In these days between solstice and the new year we bring you a gathering of writers responding to the turn of seasons and time. Today we are pleased to share writing by Tom McAllister, Candice M. Kelsey, sid sibo, Kathleen Hellen, Philippa Bowe, Kathryn Edie, Chris Scott, Michael Colonnese, David Capps, and Sarah Starr Murphy.
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Discovery
Tom McAllister
While I’m walking my dog around the lake near my house, the same lake on which Walt Whitman allegedly used to sit in his kayak and daydream, I see a red-winged blackbird perched on the branch of a dying oak tree. Recently, I’ve gotten interested in birding, which is to say I turned 40 a few years ago, which is to say I have downloaded the bird-identifier app on my phone and purchased moderately expensive binoculars and spend more time looking up than I used to. About a year ago while walking on this same path, I noticed this bird for the first time in my life, its yellow and scarlet shoulder patches on full brilliant display as it zipped past me and into the brush. My dog didn’t notice because he was busy lunging after the geese that have colonized every pathway in the area, but I was briefly mesmerized. A new bird! It crossed my mind that I had personally discovered the red-winged blackbird. I tried to take a good picture of it to validate my contribution to science, but it’s hard to take good pictures of birds in the wild. According to the app, the red-winged blackbird is abundant across North America, and it’s true, I see them everywhere now. Probably they had always been there, but I prefer to think they moved in last year and peered down from the trees, took in my markings, and thought: I wonder who that guy is? I wonder if he’s new? I wonder if this is his natural habitat? I wonder what he eats or if he has any predators? I wonder if anyone is waiting for him? I wonder if he’s here to stay?
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You and Me Both
Candice M. Kelsey
for Izzy
Sometimes it takes an unexpected / walk signal at a busy / intersection or even / a three-dollar pack of brown rice avocado rolls / to make you feel like things / are going your way / Sometimes it’s getting the manager’s discount / just because / at Jiffy Lube / or the jeweler who changes your watch battery / free of charge / for the second time in ten days / Of course what matters is / what you’re walking toward / or maybe whom you’re walking from / in your linen skirt / now stained with wasabi / Because ten percent off a three-hundred-dollar oil change / is still a crap ton of money / for whatever smoke and mirrors appear / under the hood / as you realize you’re thirty minutes late / picking up the kids / At the end of the day / when your eight-year-old tells you / she wants a parrot / you smile / Things really are okay / Just the fact of her tells you so / Until she explains / she wants the damn bird / because at least it will talk to her.
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Hot Tongues
sid sibo
She knows well the sun’s habit of standing still, pausing at its biannual extremes of north or south to rest, to reflect on its journeys. Regardless of the hour, she and the dogs greet the sun daily as it crests the ridge east of their cabin.
The dogs, of course, have no interest in pause. As morning light stretches from the valley’s western mountains toward the still-rising sun, they stretch their noses skyward, catching a scent beyond her capabilities. Their legs churn rime in thin crystalline crashes, audible between each pulse of splayed pawpads, in the airborne relative quiet of white breath pushing past hot tongues.
One of the neighbor’s red Angus mommas lies horizontal across the pile of random bones not yet scattered by coyotes or skunks. Her stomach rises in death’s distention, and magpies clean out her eye sockets. Dog voices lift in ecstatic chorus as they bounce on stiff legs and the feathered zebras circle beyond their reach.
Too cold, or too fresh, for her to pick up the stench, though first sunbeams slant off the mountain’s ridgeline, calling a frigid upslope breeze. Shine rainbows the frost as hoar drops, , spinning, from the wooden fence.
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cleared for departure
Kathleen Hellen
no fear. (says Thich Nhất Hạnh). we’re clouds. just tossing air. from here to there. no pilot error. no terror. just acrobatically inclined. flying blind. navigating winds. cloud-
pillowed. ah! glint
of cumulus. ah! lift.
what are the odds through space. time. of anything approximating dying? we’re clouds. becoming rain. becoming rivers. becoming clouds again.
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Murmuration
Philippa Bowe
The cold saws your bones but you need to get under the sky, this sky, white with winter silence, orange-clawed by the tiger ghost of summer, so you wrap your chilly body, walk it to the top of the hill, and there rippling the frozen blood-spotted sky are birds, hundreds and hundreds of starlings moving as one, dancing, swirling, tilting bodies now flamed with parting light, now dimmed, you listen to the angel murmur of wings, follow the patterns they trace, indecipherable, a beauty that pricks at your eyes, creeps under your thick scarf and clasps your throat, and you wonder if these are messages for you, think maybe if you watch long enough words will form – silk, skein, steal – but the starlings are not there to enlighten you, they are not your circus, you can watch, you can marvel, and you can remember your place in the darkening world.
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Winter Wonderland
Kathryn Edie
Breath leaves my body in a wavering puff of steam. I unlatch the hook on the aluminum trash can with stiff, cold fingers. The gloves help with the cold, hurt with dexterity. The whole corn kernels in the can are a bright spot on this dreary Michigan morning. As I scoop out feed, I hear the delicate footfalls heading my way. I move slowly, humming softly.
I spread the corn out in the small clearing and prepare to head back up to the house. I now know where the term doe-eyed comes from, she has the most beautiful, liquid brown eyes I have ever seen. There is a small herd every morning, pushing in behind me as I set out their morning buffet. The two bucks hold back, their swiveling ears beneath their regal horns cataloguing my every move. The snow gently falling has coated their buff colored backs, making them blend in to the wood. At times, they are in the clearing before I even realize they are there.
If I am even a little later than usual, they are milling around the horse pasture, their internal clock better than my analog. They are at peace with the horses, the two species co-mingling peacefully. There is absolutely no better way to start the day than this, hearing the deer crack the corn in their teeth, the horses in their stalls munching their grain, and who could forget all of the wild birds, waiting for their fresh seed. We live in a world of wonder, and too often do not pay attention to the finer details; the deer quietly moving through the brush, steam rising from their backs, the horses digging through the snow to catch the little bit of grass still hanging on, and all of the woodland creatures moving through the brush, sight unseen to those not paying attention.
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Everyone On This Plane
Chris Scott
My son grips my finger with surprising strength and asks, “Are you afraid of flying?”
I smile to keep from saying, “Are you kidding me? Yes. Obviously. If not flying, then landing, if not landing, then everything in between, everything after, all of it, everyone on this plane, just look at their faces, look how terrified we all are.”
Instead I take his whole fist in my palm, forming an imperfect shield, wondering how old I was when I first started telling this lie, how old I was when I first realized everyone else was lying, too. “I’m not afraid of anything.”
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Solstice in the Boiler Room
Michael Colonnese
You, too, may recall that heart-warming if apocryphal tale, about William Faulkner’s boiler room where he once wrote poems on a shovel with a lump of coal while he was supposed to be working as a night watchman and feeding a furnace but instead became distracted, let the fire go out and got fired.
Or maybe you’ve heard the one about John Cheever’s boiler room where they say he maintained an office, writing short stories in a cinderblock cube, in the overheated basement of his Manhattan apartment building, writing in his underwear to keep a suit neatly pressed in case The New Yorker’s editors were willing to spring for lunch.
My own boiler-room story is a little less inspiring because it was a different kind of boiler room with row upon row of desks and phones and unlicensed commodity brokers wearing headsets. We were all trying to sell options and futures for companies about to implode.
On the eve of the winter solstice, with the homeless muttering outside in the cold, I kept attempting to edit my poems there, during the minute or so of dead time while the automatic dialing machines were dialing our potential customers, and sometimes I’d have nothing much to say for myself when somebody said hello.
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Stick Season
David Capps
It finally happened. A bird shit on my head today, a feeling momentary and wet, in just the spot where, by a little bit, I’ve started to bald. A mush of crumbled seeds digested partly, scratched gently, so that had they landed elsewhere they’d maybe sprouted. Like all ideas, I suppose. That single glove in my coat pocket had a use after all. Think of it: of all the times I’ve been out in the woods, being walked by the woods with however many birds hovering directly overhead: jays, sparrows, crows, hawks, whole communities of starlings, who all let it drop where it will, following metabolic processes ultimately as mysterious as coffee turning into these words which flail to describe the miracle that, even counting near misses, it hadn’t happened until now. Now, then, that was the moment singled out by bird shit, which I find miraculous. Unrelatedly, perhaps it is as simple as this: if you don’t believe you have a soul, then you don’t. When you say, ‘After death, there is only nothingness’, it shows more than a lack of imagination, this state of nothingness surrounded by birdless birch trees in stick season.
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Needing No Witness
Sarah Starr Murphy
Pale sand, empty beach, and at the tideline, a moon-shaped rock shining black. Wrapped around the middle, a winding streak of Milky Way white. It fits neatly in my hand. Two holes burrow into its surface, and by the weak light I squint into miniature caverns lined with quartz crystals. An iced glitter here in a place where sand crunches frozen underfoot and the restless wind twirls long fronds of seagrass, carving circular patterns in the dunes. The ocean is dispassionate as ever, the stone sparkles carelessly. A long fang from the biting night, it waits out the shortest day. I hurl it into the building waves and it’s gone. Vanished like the six-pointed snowflakes that will fall tonight on the heaving water – in their fragile elegance they’ll light the hours of darkness.
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Author Bios
Tom McAllister is the author of 4 books, including the essay collection It All Felt Impossible and the novel How to Be Safe. He is the nonfiction editor at Barrelhouse, and teaches in the MFA Program at Rutgers-Camden.
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Candice M. Kelsey (she/her) is a bi-coastal writer and educator. Her work has received Pushcart and Best-of-the-Net nominations, and she is the author of eight books. Her work appears in Bust, The Rumpus, Painted Bride Quarterly, Poet Lore, SWWIM, and other journals. A reader for The Los Angeles Review and The Weight Journal, she also serves as an AWP Poetry Mentor.
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Living just west of the Continental Divide, sid sibo has won the Neltje Blanchan Memorial Writing Award and has numerous stories in literary magazines and anthologies. In 2024, Bison Books at Univ. of NE Press published debut novel The Scent of Distant Family, a finalist for two national awards. Read more with the Acoustic Burro blog at sidsibo.com.
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Kathleen Hellen’s debut collection Umberto’s Night won the poetry prize from Washington Writers’ Publishing House. She is the author of The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, Meet Me at the Bottom, and two chapbooks. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, Hellen’s work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Diode Poetry Journal, Massachusetts Review, Sixth Finch, West Branch, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. Awards include prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review.
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Philippa Bowe is a flash fiction writer, poet and translator. Her work has been published online and in print, including by Ghost City Press, New Flash Fiction Review, Firewords, Bath Flash Fiction, Spark2Flame, Hooghley Review, Temple in a City, Berlin Literary Review and LISP. She is working on a second flash novel, lives on a hill and is addicted to big vistas.
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Kathryn Edie is from a small town in the thumb region of Michigan. She loves reading, writing, crafting, horses, cats, dogs, and any other furry animal she can pet.
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Chris Scott’s work has appeared in The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs, Okay Donkey, HAD, New Flash Fiction Review, Milk Candy Review, and elsewhere. He is a regular ClickHole contributor and elementary school teacher in Washington, DC.
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Michael Colonnese is the author of Sex and Death, I Suppose, a hard-boiled detective novel with a soft Jungian underbelly, and of two prize-winning poetry collections, Temporary Agency and Double Feature. He lives in the mountains of western North Carolina, near Asheville.
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David Capps is a philosophy professor and writer living in CT.
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Sarah Starr Murphy’s writing has appeared in River Styx, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. One of her stories was listed as a special mention in the 2025 Pushcart Prize Anthology. She’s managing editor for The Forge Literary Magazine and eternally at work on a novel.