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By Martha Ellen Johnson  Like a thief in the night benzodiazepines stole my health. To mask the stresses of child welfare work, to ease the grief of knowing there are humans who intentionally steal innocence from the vulnerable, I took medication I believed safe. The prescribed psychotropic medication that had been aggressively marketed, recklessly delivered and negligently monitored was neurotoxic. Pharmaceutical companies knew the risks, but they did not tell. I was oblivious to the damage it was causing my central nervous system, including my brain; and, later, I was ignorant of the etiology of the pervasive, bizarre symptoms that forced my retirement.
On the lowest footpath, I wandered deeper into a dark world.
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The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
By Jennifer Anne Gordon  You have decided that the relationship is unhealthy, of course it is. You alternate between being the loyal lover and the mistress. So much of this, you blame on this time in your life, on college, on theatre, on your father dying, on boredom. You find yourself on a Monday morning. The play you were in had its final show last night. You visited your father in the hospital. His brother was there, and they had not spoken since your father was let go from his job several years before after too much time away being sick.
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 Photo by Dustin Barlow. The writer shared the following story at Queer to Tell for Pride Fest at the Irish Repertory Theatre in New York City on June 27, 2024: Meet Lindsay. She’s one of my first friends ever and an early latent crush. She has two beauty marks on her left cheek and a Barbra Streisan bob. Adopted from Honduras by two white people, she’s stuck in suburban Virginia like me. Her adoptive parents are super white: Welsh and Irish descent. My mom is from El Salvador and my dad is of broadly British descent. He usually claims “Scottish.” Fast forward to my college days. He does the whole Ancestry.com and 23&Me thing; it’s clear he has Irish heritage, too. His very WASPy father would’ve hated that. The Irish are Catholics, not Protestant. Even at age 7, I know that. Mami has a hunch about Daddy’s Irish ancestry and goes overboard with St. Patrick’s Day enthusiasm. She’s big on fun. She also loves that the Irish are Catholic like her. Daddy’s father hated that she was Catholic and, you know, a “Spic.” His journalist son never should’ve married one of the “natives” he met covering their war. But he did and that’s how I, a “mutt,” was born.
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 I kept my eyes on the axle spinning underneath the bowed two-by-four laid across where the bottom of the cab had rusted out to avoid looking up at the trees. The bats hung above us crowding out the sky and weighing down branches like dark leathery tumors, the sum of all their little breaths and twitches making the canopy squirm. It was ten in the morning, but distant facts like nocturnal sleeping schedules don’t make a few thousand flying foxes dangling over your head any less ominous. Despite the throaty belches coming from Daniel’s roofless carcass of a Land Rover, I found myself carefully quiet hoping not to wake the sleeping beasts above me.
The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
By Madeline Edalow  A view of Kellogg’s Diner from December 2023. Photo by Christine Stoddard. New York City is ever-changing and long time residents grow accustomed to iconic establishments disappearing.
I am a life-long New Yorker. Within my lifetime, the gentrification of Northern Brooklyn has progressed at lightening speed. The luxury establishments that continue to open often feel inaccessible to me. I often feel like a tourist in the city I grew up in, not recognizing neighborhoods where I used to spend a lot of time. As the area surrounding the Lorimer L train in Williamsburg Brooklyn felt the impact of trendy hipsterdom, one spot felt accessible to a wide range of people. I am speaking of Kellogg’s Diner. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
By Sarah Harley  My mother was a woman with pretty glinty eyes. Pale green, sometimes flecked with silver, depending on her mood. The eyes lighted on sights that made her smile. The passing dazzle: summer flowers filled with petals then run to seed; slants of blue and yellow light. She knew about distances that were not connected to the visible world. She saw things others did not, things just beyond. She possessed a predisposition, acquired through fire and bombs falling through the roof.
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By Karen Resta  The man across from me was vaguely familiar, but I really didn’t know him at all. The woman next to me I did know, but at the moment she was acting distant. We sat in a large booth near the front of this famous old Brooklyn restaurant, a gilded place with broken-springed red velvet banquettes, uneven wooden floors, and elderly waiters wearing long aprons that fell well below their knees. The gaslights fizzed grimy yellow, highlighting the dark sticky contours of the heavily varnished booths.
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By Brenna Cuba  They didn’t know it, but the change would be permanent. The kids got so quiet afterward. They hadn’t thought to be quiet before I shed that quaint skin they preferred me in. That’s what changed first: my skin. It became thin and translucent. I hung back against the pale walls of the living room. I thought I could calm down before anything escalated, blend in, go unnoticed.The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
By Amy Lee  “subway station
i wish to go nowhere” Poetry can sometimes become too cumbersome and preoccupied with forms and rules that it feels heavy and contrived. Yet the elegance of simplicity and the quiet power of ‘less is more’ is alive in Neha R. Krishna’s first volume of modern Haiku, no urgency to be home. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Book Review & Free Link to E-book.pdf: 'Love in the Time of Corona' - By Tharani Balachandran9/25/2023 By Amy Lee  “…and now all I miss is the touch of my mother’s hand my friends who are out saving the world and the lovers I just couldn’t hold onto.” - Love in the Time of Corona I have often been fascinated by the intensity and originality of writings produced during isolation and loneliness by the likes of the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen. Tharani Balachandran’s debut poetry chapbook, Love in the Time of Corona, charters upon a similar story-telling with ‘Bridget-Jones’-esque wit, sharp political commentary and vivid imageries about a modern feminist’s life, love and the unfair pressures of ‘having it all’. The narratives are so bouncy and rich that the reader will feel like s/he just enjoyed a cup of coffee with an old friend. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
By Steph Whitehouse  There is a box that sits in my wardrobe. It’s been there a long time and has travelled many places with me. This box contains many treasures that have been collected over a lifetime. My mother started the original box for me when I was born. She filled it with special items from my childhood. Things she thought I would like to see when I was older and recall special memories. I have been through this box many times and cleaned it out a few times. Some things have been thrown out and others have stayed. Some things have stayed for their memories, others for the people who gave them to me and others because they are cherished childhood items.
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By David Sparenberg  "Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are". - Jose Ortega y Gasset, Spanish Philosopher I am a human member. My home is of intimate space. I live between Earth and Sky. I am between land and water.
The ocean-world that cannot be crossed in a single day, a single night, or even in a single lifetime, starts and ends at my bare feet. Unbroken rhythm washing the singing sand surges between my toes, bubbling beneath where I stand, under my soles. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
 Legs. They’re what I notice most often about other women, aside from face and hair and outfit and all the other things we love to judge.
Lest you think I have ulterior motives, I’m not trawling for a conquest or stalkee. I’m a straight, cis, aging Gen X-er with a tidily manicured set of body image issues. A 5’9” size 16 sort of woman: bigger than some, smaller than others, and utterly average by American standards of measurement. I’m just kind of hung up on legs. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
By Steph Whitehouse  Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence This is a topic is often shrouded in secrecy that I almost hesitate to write of it. Yet my hesitation only adds to the secrecy when in fact, it needs to brought out into the open. It must be done so that others do not feel so isolated and know they are not alone. By sharing our stories and knowledge we can feel united and end the shame and secrecy around domestic violence. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
By Sarah Harley  "A light here required a shadow there". – Virginia Woolf Along with threads of cotton, lengths of garden jute twine, my mother’s brown hair that fell out in soft, abandoned clumps after the radiation and chemotherapy treatment – the paper dolls were cut with the blunt edge of the tarnished silver scissors. The scissors lived in the darkness of the kitchen drawer, the one above the pitch black cupboard where my mother hid the alcohol.
The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
By Amy Lee  “The past does not trust us yet, but I do. I do" The path from girlhood to womanhood can be fraught with complexity, fragility and even spiritually incomplete without a full reflection and reckoning. Anastasia DiFonzo’s A Certain Serenity fearlessly revisits and navigates through the journey from girlhood to womanhood with poetry that is ravishingly raw and rare.
The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
By Marie-Eve Bernier  She would playfully ask the same two questions.
“Do you prefer to sit on a rocking chair or a stable armchair?” and “Do you prefer sweet or salty treats?”. This was her failproof ‘scientific’ test to figure which genes her grandchildren had inherited. My grandmother’s maiden name is Fillion, which meant she liked to sit on stable chairs and preferred salted snacks, while my grandfather’s surname is Cloutier, otherwise known for enjoying rocking chairs and having a sweet tooth. She would take great amusement if one of her grandchildren showed traits of both genes, such as if one liked salted chips but also enjoyed a rocking chair. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
By Maria Newsom  As executor of my late great Uncle Harry’s estate, my mother inherited a box of short stories. Miraculously, this collection of hand-typed, double-spaced sheets of medium-weight paper survived four cellar floods in my parents’ Brooklyn home. Each time the waters abated, mom was relieved to find the box dry. Still, it never came upstairs. Eventually, my parents moved upstate, and the box moved to a new basement. It still hadn’t come above ground when I visited them last summer and found it downstairs, wedged between rolls of Santa Claus paper and a dust-shrouded set of Encyclopedia Britannica.
The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
By Bharti Bansal  I am going to be 25 this year.
It sounds like a good number only when you remember that you are at an age when your mother got married. It seems a good deal to me when I realize that at my age, my mother had two kids already. But this isn’t the hard part. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
By Owen Patterson  I don't have a favorite childhood vacation memory. Although, one vacation does stand out.
In the mid '70s... I was 9 or 10 years old. We vacationed in Orlando, Florida. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
By George Leipold  It was an unseasonably warm day in April.
“I can’t go on another walk. We won’t find him.” I said with defeat and exhaustion in my voice. “I know,” said my roommate, “I’ll go.” The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
 Mom’s calendar page boasted a busy week that August when she was living at Napa’s Redwoods, a retirement community. There were the usual events: Bingo, Wednesday luncheon, hair appointment, church. But that week, the activities director had organized two extra bus trips. Monday was a winery visit. Wrapped in the heady perfume of ripening grapes, guests would sample hors d’oeuvres and sip wine against the backdrop of Napa Valley’s lush vineyards. And for my eighty-two-year-old football-loving mother, Tuesday sounded even better. The Oakland Raiders had their summer training camp in Napa; Redwoods residents would watch the Raiders, and then go to lunch.
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By Meaghan Curley  Incandescence by Mehreen Ahmed is equal parts endearing, philosophical, and sentimental.
The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
 I got the call that my grandmother was dying on a weekday afternoon. It was a sunny spring day, objectively beautiful. I studied the imposing Gothic church outside my apartment window as I listened to my father’s uncharacteristic silence. When he could finally speak, he told me a priest was on his way.
My grandmother had dementia, so the feeling of losing her wasn’t new. I didn’t ask why this moment was declared as the beginning of her dying. I ended the call and got in my car. |
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