Tag: family (Page 1 of 4)

Memory, a Satellite

1 April 2025 / Editor

Poetry by KB Ballentine

Oh, my grandmother’s hibiscus!
Her begonias were bright and beautiful,
but her hibiscus was magic. Sunbaked
and salt-sprayed, filaments and anthers
waving wild in Florida rain brewed an elixir
that made the hummingbirds chirp.
An instant brightness, that shocking red
(matching my skin one summer),
where bees hummed praises and nuzzled
into the honeyed hearts. Forget the oranges
bulging behind blossoms, hibiscus let me know
I was home—wherever I happened to be.

KB Ballentine’s latest collection All the Way Through was published in November 2024 from Sheila-Na-Gig Inc. Other books are published with Blue Light Press, Iris Press, Middle Creek Publishing, and Celtic Cat Publishing. Additional writing has been published in North Dakota Quarterly, Atlanta Review and Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal. Learn more at www.kbballentine.com.

Sestina for a Beloved Son

1 April 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Alice Collinsworth

I start the journey to see him before dawn, a long stretch
of interstate highways and two-lane roads to follow,
traveling alone a long distance with only the voice
of my mapping app for company. I turn
on the radio for a while, looking for distraction, but time
passes slowly nonetheless. I turn it off again. Straight

ahead is the entrance ramp to I-35. “Drive straight
for 148 miles,” Google instructs me. This stretch
is well known, comfortable, traveled many times
to class reunions or family gatherings in Kansas. “Follow
the yellow brick road,” as they say there. I turn
my mind to autopilot and talk to myself, my voice

rising above the hum of the tires; the only voice
answering is the one in my head (not always on straight,
I admit, muddling conversations). I can turn
that inner voice off sometimes, but not today. It’s a stretch
to engage with it, honestly, but we reminisce together. I follow
a red Peterbilt to Wichita, making good time.

From there it’s a less-familiar route, traveled only a few times,
northeast to Kansas City to see my son. His voice
on the phone had sounded so earnest, beseeching – so I follow
the compass of my heart, though our relationship was never straight-
forward. There were years we barely spoke, long stretches
of distance and silence. He has reached out now, so it’s my turn

to make the effort, to reach back. We had issues, but he’s turned
out so very well, and I yearn to be there now. This time
I’m determined to connect, to build that bridge. I stop to stretch
my legs and buy coffee at a truck stop, where the cashier’s voice
reminds me of my own late mother – a strait-
laced woman if there ever was one, who followed

her Bible’s rules doggedly. One of the rare, true followers
of Christ, she called herself. “You must turn
from your evil ways,” she would admonish my son. “Strait
and narrow is the gate, you know.” She railed at him so many times
that we stopped going to her, stopped calling. I don’t want my own voice
to sound like hers. Love needs to bend, to expand, to stretch

and embrace. I follow the guidance of the GPS and not my mom this time,
turning onto the last highway that leads to the voice of my dear son,
heading straight to him, stretching out my arms.

Alice Collinsworth worked in journalism, writing and media relations during her career and is now happily retired with her cat, Cookie, to keep her company. Her poems and stories have appeared in several online journals and local collections. She has won numerous awards in regional contests. She lives in Oklahoma.

Reminiscence

8 March 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Kandi Maxwell

My mother’s fingernails are perfectly painted a deep shade of red. She sits upright in her maroon leather recliner, a soft white pillow on her lap. Sunlight filters in through the sliding glass doors near the kitchen in her Southern California home. Outside are roses, geraniums, begonias. A small, green-grass lawn. I sit beside my mother. It’s lunchtime. Today, her caregiver has made a pretty plate of Wheat Thin crackers, each topped with cottage cheese and a dab of ruby-red strawberry jam in the center.

With her left hand, my mother holds her plate on top of the pillow. She uses her right hand to daintily pinch her thumb and forefinger on the edges of a cracker. Slowly, so slowly and carefully, she lifts the cracker to her mouth. She chews her cracker thoroughly before reaching for another. Her movements are measured, as she savors each bite.

When lunch is over, my mother naps and I chat quietly with my two sisters who are also visiting. The day is tranquil, as we reminisce about our childhoods. My mother, who isn’t really sleeping, occasionally throws her thoughts into the conversation making us laugh. Two days later, I fly back home to Northern California.

Although my mother had been suffering from heart failure, I didn’t know those moments would be our ending. I didn’t know how vividly memories of that scene would evoke my mother’s essence. Even now, four years later, when I miss her and need her familiarity, I picture her brightly painted fingernails; her unhurried manner; her humor. Her gracefulness throughout her physical decline and her strength in confronting mortality.

Kandi Maxwell is a creative nonfiction writer living in Northern California. Her stories have been published in Hippocampus Magazine, KYSO Flash, Raven’s Perch, Wordrunner eChapbooks, and other literary journals and anthologies. Her memoir, Snow After Fire, was released in 2023 by Legacy Book Press. Learn about Kandi’s writing at kandimaxwell.com.

Family Flock

23 February 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Danita Dodson

Daily I count turkeys on my land—
one, two, three, four, five,
six, seven, eight, nine—
willing this family unit
to stay together forever, wishing
to goodness that not one of them
will ever be lost from the circle
when winds blow or rifles rise,
hoping they’ll keep close to home
in the unknowns of shifting storms.

At twilight, they nest in the trees,
finding refuge in the folds of earth,
the sky a quilt of fading autumn light
that draws them near as one,
like a cabin’s warmth at day’s end,
kinship a shield against the cold.
And I pray for them as a brood—
one, two, three, four, five,
six, seven, eight, nine—
what I’ve prayed for my own family.

Danita Dodson is the author of three poetry collections: Trailing the Azimuth, The Medicine Woods, and Between Gone and Everlasting. Her poems appear in Salvation South and elsewhere. She is the 2024 winner of the Poetry Society of Tennessee’s Best of Fest. She lives in Sneedville, Tennessee. More at danitadodson.com.

Tilt

13 December 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Kersten Christianson

Under the Falling
Yellow Cedar moon
we solstice. Beef roast

in the slow cooker,
ham bakes in the oven.
Stars and moon align,

twinkle in cavernous
bookshelves, where
the printed word basks

in the spoken. My dad
and brother taste test
each other’s pickled fish,

banter over the better.
Gloria’s cake sports
jingle bells, boughs

from last weekend’s
tree falling in a windstorm.
We have come together

before and will again
to celebrate the U-turn
in darkness; name those

no longer with us
in this life, but within
memory’s reach.

Kersten Christianson is a poet and English teacher from Sitka, Alaska. She is the author of Curating the House of Nostalgia (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2020) and Something Yet to Be Named (Kelsay Books, 2017). She serves as poetry editor of Alaska Women Speak. Kersten savors road trips, bookstores, and smooth ink pens.

Imprint

11 October 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Carolyn Chilton Casas

How much of my essence
is imprinted for perpetuity
on the objects I hold dear?

My favorite coffee cup
stamped with a dragonfly,
stashed on a higher shelf,
waiting to be filled with a favorite,
freshly ground roast,
frothed cashew cream stirred in,
cinnamon sprinkled on top.

The colored notepads where I write
to my heart’s abandon,
or the dusty keyboard
with its smooth, black mouse cupped
for hours in my right hand.

The special pruning shears
and gloves only I use
while speaking kindly to each plant
and flower I trim.

A fraction of my being
infused into items often touched.

The rose-gold, ruby diamond ring
my grandfather presented
to my mother’s mother
almost a hundred years ago,
her legacy, the one she placed
in my sixteen-year-old palm
days before she died.

Carolyn Chilton Casas writes for energy and wellness magazines in several countries. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies including The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal. More of Carolyn’s work can be found in her second collection of poetry Under the Same Sky.

Photo by Valentina Locatelli on Unsplash

Way Back When

1 August 2024 / Editor

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.

Washington Heights

1 June 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Leslie Lisbona

Two weeks ago, Aaron moved out of our house and into his first apartment. It is 20 minutes away in Washington Heights. He is 25 years old, and this is a milestone I should be proud of.

When he was born, I gazed at his pale skin and dark hair. I felt like I had been given a prize, or I had won the Olympics, or I was as strong as a woman from the Amazon.

I also couldn’t stop crying. My sister, Debi, didn’t understand. “You are a mother,” she cooed. But I cried because I loved Aaron so much. The loving was an ache. I could not live if anything happened to him. When someone else carried him, I leaned closer, hovering.

When Aaron was two-and-a-half and a big brother to five-month-old Oliver, his father and I separated and eventually divorced. Val would take both children for the weekend, and I spent hours panicking that they weren’t within reach. I was wretched; I couldn’t stand to be alone in my apartment without them.

Every mother thinks her child is beautiful, but Aaron really was. At four, his eyelashes were full, with eyebrows that defined his round face, lips that were heart-shaped and impossibly red. Whenever he laughed, you could see a space between his two front teeth.

When he was six, his father moved back in with us. We were living in a rental building in Queens. Aaron wore red Pumas and jumped in the air to show Val how high his new sneakers made him go. When he was eleven, he and Oliver watched as a judge married us for the second time in our living room, and then we all went out for breakfast. Our boys were the only witnesses.

At 16, tall, thin, with thick wavy hair, he said he wanted to go away to college. I prepared myself, thinking I would come undone when he left, but he was so happy when we dropped him off in Albany that I was okay.

Shortly before he graduated, we moved again, to a house in New Rochelle, and we got a dog. “Why are you getting a dog?” he said. “I’ll be gone soon.” I had to explain that the dog was not for him.

Then the pandemic happened. Aaron moved back home. His graduation was on Zoom. He wore a borrowed cap and a gown that was too short. I baked a pound cake, and we toasted him in our backyard.

The only job he could get was at a supermarket, behind the deli counter. He was cold, his feet hurt, and he was berated daily. After that he had three more jobs that were backbreaking or demeaning. Finally he found a job he liked and a girlfriend he loved. He saved the money I told him he needed to go out on his own. It took four years longer than he had planned. I was grateful for this bonus time, to have him under my roof a little longer.

I’m glad he has moved out – it is as it should be. But I will miss having coffee with him in the mornings and lunch together a few hours later. I will miss hearing his voice as he talked on his phone in his room. I will miss the times he asked me to shave the back of his neck. Or the walks we took together on the wooded trail near our house as the dog ran between us.

Since he left, I have found reasons to go into his old bedroom. I changed the sheets, mopped the floor, discovered his lost slippers in the back of his closet, and dusted his model cars.

The day he moved out he came back to New Rochelle to drop off the rental truck, and then we decided to have dinner together. The next night he came over for Hannukah and presented me with a card and a gift. Two days later I went to his apartment because he forgot to pack his medication. The next day we dropped off a piece of furniture and then had pizza in his neighborhood. Later that week he came home to see Oliver, who had returned from his semester in Italy. That night he slept in our house, and the two boys were together the following day, laughing the way they did when they were little and so happy to see each other. A few days after that we all went to eat Persian food at Ravagh in the city for Val’s birthday. The next day we met in Queens for another birthday party at my sister’s apartment. I know there will be countless more soccer games to watch on TV with Val and Oliver. And dinners of zucchini souffle, majedra, and macaroni au gratin.

“Aaron,” I said, “I see you more than ever!”

“I miss you,” he said.

I didn’t lose him. He just doesn’t live with me anymore.

Leslie Lisbona recently had several pieces published in Synchronized Chaos, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, The Bluebird Word, The Jewish Literary Journal, miniskirt magazine, Yalobusha Review, Tangled Locks, Koukash Review, and others. She is the child of immigrants from Beirut, Lebanon, and grew up in Queens, NY. Read Hell’s Kitchen, a companion piece to this essay published in The Bluebird Word in March.

Everything You’ve Ever Loved

1 April 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Robin Greene

Forty years have passed, and this morning you find yourself
alone at sunrise—red and orange overtaking the forested
mountain in front of you, as you sit there, as early light
opens the day, turning it into something mutable.

Most of your life is behind you, but sitting there
on that old wicker chair, you hear a mourning dove’s
coo from a distant tree as a murder of black crows
sweeps the sky. Only then, you remember the midwife

lifting your firstborn from your body—his initial cry marking
the next two decades of your life—a life now almost over.
Then, you’re at a hospital, hearing your mother’s labored
breathing as she lies there, covered in white blankets,

mouth open, eyes closed, and you encourage her release.
Forty years dissolve into weightless memory on this chair,
as you realize that everything you’ve ever loved will leave you,
and that the cooing of the mourning dove is not so premature.

Robin Greene is a former English professor and current part-time yoga and writing instructor, living in NC. She’s published five books: Real Birth: Women Share Their Stories (nonfiction Kindle bestseller); A Shelf Life of Fire (novel); Lateral Drift (poetry); Memories of Light (poetry); and Augustus: Narrative of a Slave Woman (novel).

Image of author as young girl — Photo courtesy of author

Lucky Girl

1 April 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Carol E. Anderson

It’s 1950. I’m three years old, standing in our backyard next to a patch of wildflowers as tall as I am. My tiny right fist peaks out from the sleeve of my oversized double-breasted coat with crisscrossing lapels. Chubby knees extend into sturdy legs that lead to small feet housed in white anklet socks and polished white tennis shoes. Whisps of blonde hair flow back in the wind. My bangs, short and choppy, look like I took the shears to them myself. Atop my head is a tiny woolen cap.

My face is turned up. Eyes squint as I smile at my mom with the camera—my gleeful expression punctuated by a slight suggestion of a dimple in my left cheek. I’m anticipating something wonderful. The zoo? The circus? A birthday party?

I’m unaware that by the end of my fifth year, my father will suffer a visual disability wrought by incompetent doctors. He will never work again. My mother, a secretary, will numb her fingers typing away in a tiny cubicle to support our family, working for a boss half as smart as she. I will wish her to be like all the other moms and stay at home, fix me snacks after school, and teach me how to ride a bike. My brother will withdraw into a world of thoughts and books. We will never be friends.

Standing on the lawn in my miniature peacoat, I don’t realize that by the time I’m fifteen, I’ll be rejected by the Baptist church for loving a woman. I’ll begin to understand the word hypocrite. I’ll believe my parents’ teachings of love, kindness, generosity, and fairness are principles everyone strives to live by—tenets issued by God. I won’t know these tenets have exclusionary clauses invisible to innocent eyes, that I will witness Christian fundamentalism grow in twisted power and gird its flocks to act with naked cruelty on the belief that difference is a sin.

I don’t realize that at the age of twenty-one, I’ll be outed by my college classmates, introducing terror into my daily life. I’ll be astonished that all my efforts to guard this secret are as useless as a sheet of transparent tissue paper.

I am unaware that at age twenty-six, in my attempt to be straight, my boyfriend will dump me on our six-week road trip to be with a woman he met at his brother’s wedding the week before—and he will not repay the $800 he owes me.

Looking up at the camera without knowledge of the need for hope, I don’t know that my father will die one month before my twenty-eighth birthday, and that I’ll survive—that I will remain wrapped in the shimmering cords of his love even decades after he’s gone.

I am unaware that at age thirty-two I’ll start my own business as an organizational consultant and will coach leaders to inspire people rather than control them—that this work will help me understand the complexity of human beings, and their scars.

I don’t know that on my fiftieth birthday I’ll start a non-profit called Rebellious Dreamers to lift up women to reclaim their dreams—that it will last twenty-five years and eventually fund microloans for women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

I don’t realize that when I turn fifty-four, I’ll meet my great love, each of us destined for the other, that knowing her will smooth the jagged edges of terror and loss, that we will build a home on nine acres of land surrounded by trees and be rich in our chosen family of friends.

Standing with my beloved, in our own garden now, I’m anticipating something wonderful.

Carol E. Anderson is a life coach whose passions are travel and photography. She holds a doctorate in spiritual studies, and an MFA in creative nonfiction. She is the author of You Can’t Buy Love Like That: Growing Up Gay in the Sixties. Carol lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.