Nightingale & Sparrow

Category: bonfire (issue no. XIX)

  • Emma Wells

    Emma Wells

    Emma Wells

    Fiction Contributor

    Emma is a mother and English teacher. She has poetry published with and by: The World’s Greatest Anthology, The League of Poets, The Lake, The Beckindale Poetry Journal, Dreich Magazine, Drunken Pen Writing, Porridge Magazine, Visual Verse, Littoral Magazine, The Pangolin Review, Derailleur Press, Giving Room Magazine, Chronogram, and for the Ledbury Poetry Festival. She also has published a number of short stories and her first novel, Shelley’s Sisterhood, is due to be published shortly.


    Works in Nightingale & Sparrow

    Autumn Camp

  • Best Friends

    Best Friends

    Faith Allington

    We met on Bonfire Night
    before the seasons turned
    too likely to ignite.

    The stars were affixed
    to the velvet dusk
    while flames blossomed
    on our cheeks.

    Bright sparks of laughter,
    the arc of your smile,
    and dark rich scent of apples
    rising from the cup.

    We offered the fire
    our twigs of hawthorn.
    I thought we were gold,
    even knowing Robert Frost’s
    admonition—
    nothing gold can last.

    But in that night we remain
    etched in firelight,
    flickering selves that never
    break or rust.

    Faith Allington

  • Fiery Times

    Fiery Times

    Kaitlyn Dempsey

    Fiery Times

    Kaitlyn Dempsey

  • Immigration

    Immigration

    Robert Okaji

    The hill’s shoulders, slumped under the sky’s glare.
    Hardscrabble and brown grass, insects chirring.
    Voices in the still leaves.
    I ask the boy if he would like water,
    some bread. Fruit. No, he says, I must go.
    The sun flares on the barn’s metal roof. A history
    of stray thoughts, of complicity and calloused hands.
    One tired cloud lingers overhead.
    I sharpen my knives, think of cold beer.
    Of finding home where no one knows me.
    Where snow falls and wood burns cool.
    And other incessant dreams.

    Robert Okaji

  • Sunset Bouquet

    Sunset Bouquet

    Carella Keil

    Sunset Bouquet

    Carella Keil

  • Showy Yellow Flowers

    Showy Yellow Flowers

    Maggie Frank-Hsu

    Often hard or poor soil
    is a fragile, complex mix.
    a single season of flood
    makes for wild
    hurried blooming,
    the rare chance
    to be too much
    before drying to stiff
    bayonet-like leaves
    that catch fire and burn easily;
    a bell of sacred smoke
    seen from a straight-back chair
    beside the bay window
    where nobody ever sat.
    I have asked for so little, just
    a drop in the dry season
    to take hold on the soil surface.

    Maggie Frank-Hsu

  • Phoenix Rising

    Phoenix Rising

    Carella Keil

    Fiery Times

    Carella Keil

  • Wildfire

    Wildfire

    Mahaila Smith

    People are setting fires because they’re frustrated, angry, hopeless. They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it.

    —Octavia E. Butler

    All of your objects will outlive you.
    Here they are:
    haunting your line of sight.
    So set them aflame.
    As in:
    The whole world will outlive you
    As in:
    You are a dying god.
    As in:
    Welcome to Ragnarök,
    welcome to the burning of the world.

    A layer of ash coats the sides of trees,
    cars, sidewalks, schools, deer,
    lungs, arteries.
    It is a dry summer.
    There have always been fires,
    they say,
    These are no different.
    They start with a spark of static,
    a misused chainsaw,
    a lighter
    a can of gasoline
    a metal shovel striking a rock.

    We stay inside for days.
    The burnt wood floors
    and walls and wires
    desensitize our noses
    to the smell of lilacs.

    Mahaila Smith

  • Hypnotic Flame

    Hypnotic Flame

    Carella Keil

    Hypnotic Flame

    Carella Keil

  • Claimed by Fire

    Claimed by Fire

    D.W. Baker

    summersong
    hatchet fall
    dead wood
    flicker tall
    ghost light
    scattershot
    warm wind
    yellow spot
    smoke ring
    ash cloud
    everything
    out loud
    slow blink
    earthbound

    D.W. Baker