Birds
micro series
poetry
WHILE WRITING LECTURE NOTES ON ANNE LAMOTT’S BIRD BY BIRD
Brian Phillip Whalen’s debut collection, Semiotic Love [Stories], was named one of the Best Books of 2021 by Kirkus Reviews. Brian's work has appeared in The Southern Review, Creative Nonfiction, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Literary Hub, Salt Hill, The Pinch, Poets.org, and elsewhere. He's an Assistant Professor of English at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati.
Two Birds
Luisa A. Igloria is the author of Caulbearer (Immigrant Writing Series Prize, Black Lawrence Press, 2024), 14 other books, and 4 chapbooks. She is lead editor of The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America’s Lands, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders(Paloma Press, 2025), with co-editors Aileen Cassinetto and David Hassler. She teaches in Old Dominion University’s MFA Creative Writing Program, and also leads workshops for The Muse Writers Center. Luisa is the 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia (2020-22), Emerita. During her term, the Academy of American Poets awarded her a 2021 Poet Laureate Fellowship.
do you believe in reincarnation?
Cassie Lipton is a poet and writer currently based in Nashville, Tennessee. She is a graduate of the University of Virginia and has work appearing or forthcoming in The Icarus Collective, The Orange Rose, and Somersault Magazine. In 2023, she was the second place winner of the One Page Poetry Contest. She can often be found at indie shows or in the public library.
fiction
The Ground, The Sea
Lined up in the dirt, a mass of blue uniforms shifts gently like ocean tides. Digging, soil packed deep beneath their fingernails. Birds sit high on telephone wires to watch them bury things. Torn books. Old nicknames. A cigarette butt ringed with red lipstick. Murmurs and scraps disappear into the ground. As quickly as it began, the children scatter. The earth is smoothed flat with careful hands. When the bell rings, one of the blue is missing. The birds don’t move.
*
There’s only one girl at the beach today. Seaweed wrapped in a braided crown. She speaks to the seagulls, coaxing them to the water’s edge. They circle overhead but don’t land. That evening, she returns home with wet socks, hair stiff with salt. She pulls a smooth, white egg from her pocket and sets it gently on the windowsill beside the others.
Rachel M. Hollis lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, son, and a deeply unmotivated dog. Her work appears in New Flash Fiction Review, Necessary Fiction, Gone Lawn, MoonPark Review, and elsewhere. She can be found at rachelmhollis.com.
At Logan airport
the man calls us snowy owls but that doesn’t sound right. Where salt hay was once a marsh, we gather to watch the silverbirds. We line up near the strip, live for the blast-smear of air as they nose forward, the bone-rattle thunder as they drop, running. Our outer feathers slap and whip like boat sails or flags.
When he puts me in the sauce can his hand is warm. It makes a helmet over my cool head. His truck hums north and he opens the cans near the clam shack that’s closed for the winter, for your own good he says every time. I want to go home where the ptarmigan is sweet. Nothing here is silver. Everything tastes like tin.
Colleen Nial is a mother, teacher and writer from Troy, New York. Her work has appeared in MER Literary, Molecule and LampLit. She has an MFA from Emerson College and a pair of cardinals at her window. She has been away from her desk for twenty years.
Kindling
I feed the blue jay even though folks say jaybirds are evil. They say on Fridays, blue jays go to hell to help the devil gather kindling. I’d help too, if it meant Fridays off from this shit job.
The jaybird outside the mini-mart has a name I won’t say out loud. At lunch, I buy a bag of peanuts with my employee discount. The jay perches on the pine by the dumpster. Denim jacket, black collar, black eyes. Head like an axe.
It can take two peanuts at once. Swallows one halfway, holds the second in its beak, flies into the tree. I bet it could carry a lot of kindling. I find a twig and toss it at its feet. I speak its name. Three times, like at a crossroads at midnight.
Startled, it caws and flies away. The twig lands in my lap. I’ll go gather more.
Michele H. Porter lives in rural southern Illinois and works as a nonprofit proposal writer. Her stories are in Kaleidotrope, Bloodletter Magazine, 100-Word Story, and others. More of her fiction can be found at www.michelehporter.com.