Nightingale & Sparrow

Author: meganrusso

  • “Sing for Me”

    “Sing for Me”

    Iona Murphy

    The Last words shared between us. We were at a family dinner in the local Chinese Buffet. Now it keeps closing down and reopening with a different name and the exact same food. I sat right opposite you at dinner so we could talk the whole time, challenging each other to see who could eat the most banana fritters. I ate so many I thought my little belly was going to explode. You let me win with seven. I told you all about rehearsals for the talent show coming up and how I was going to sing Magic Moments. On the way out you asked for a sneak preview. I wish I sung that day.

    You never got to see the talent show where I sang Magic Moments. I even had a solo part. I was a backing dancer in Super Trooper and Rocking All Over the World too. Even without you cheering me on, I didn’t shy away from the stage. You never saw our production of The Button Box where I played Auntie Nellie the belly dancer and ‘Crow Two.’ Not the most glamourous roles, especially when I had auditioned for the lead. You still would have been proud though, telling me I was the shining star of the show.

    Two days after it happened I went to Choir like I did every Wednesday. We were learning to sing songs from The Lion King because the kids in year six were going to see it performed in the West End. Next year I would get to go, but I never got to tell you that. The song that day was Endless Night, coming straight after Mufasa’s death. You promised you’d be there, whenever I needed you, whenever I call your name, you’re not anywhere. I couldn’t get the words out. When I was fourteen I downloaded the West End album on my iPod. I skipped Endless Night every time. I haven’t listened to it since that day in choir.

    When I was learning to play the piano I was so excited to tell you that I was learning Puff the Magic Dragon. You asked me if I knew what it was really about and I told a story of finding magical dragons down by the water. You told me my version of the story was much better and that really it was about drugs. I was so excited that I knew something other people didn’t, it was our little secret. When I lost you on Monday I didn’t go to piano lessons. My teacher was your friend and she hurt too. I wanted to go but I couldn’t move my body from the left hand corner of the sofa, staring blankly at the board games on the shelves opposite. Asking why it happened. It wasn’t fair. I still sit in that spot on the sofa, holding on to a little part of you. I kept playing even without you. When I dusted off the keyboard for the first time in ten years I thought of you as I played a shaky version of Addict with a Pen. In Copenhagen I did a duet of Welcome to the Black Parade with a friend, it reminded me of our duets. I knew you’d be happy that I returned back to music that was our special bond.

    I’ll never get to tell you that I got the part of Mary in the nativity, just like you always said I would. How I sat in Church on the alter and sang Away in a Manger, cradling a real baby in my arms. When my little baby Jesus started filling the Church with screams, I had to pass her through a little arched window and the real mother passed back a tissue box hidden in a white blanket because someone forgot to bring the emergency back-up doll. We never got to laugh about how they couldn’t get a real donkey because the couple who owned the usual nativity donkey got divorced and were in an angry custody battle. They had to use a Shetland pony, who refused to walk down the aisle to the tune of Little Donkey which they played three times before he decided to trot towards the crib.

    When Christmas comes around I put your unreleased Christmas song on. I know it would be a hit if we released it, maybe even Christmas number one. You were the most wonderful singer and hearing your voice at Christmas fills the air with your presence. Each snowfall reminds me of you. You always had a powerful voice, your laughter filled every room. For months afterwards, each time I heard a Scottish accent I thought it was you. The day of the funeral a tall man with a deep voice came in and I caught my breath. You had come and it was all a prank. No matter how hard I wished, no man was you.

    Granny thinks of you when Can’t Help Falling in Love starts to play. It makes me think about you too. I know if you could see her now you’d beam with joy. Her wonderful hats, her tiny little Scottie dog, her enthralling conversation, her warm heart. She still lights up every room just like you’d remember. Sometimes when I don’t believe in love, I think about the way you would look at each other, peeking through the glass of the framed photo of you both on my desk. She still wears a locket with your hair inside.

    When I sing out of tune I know it would make you smile. When I grab the microphone and pour my heart out at karaoke I know you’d be glad that I never hid my voice in shame. Your little girl grew up and never stopped thinking about you, wishing you could have been there for all the big moments in her life. I know you’d be proud of every little thing I did, you always were. I started doing the things you told me I could do. Twenty-one I picked up a pen and wrote again. It was a poem about loss. You always told me I could be a writer, you loved listening to my stories, those little fantasy worlds I dreamed up in my head. That’s where you live now.

    The first poem I ever wrote, I read for you in the crematorium. A tremble in my voice I stood in front of the masses of people who loved you like I do. Each stanza ended in the same rhyming couplet: “there’s no need to protest / my grandad was the best.” Everybody told me I was very brave. They still tell me that fourteen years later. I’ll never see it as brave. It’s what you deserved. A doodle of a tiny little girl with plaits and a full fringe holding hands with a six-foot man with a big belly. My big grandad. Sometimes I sit at your bench and trace the letters in your name. I read that phrase over and over again. Life is fleeting. Love is eternal.

    Magic Moments never had the same feeling again. It’s always for you. Time can’t erase it. Time won’t erase you. Our magic moments, filled with love.

    Iona Murphy

  • 3 A.M. is the Perfect Time For a Lost Lover

    3 A.M. is the Perfect Time For a Lost Lover

    Hunter Blackwell

    Now it’s three in the morning and you’re
    not changing my mind. No matter how
    many chords you learn or riffs you perfect.

    Now it’s three in the morning and you’re drunk –
    I can tell by the sleepy eyes and cat-screech
    strumming. Let it go man; just let it go.

    You told me it was me and the piano
    that stole your heart, it was my
    fingers flying over the keys that flew

    away

    with

    your

    heart;

    and you didn’t want it back either,

    not if it meant giving up my Sunday

    performances, the finger snaps in tempo.

    I was a fool though, let you play

    my heart just like your electric,

    fingers strumming with practice.

    You’ve wrapped girls around your finger
    before I assume, must’ve been easy for
    you – just another chord progression,

    another tightening of the strings
    another capo placed exactly
    where you needed

    but nothing more than an accessory.
    Boy you played me well, made my
    hips swivel to the beat; you made

    my foot

    tap to,

    the riff I hummed
    making you waffles and bacon.
    You said, it wasn’t working out, you didn’t
    feel like I did. I trusted you, every lyric
    dripping in fictitious harmony.

    Hunter Blackwell

  • Self- Portrait as my most repeated song

    Self- Portrait as my most repeated song

    Yasmine Rukia

    Yasmine Rukia

  • THE CONSECRATION OF THE APSARASES

    THE CONSECRATION OF THE APSARASES

    Sarra Culleno

    Natajara rocks
    to tread a measure. Gets down.
    Terpsichore gyrates
    and pirouettes, cuts a rug.
    They trip the light fantastic.

    Firestarter twists
    snaking smoke mists into lungs,
    yanking hearts, out, up
    above the crowd’s waving hands,
    bounced in buoyancy of bass.

    Crowned Queen Mab’s decks spin
    notes placed in algorithms.
    Their calculated
    designs stand our hairs on end,
    lifted in heart-beat updrafts.

    They are The Walrus
    and midsummer’s madness in
    Soltice’s bedlam.
    We move to timbrels and harps.
    We shall praise Their Names in dance.

    We shall throw some shapes.

    Sarra Culleno

  • New York’s (Just Like) Starting Over

    New York’s (Just Like) Starting Over

    Kathleen McKitty Harris

    “With Double Fantasy, I’m saying, ‘Here I am now. How are you?
    How’s your relationship going? Did you get through it all? Wasn’t
    the seventies a drag, you know? Well, here we are, let’s make the
    eighties great because it’s up to us to make what we can of it.” — John Lennon

    I was a ten-year-old kid living in Queens when John Lennon was shot and killed in New York City, gunned down in front of the Dakota where he and Yoko Ono resided. On the morning after John’s murder, I was awakened by my mother—who, as a teenager, had screamed at the first grainy, gray sight of The Beatles performing on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1963, who peeked her thirty-something head into my bedroom and asked me to pray for John’s soul.

    I was born in the summer of 1970, a year after my parents’ nuptials, and a few months after The Beatles’ official breakup. I had never known life without The Beatles or their music. They were like sunlight, like water, like air—always surrounding me, always present.

    By the end of the seventies, New Yorkers were long numbed to reports of knifings and shootings and muggings. But this news shook us out of our city-wide defensive stupor. We had come to understand that violence would happen to ordinary people like us, but not to someone like him.

    New York City was my home, my ancestry, my epicenter. I was a fifth-generation native and I thought nothing of it because so many people in my city microcosm held the same title. New York was a place that I always expected to be from. As a child, I couldn’t comprehend that there was soil and bedrock and earth beneath paved city streets. If the asphalt was jackhammered too far, too deep, I was sure that all five boroughs would collapse into a black hole of nothingness.

    As New York City prepared for the Christmas holiday season that year, the song that had the most radio airplay was the startlingly ironic “(Just Like) Starting Over,” the first single from Lennon’s newly released double LP Double Fantasy. New Yorkers, in their shame and shock, lined up in droves to buy the album, and turned up the volume all the way whenever that song played on the radio. It was an infinite loop in those days of mourning, a constant companion to our displaced, Christmas-lit grief. Shopkeepers played it behind the counter, on the AM radios they kept on high shelves and near the cash register. Kids played it on their transistor radios on buses and stoops. No one ever seemed to complain about the noise or repetition. We absorbed it as some kind of collective penance because it had happened in our city, on our streets.

    Scott Muni, Dennis Elsas, and Carole Miller, our beloved New York City FM radio DJs, walked us through our stunned, collective grief by playing an endless list of Beatles songs as well as Lennon’s first post-Beatles solo hit, “Imagine.” John’s love poem to his wife Yoko, “Woman,” “Nobody Told Me” from Milk and Honey, a nodding baby-boomer anti-paean, and John and Yoko’s Vietnam-era Christmas song, “Happy Xmas (War is Over.)” It was almost too much to bear by mid-month when Christmas songs dominated the airwaves, and John and Yoko’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” was given airplay, an uppercut to our collective gut each time we heard it. Dear God, what had we done—to our city and our heroes and ourselves? Another year over, and a new one just begun.

    Even now, I’m still struck by the whispered opening of their tender holiday protest song. Memories of tinseled row house windows, tired, sixties-era blow-mold-plastic carolers, and WWII-era strings of Christmas lights across shopping streets all arise at the sound of John and Yoko’s voices. My throat still tightens upon hearing it, a clutch of remembrance embedded within me, of a city and a culture tainted and lessened, and of the only home I’d ever known.

    New Yorkers all seemed to walk to the beat of “(Just Like) Starting Over” in those mournful days. We recognized the sound of the clanging bell at the song’s opening, as well as the muffled PA announcement from the JFK ticket agent at its close. We played that song over and over again until the melody was imprinted on all of us. I don’t like to listen to “(Just Like) Starting Over” so much anymore because it takes me back to that sad and sorrowful winter when we had lost John to madness, and when we seemed to be losing New York City, our grand urban goddess, as well. I prefer “Watching the Wheels” instead, which is slower and gentler, less produced, more acoustic in sound. It’s still one of my favorite Lennon songs. I guess it’s how I’d rather remember him—enjoying that short span of time in being an everyday New Yorker and a doting father, no longer riding on the merry-go-round, letting it all go. The tune had captured so much of what John must have loved about his life as a stay-at-home father in NYC—baking bread for his son in the Dakota, walking the Central Park Reservoir path like a native, and living among the rest of us New Yorkers as a mere mortal.

    Kathleen McKitty Harris

  • rose is listening to the quiet guitar strings

    rose is listening to the quiet guitar strings

    Martina Rimbaldo

    Martina Rimbaldo

  • antique melody

    antique melody

    Martina Rimbaldo

    Martina Rimbaldo

  • A Late-Night Playroom Soirée

    A Late-Night Playroom Soirée

    Lauren Aspery

    Sitting
    cross-legged
    on the blue carpet
    under the glow
    of the bare yellow bulb.
    Sipping water
    from a tiny wine glass,
    plastic,
    also yellow;
    small enough
    for the fist
    of a seven-year-old girl.

    Intoxicated
    between notes of melamine
    and the glare
    of the lime green walls.
    Drunk in my make-believe kitchen,
    drinking from my make-believe cup,
    wine straight from the bathroom tap.

    I turn to the radio and press play.
    “MY TITANIC CD!” starts to spin
    and, from inside the metallic soundbox,
    My Heart Will Go On emerges.

    I lie on the floor,
    kicking the pink office chair
    from underneath
    so it turns
    Near
    and turns
    Far
    and turns
    Wherever you are
    to the sound of Celine Dion.

    Lauren Aspery

  • After a Room full of Muddled Melodies

    After a Room full of Muddled Melodies

    Mandira Pattnaik

    If it’s not Acapulco Moonlight, where the first trumpet’s highest note is an optional E, it’s a room full of muddled melodies. Remember, melodies, like life, can be grooved, with directions or blends of the two; just like formulas charted out might turn out jagged or scraped at the edges. Like light that seeped into your room at 16, Bentinck Street, Kolkata, where the changing but unceasing cacophony lingered in the air until nightfall. When darkness drew an impervious curtain, the squalid, overcrowded conditions slightly abated, as did the raised, frayed tempers of the hawkers just underneath your window; where the pavement was usurped each day by screaming men and women selling everything from tea, jalebis to fruits, steel utensils and cheap clothes.

    ‘Five bananas for ten rupees! Five for ten!’

    ‘Best quality steel! Plates, larder, glasses! Get anything for thirty! Only thirty!’

    Vans, handcarts, rickshaws, egg-yolk-yellow taxis, rickety buses parked erratically wherever it suited the driver—to pee, or chat, or a cup of chai. You never complained to the man you’d married a fortnight ago. Instead, every afternoon, you paced the tiny room to find something to fill the hours with, then defeated you craned your neck to view, just beyond the grilled window, brick-and-mortar shops rubbing shoulders, standing chock-a-bloc, with pigeonholed stalls stacked precariously like Lego blocks over dilapidated, old warehouses, huddled together, covered in dust and soot, waiting endlessly and hopelessly for an end to their agony. Roots of a Banyan or Peepul pawed unbridled the remnants of a bygone colonial era as they stood in stoic silence. Isn’t silence a pause in music?

    You breathed in the grimy air, registered the synchronized melody of chaos, until it penetrated you, your life.

    You hadn’t prepared yourself to be holding the pink stick to your indifferent partner. Just like you hadn’t prepared yourself for your husband’s drunken ruckus, and the horrors of the night that perforated the walls of the room. After your baby was born, in the static soundless soul of the night, you sat to hear a distant owl’s hoot, whistle of a night train rattling over the rail bridge and the shattering of something very near, like the place between your breasts.

    You thought you heard the fluttering of wings — your soul on flight! You thought you heard a spluttering fire that raced towards the closed door but couldn’t escape.

    But the next moment there were other melodies — the cries of your baby on the cot asking for you; the lullaby you sung it to sleep; the murmurs of fleas circling your open wound.

    Morning dawned with the sounds of pots and pans at your neighbors and then back to the patterns of high notes and lows.

    You lived in that room, as if in trance, rode the crests and falls like you were a feather in the wind, like the blue on your left cheek was the plume of a kingfisher. You thought you heard the sunlight break onto the floor, the moonlight tip-toe to lie on your tear-soaked pillow. You thought you heard your mother’s love when the rains splattered on the broken chimney; you thought you heard the harmonica being played when sparrows lined the window pane.

    The first digit of your foot turned backwards; sometimes you found you could coo like the cuckoo; sometimes you shook off the bristles that had grown where your eyebrows were.

    You waited. You trained your ears to hear. You coached them to hum a tune, until that night after your son left for boarding.

    You heard trills and gurgles of a nightingale, a strain rose above the din of your room, above the crescendo your heart was reaching. You let the blood of the demon in the room soak your tail wing; and with rapid beats you flew to where the bird sang an impaling melody.

    Mandira Pattnaik

  • an ode to troubled times

    an ode to troubled times

    – after ‘I Wish You Love’ by Natalie Cole
    Rebecca L. Yong

    when times are trying
    and life hangs in the balance,
    (i wish you bluebirds in the spring)

    when we feel like crying
    because the future is uncertain,
    (to give your heart a song to sing)

    we sing for one another, undying,
    step into flourishing gardens
    (and then a kiss, but more than this)

    i wish you love

    Rebecca L. Yong