Tag: childhood (Page 2 of 2)

From One Adult to Another

14 March 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Brian C. Billings

Let’s skip the gifts this Christmas.

Oh, let the children have their boxes
and stockings and weeks of waiting;
they have innocence and energy.

The two of us have jobs.

Why worry once again about
the niceties of equivalent exchange
or dropping hints inside of stores?

How much bric-a-brac can we afford to hoard?

Cracking the ritual might hurt
but not so much as hemorrhaging
money and mind for months.

We’re neither one of us detectives.

I think we can agree upon what’s small
to mean the deepest feeling and allow
the credit cards a chance to cool.

I like a latte. So do you.

To be beyond eighteen should mean
cutting ties with those tyrannical lists
our mothers taught us we should make.

Gifts are hard. Leave penance for the cards.

Brian C. Billings is a professor of drama and English at Texas A&M University-Texarkana. His work has appeared in such journals as Ancient Paths, Antietam Review, Argestes, Confrontation, Evening Street Review, and Poems and Plays. Publishers for his scripts include Eldridge Publishing and Heuer Publishing.

close up dirty door door knob — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The Trapped Door

12 March 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Daniella DiMaggio

When I was a girl, my grandma showed me a trapdoor in our house. She lived in the basement apartment, where the trapdoor was. I want to say that the door was by the staircase or in the alcove where the washer and dryer were, but I truly cannot remember. When you opened the door, there was a red ladder that took you far down into a white room that was filled with wonders that I cannot recall now. In my mind’s eye, it was filled with toys, and it was vaster than vast. It was the universe, ever expanding.

I want to say that I visited this trapdoor multiple times in my childhood. And I want to say that it was not in one single instance that this door disappeared. I want to say that as I continued to visit it, the door became more and more transparent; the handle, at first, difficult to turn, and then impossible to find. I want to say that the square outline of the door slowly faded into the wall.

I have many dreams that I’m somehow journeying through the foundation of my childhood home. In the dream, it doesn’t always look like my childhood home, but I know that’s what it is. There are secret passageways in the walls that allow me to contort and climb through. They don’t do much of anything other than transport me from one room to another.

I’m reminded of when my sister and I were girls sharing a room. We had a large white dresser, it almost reached the ceiling (or maybe I just thought this because I was small), and she used to climb on top of it and crawl across it to my bed. It wasn’t until we were older that we realized how dangerous this was, the top half of the dresser not being nailed down to the bottom half. My sister never realized that she was a precarious leaf on a branch. We laugh about it now.

I sometimes wonder if the trapdoor disappeared or if I disappeared. If I became stuck down there and slowly the wonders just vanished, and one day, a day close to my dying, in a new long lived-in house of my adult years (a house I’ve yet to even meet), I will discover a small square frame with a knob and realize that no one has been looking for me.

Daniella DiMaggio is a recent graduate of the Queens College MFA Program where she studied fiction. She teaches at Queens College and Plaza College.

The Landscape of Childhood

5 March 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Janice Northerns

R-r-r-r-r-d-d-d. That sound, the bumpty-bump-bump of our car passing over the two cattle guards near our rural West Texas farmhouse, framed my childhood. Cattle guards, metal pipe contraptions used in place of a gate across a road, are designed to let vehicles pass through while keeping livestock in; however, they meant much more than that to me.

On the long trips back from town almost 30 miles away, crossing those cattle guards often jolted me out of a sound sleep or a dreamy reverie. But it was a comforting jolt, a rumbling almost home, almost home.

My mother sometimes used the cattle guard as a boundary marker when we went out to play: “Don’t go past the second cattle guard,” she’d warn.

Daddy referred to the cattle guards as landmarks when giving directions: “Turn at the first cattle guard, go across the second one, then take the right fork in the road and you’re there.”

And the cattle guards themselves, all those wide spaces between treacherously smooth metal pipes with looming chasms beneath, presented formidable obstacles to be crossed on foot when I was small. It was a test of bravery to see if we could make it across quickly without having to grab the triangular side rail.

For many years most of the place markers of my childhood remained intact, long after I left home. But I still remember the day when I mourned the absence of one of them. It was on a trip to see my parents, and as usual, when I turned at the first cattle guard, its low rumble whispered almost home, almost home. But as I approached the second cattle guard, I saw that something was not quite right. The road had been filled in, the cattle guard removed.

No more ditch to cross, no more bumpy jolt.

Instead of enjoying the newly smooth blacktop, I had the distinct urge to hang on for dear life as I crossed that spot in the road, as if I were driving across a high, narrow bridge with no guard rails. It was a visceral, physical sensation, one that surprised me. How silly, I thought. It’s just a cattle guard. But there was no denying that this change in my childhood landscape left me momentarily unmoored. This no longer felt like the road home.

My father explained the removal of the cattle guard. It was in need of repair, and since my parents hadn’t owned any livestock for years, there was no longer a reason for a cattle guard. It made more sense to simply fill in the road.

I puzzled over why such a simple change affected me so strongly. Perhaps there was no longer a practical purpose for that cattle guard, but for me it served as a talisman. The bumpty thud of cattle guards marked every entry and exit to and from the larger world, a border crossing into my home country. If the borders, or the border markers, change is there still a country to enter?

Of course, it’s only natural that those external markers of childhood become fewer as time passes. Other changes have happened over the years. The old schoolhouse down the road, empty for many years, was at last removed. Houses of childhood playmates have been gone so long that not even a trace of the foundations remains. My parents are also gone now, and the house where I grew up, though still there, is no longer ours. The cottonwood trees that I played in as a child have been cut down. But those cottonwoods, their leafy green summer stirrings, are as vivid to me now as when I last set eyes on them more than 15 years ago.

Maybe I really don’t need external markers to find my way. The landscape of childhood, far from fading away with the removal of its landmarks, seems indelibly etched on some map of memory:

It is a July day in 1965 and I am not quite nine years old. My little brother and I clutch sweaty nickels and dimes in our palms as we walk to the tiny country store located just around the bend after the second cattle guard.

Barefoot, as always, we race to the first cattle guard, keeping to the side of the road where the dirt is cooler than the blacktop pavement.

At the cattle guard, my feet curve to grip the hot metal pipes as I struggle to keep my balance, hang on to my money and scamper to solid ground. Safely across, only then do I look back and down, down into the ditch my little brother and I have once more successfully traversed.

One more cattle guard and we’re at Halley’s Grocery. The interior of the store is cool and dim. We luxuriate in the cement soothing the blistered soles of our bare feet, sidle up to the Coca-Cola chest cooler and open wide the glass lid for a blast of icy air.

On the way home, we swig cold orange Nehi sodas, a bag of peanuts dumped into them. As I make my way across the last cattle guard, there is no bumpty-bump rumble; I’m on foot.

But the sound is still there, always, in my head. I look up and the house is within sight.

Almost home, almost home.

Janice Northerns is the author of Some Electric Hum, winner of the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award (University of Kansas), the Nelson Poetry Book Award, and a WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry. The author grew up in Texas and now lives in southwest Kansas. Read more at www.janicenortherns.com.

Taboule

23 February 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Leslie Lisbona

Perched on a footstool, I plunged my five-year-old hand into the sink full of cold water and grabbed for the parsley leaves that my mother had soaked. They were elusive; it took me several tries to catch just one. My mom was behind me, close enough that I could smell her Bal à Versailles perfume.

Although the kitchen was small, it didn’t feel cramped. The window was open, and the spring air wafted in. I placed the leaves on a towel on the counter to dry, my hands dripping water to my elbows. My mom used a handheld metal contraption to shred the parsley. It was about the size of a book and had a crank that she wheeled around. She pushed her dark hair off her face with her wrist. Her eyes were lined with kohl. After a long while, we had a salad bowl full of leaves.

We soaked bulgur wheat into a big bowl of water. My mom said it in Arabic: burhol. She chopped scallions and let me sprinkle a thick layer of salt on top. She cut up tomatoes into little pieces as her gold bangles made soft chime-like sounds. She guided me to press the lemon halves onto a glass juicer. She smiled and said we needed a rest.

We lay on the hammock on the terrace overlooking 83^rd Avenue and the empty lot across the street. We lived on the second floor, and the terrace was an extension of our living room. My mother smoked a cigarette, pressing her red lipstick onto the filter tip, while I slid alongside her silk dress. I played with her gold bracelets. Pigeons swooped around the courtyard below. She opened her book and slit a page open with a butter knife, leaving a jagged edge. Only the French books were like that.

In the afternoon, we returned to the task. Back on the footstool over the sink, I took a handful of bulgur wheat from the water, and I squeezed as hard as I could, tightening my stomach to get every drop out. I farted with the effort, and my mother laughed, her mouth open, her head back. I couldn’t help but laugh, too.

I tossed the drained bulgur into the bowl with the leaves. Then we did the same with the scallions. The juice from the scallions was viscous, turning my hands slimy. She added the tomatoes, lemon juice, and olive oil and mixed it all together. Then she gave me a taste. “Maybe more lemon,” I said through a mouthful of parsley, and she hugged me saying, “Ya rochi,” my darling.

Debi, my sister, came home from Russell Sage Junior High, her long blond hair hanging like ribbon past her shoulders. “Ohhh, taboule,” she crooned. She went to our room, and I followed her like a magnet. She threw her bag on the waterbed, and I fell beside it, making waves, my body jerking up and down. She kissed me and called me Leslie Pie. She smelled like rebellion, cigarettes and Herbal Essence shampoo.

My brother, Dorian, came home from work and said, “Oh wow, taboule!” and I scrambled to follow him around the apartment. “Hey, Arn,” his name for me, and he picked me up and swung me onto a shoulder. I loved the sheer strength of him. I rested my hand on top of his head, his dark wavy hair laced around my fingers.

My dad came home, and I ran into his outstretched arms. His cheeks were prickly, and I put my hands to mine to protect them. He kissed my neck. I giggled. “We made taboule,” I said. “I can’t wait,” he said.

I stood in the middle of my family as they moved around one another, reaching for bowls from the cabinet. We ate the taboule with whatever else my mother must have cooked when I wasn’t paying attention. The parsley stuck to our teeth; “Don’t ever eat taboule on a date!” my mom said. The taste was kaleidoscopic, citrusy, dense, complex, and comforting.

My parents talked to each other in Arabic, with French words mixed in. My mother called my dad “Cherie.” The singsong of their voices was tender and affectionate, their expressions frozen in time and unchanged since they had left Lebanon in 1949.

The taboule gone, my mom washed the bowl and laid it on a towel on the counter, swatting the hair from her eyes and exhaling deeply. She smiled at me and checked that her nail polish wasn’t ruined. Sleepy, I went to the living room, dragging my feet on the tan shag carpet to find my father asleep in front of the TV, still in his suit and shoes. I reached up and changed the channel to “I Dream of Jeanie.” I sat on the rug near my father as he dozed, the sensation of taboule and the nearness of my mother still present in my body.

Leslie Lisbona has been part of a writing workshop for ten years. She recently had her first piece published in Synchronized Chaos. She is the child of immigrants from Beirut, Lebanon, and grew up in Queens, NY. Most of her writing has to do with her upbringing.

Untitled

30 October 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Melissa Donati-Pizirusso

I am a helium filled balloon
Released from the hands
Of a little girl
Staring in wonder at the sky

A balloon that floats freely
Up
Into the wind
Caught in branches
Waiting for the next breeze to set me free

Descending then to the ground
And then picked up
By another breeze
Sending me to low points and then high
Low
High
Sweeping at the ground
Then dropping
Into a foliage of leaves
Waiting to be lifted again

By a breeze
That may never come
Or one that may bring me even lower

Until once again
I am picked up
by the hands of a child
that holds me like a treasure
to their chest.

Melissa Donati-Pizirusso is a Mom, Writer, and Assistant Principal. Her love of writing and poetry goes back to when she was a child writing numerous stories and poems on a daily basis. She is a graduate of SUNY Albany where she studied Sociology, Italian and Journalism.

Barry and friend, photo provided by author

Polio

23 July 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by David Blumenfeld

August 1, 1944

I’m almost seven. Mother tells me she’s going to have a baby. I think: That’s why her belly has gotten so big. Smiling, she says how nice it will be to have a little brother or sister. I’ll be the big brother. I feel grown up and hope for a boy.

October 3, 1944

Mother returns from the hospital with baby Barry, a fair-skinned, blond, blue-eyed boy with a tiny, button nose. In our family, only Bubby Rebecca, my paternal grandmother, has blue eyes and everyone says that’s where baby Barry’s eyes came from. I wonder: Do eye colors come from relatives? How? But there isn’t a single blond in our family and Barry is a tow head, whose yellow-white hair is like a gold and silver crown. A flaxen-haired babe has miraculously been born to a dark-skinned, eastern-European Jewish family! Friends needle Dad that someone else got into the act. I ask myself: What does that mean? But Dad adores his blue-eyed baby. Does he adore him more than he adores me? Me, who was here first? Aunt Gert and Uncle Murph, who have no children, treat Barry like their own child, the one they want but, for some reason, cannot have. As the years pass, Barry becomes even more beautiful: the bright-eyed, good-natured, golden-haired child loved by all.

Summer, 1951

Every parent and every child old enough to read the daily paper or see newsreels in movie theaters lives in fear of polio, the crippling disease that typically strikes the young, especially in the summer. It has even struck President Roosevelt, though the press keeps it hidden. Newsreels show physically stunted young polio victims with crutches and leg braces trying awkwardly to relearn to walk. Worse yet are those who lay prone, encased in an “iron lung,” or early respirator, a huge box that covers them from neck to foot, leaving them immobile, imprisoned alive in a metal tomb. I shudder and pray to God neither I nor anyone I care about will suffer such a horrific fate.

September 14 – 16, 1951

Barry goes to a summer camp and after a few days, returns home with a violent illness. I try to read to him but he is too sick to listen. Mom and Dad rush him to the hospital, where they learn that he has bulbar polio, the most devastating form of the disease. The next day the family gathers at Grandpa Ben’s and Bubby Rebecca’s apartment waiting for news from Mother who is at the hospital by Barry’s side. After what seems like endless hours, Mother staggers into the apartment, her face bloodless and ghost-like, and collapses into a chair. “He’s dead,” she says, grimacing and clearly in shock. After a second’s pause, there bursts from the rest of us a wail the likes of which I have never heard before and, God willing, I shall never hear again. It says: Everything worthwhile, everything good and bright in the world, has vanished and can never be restored.

September 17, 1951

In the following days, Dad cries only briefly but looks as though someone has kicked him brutally in the stomach. Then he sucks it up and soldiers on, hiding his grief as best he can. Everyone fears that Mother, who has a history of mental illness, will collapse. But she does no such thing. She collects herself and, as if on autopilot, mechanically and with blank eyes, arranges for the funeral and for sitting shiva, the week-long Jewish mourning period when friends gather at the home of the bereaved family to support them. In the next few days, with a stolid and impassive visage, she does much else and makes many wise decisions. For more than a decade she speaks of Barry almost daily, visiting his grave at least once a week.

Years later, while rummaging through a drawer of old clothing in a room Barry and I shared, I find a little, neatly-ironed suit of his that she has preserved as a keepsake. I suspect that it is not the only such memento mori buried in the house to remind her of him. Polio casts a pall over my mother for the rest of her life.

1952

1952 sees the worst polio outbreak in U.S. history: 57,000 cases, primarily among children. In 1953, Jonas Salk successfully tests a polio vaccine and, despite some early setbacks, hope arises that someday polio will be eradicated. By 2020, the three most common forms of the disease are declared eradicated everywhere but in Asia and are endemic only in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Yet new strains of the disease are beginning to emerge and as we have learned, viruses that threaten one country, threaten us all. Caveat mundus: Let the world beware! May there never again be polio deaths like my brother Barry’s.

(Editor’s Note: On 22 July 2022, the New York Times publishes the story Rare Case of Polio Prompts Alarm and an Urgent Investigation in New York. “Health officials in Rockland County…urged the public to get shots as they investigated whether the disease had spread to others.”)

David Blumenfeld (aka Dean Flowerfield) is an 84-year-old retired philosophy professor and associate dean who only recently returned to writing stories, poetry, and children’s literature, which he abandoned in his thirties to devote full-time to philosophy. He is happy to have returned to a road only briefly taken.

red blue and white fluid abstract painting — Photo by Anni Roenkae on Pexels.com

Some Evidence

20 March 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Jen Prince

There’s a little church in my hands—
supplicant fingers that petition the kitchen table, fracture,
find broken only the bones that matter.

Hound the relics of god’s own garbage that thrum under my skin, gentle and wicked,
blinkering as through a veil.

What I find I pull close, press in, tuck under my chin. Now
this is the dark-eyed child who takes after her mother.
This is the daughter who speaks softer.

Down the hall the dog is barking, marking the wail of a plane through wafer-thin walls—
there’s a certain pitch at which my brain just breaks.

My voracious father, a dog lover, has been known to lose his appetite from time to time.
Has been known to gorge instead on godly ferocity, the muscles in his jaw flickering
like the first light of the world.

I know you better than you know yourself, he said: when I met your mother,
I warned her I could yell.

In my own home moonlight passes over like a benign plague or stranger’s favor,
and an owl calls me alone from sleep.
The iron words lie hot on my tongue, drowned and hissing.

Jen Prince is a writer and editor based in Memphis, TN. Her poetic work centers on ideas of separation, memory, and myth. Her poem “Brittle Mirror” has been accepted for publication at the Scapegoat Review.

cars on road in city during night time — Photo by KEHN HERMANO on Pexels.com

And It Must Follow

7 March 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Dianne Thomas

The night belongs
to bats and rats
and alley cats

to coons and possums
and moonflower blossoms

to kids in cars
who frequent the bars

to cruise and drink
and do the things they only think

about in daytime
when they must tow the line

to earn their keep
and only dream of sleep

to do as we did
when we were kids

our candles burning at both ends
shunning family to be with friends

dancing, laughing, singing
our ears ringing

as we moved into the street
with the world at our feet

or so we thought
until happiness could not be bought

with charm or looks
we couldn’t even get our hooks

on real affection
discovering life’s true complexion

and slowly we turned
to what could be earned

in sunlit hours
in concrete towers

to a daily grind
always keeping top of mind

the whistle blow
the freedom to go

but now to the nest
to be at rest

with comforts we’ve gained
because we’ve strained

for one more day
with dreams put away

till nightfall ends the pain
and bats and rats and alley cats
rule again

Dianne Thomas is a Detroit-based writer whose work has appeared in Octavo, Flashquake, The Threepenny Review, and other online and print publications.