Nightingale & Sparrow

Category: Sakura (Issue No. XVIII)

  • Mother, Sister, Daughter, Sakura

    Mother, Sister, Daughter, Sakura

    Vikki C.

    This world is wounding itself. I walk through the conflict, avoiding the churches, the in-laws and all acts of confession. My lithe body, barely a nightdress, floating south and south again, until I reach my youth. Quiet feet wading through the boulevard of pink cherry blossoms from another heaven. 

    Dad leaves the petals unswept over the lawn, to hide the unkempt yellow grass from Mum, or to mask the scars in advance. The driveway is blanketed too, and the car is still covered with the darker pink petals from the hospice visit. We let them be.

    Ordinary men say famous artists only paint almond blossoms as a distraction from the asylum. That if we fill our eyes with portraits of spring and promise, bright buds on blue, we would be cured for a little while, enough time to find the exit. That insanity would not encroach with its heavy black bough, latching the door from the inside out. 

    But now it’s 2023, and I’m at Kensington cemetery paying respects to the latest victims of tragedy. The cherry trees are weeping heavily over the wet lichened graves, mourning about me leaving too early that one winter Sunday, naively hurrying to a lover in my next life. Your pale face at the small window washed in evening light, as if watching from the other side – seeing the divorce and all the babies swept away to far-off territories. Unreachable. 

    Occasionally, they call home, pretending to keep me alive. They’re a hardy species known to weather the harsh winters in places cut off by cold wars. Bombs, crisis, severance. The signal is lost after a minute, but I know they remember the womb like a safe haven.

    Still, there are brave men who carry injured women like me to safety, comforting us with white lies: dusting the shrapnel from our hair, brushing it off as just sakura. They tell us that the flowerless vase in the hallway is shattered – but maybe the house can be salvaged. 

    That there are girls with minds like mine. Daughters who are fragile blooms, caught in the middle of battlefields. And as much as they belong with us, we can never carry them home safely, without the petals coming apart in our hands.

    Vikki C.

  • Sublet

    Sublet

    Emily Kedar

    I come back
    to find my grandmother’s
    pink geraniums dead. The only
    living being
    that knew us both
    and had no tongue to lie.

    I drag my finger
    across the glass face
    of the coffee table. My thumbprint
    warped and elongated, presses
    down into dust. 

    I rearrange the stones
    I’d left on the window sill
    back the way they were.
    The coffee grinder’s bust, so 

    I head out
    into the light snow
    of morning, my feet landing
    step after step
    in someone else’s footprints.

    Emily Kedar

  • for Now

    for Now

    Tylyn K. Johnson

    let this momentary experience be
    for us, to turn ourselves
    into a messy painting
    on your wall, made of
    our skin and flesh and
    sweat and laughter

    Tylyn K. Johnson

  • At the Edge of Hope

    At the Edge of Hope

    Kersten Christianson

    I want to pen a note about spring.
    Not the dead alder, rain after rain after
    rain despair of it, but the rose
    gold sheen of storm having passed,
    dissipating at the knife-sharp edge of outer coast
    where blue herons and mallards frequent
    the estuary’s ebb and flow.

    I want the medicine of tender greens
    the tangle of blooming branch,
    squall of cherry blossoms adrift

    under patches of blue-sky canopy
    with supple heart and thoughts of you,
    I want the spring that snaps winter’s back.

    Kersten Christianson

  • Vikki C.

    VIKKI C._photo

    Vikki C.

    Poetry Contributor

    Vikki C., author of ‘The Art of Glass Houses’ (Alien Buddha Press), is a British-born writer, poet and musician from London, whose literary works are informed by existentialism, science, the metaphysical, and human relationships. Her poetry and prose have been published or are forthcoming in Across The Margin, Black Bough Poetry, Acropolis Journal, DarkWinter Literary Magazine, Spare Parts Lit  and others.

     

    Works in Nightingale & Sparrow

    Mother, Sister, Daughter, Sakura

  • Early Blossoms in Spring 4

    Early Blossoms in Spring 4

    Jacelyn Yap

    Early Blossoms In Spring 4

    Jacelyn Yap

  • A Strong Man

    A Strong Man

    Jennifer Mills Kerr

    Summers, our bikes leaned against the front porch; winters, our boots piled in heaps by the door. Chris and I couldn’t wait for his mom’s pancake breakfasts on Saturdays. Mrs. Riley was a round woman, freckled, cheerful. I was eleven when she died; an accident, everyone said, nothing more.

    Soon afterward, Mr. Riley moved the family away — though he refused to sell the house. None of us knew why.

    Now 34 Edgefield Road remains, sinking into the earth, dilapidated, forlorn. This morning, I watch sparrows fly in and out of its broken windows. Do they sing inside those empty rooms?

    No sound except the sigh of wind through the elms, dappled light, a golden murmur around my feet.  I imagine the tiny birds chirping inside the house with its creaking floors and scent of dirt, of rot — I can see it so very clearly — but if anyone invited me inside, would I go? Where’s Chris now?

    I haven’t told my wife how frequently I come here since Arthur died. We still have Susan, of course: a promising girl, very different from her brother. Art came into this world burdened by melancholy.  There was nothing I could do to change that. Sharon and I tried, but our son was just too heavy for us to carry. And I’d always imagined myself a strong man.  

    They found Art in his dorm room. Where he got the pills no one could say. Or would.    

    My heart, banging inside my chest as if to break loose. What was it Mrs. Riley always said? Let me get you a drink, sweetheart. You look spent. Iced tea, sweet and tart and cold. She’d watch as I gulped it down. There, now. 

    Suddenly, a sparrow appears from inside the house — though it doesn’t fly free. Instead, it perches upon one window’s jagged glass, preening, flickering its wings. There, now.  

    I wait. Not for the creature to sing, but to watch it fly, to a tree or into the light, anywhere, anywhere else. I’ve got to see. 

    Jennifer Mills Kerr

  • Sweet Sorrow

    Sweet Sorrow

    Jennifer Geisinger

    Violet watched the tree all year. She was going to miss it when she left. It would be good to cash in, cash out, sell the house, have enough to retire, enough to live on. She didn’t need the headache anymore. It was hard to take a ferry every time she needed to see a doctor, go to chemo or radiation, even though the visits were fewer and farther between. She hated having to put anyone out. It took an entire day sometimes, just to go for a check-up, and the ferries were always late. She fantasized about calling an Uber, of being anonymous. She was becoming so practical in her old age.

    Violet wasn’t old.  Old enough, though, to not want to pay someone all the time to keep up the lawn, to keep up appearances, to chat at Thriftway, to watch all the new children come through town and have no idea who they were. Her own two couldn’t believe she was selling — a wave of hurt, betrayal. Hurting her kids was enough to make her turn back, to take it all back, to just stay and stay and stay, just in case they decided to return home. 

    But they couldn’t come back, and shouldn’t come back, and she couldn’t just spend her whole life waiting.

    This island was a trap, it really was. It caught her with its beauty, with the strangeness of explaining to people about island living without sounding too proud, too much, too elite. It was  hard to explain that she wasn’t one of them, not one of the mansion people, or the summer people. Just an islander. She wasn’t really an islander though, and would never say that around a local. Unless your family had been homesteaders that came before the ferry system, you couldn’t claim that title. Everyone was a newcomer until maybe the twenty-year mark, then you could say you’d been there for “a while.”

    Still, she was glad to go, isn’t that strange? She had wanted to move here for so long, and anytime she was away she longed for it, with a longing that she had accepted would always be there, whether or not she was on the island. It squeezed her heart so tight with love, it almost felt like a straightjacket — constricting, taking away her free will, taking away all her choices of love, travel, retirement, excitement. She wouldn’t be happy staying, and she would always regret going. She knew this to the marrow of her bones. She knew it even as she could feel her house falling apart. She was glad the carpenter ants she had held at bay for twenty years would soon be somebody else’s problem, along with the hairline fracture in the foundation, which would only be forgiven because it was a seller’s market. Life on an island is always a seller’s market, because love is blind.

    She was glad to leave when the tree was in full bloom. It was prettiest this way. All year it worked toward the big show. She always said they should name the cherry tree. Her children spent half of their childhood climbing it along with all the other children from the neighborhood, long before she had come, and hopefully long after she was gone. 

    For a few years, her daughter had called the tree Sweet.  She would croon to it, and sing “Sweet, Sweet, Sweet,” in the tuneless lullabies of children, which are brand new, but hauntingly familiar.  It was just one cherry tree, but it was her favorite part of the whole thing.

    She had gotten through the horrid good-bye parties, and promised to visit, knowing deep to the quick that she would not. She would not visit again. It was time for good-bye, the very last one.  Even though she knew she could fall, and what a disaster that would be, she went up the little hill in her yard, where the tree lived, and supported her whole self with the trunk.  She enveloped herself through the branches, and leaned hard into her, something she realized she had never done in all the years she had watched the flowers bloom and die over and over.  

    She told the tree to be good, just as she did her toddlers when she left them with a sitter, and breathed in the freedom of a quick getaway.  She gave the tree a last little pat, and she hoped it would live and last. Sweet. She realized that she was talking to a tree, but nobody could see her, and if they did, they would understand. She had given so much, and had meant so much.  

    It was time to go. The hurt became intolerable. It would fade if she could just get on the boat. Thirty years, in and out. Everything else was already gone, already stored, the house ready for the next chapter. She got in her car and drove away from her dream and headed to the ferry dock.

    Jennifer Geisinger

  • Final Measure

    Final Measure

    Ellen Malphrus

    Ellen Malphrus

  • Seattle Sunrise

    Seattle Sunrise

    Lindsay Pucci

    Seattle Sunrise

    Lindsay Pucci