Instructions for painting a bird in six steps
by Fokkina McDonnell

Let your shadow be present. Someone needs to interpret their dreams.
First paint or draw a circle, as many claw prints as your years. Soot is fine. Work clockwise.
Call, chirrup, caw, chirp, chatter – wake your inner aviary.
Black ink is needed and tears. It cannot be rushed.
Use one hand. You may change hands when your fingers are cramped, like a talon.
Hunger. Fatigue. This is their life – hunting on the wing for insects, grub, the odd vole.

PAINTING:Geese at full moon (detail) by Ohara Koson (1945).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Doing a writing course The Avian Eye, I’ve become obsessed with birds, researching online: migration, the behaviour of cuckoo, the cleverness of crows.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Dutch-born Fokkina McDonnell has two poetry collections (Another life, Oversteps Books Ltd, 2016; Nothing serious, nothing…

Acrylic Pour at the Art Center
by Lindsey Martin-Bowen
for Theresa Henderson

This method scares me—no brushes,
no palate knives. We pour paint—
mostly white—into a Dixie cup,
three other cups hold one color
apiece: turquoise, navy, or pink.

We fold Floetrol, water, and three
drops of silicone into each.
Then we pour Dixies one at-a-time,
holding them high, into a plastic custard
cup we flip onto canvas. We wait,

then slide, tilt, and roll the paint.
I worry I cannot create the shiny
abstract scenes filled with “cells”
that form eyes on a glossy canvas.
I still don’t know if I can make it:

The key, I’m told, is giving up control.

PAINTING:In Bloom by Lindsey Martin-Bowen.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: When I was much younger, beginning in high school, I was a visual artist, painting mainly with oils and acrylics. Often I worked in a surreal style…

How the Poet Learns from Snowbound
by Tricia Knoll

Every sentence has potential to sparkle. If not, let it lie silent on other flakes
and look for a footstep or a pawprint to suggest a new path.

An icicle glints in the sunbeam, a prism. And in moonlight, its glassy
twist lights the theater of tragedy or midnight romance.

A bit of thaw, one day at a time, and the ice dam drips. Short minutes
at noon, words may drip if they cannot gush.

The bird feeder witnesses to winter’s hunger. The insatiable
desire for nurturing, nutrition. Needed feeding

to keep wings beating. Thesaurus on the table. Anthologies
on the night stand. Pecks of haiku. Suet of sonnets.

Fear lumpy sidewalk ice? Strap on traction cleats and imagine skating.
Welcome glides. Wind in your hair. Escape. Free verse.

PAINTING:La Pie (The Magpie) by Claude Monet (1868-1869).

NOTE FROM THE…

How to Identify a Bird
by Laurel Benjamin

Focus on the orange beak, a crusher,
take your time, turn the nobs
oriented left to right—
see the racing stripe head, a bullet,
puff of white black white
flight action.
Zoom out from the golden
morning tree among white corollas
to bird frock a holiday suit,
dive and land.
I’ve studied the dynasty of devotion
among bird families,
a queenship of no solitary taste.
Now look from the side,
narrow as a finger, almost
disconsolate, almost tearful,
like a bride without like flesh,
without sugar breath.
From the front, view the open eyes,
too dilated, streaked neck,
hints of wing stripes, tan breast
no one can contest.
Or are there too many details
like a Victorian instruction book?
I set my eyes forward
to meet the bird’s as if
I the mother
eggs underneath, a little boudoir
with a dainty chair…

“Ali’s Smile: Naked Scientology is a collection of essays and a short story by American Beat writerWilliam S. Burroughs (1914–97). First published in 1971 as the short story ‘Ali’s Smile’, the book eventually contained a group of previously published newspaper articles as well, all of which address Scientology. Burroughs had been interested in Scientology throughout the 1960s, believing that its methods might help combat a controlling society. He joined the Church of Scientology later in the decade. However, he became disenchanted with the authoritarian nature of the organization. In 1970 Burroughs had published a ‘considered statement’ on Scientology’s methods because he felt they were significant enough to warrant commentary. These pieces were later gathered together into Ali’s Smile: Naked Scientology, which religious studies scholar Hugh B. Urban describes as a ‘nonscholarly popular exposé of Scientology’. Burroughs’s texts argue that while some of Scientology’s therapies are worthwhile…

Ezra Klein of the New York Times interviewed Senator Bernie Sanders for his podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show.”

Listen to “The Ezra Klein Show”:Apple Podcasts,Pocket Casts,Spotify,Google Podcasts,Stitcher(How to Listen)

Bernie Sanders didn’t win the 2020 election. But he may have won its aftermath.

If you look back at Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders’s careers, the $1.9 trillion stimulus package, the American Rescue Plan, looks a lot like the proposals Sanders has fought for forever, without much of the compromise or concerns that you used to see from Senator Joe Biden. That’s not to take anything away from Biden. He’s the president. This is his plan. And it is to his credit that he saw what the country needed, what the politics of the moment would support and where his party had moved, and met it with full force.

Learning How to Make Meyer Lemon Muffins
by Catherine Gonick

“Have some sunshine!” read the note inside
the box. There was none outside, in icy New York,
but before me were twenty small suns, Meyer lemons
that my friend had picked herself, in her Santa Rosa yard.
Like everyone who’s lived in California, I knew
that Meyers were the best. A cross between
a lemon and a tangerine, colored deep yellow
inside and out, exuding a spicy scent,
they were sweet enough to eat out of hand.
I ate one. The snow on my balcony whispered,
muffins are next. Was this even possible? I rarely baked,
had never even attempted bread, but now
could think of nothing else. I found two muffin tins
bought decades ago, and they shouted, Meyer lemon
muffins or bust. The recipe asked me to blend
a whole lemon till finely ground. Boil it first,
advised…

How to Savour a Favourite Memory
by Graham Wood

Mandarins bring my grandmother back every time,
standing with her by the old house in winter sunlight
sharing the first fruit I can remember. Four years old,
I’d wrestled it moments before from the huge tree
in the chook yard as she held me up towards it,
one of many plump tangerine disks
bobbing overhead against a sea of green.

She rolled the peel off deftly with her fingers, turning it on the point
of one thumb into large orange scoops of rind, stripping each pod
free of its pulpy strings. Then it was there! A burst of sweetness
on my tongue, elemental, never before anything like this.

Half a century dead my grandmother now,
inhabiting the long sweet breath of memory.
In spite of the decades that have vanished,
every time I peel and savour this favoured fruit
my grandmother…