Even the Clean Ones are Unclean

It’s that time of summer: when everyone’s everywhere doing everything when days are longer, happinesses stronger when the green grass looks like it’s been told I-love-you. Six past six o’clock. Evening. The sun is effulgent, the wind mildly turbulent. At a field, around a neighborhood, in Berlin, on a sunny summer Sunday, three friends meet

Birth of the Blue Heron

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.    My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,    Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I? A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.    The mind enters itself, and God the mind,    And one is One, free in the tearing wind. “In a Dark Time”  By

The Fire That Never Went Out

Die Bärliner invites you to revisit a flash fiction piece by BCB graduate Océanne Fry (HAST’ 21), originally published during our Poetry Month in April. Océanne worked on this project last Spring semester as part of the “LT 167 Writing African Futures” course taught by Prof. Dr. Kerry Bystrom at BCB, in association with the

Open your eyes

A slow movement of the eyes before the dizziness of the day is taking over. The clumsy beams of the Sun are rushing into the mirror on the wall and then bouncing back, leaving behind no more than a puddle of light. The birds are finding their melodies they lost during the night, starting the

Her Hardest Hue to Hold

Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. -Robert Frost We decided it was the best place to study flamingos, but camping was

I Checked and It Was Still There

“But as they burned, disappearing irrevocably one after the other, you stopped believing that there was any purpose in a book’s existence. Or perhaps the only one to have worked out their purpose was the Sarajevan author and bibliophile who, instead of using expensive firewood, warmed his fingers last winter on the flames of Dostoevsky,

Choice Words

We are at Boots, Etc., exit 149 when driving South in Georgia towards New Orleans. We watch as a man hammers hand-wrought silver tips onto Henry’s new red leather boots. The man uses shining little nails, he squints, he moves his hands as delicately as a pianist, as a mother braiding hair. As he works behind