not just our team that deserves a thank you.  Each of the contributors contained herein, every submitter, and all of our followers and readers (like you) makes Nightingale & Sparrow possible.  We quite literally couldn’t do this without you.  

    I hope you enjoy this issue of Nightingale & Sparrow.  We asked submitters to send us their “best bits of gothic” and, as always, our contributors delivered just that. Step into a dark and stormy past through pieces like Elizabeth Spencer Spragins’ “In the Dungeon of Duntulm Castle” and Birdy Odell’s “Stones.”  or look Death in the face through J.S. Watts’ “Earth to Earth.” Shiver as you page through ghosts, spells, and all things spooky.  

    Happy Halloween, and we’ll see you in 2020 with issue V!  

    Juliette Sebock

    Editor-in-Chief, Nightingale and Sparrow

  • Alannah Radburn

    Alannah Radburn

    Poetry Contributor

    Alannah Radburn is a queer witch living in Ottawa, Ontario. She likes to drink tea in the forest, and shares her poems with everyone who is willing to listen. Alannah believes that love comes in all shapes, sizes and genders, and believes in the power of sisterhood.


    @alannahradburn.poetry


    Works in Nightingale & Sparrow

    Last Nightmare

     

  • Rumours and oracles

    Roumours and oracles*

    Kate Garrett

    Seers claimed they were shown the end of Mary:
    clouds of red hair swathing the sky over Scotland

    with blood like mist – the vertebrae snapped – skin
    severed. The boy king locked this vision in his

    heart, pulled chains tight around it: no time to love
    his faraway mother held in her chambers and turrets.

    Nor any inclination – raised by steel-tongued wooden
    men – but he forever paled at the suggestion of her

    execution, it rolled around his ribcage like a rough-
    cut gem, polished over time into deep superstition,

    into acceptance. As the years delivered the gore
    foretold, a woman whose own alchemy once gave

    him life had dwindled to an artefact – a mother
    unseen, untouched, unknown. Distant and dead,

    one less hurdle to the throne, but left James a legacy
    of backward glances – expecting death by axe- by curse.

     

    *King James VI of Scotland & I of England is remembered by many for his persecution of witches. One reason behind this hatred was his fear of a violent death – which was in no small part brought on by the execution of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587. On top of that, Mary’s death was supposedly predicted by those with ‘the sight’ in Scotland throughout his youth, which added to James’s superstitions about those who practiced magic.

     

    Kate Garrett