An Online Literary Journal for Poetry and Flash

Tag: childhood memories

How Light Travels

Poetry by Sheila Dietz

For Christina (1956-2017)

In this picture it’s Christmas morning
and we’re opening presents. Carl, five,
looks away from the camera at Mary
who is out of view. He holds a bag—
red fabric tied at one end
with gold ribbon. I, the oldest,
maybe ten, am trying to pull
a fat gold ribbon from a gift wrapped
in white froth. I wear a shy
smile for the camera
which has caught me in my pajamas—
the red ones with a hole in the heel.

And you, baby sister, your wild,
curly hair catching the light,
cozy in your faded red nightgown
with white buttons, are lifting your face
to the person taking the picture.

One hand is open in your lap,
fingers splayed, and still,
two of its fingers held fast
by the other hand—a nascent
reticence that has not yet reached
your mouth, which, open in a wide smile,
reveals pure joy while the light
in your gold flecked eyes
reflects a gold ornament
dangling from a nearby branch.

Oh, Christina,
how can it be that I did not see you
until just now?


Sheila Dietz also writes as Sheila Bonenberger. She holds an MFA from Vermont College, and poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Wrath-Bearing Tree, Denver Quarterly and The Massachusetts Review, among others. Most recently her work appeared in the 2023 One Page Poetry anthology.

Way Back When

Nonfiction by Meredith Escudier

My little sister is seven, bundled up in a brown, corduroy car coat. I am nine, sporting a pair of orange polka-dotted pedal pushers and feeling fairly fleet-footed in my canvas Keds. Together we are walking home at dusk from our neighbor’s house where we have enjoyed yet another game of Chinese checkers.

“Can we play orphans?” she asks. Orphans. It’s a familiar game of ours, influenced by the thrill of childhood literature – The Boxcar Children or Oliver Twist or any number of hair-raising fairy tales that filled our impressionable psyches. According to the game’s unspoken rules, we must identify a house friendly enough to ask its current residents to take us in – two bedraggled sisters who have only recently escaped from the workhouse.

Perhaps in our mind’s eye, we are barefoot, ragged, dirty, but also surely sweet-faced, hopeful, and plucky. After some faux-hesitation, we will, of course, choose our own house – what else? –  but the exercise allows us to flirt momentarily with independence and adventure, only to be flooded by a warm, familiar security afterwards. Our chosen scenario, as usual, unfolds with a practiced, codified dialog:

“How about this one?” she suggests, as we walk past a large corner house.

“No, too dark,” I respond on cue, shaking my head vigorously as we march along.

“Then this one?” She points to a house whose front lawn has recently been edged. A forgotten rubber ball is wedged between a planter box and a picket fence. I appear to inspect her choice before disqualifying it with a “Naah,” aligning myself perfectly with the unwritten script. “Not cozy enough,” I announce.

“Then how about this cute little house? It looks sort of friendly,” she says, tacking on a hopeful argument for good measure. Hmm, I take a look. She could be right. Among the cookie-cutter post-war housing that went up fast in the Fifties and that provided the parents of baby boomers a decent, if not charming, place to live, this house – with its ruby red front porch and generic cement driveway – just seemed to stand out. Well, at least to us.

We stop and peer in, evaluating the odds, wondering if this family might adopt our lonesome selves. Will they show mercy? Human kindness? Would they like the addition of two beseeching little girls around the dinner table tonight? I notice the glow from the light in the kitchen and guess at our older sister studiously setting the table, carefully placing our father’s milk glass at the helm. “Yes,” I agree companionably as we turn into our own comfortable driveway and trot up the front steps. Out back, between the clothesline and the dangling tether ball, is a likeness of our handprints, marking the day when three sisters leaned down and opened their hands, stretching and splaying their fingers wide as they pressed their palms into fresh cement.


Meredith Escudier has lived in France for over 35 years, teaching, translating, raising a family and writing. She is the author of three books, most recently, a food memoir, The Taste of Forever, an affectionate examination of home cooks that features an American mother and a French husband.

Empty Netters

Nonfiction by Diane Choplin

Dada Brown gently jostled me awake, forefinger finger pressed to his lips.

“It’s time,” he whispered. “You dressed?”

“I slept in clothes.”

“Atta girl.”

Cautiously fumbling our way in the dark, so as not to wake Mama Brown, I felt my way down the hall as he gathered our gear. Once outside, we clicked on flashlights and made for an old chest freezer advertising Creamsicles in faded, cyan lettering. Dada Brown held open the lid while I stood on tippy toes and reached inside, plunging all ten figures into loose soil.

“We just need a handful in this styrofoam cup.”

I was six years old, digging for red wigglers on my first crack-of-dawn fishing expedition with grandpa. He and Mama Brown, my grandma-too-young-to-be-called-that, lived on riverside acreage in La Grange, California – a tiny gold rush town surrounded by rolling hills dotted with gnarled oak trees. Two blocks of nineteenth-century western-fronted shops defined its center. Overlooking these was a hilltop one-room schoolhouse with bell and similarly designed Catholic Church with pioneer cemetery.

We loaded Dada Brown’s forest green ‘66 Dodge truck, smooth-fronted like a VW bus, while Toby, his collie, hopped in the back, pacing excitedly. A short rumble down windy road brought us to a gravel pull out looking like any other. Adamant No Trespassing and No Hunting or Fishing decrees were nailed to nearby trees. Though Dada Brown was one of a privileged few locals permitted to ignore the signs, I still felt an exhilarating prick of danger defying them.

Juggling our poles, net, folding chair and cooler, we made our way across uneven pasture to a four-strand barbed wire fence, sunrise softly illuminating oak savannah. Dada Brown pushed down its menacing top line and climbed deftly over, one leg at a time. Then, as he would on every successive trip, he stepped on the bottom wire and pulled up the next adjacent, prying them apart for my passage through. Some fragment of me inevitably caught. He’d free my fly-away morning hair, my corduroy pants or yellow windbreaker, and we’d continue on, dodging cow pies. Toby led the way down the hill, skirting the lichen splotched dry stone wall, his tail moving in happy circles. When frog chorus suddenly halted, we knew he’d made the pond.

Squeamish about putting worms on hooks, I recoiled at first effort.

“They can’t feel it,” Dada Brown said, reassuringly.

I was skeptical about worms not feeling pain, thrashing as they do when poked.

“Did you know,” he added, “that worms have five hearts? If you cut one in half, they’ll heal and live on as two.” (His voice returns to me when I accidentally cleave one with my shovel: “It’ll be okay, Diane. You made one into two.”)

Somewhat appeased by their regenerative superpower, I reluctantly baited my hook.

Lines cast, Dada Brown settled on his folding chair, pole in one hand, thermos at his side. Unable to sit still, I propped mine against a log, braced it with a rock, and explored with Toby. We stalked bright green tree frogs, shy crawdads and praying mantis, catching each for closer examination. Once, I even managed a young garter snake, Toby barking wildly in what I imagined to be congratulations.

Tugs on line reclaimed my attention, but I don’t remember ever catching a fish. For lunch Dada Brown brought hotdogs we’d roast on sticks over a fire, or wax paper wrapped bacon and peanut butter sandwiches. We ate while making up stories about wily fish evading hooks, occasionally tossing pebbles for Toby to chase.

“Get the frogs,” we shouted. He gleefully obliged, biting water where stones broke the surface. Our raucous game eliminated all hope of hooking dinner.

Once the sun reached its apex, hot and glaring, we packed up. Not wanting to return empty handed, we stopped by the general store for a whole fish, later telling Mama Brown we’d caught it. She no doubt saw through our ruse, but my child brain, giddy to share in a secret, believed she believed.

I’ve been on a few fishing excursions since my early trips with Dada Brown, none nearly as fun. Trapped in a boat, I got antsy, itching to move. Casting lines from watercraft isn’t my idea of a good time. I can’t just park my pole and run around a bank, exploring. I have to sit still and wait. I’m not good at sitting still.

“Isn’t this great!” someone inevitably exclaims. Feet up with a fishing pole in one hand, cold beer in the other, they say: “I could be out here all day!”

Half smiling, I shift uncomfortably and stare off into the distance, where shoreline dissolves into dense forest, wondering what treasures might be found there.


Diane Choplin‘s essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Countryside Magazine, Oregon Humanities, Monologging, and The Oregonian. She lives and writes on a five-acre farm where she also raises rotationally grazed lamb, welcomes Airbnb guests, and keeps hopeful eye out for edible wild mushrooms.

Two Dolls and Three Kings

Nonfiction by Antonia Wang

I only ever owned two dolls, delicate treasures in a world where Barbies belonged to children with ties to distant lands like the United States or, in a bygone era, Venezuela.

My dolls weren’t the coveted reborn dolls of the ’80s, the ones I daydreamed about swaddling and adorning with miniature outfits like real infants. No, my dolls were not my first choice, but they were unique— a second-hand, silicone-skinned Japanese doll with straight chestnut hair, a miniature yogi ready to bend and twist to my whims. The other, a robust, plastic blonde doll with pigtail braids, remained shelved most of the time, but I could never forget her.

How did I come to possess a Japanese doll while living in the insular mountains of the 1980s Dominican Republic? My recollection is hazy, but I remember it as a gift from a Spanish missionary whom my family hosted one summer while she worked with the church. The doll had meager clothes, so I fashioned her an outfit with the little fabric I could find and my rudimentary sewing skills.

The blonde doll had been a “Three Kings” gift from my dad. Christmas gifts were for Americans. Dominican kids didn’t have Santa. We had the Three Kings, who somehow made no noise as they filled our rooms with their camels on the eve of January 6th, delivering our toys. Oh, coveted joy! They were the only gifts of the year for many of us. “At least you had toys,” my siblings would chime in. But this isn’t a sad story about growing up in a small town in the countryside of a humble island. This isn’t a sad story at all.

Sure, we had limited means, but we never lacked what truly mattered: a roof of our own, honest and loving parents, friends galore, and a multitude of cousins. Cousins to play hide and seek with, tackle homework with, attend church together, and, of course, get into the occasional trouble with. And then there were the lush mountains, always smiling around me, offering endless adventures and mysteries. Our home had no television when I was a kid, and it wasn’t until I reached my teenage years that we got a fridge. Bicycles or scooters were scarce, and cars? They were a luxury reserved solely for the ‘rich,’ although even those we deemed ‘rich’ carried their own burdens—a spouse who had migrated to the United States, the trials of managing a small-town business, or concealed guilt.

No, I never felt poor. We had what we needed and nothing more, except for food. Come what may, we had food—for everyone at home, for the neighbor who couldn’t afford to cook, for my grandpa who preferred my mom’s cooking though he didn’t live with us, for the occasional country visitor, my father’s third cousin, or the Haitian woman with a child who stopped by every few months. I couldn’t remember her name or whether she had a home. There was always plenty of food, even if my mom had to make herself a meal from our leftovers. But this isn’t a sad story, no.

This is a tale of devotion—a father who wanted to give me the childhood he never had growing up as a farmer’s kid in the mountains of Camú.

One evening, approaching January 6th, I witnessed a secret ritual. My late father, convinced I was asleep, concealed a grand, plastic doll within a duffle bag hanging from a nail on the wooden wall, believing he had hidden it where I would never think to look. I smiled and turned sideways, pretending to be sleep.

Outside, the chorus of crickets remained silent. The unsightly toads in the nearby miniature swamp, where taro root and yautía malanga thrived unbidden yet embraced, also remained silent. Nor did I hear a whisper from the brown geckos that crept about our small-town dwelling, which we regarded as an auspicious omen.

The next day, I didn’t say a word, filled with excitement as I eagerly awaited the surprise at the foot of my bed on Three Kings’ Day. I remained silent because, more than a toy, I cherished the joy of my father’s belief in magic.


Antonia Wang, poet, nature enthusiast, and yogi, weaves intricate, symbolic poems from the tapestry of everyday life and the natural world. Exploring universal themes of relationships, self-discovery, and philosophy, Antonia’s work exudes a nostalgic Caribbean essence. She writes in English and Spanish, and lives with her family in the USA.

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