fall 2021
Table of Contents
Return to Home PageSomewhere within Kostanay, Kazakhstan Justin Timbol
She's a Pretty Bird
Susan Zimmerman
latchkey fragments
Frances Boyle
What We Carry on a Pilgrimage
Granada, Take Three
Elena Johnson
Making the Most of Our Voices
Ken Victor
Between Then and Then
Millicent Borges Accardi
Upon Watching the Rotation of the Earth
Charlotte Vermue Peters
A wrist, a wren, a small knife
Ellen Stone
Say It Delicious
Berry-Picking
Laura Cesarco Eglin
Swans at the Golf Club
Ruth Daniell
When I See Lake Water
Kristin LaFollette
i decay, bro
erica hiroko isomura
No One Knows How to Be Good
Emily Kedar
Late August at the End of the World
Bren Simmers
Boy With Orange
Phillip Watts Brown
On the Straightaway to the Rockies
Great Grandpa's Grain Elevator
A Nova Scotian Night Light
Ryan Smith
The Graveyard Metaphor for Euphoria Kaye Miller
She’s a Pretty Bird
When I say cuckoo, you think cruelty,
thieves, parasites. Heartless, abandoning their eggs
to be hatched and fed by strangers—a shocking
perversion of maternal feeling, writes an expert.
More shocking still, their ruthless progeny—
shoving the rightful eggs from the nest,
uttering their deceptive cry that mimics a host
of hungry fledglings. What else did you expect
from cuckoos? They didn’t ask to be hatched
in someone else’s nest. They didn’t contrive
that tender spot on the back that jostling activates
to sabotage and murder. As if the parents
could do anything but drop their eggs
in the nests of strangers, being cuckoos.
As if the new-hatched baby had any
choice but to swallow the whole future
of the rightful heirs.
Oh, the cuckoo she’s a pretty bird,
she sings as she flies—
she never gets lonely
till the first day of July—
Once, you’d thank God for the cuckoo’s cry.
May we live to hear it again, you’d say.
Harbinger of good luck, best if heard by the right ear,
still lucky enough by the left.
They say the Irish cuckoos wintered in the
south of the Republic of Congo,
brought home summer on their wings.