‘Roses and Lilacs’

Tetiana Yatsechko-Blazhenko is a Ukrainian writer, poet, and visual artist. Her work has appeared in literary journals and magazines including Midway Journal, Shot Glass Journal, Gabby & Min’s Literary Review, Eleventh Hour Literary, Corncrake Magazine, Sheepshead Review, Plants & Poetry Journal, Red Ogre Review, Hearts of Thunder. She has contributed to anthologies such as Tidings, The Haunted Words Press 2025 Anthology, The Echoes We Make, Rituals & Remedies, and In the Language of Flowers. In 2025, she won in the prose category of the Odesa Miniature contest.

Roses and Lilacs

You’re yards ahead of me as we run through thicket. I’m going as fast as I can with pockets full of rocks. Each step another effort to prove myself. 

An acrobat bounds from branch to branch above. I wonder if I could do that? 

The moment he lands, there’s no tree, there’s no squirrel. It’s all one until he leaps again.

You yell for me to hurry up and I obey, tearing my eyes from the squirrel and finding you in the distance. Blocking the late orange sun, your silhouette draws me forward. 

With a heaving chest of scar tissue and mosquito-bitten ankles, I reach you at last. Between your boots is a sparrow, its wing twisted and crushed, red stained on brown.

“I didn’t know that birds could bleed”

“Everything bleeds,” you tell me.

The sun is setting.

“We have to help it”

You agree.

I pluck lambs-ear blankets and clover stem thread

I spot a stone, flat and level,

“We can carry him on this”

I lay leaves on the rock before passing it to you, heaving with its weight. 

When we get back I’ll build a nest from a shoebox, and he’ll sleep next to me.

The crunch of bone against bone brings me back to the moment.

You, soldier of mercy, look down at the feathers poking out from beneath the stone.

I look up at your eyes, the same blue as mine.  

You look back after a moment, “Birds can’t live with a broken wing”.

Delilah James has spent the first seventeen years of her life in western New York before shipping up to Vermont for school. Delilah is currently in her second year of a Champlain College filmmaking BFA at the moment, specializing in screenwriting.