Tag: family (Page 3 of 4)

Nourish

12 December 2022 / Editor

Special Selection for the 2022/2023 Winter Holiday Issue

Nonfiction by Becky A. Benson

I still have the tiny baking set my mom bought for me from the Tupperware catalog
in the early eighties. The mixing bowls, various and hideous colors of burnt orange, sungold yellow, and dirt brown, (although today I suppose they would call it espresso) were a 1970s left over influence that looked like the color palette had been borrowed from a bag of Reese’s Pieces. The rolling pin is a free spinning wood tool with red painted handles, and of course, the bake ware is metal. Impossibly small sheet pans, muffin tins, loaf pans and even a pie plate.

My stay-at-home-mother made everything from scratch. Everything. And I would
sidle right up next to her in a chair pushed to the edge of the counter and mime along with the baking. My favorite was when she allotted me the extra pie crust to roll out because the extra would always be baked with cinnamon and sugar. It was one of my favorite treats. It still is.

Baking along with my mom was an act of love, one I still practice today. I loved
spending that time with her. Her mother’s recipe for southern chocolate pudding pie is our family’s all-time favorite dessert, and holiday staple. Propelled by both nostalgia and hope for the future, I had the recipe printed on tea towels as a gift for everyone in the family. My eighteen-year-old daughter is now the fourth generation to make this holiday and family gathering staple. Her first job was as a baker at a local bakery and she came home beaming with pride every time she expertly crafted a new treat.

This last Thanksgiving my brother looked on intently as we began making the pie.
Calculating and reprogramming our movements in his mind, filing them into a folder he could open at a later date, and asked my mom and me to describe, in detail every step of the pie making process as we stood at my mom’s stove and did just that.

“You have to temper the eggs,” I told him. “It’s a very important for creating the
custard in your pie and getting it to set up correctly without having scrambled eggs end up throughout the chocolate pudding. Wisk the eggs in a separate bowl, then add some of the chocolate mixture a little at a time, mixing as you go. Next, return the egg mixture to the pot with the rest of the chocolate mixture and stir until it’s nice and bubbly.”

After returning home he promptly and proudly sent us a picture of his very first
homemade pie. It was perfect.

As I knead the dough that has risen in my kitchen next to the warmth of the oven, I
think of the process of creation. Bread making teaches patience with its often, multiple intervals of rising. A science unto itself, baking relies on the correct proportions, of mixing and combining ingredients to create a new chemical compound. A flavorful chemistry experiment. I smell the yeasty scent wafting up to meet my nose as I pull and shape the ball of dough on my counter. I think of the nourishment it will bring my family, the joy over the comfort of it, and the relishing of the taste it provides.

It’s taken many years to become a skilled bread maker, and it’s a skill I’m proud of.
A fresh loaf of warm bread is always a welcomed offering. Creating these devourable masterpieces feels a lot like offering my love. The process is also an act of self-care for me in many ways. It accomplishes the necessary task of providing food, but it’s also a creative outlet where I can dream up new concoctions and combine them in a way to delight the senses.

In the kitchen I can tune out the world. I can focus on the task at hand because it
requires every ounce of my attention to be successful. Here I can leave the worries of my day behind and add a little goodness back into my immediate world. The meals and memories shared in the kitchen have the power to stick with us throughout our lives.

My confident, self-sufficient, enterprising young woman of a daughter once
famously told me, when I sarcastically quipped that she, “apparently didn’t need me for anything,” that she still needed me to make dinner. Then capped it off with, “I’m just a kid. I can’t use the stove.” She was five at the time and happily reports (often) that she’s able to use the stove these days. Moreover, she prefers to do it all on her own now. Sometimes I’ll come home to the most delightful treats I had nothing to do with. I couldn’t be prouder.

I wish I could have spent all these years baking with both my girls, laughing together and dusting their noses with powdered sugar as they tried to sneak a lick off the spoon. The memories we were never afforded the opportunity to make wash over me in a flood. Who would my youngest daughter be had she not died of Tay-Sachs disease at the age of three years old? Would she love chocolate pie as much as the rest of us? Would she, now at should-be-fourteen, also use the stove all on her own? I’ll never know.

My nine-year-old son stands in my doorway as I type and sheepishly asks if maybe
we can make something together today. As a child who spent the entirety of his short life in an unfortunate, harmful, and unstable placement in the foster care system before coming to us just a week shy of his seventh birthday, he relishes in any time we spend simply doing things with and including him. Finding his voice to speak up for even these small requests has been a big step in learning his own agency, as well as connection, and support.

Of course, we can make something together today. I know just the thing. After all,
who doesn’t love chocolate pie?

Becky A. Benson‘s work has appeared in print, online, and various television and podcast outlets. Becky serves as a public speaker, holds a degree in psychology, and works for the National Tay-Sachs & Allied Diseases Association serving families of terminally ill children as the organization’s Family Services Manager.

photography of green pine tree — Photo by Irina Iriser on Pexels.com

The Christmas Tree Shop

4 December 2022 / Editor

Special Selection for the 2022/2023 Winter Holiday Issue

Fiction by Derville Quigley

There is a Christmas Tree Shop where the chemist used to be. I work there. Today an old man and his daughter passed through. The man had a slight American accent and the look of a returned expat. He was dapper, carried a blackthorn stick, wore a long tweed coat and a knitted woollen hat.

“We would like one of your finest trees,” said his daughter.

“At a good price,” he piped up.

She smiled lovingly at him while throwing her eyes to heaven. With that he turned on his heel and walked to the far end, to explore the shop on his own.

“I love the smell. Daddy, don’t you just love the smell?”

He was ignoring her, lifting his stick to poke the trunk of a tree on display. The sign said, Non-shed Trees For Sale and he saw hundreds of pine needles scattered on the ground.

“We normally have an artificial one, but this year I have persuaded Mum and Dad to get a real one,” she told me.

“What do you think of that tree in the corner, Dad?”

“No,” was his adamant reply.

“Tell me about them,” she said.

So I told her how they were all Noble fir grown on the side of a mountain in County Wicklow. Grand, full trees. Sixteen years old. No trimming necessary.

“What do you think Dad?”

“I think you’re wasting your time,” he replied.

Her smile dropped and she walked over to the trees still packed in their netting. Bing Crosby sang of days merry and bright. There was a low fog and the lights glowed red, green and blue on the tree outside the courthouse. Meanwhile the old man was bent over his stick, looking at the pine needles lying everywhere. For a precious moment, the three of us were suspended in silence, in the fog.

“Show me one, which is seven foot and full right up to the top. I don’t want gaps and I want a bushy one,” she said sharply.

“Dad do you want to sit down?” she asked.

“No,” he replied.

“Okay we’ll take this one,” she said pointing to a large tree, wrapped and close at hand.

“Dad I’m going to pay for it and don’t tell Mum how much it cost.”

He took no notice of her. “I’m just going to bring the car back around and go to the bank machine. You stay here.”

She left the shop and he relaxed although looked weary. I faced the chair towards him and he sat down.

“Which one did she pick?” he asked clutching his stomach.

“This one,” I said.

He looked frail and tired and although genuinely interested he seemed to have more energy when despondent.

“I have birds in my chest,” he said. “I can feel them, their beaks pecking through my ribs. Sometimes they sing to me. There are six of them.”

He smiled with a wink.

“I was in hospital, treated for cancer and the damn bastard thing is back. I tell ya, I’m going to drink a lot of whiskey before I go. When a doctor tells a sick man to carry on as normal and don’t change his lifestyle, that’s when he knows he’s had it. Dr. Dutton told me not to listen to my wife…to do whatever I want to do. Not listen to my wife…and now we’re getting a real tree.”

For a moment he looked terribly frightened and then he started to laugh. We both laughed and snorted as tears streamed down our faces. “It’s getting dark now,” he said, sobered by the thought. She came back red-nosed with her purse in hand.

She was muttering to herself, “I’m going to be all right with the tree. I think I’ll be able to manage it in the car.” She handed me twenty euro.

“Did you ask the girl for a discount?”

“No, Dad, I didn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “‘”I can’t give any discounts. They’re not my trees.” He stood up straight and poked another tree.

“I would have preferred that one myself, anyway I thought our plan was to leave by sunset.”

“Dad, I still have to collect the turkey,” she said, and with that pulled the large, awkward, prickly tree out the door.

Derville Quigley is a writer and poet based in the Netherlands. She is co-founder of Strange Birds, a migratory writing collective and a co-organiser of Writers Flock, an international writers’ festival. Visit www.dervillequigley.net for more info.

flowers during golden hour — Photo by Irina Iriser on Pexels.com

Sunrise Dances

21 November 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Hawke Trumbo

My mother taught me to slow dance.

She placed my left hand on her shoulder,
my right hand in her left.
Her right palm rested on the curve
of my spine.

Pre-fab flooring supported our steps
as my feet shadowed her glide.

We swayed in a Virginia valley
to the tune
of a Rocky Mountain hiiiiigh Colorado.

We saved time in a bottle,
lulled by the easy silence
of our pine and oak audience.

We twirled in kitchens,
perfected our timing to strums
’bout poems prayers and promises.

We pivoted as a teenager
found her feet and a mother learned
to loosen her grip.

Our arms stayed firm,
so we never lost each other.

Hawke Trumbo (they/them) is an East Coast writer and graduate of Chatham University’s Creative Writing MFA program. Their work has appeared in Coffin Bell and for the Western Pennsylvania Disability History & Action Consortium.

Never Too Late

8 October 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Nick Wynne

I had no experience with fatherhood, nor did I have the kind of experience with my father that would have helped me to be a better one. My father was an alcoholic, and I and all my siblings bore the brunt of that. He could be kind, but he could also be harsh and emotionally abusive. Despite his shortcomings, he and my mother made sure that we grew up with strong moral values and work ethic. Although we went through periods of severe economic stress as a family, they sacrificed to ensure that we were fed, clothed, and loved. Tragically, as a family we didn’t articulate our love for each other until after his death. It was there, but we didn’t express it.

I must confess I never really understood my father until I was in my mid-30s. Only then did I understand that he was a brilliant man who could have been anything he wanted to with an education but was forced to leave school in the third grade and work to support his mother and family. We, his own family, were five in number, and he worked hard to support us despite knowing that every job he took involved hard labor and minimum wages. Nevertheless, he persisted. It is no wonder that he took to drink to relieve his frustrations at not being able to provide more. Hard to understand, but understandable.

I do know that I never told my father I loved him until he was on his death bed. My brother Joe and I were in his room where he was in a coma. Joe left for some reason, and I was there alone with him. He briefly opened his eyes and looked at me. I felt compelled to tell him face-to-face, “I never told you this, you old sonofabitch, but I love you.” He blinked his eyes, smiled a little smile, closed his eyes, and died.

Nick Wynne is a retired educator and published author. He is a native of McRae, Georgia but lives in Rockledge, Florida. His latest book is Cousin Bob: The World War II Experiences of Robert Morris Warren, DSC. His website is www.nickwynnebooks.com.

The Place Between

29 August 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Susan Pope

Nothing but white. Walls, comforter, window shades, pale light leaking around the edges. Am I awake or dreaming? Is it night or day? I’ve lost all tethers.

The fury that delivered us here to Iceland spun out. In the calm, bird song. I slip from the warmth of my husband’s side, fumble for hat, coat, gloves, binoculars, and gently open the door.

“Where are you going?”

My eighteen-year-old grandson lifts his head from a pillow in the next bed.

“For a walk.”

“At 4:30 in the morning?”

He, at least, has come to rest on local time, while my body hovers between oceans and continents, time zones and eras. We pause between our home in Alaska and our destination, Paris, where we’ll join the rest of the family for a grand tour of Europe.

Moist air skims my cheeks as I hike a worn path to the lake. Steam lifts from the shore, drifting up from thick black mud. No other humans stir, but the birds sing, each in its own language. In the distance, whooper swans trumpet to each other, surely bowing and weaving their long, elegant necks in a courtship dance. Close by, Arctic terns, bodies sleek and silver in the luminous light, hover, swoop, snatch fish from the smooth water, and hum their raspy tunes.

I imagine a tall, sturdy Viking woman walking this same path. She’s slipped out of her sod hut, leaving her husband and children tucked beneath their sheepskin robes, on her way to fish for Arctic char or steal eggs from bird nests along the shore. She feeds her family.

By contrast, here I am, a small, American grandmother in a blue and purple hat, wandering with no other purpose than to spy on birds and guess their names.

This extravagant journey was my idea, a gathering of three generations before my teenaged grandchildren flee my grown daughter’s nest. I hope that a glimpse of the wider world will be my legacy to them. But, more honestly, the trip is a gift to me, as I turn seventy. If I can just hold my family close one more time…. What? They will love me? Remember me? Thank me?

Eric Erickson, the developmental psychologist, believed that the task of the last phase of life is to reconcile integrity with despair. If we look back on our lives and feel a sense of accomplishment, then we will feel complete, that our life had value. If we look back and feel guilty that we have not met our goals, then we will feel hopeless. The ultimate goal in this phase is wisdom. But, I feel neither wise nor hopeless, nor ready to declare this the final chapter of my life.

I reach a small clearing beside the lake. A weathered sign proclaims this ground—heated from the earth’s molten core—a sacred place. People once traveled here for healing. Now, it’s overgrown and neglected. Perhaps no one needs to make a healing pilgrimage anymore. I move to the center of the weeds and wait for a tingle of enlightenment. Instead, I feel only the warm ground at my feet and cool breeze on my face.

My mother turned seventy the year my daughter turned twenty-one. Their birthdays were two days apart, so we held a double celebration, my daughter reaching adulthood, my mother, wisdom, or at least longevity. I discounted my mother’s life then. I tried my best to be nothing like her. She had no interest in education, career, travel, or anything broader than taking care of husband and family. By contrast, I layered my life with diplomas, careers, and travel to exotic places. It was never quite enough.

I turn back, heading up the hill to the old school turned tourist hostel. Just as I fumble for my key, the night clerk rushes to open the door for me. He must have been watching the crazy woman roaming among the birds.

When I enter our room, it smells of sweat and damp clothes. Old man and boy man. I slide off my coat and shoes and slip back into the cocoon for a few more minutes, close to my men with their soft snores and grunts.

I don’t know if my mother felt wise when she died twelve years after her seventieth birthday. I do know that she was content to fiercely love the small cluster of people she kept close to her. Maybe that’s enough of a legacy for anyone to leave.

Susan Pope writes about nature, travel, and family. Her work has appeared in Pilgrimage, Under the Sun, Cirque: A Literary Journal of the Pacific Rim, Hippocampus, Burrow Press Review, BioStories, and Alaska Magazine, among others. Her writing reflects intimate ties to the North and a restless pursuit of faraway places.

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.

Familial Territory

10 May 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Jessica (Tyner) Mehta

You told me you looked like your father,
your brother like your mother,
but that’s not what I saw in the Mumbai tea house–
what everyone told you was wrong,
a lie from their eyes. Your mother
engulfs you both, in the cacao black
eyes and teeth crowded as a morning train.

Your father, he’s slipped into your innards,
entrenched in your turned down chin,
arms frozen across chest, the cold set
of your jaw, the distance of your aura.
Your father doesn’t scare me

because all I see is you. You in thirty years,
the you of our past, over-seasoning tradition
and fear with barricades.
I broke them down once,
I can do it again, they all doubt me

and therein lies my power. It’s in my tiny bones,
the reach of my hair, the fray
of my lashes. You know my stubbornness
is thicker than yours, my desire burns brighter
than all the fireworks of Diwali
and your father—the poor man

will see me one day
just as you do.

Jessica (Tyner) Mehta is a multi-award-winning Aniyunwiya, Two-Spirit, queer, interdisciplinary poet and artist. She is currently preparing for her Fulbright Senior Scholar award and her post-doctoral fellowship as the 2022 Forecast Change Lab fellow.

Grandma’s Refrigerator

8 May 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Abigail Mathews

Grandma’s refrigerator is the color of the world. It is everywhere.

When the sky is no longer dark, but painted with rising yellows, then the smell of the kitchen is nearing, and I am reminded of milk jars and oven mitts.

Oh, when the flowers finally bloom, and the yellow petals fall to the mud, I see cigarette smoke wafting out windows, and oven-crisped cookies sliding from the pan onto dirtied white floors, and Grandma’s refrigerator is humming.

And the bumblebees are humming, and their yellow hue is familiar.

If the soil were to be peeled back and the dirt dried by the yellow sun, then the grass would turn yellow and die, and the flower roots would turn yellow and die, and the leaves have turned yellow and died, and I wonder when it became Fall again.

It was just yesterday that the dragonflies nibbled my ankles, and the skin on my shoulders were freckled, wasn’t it? The air crunches again, as does my chest with my fiberglass inhales. My yellow lungs heave like the chest of my grandfather.

The Autumn air brings a stale smell, but it is not a painful stale, because it is the stale smell of grandmother, and you remember how she cooked for you while you sat at the kitchen table picking apart napkins, and she wore an apron lined with yellow lace.

And the lace was as thin as her skin and as yellow as her refrigerator.

Abigail Mathews is a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington where she is pursuing a major in creative writing.

left human hand photo — Photo by Jonas Ferlin on Pexels.com

Where to Start

11 April 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Sara Sherr

Let’s play this backward, that could be the place to start.
Driving home from practice with your dad, fear sang
you’re the worst one on the team, you’re the worst one on the team.

Remember us at Hannukah, you’re a baby with curly hair,
you’re safe, you’re protected, everyone here loves you and always will.
The four of us, forever, you loved your little sister,
you’ll always miss her. You fell asleep with your hand on her arm
at your grandparents’ while the cars rushed by below. Go to sleep now.

Remember it with me, shield your eyes so love doesn’t blind you.
Fear lived inside these stories. But what did the trees say?
Love sung on, floated in the sunlight on the lake
your mom, your girlfriend, lying on the blow up boat and there were no mirrors
and there were no cell phones there was just
the present, the radiant, exalted now.

You never really rode horses, your bike never really got crunched,
you never yanked up a whole garden at its roots. Bravo, my love, I’m proud and
you made it all up. You never got to be a boy but you’re glad about that now, right?

You made it all up. You never got to be a boy, but you’re glad about that now. Right?
You never yanked up a whole garden at its roots. Bravo my love, I’m proud and
you never really rode horses. Your bike never really got crunched.

The present, the radiant, exalted now.
And there were no cell phones there was just
your mom, your girlfriend, lying on the blow up boat and there were no mirrors.
Love sung on, floated in the sunlight on top of the lake.
Fear lived inside these stories. (But what did the trees say?)
Shield your eyes so love doesn’t blind you. Remember it with me.

At your grandparents’, while the cars rushed below, go to sleep now,
you’ll always miss her. You fell asleep with your hand on her arm,
the four of us, forever. You loved your little sister.
You’re safe, you’re protected, everyone here loves you and always will.
Remember us at Hannukah, you’re a baby with curly hair.

You’re the worst one on the team, you’re the worst one on the team.
Driving home from practice, with your dad, fear sang.
That could be the place to start. Let’s play this backward.

Sara Sherr is a writer and high school English teacher who lives in Yarmouth, Maine with her fiancé and their dog. Let’s get in touch: [email protected].

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.