Nightingale & Sparrow

Category: flight (Issue No. I)

  • Drive

    Drive

    Visar

    Squirrels racing through brushes
    watched the Volkswagen driving us in circles,  

    Lights from dreams of Amsterdam
    blinded us through the windscreen,  

    from the Eiffel to china that splintered
    in parties never started,  

    we learned things we don’t do are
    consequential as the ones we accomplish,  

    As lights once poured in from the clerestory,
    where we held silence that rattled  

    the grisaille windows. Moon dined with us,
    shedding skin cells in the moving car.  

    In the night as black as the Neanderthal’s face
    that understood its youth 

    we shared Budweisers by the pool
    Mars soaked in the suns of our eyes,   

    Watched him roll tobacco and he said, “Leaving.
    Leaving is a choice no one wants to make and it  

    makes us anyway”. Then, smoke rose up.
    Then, no one was there.

    Visar

  • Adrift

    Adrift

    Robin Anna Smith

    Sunday, the day we go to visit Grandma—the day I dread all week. I ask my mother if I can go to a friend’s house or stay home. As always, she rejects my plea, states that we are the only family who visits, that Grandma’s lonely and looks forward to seeing us.

    Grandma lives in a tiny apartment in a building that looks like a run-down motel. The gravel parking lot matches the tone of her voice—rough and uneven. Her apartment is hot and stagnant. It has a signature scent: cigarette smoke is the top note, floating above the heart note of a neighbor’s meal cooking, and the base note of cockroaches.

    At thirteen years old, I’ve never known Grandma to be happy. Her smiles look like lies, her cackle unconvincing. As someone affected by depression, I recognize it plainly. Thin and frail, I rarely see her stand. Sunk into a nicotine-stained couch, she chain-smokes and sucks oxygen from a green tank that I’ve never seen her without. Her commitment to smoking speaks to her infidelity to life, to us.

    When she’s taken to the hospital, family comes from all over. Outside the ICU, we sit and watch the clock as my relatives argue and assign blame.

    After she passes, we take her ashes to scatter in the Gulf of Mexico. My family cries for our loss while I sob with relief for her escape.

    beach baptism . . .
    a seagull swings
    from a sunray

    Robin Anna Smith

  • A Composition of Melodious Words

    A Composition of Melodious Words

    Justine Akbari

    Through the noise I hear it
    the string of words floating towards me
    formulating before me—
    slowly, methodically, categorically, sporadically
    with pause
    to test out each pitch, each decibel, each tenor
    and resonance
    on the tongue, in a thought, against another word
    or an absence of one.
    Melodies and mania surround the
    delicate, dynamic, demonstrative
    words that exist despite the
    chaos and crescendo.
    A thought disrupts the stillness of the mind
    the way the mind disrupts the enchantment
    of a thought. 

    Reading music
    listening to words
    reading words
    listening to music;
    A melody of notes to an orchestration of words;
    an arrangement of words to a composition of music.

    I cling to these words
    to make sense of the world,
    to give voice to the world,
    to communicate with the world.
    Humanity’s babble mixed with the city’s grumble
    and a grandparent’s garble
    enhanced with life’s elixirs
    swath the sky in a synchronous symphony.

    Justine Akbari

  • In Flight

    In Flight

    Joan McNerney

    Shy autumnal bird
    did you brush against the moon
    to get that pale down?  

    A tree waves wooing
    birds who fly from branch to branch
    looking for a home. 

    Congregations of wrens
    winging off to choral practice
    stop at bird feeders first.  

    An outdoor concert.
    Which is sweeter, the flute
    or bird song in woods? 

    Sparrows recite litanies
    in wood. Trees
    greener every rainfall
    their leaves growing longer.

    Joan McNerney

  • Silence – a lost art

    “Silence – a lost art”

    Megha Sood

    Silence is neatly tucked
    between the layered wings of the soaring eagle
    the shifting angle of his wings
    holds the distance between
    the spoken and the untold

    Silence has its own semantics
    the lexicon of the unspoken
    I can carry the debilitating
    pain in my marred soul for eons
    before you see the
    tears trickling from my eyes

    Silence, a deep soliloquy with time
    you press ears to the
    throbbing heart
    else would miss the pain

    Silence is neatly tucked
    in the palm of a stillborn
    dissolved in its muted stench

    Silence is the only conversation
    for the reticent mind
    as the moon brushes across my face
    dripping the verses
    picked neatly by the time

    Silence is a lost art
    so sublime.

    Megha Sood

  • Bright sky

    Bright sky

    Carol Alena Aronoff

    dispels black thought;
    fear slips away–wisps of cloud
    dissolving into azure silk.
    I look south for solace, search 
    for sun’s fire in my waning
    inner life, seek to rekindle
    a clear path to spirit.

    Threads are still there–
    frayed from trying 
    too hard or not at all.
    Confusion has been woven
    in my outer fabric
    yet I know there’s a clarity
    that shines from the heart,
    so close, so luminous,
    it is easy to overlook–
    to look elsewhere. 

    Opening past habits of dead 
    wood, the voice complaining
    like lazy wind blows 
    this way and that
    without saying anything.
    I find space to breathe,
    take flight with geese
    in endless lemon sky, 
    soar blissfully
    back into my self,
    knowing that I never
    lost anything. 

    Carol Alena Aronoff

  • Country Boy

    Country Boy

    Jack M. Freedman

    Tapping in his Tony Lamas
    Wiggling in his Wranglers
    Stimulating in his Stetson
    The wind propels him
    Twisting and spinning
    As the guitar strums
    He is a centrifuge
    Defying gravity
    Never succumbing
    To earthly limitations
    This cowboy soars
    Grabbing his belt buckle
    As if launching himself
    Into the atmosphere
    Propelled in alignment
    Embraced by acoustics
    Born in the USA
    Stature of the
    Colossus of Rhodes
    Love child of deities
    Product of divinity birthed
    As if Icarus and Terpsichore
    Conceived him
    As he glides across dancefloors
    He could make himself
    Levitate in midair
    Knowing full well
    He was born to fly

    Jack M. Freedman

  • we wait for something beautiful then we destroy it

    “we wait for something beautiful then we destroy it”

    Stuart Buck

    lying in the inch of fairy floss snowfall in the car park
    of the abandoned hardware store but we don’t feel the cold
    oh no, we are boiling mercury in our veins and the beautiful
    thing is that the sky isn’t falling, we are soaring up to meet it
    so I kiss your hand as we hit the screaming brilliance head on
    becoming fractured perfection for those endless seconds but
    oh god, we wake as only dust on the pavement and your frostbitten
    fingers curl up as a dying plant in a desert of unanswered prayers

    Stuart Buck