____________________________________________________________ Birdy Odell is a Canadian artist and writer whose work highlights themes of death, childhood, abandonment, love and reflections on time.  She works primarily in found words and flash fiction, and is the winner of the Saskatchewan Library Association Award for Book Spine Poetry, 2017.  Her work has appeared in Barren Magazine, The…

Splash language into my eyes like bathtub water. I feel, I love digitized words surging through my Pacific wave vision.  Who has the time to spend a sunloop piecemealing a Victorian novel when I can receive Bronte’s impetus within a nanosecond of absorption.  The judgement of Jane Eyre corrals inside neurological sparks before draining into a reject binat the…

Transparent beauty, I adore the wayyour mind filters and reconstructs patterns,waves transcending straight lines through color-drenched nature and the coming days. Like a second page cleansed of words,or a bulldozed path through a mine field,we start our separate lives together, anew.Even the winged beings admire us. Our pasts hover behind,shadowing our…

At 64, time became a race car.I had thought of it as a bike.I’d go riding around town,gliding from garage saleto garage sale.  In 1971 timeoften felt like a boulder:when would graduation come?when my birthday?when would I get my first job?Whens made high school feel like water I was trying to plod through.  …

There is a sad soulfulness here to behold.It goes round and round in Spanish soundsthat ricochet off the walls of Casco Viejoand moseys on down narrow cobblestone streetswith its own special assonance and consonanceechoing in every barrio, mourning a past of some hidden might-have-been memory of a nation with wings once its…

I am a princess alone             among the rhododendrons, plucking the sticky flowers     pushing as many as I can behind my small ears     weaving them into my tangled hair. I raise a single blossom up to the sun     see how it blazes deep pink all the way through,                  sunbeams glinting off the syrup at its centre     wonder how it tastes     want to put my tongue to it.  One…

Consider the fact that the sky sinks something in us sky watchers every night  in Agbowo,  stand near the door and draw slow breaths from the unspeakable silence.   hear the rustle and barking of watchdogs, and the sirens in the  wind. Then I try to remember how to remember and forget  even why I try.  Some nights in…

When there were bombs                                                    and my grandma earned the Yad Vashem The spirit of the Blitz was fleeing:thousands of duffel coats, tagged,like luggage: handle with care: Gloves on string lost up sleeves,this way up: please come back soon.The train pulled away. My grandma was no believer but stillshe hid that awkward young…

Do you remember that time you got accidentally attracted,that goddamn time when desire felt so criminal,that it guillotined your head into a bucket of shame. If parts of the body change texture to keep up with time,if words of the tongue shift shape to appease audiences,it must be only natural we’re all…

The direction of flight and the wing’s flutter confirm the origin of firestill raging in your ear. The kick and bite of a .340 Magnum— a brutal entrance.  The world—a freeze and a cringe, a fox in full leap, suspended in time, the physics of resistance, acceleration and fall, fused, and you  pinned to the…