Evening Fire
Elizabeth York Dickinson
Dear Reader,
I’m so happy that you’ve picked up heat, our third issue of Nightingale & Sparrow. This is our biggest issue yet—packed with poetry, prose, and photography from more than 70 contributors from across the globe. We have quite a few returning contributors, who’ve been an instrumental part of Nightingale & Sparrow from the very start. And, just as importantly, we have a slew of brand-new birds welcomed into the Nightingale & Sparrow nest.
As I write this letter, Nightingale & Sparrow is in the midst of some exciting additions and changes. We’ve continued to grow, and will continue to expand our team, our community, and our offerings well into the future. We’ll soon be announcing our 2020 themes for this literary magazine, and our press and its activist imprint share some publishing plans that we can hardly wait to share.
Of course, none of this would be possible without our incredible community. From each individual submitter, to our phenomenal team (Emma, Megan, and Kim—thank you, as always, for your hard work!), countless people play a critical role in the growth and continuation of our corner of the literary space. And these crucial players are the reason you can read this issue.
When we announced submissions for heat, I had no idea I’d be reading and editing work in the midst of a series of literal heat waves! But truly, these pieces didn’t need such a setting—they brought up the temperature effortlessly. We asked submitters to send us “sunshine and bonfires…fireworks and rendezvous, beach scenes and bedrooms,” and they certainly delivered.
From those submissions, we’re thrilled to bring you the selections herein. Feel the seductive drip of sweet fruit juice in Margaret King’s “I Should Be Writing/Mango”, and the tang of pomegranate in Mollie Williamson’s “Persephone”. Quench your thirst with Lynne Schmidt’s “Remember to Drink Water” and step onto the beach with the opening stanza of “First Date Not Counting Lester Duncan”. Step into the fire of words and images making up heat and feel the sparks surround you.
As always, thank you to every submitter, contributor, reader, supporter, and staff member who’ve made heat and Nightingale & Sparrow more generally. I hope you enjoy issue III as much as I have, and I can’t wait to see what’s to come in issue IV, nevermore, this Halloween!
Juliette Sebock
Editor-in-Chief, Nightingale and Sparrow
Sean Riley
I had almost five thousand followers at the time of the fire. The account at-fridge-magnet-poetry wasn’t exactly an influencer, but I felt like it was a worthwhile artistic endeavour and I had turned it into something slightly more than a hobby.
The irony of photos in the digital world, streamed across the sky and interspersed with text messages, social media posts and porn videos; but anchored to one physical place – my refrigerator – and one physical set of magnetized scrabble letters, made me happy. It gave me a feeling of crossing over, of connecting different worlds together.
A new person walking into my kitchen would have thought I was pretty crazy. The lighting setup around the fridge looked like a movie set. Silver reflectors, flashbulbs and tripods were mounted in between fruit bowls, knife racks and hanging frying pans. I could have built out an actual photo studio in the garage, but then it wouldn’t be my fridge, it would be a prop; not the real thing anymore at all. It had started with the fridge that contains my groceries, and it would continue that way. Anyway, the garage had been converted into a dark room to develop the photos from my antique Nikon DSLR, so there was no room out there for a fridge.
I posted every day. Blobs of text, artfully arranged and creatively photographed. The project had a surprisingly wide disciplinary scope; a convergence of literary snippets, analog execution, digital composition, and true modern-day social media marketing; an art of its own.
“Tuneful Idiocy makes me cry,” was the entire poem one day. Photographed in the early morning, just before sunrise with sharp shadows from the streetlamp outside, I used a long exposure that captured some ambiguous reflections in the chrome of the fridge handle. The posted photo itself I left naked, but my story that day overlaid it with an animated “Feels” sticker and mood hashtag. It got some comments asking if I was okay. I was fine.
This morning, I was poking through the burned-out rubble of my apartment. I crossed the line of yellow do-not-cross tape and felt unidentifiable somethings crunch under my boots. Those could be the remains of anything in my life. I didn’t want to know. There was almost nothing left that came up above my knees.
Standing alone in the space that used to be my kitchen was the husk of my beloved refrigerator. The door hung open as if something had burst out from the inside. I picked my way through the ash-covered remnants and stood before it. There was a poem laid out in scrabble letters. Well, a fragment of a poem anyway.
“Feeling Like Death,” it said, angling down further with each letter as if the phrase trailed away into silence. Pretty cliche technique, I’d gotten over that trope years ago. But I hadn’t written this one. I pulled out my phone and checked my photo log just in case I was losing my mind, but no. I never wrote that.
An alert popped up on my feed. I reached to swipe it away, but then stopped as I recognized the thumbnail. I tapped and my eyes widening as it opened.
“Feeling Like Death,” the tiles on the photo said. A photo in my kitchen of my fridge with my letters in my lighting in my house. Tagged last night. Not taken by me.
I sat down, or rather I slumped down to the kitchen floor, raising a cloud of ash. Oblivious to my now-filthy clothes and coughing from the crap entering my lungs, I tapped furiously at the screen to find out more. The account was new, zero followers, zero description. One post. One message. At-Feeling-Like-Death was also my latest follower. Involuntarily, I looked over my shoulder.
Cymelle Leah Edwards
Some hollow way across a reservoir,
sinking into alleys unobserved,
too small and skinny to fit into,
the lost sparks of a firework swirl and
a homeless man tries to bum a light
from the sky.
I close my eyes after looking
for too long and my thoughts
double over and curl like a ribbon,
loosely trailing memories tainted by
a shallow hue.
The trees are filled with smoke
and lather, a swarm of novas dancing
among the leaves, their tips a show
of twinkling stars to eyes
watching from the milky way,
and the land is steeping as a kettle
of neglected cactus blossom, queer
and brewed to its astringent fill,
my view is sustained by a single flicker
of magenta as it traces the shape of
a fiery scene and tries to make sense
of its light.
Kiira Rhosair
You have travelled a thousand miles and, as I stir coffee in my kitchen, pheromones are swirling between us, concrete enough to distil and scent; huge, round molecules invading nostrils and breaching blood-brain barriers, turning us into bodies. I take in all of you with half a glance, and it starts a whirlpool that will spin in torques, and plunge us deep into that sinkhole. So I breathe, blink the thought away and ask if you will have milk. You don’t take milk. Maybe, you say. You step forward and, you have never done this before. You touch my elbow and look at me. Torques reel and madden. Sinking feelings are fates written. We will plunge again and be flung a thousand miles apart. And you say, we should talk. I don’t want to talk. I want to say hello to the hairs straggling from the dip in your shirt but, I have never done this before. I put the coffee cup on the worktop and step back.
Alexondria Jolene
Visualize your one-year-old daughter. She has pale petite lips, light molasses colored hair, and her little feet wear miniature Converse. Ones just like yours.
Your husband is young, though not as young as you. He has a poor sense of fashion, though yours isn’t much better. You have red hair—not the natural kind—the deep wine red that’s in style. It’s been in style for years. You have unblemished, dewy skin and not a wrinkle in sight.
Imagine you can never see those descriptions again.
Your daughter is gone with your husband. They’re at Grandma’s house. You’re at home studying for a biology test.
You know something is wrong when half of the textbook page suddenly goes blank. Half of each word, gone. Half of your face, dissolved.
The vision in your right eye disappears. You’re unable to read, therefore, unable to drive. You don’t know whether to call an ambulance or risk going to sleep and waking up without the ability to see. You try Googling it, checking off the symptoms in the WebMD symptom checker, though you’re not sure if you’re checking off the right ones. It confirms the worst, of course.
You brace yourself on your suede couch and let it happen. Surely it’s nothing serious. Your head is pounding as your vision continues to fade, your body generating humidity between your skin and shirt. Everything goes dark every other second. You relive the haunted house strobe lights from the previous year over and over again. The zig-zag lights move across your line of vision until they stop right in the center. Your right eye is taken over by the problem you get when you look at the sun for too long. But it’s just your right eye—your left is untouched. Swirls and glistening stripes leave you seated. Your head feels like it’s spinning out of control. And then suddenly, it’s gone. You can see again.
It happens every few months, only now, you can’t see your daughter or your son. Those miniature Converse are no longer miniature, and that husband is no longer your husband. Your hair is no longer red, but instead, a plain brown. And your skin is no longer clear, showing its first signs of aging. But that terror, that terror when you think that it’s more than an ocular migraine, that’s still there. You fear it’s something worse every time. You fear it’ll eventually kill you. It forces you to pull over on the highway. It forces your mind to stop reading. It forces you to keep your latte in your stomach, though not from the pain like most unlucky sufferers, but from the anxiety when you realize that this time is worse than the last.
Juliette van der Molen
why won’t you remember those
on Gallow’s Hill1, how they
hung and swung,
twitched and turned
unless they were lucky—
gifted with a hangman
adept at wrapping nooses
to snap necks
of those accused.
your blood lust demands
that they were tried by
fire, those witches,
my mother,
writhing in toxic
fumes, charred putrefaction
for the appeasement
of the holy.
O Constitutio Criminalis Carolina2
enter in the inquisition,
tamed into confession licked fire.
you won’t imagine tears
of a child,
me—
harbinger of death
from my birth cry,
stealer of souls,
life’s litany lost
inside the mouth
of my serpent familiar
coiled red-hot,
forked tongue a-flame.
O Constitutio Criminalis Carolina
inscribe history’s memory,
branding the woman i blamed.
1) This was the place where condemned witches from the Salem Witch Trials were taken to die by hanging, in accordance with English Law. (Source: Evan Andrews: Were witches burned at the stake during the Salem Witch Trials, The History Channel)
2) This was the first recognized body of German law which was enacted into law in 1532 during the Diet of Regensburg. This law defined certain crimes as severe and included the crime of witchcraft. It authorized the use of torture to gain confessions and was one of the earliest laws utlized during the inquisition. Punishment for being found guilty of this law was death by burning. (Source: Carnell, Elisabeth: Crimen Excepta: Torture, Jesuits and Witches in Early Seventeenth Century Germany)
MJ Moore
On a scorched Miami night,
a girl’s hot bare feet creep up pale cool walls,
tracing the old smudged path.
A pearl of sweat blossoms and spills on the bed.
Sweet, pungent cigar smoke snakes under the door.
An opera tenor blares from the warped hi-fi,
a heart-breaking miserere—
“Lord, have mercy on my soul.”
One a.m.
Outside, moths batter themselves
against the fizzing porch light,
circling their moon.
On nights like this
the mind stumbles through the garden maze,
seeking the torched center, longing
for the way out.
Rob McKinnon
The town was once a thriving centre
when the paddocks were lush
the crops had been bountiful.
At harvest time there was a boom,
with money to spend
the shops were full of locals and visitors.
At first, hopes were that the drought
would only last a short time
as they had done in the past.
Politicians from where the rain still fell
and the grass was green
had told them so,
it had been a long time now since
they had visited the town.
What was once an occasional event
had dragged on and on
until it had become clear
that it there had been a permanent change.
The streets of the town had once
been teeming with children,
but only a few older locals remained.
No one bothered with “for sale” signs anymore,
no buyers wanted houses in the heat and dust.
A row of empty shops filled the main street,
places that were once meeting hubs
for chats and catch ups by the locals
had become just voids.
Wendy’s shop was last one left open.
In the old days the shelves were fully stocked,
with only a few regular customers
she only stocked milk, bread and a few essential groceries.
She did not know how much longer she could continue,
with no jobs and no money in town
she barely covered the bills,
but she was determined to struggle on
because this was her home
and she had nowhere else to go.
Linda M. Crate
you told me once
i didn’t have a temper,
do you feel it now?
in the flames of my immortal
wings?
or perhaps in the fires of my dragons?
i know you must feel the heat
of my rage
i haven’t quite disguised it
does it disquiet you?
or do you think you will quiet me
with sweet honeyed words
full of insincerity?
silver tongued devil,
i know the fangs of your
death and darkness,
but i do not despair because
you have not yet met my monsters;
i will destroy your darkness
with all of my light
and the heat of the fangs of my monsters
will destroy what’s left.