THE LEAVES BY MARCI PURCELL All the leaves crumble under the weight of me. Leaves leaving crumble crumbling weight waiting under me The leavers crumble under the weight of me. They crumble under the weight and leave me They are leaving and I crumble under the weight. Crumbling under the weight of  all  the leaving I leave, crumbling under the wait. I  crumble  under the weight of me leaving The weight of the leaves crumbles us all. We crumble under the wait of the leaves I am waiting under the crumbled leaves. I wait under  leaves  and the  leavers cr ..read more

I WELCOME THE FALL BY DANIELLE ORR The doves and hummingbirds sang their songs to me all summer long, sharing their secrets and knowledge, and sometimes their sorrows. Even the three crows that drank water each day from the fountain outside my kitchen window are now gone. Were they an invention of my imagination, a figment of my desires and brooding nature? Have they gone looking for winter warmth elsewhere? If only I could fly with them, destination unknown. Murmuration is the feeling I can’t find but leads my wings onward. Never lost, following ley lines known to ancestors who wait i ..read more

THE KEY TO ME BY JEAN WIDNER I was given a key. A meaningless key that opens a door, or a box, or a house, but I do not know where. It is a key without a home. Without a name. Just like me on the day they created my first birth certificate. The one sealed away, ignored, and made into an unofficial document by the powers that be. This unnamed child and her key will go elsewhere, to a new family that will adopt her. It never occurs to anyone to wonder who gave a key to this baby girl. I was given a key. Randomly delivered, much like me, now a babe, two months of age. A photo viewed by tw ..read more

MORNING COFFEE AT WIT'S END BY KATHLEEN SHEA KIRSTEIN I painted Morning Coffee at Wit’s End in 2001. Wit’s End was my happy place. I felt a deep peace there. I enjoyed listening to the call of the loons and watching the blue herons at the shore’s edge. The cottage faced west, and the sunsets were beautiful. This lakefront property in New Hampshire was my dream come true. It was the only place in my life where I felt as if I belonged. I knew I had to capture it on a 5” x 7” watercolor card. I needed this moment preserved forever.  Art by Kathleen Shea Kirstein, “Morning Coffee at Wit’s ..read more

FUZZY BY HANNAH ANDREWS Lisbeth knew better. She’d been warned a thousand times.  “Never, ” Mama had said. “Don’t you ever,” Papa said, and their never-evers echoed endlessly inside her head as she sprinted toward the forbidden forest. “Belle! Come back!” Lisbeth cried. Her precious beagle, Belle, had bounded after a bunny, then blurred away, disappearing somewhere past the double tree door. That’s what Lisbeth called it, that spot so far in the distance. The place she didn’t dare go, but was now running towards, where two giant trees stood like sentinels.  Lisbeth only inten ..read more

TREE OF LIFE BY ELISA NICKERSON My biological father is married to a lovely woman named Pat. She is his second wife and is shy and pretty and a bit quiet. My father is like me, loud, gregarious, a talker. Pat observes. She has opened her heart to me which I find beautiful, as neither of us were involved in the creating of me, or in the decisions around my birth, relinquishment, and adoption. My father had told her about my existence when they were dating, the only person he ever told, but the realness of me, that’s quite different than the idea of me. When I met Pat for the first time ..read more

RED GALOSHES BY JULIE MAE PIGOTT I’ve been looking in mirrors. Searching for reflections of belonging. Begging for someone to teach me the undecipherable code of family roots. I look at my birth mother’s high school yearbook photo for evidence. My favorite image was taken four months before she knew she was pregnant with me. I long to find myself within the radiant archetype of her face. “You look just like her!” others kindly say. But I don’t see it. “Your voice just now, it’s so familiar, it sounds just like Gloria’s,” they say. But I have no intrauterine memory of her humming voice ..read more

FINE BY AUDREY B Do answers change, mature monotonous clarifying statements  pressed onto skin  that somehow  visibly invited … “Your parents must be saints!” “Are you adopted?” “What are you?” “Do you want to find your real parents?”  … how are you …  I have grown to ask,  “How did you sleep?”  answers can vary  family, biology queried …  trauma’s politeness. Entitled examination, at any moment, under the sun what can be replied …  you don’t really want to know,  never understand … “I am thankful I have a bed and I didn’t sleep gr ..read more

SHOCKWAVES BY JULIAN WASHIO-COLLETTE My wife, Lisa, and I recently moved from a wilderness setting to the suburbs, from a highly structured environment to a more spontaneous way of life. We now live in a tiny house, which, at 200 square feet, isn’t tiny to us at all since it’s larger than the cabin we lived in for the previous five years. The one peculiarity that has been a challenging adjustment, though, is the low-hanging single-slope ceiling above the loft where we sleep. The ceiling is so low, in fact, that we have to crawl to get up into the loft. And if I am not careful when I ge ..read more

CARING FOR ROCKS BY Anna Grundström There is an old Hindu saying that goes something like this: A person is unable to fill their treasure chest with jewels while it’s still full of rocks.  Three years ago in the early summer, my treasure chest was full of rocks I didn’t know how to unload, so naturally it broke. I looked at rocks and pieces of my treasure chest scattered all over the floor, forming an unpleasant arrangement of things that hurt and things that fought. I tried to pick up the rocks, rough and heavy, but they refused to move. Instead, I tried to collect the pieces of ..read more