Rachel Coyne
Visual Art Contributor
Rachel Coyne is a writer and painter from Lindstrom, Mn.
Category: Starlight (Issue XVI)
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Sabrynne Buchholz
Sabrynne Buchholz
Poetry Contributor
Sabrynne has taken to using poetry as a means of investigating and learning about the world she inhabits, and her work has been published in print and online nationally and internationally, appearing in the Greyrock Review, Bloom Magazine, Studio OUCH! Gazette, and others.
Works in Nightingale & Sparrow
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The Night Gardener
The Night Gardener
knows her plants by feel.
Here, the curl of a sprout.
There, the poke of a weed.
Water soaks into dirt. Scissors snip the scraggly ends. She croons to the baby zucchinis in the greenhouse because her human children are all grown and too old for lullabies. For the seedlings big enough to be tucked into beds, she coddles their roots with compost and whispers stories about past blooms from long ago. The tomatoes listen and learn about the colors they can become. The tiny kale ignore her, preoccupied with their fresh new frills. She does not tell them about fall. About the reaping that happens when summer’s warmth begins to die. Only once, in all her gardening years, did she ever look up at the moon and ask, “Are you lonely?”
When the minutes scatter past eleven, she turns to home, and then to bed. She pulls back the sheets, lies in the middle so that there are no unoccupied sides, and arranges her body into the shape of a star. She spreads arms, fingers, knees and toes. A pillowed softness stretches beneath. The moon slips through, prunes back shadow, light pushing between the spaces.
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Centaur, firing an arrow
Centaur, firing an arrow
Indu Parvathi
At the window, the crow waits for its usual,
half a banana or a biscuit, but the astrologer
reads forefathers’ ire in its calls,
warns of imports. Between cousins
and curtains, the spout
of my Sagittarian teapot tilts
towards his board spilling milky ways.
Impress him. Nebulae rise with the fumes
from the ghee lit lamp,
–Eau de space– it’s acrid. He decodes
cyphers from my palm leaf horoscope,
only a bride crossing the seas.
I touch my feng shui bracelet, remember
there are other doors. In the river crossing
game some stones are dummies. Rahu kalam,
yama ganda kalam, gulika kalam… -
Light Meals
Light Meals
Sabrynne Buchholz
the gods eat gems at daybreak, as the sun devours the stars
and us at the bottom, groundlevel, the cogs, we drink the juice of oranges
a gift from the glow of those higher beings, but less than that saved for the heavens
sunbeam rolls over tide to froth on the sand, grains shaped like stars
or shards made in the image of space–leftovers not meant for consumption, but we make do with a day at the beach
fortune is found in freedom, but perhaps can be manufactured
cogs and gears and wheels work hard to create what cannot be found, and
isn’t creation meant only for gods?
the sun and its fellows all roar and consumeyet left in that wake are all the things meant for us
the hierarchy feels muddled sometimes, but
each day starts the same as the last – the gods eat breakfast, the cogs start to turn
day turns to night, and collectively, we all take a breath
fruit can glimmer like crystal -
starlight
Contents
ISSN 2642-0104 (print)
ISSN 2641-7693 (online)
Editor’s Letter
Founding Editor, Juliette Sebock
Poetry
Centaur, firing an arrow Indu Parvathi
Light Meals Sabrynne Buchholz
Meteor Envy RC deWinter
Sky of Your Influence Angela Acosta
The Light Fantastic Frances Boyle
U n f o l d Kristiana Reed
Self Portrait as Luna Annika GangopadhyayFiction
The Night Gardener Jenny WongVisual Art
Vision of a Sparrow Rachel Coyne
Vision of Songbird Rachel CoyneCover Image
Star Giants Rachel CoyneMicropoems
In the leadup to poetry, we shared a series of micropoems across social media:
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Letter from the Editor Starlight Issue
Letter from the Editor
Dear Reader,
starlight is the sixteenth issue of Nightingale & Sparrow Literary Magazine, and our final issue of 2022. As we put together this autumnal edition, it’s hard not to look back on the year and all we’ve had to be grateful for.
For instance, we had the opportunity to review some beautiful work for this issue. In our call for submissions, we prompted submitters with the following: “What do you see when you look up at the night sky? From astrology and lullabies to planetariums and Taylor Swift lyrics, we want to see your poems, stories, essays, and art that come face-to-face with the cosmos. Give us space; give us skies; give us starlight.”
The pages that follow bring this imagery to life. From the constellations of “Centaur, firing an arrow” by Indu Parvathi and Rachel Coyne’s “Star Giants” on this issue’s cover to Jenny Wong’s tale of “The Night Gardener,” there’s something for everyone to enjoy in the shooting star that is starlight.
With this issue and beyond, I and the N&S team are so thankful for our contributors, readers, customers, and other supporters who let us bring a new issue to life with each changing season.
We hope you enjoy—and we’re so excited to see what 2023 will bring.
Juliette Sebock
Editor-in-Chief, Nightingale & Sparrow
