Lucinda Cummings

April 2026 | nonfiction

Pockets

When my firstborn son Benjamin attended morning preschool, his grandma picked him up afterwards, and they spent afternoons together while I worked. On my birthday, the year he was 3, Benjamin asked his “Gamma” for white fabric. He cut out four jagged cotton squares, enlisting her help to stitch each pair together on three sides. On the open sides, he clipped safety pins to the corners.

When I arrived to pick him up, he danced around the room, blue eyes alight, clutching a package wrapped in crumpled green paper with too much tape. “I made it for you, Mom, and it’s a surprise! Happy Birthday! Open it now!”

I tore open the wrapping paper and pulled out the squares, both decorated in marker with clumsily drawn flowers and designs, my full name inscribed on the front of each one by his grandma. A fabric birthday card covered in red hearts accompanied the gift – twenty hearts in all, outlined by Gamma, painstakingly colored in by Benjamin.

“They’re pockets, for you!” he exclaimed, grinning and bouncing in place. “See, you can pin them on your shirt and you’ll always have pockets to put stuff in! And they’re portable pockets, so you can move them when you change your clothes! See?”

I sat down to pin the pockets onto my dress, moved by the tenderness of his gift, admiring his ingenuity. When I stood to model the new pockets, I asked, “Whose idea was this?”

Delight shone on his face, and Gamma nodded, as he declared, “It was my idea! Gamma just helped!”

Benjamin died suddenly on New Year’s Day when he was 23.  Today I stroke the worn cotton pockets in my lap, tracing the marks made by his small hands, marveling at his loving creativity, longing. If only I could have tucked Benjamin inside these pockets like a baby kangaroo, protecting him from harm.

Lucinda Cummings

Lucinda Cummings is a writer and retired psychologist who lives in Minnesota. Her essays have appeared in Hippocampus, The Baltimore Review, Woven Tale Press, Glassworks, and other journals and anthologies. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and listed as “Notable” in Best American Essays 2023. She is working on a memoir about erasure.

Robin Carstensen

April 2026 | nonfiction

Log Book. Camp Mystic, Kerrville, Texas. Northern Hemisphere, Planet Earth

                                                Texas lawmakers failed to pass a bill to improve local disaster

                                                warning systems this year. . . Texas Tribune. July 6, 2025.

July 10^th, 2025—173 children still missing along the Guadalupe River, Texas Hill Country:

We bet on our chances down to the last community card we call the river, playing Texas Hold’ Em. We spoke in a hush how the nature of any river is to rise if there be a notion to rise, and we watched on TV how the Guadalupe rose up and ravaged everything—the clouds just pouring out a beast. No warning shot or godly thought for us, the parents hobbled, waiting and crouched by their phones for a word. Cabins and trees in flood alley washed away, hands grasping edges, branches, rocks, and then there was us the next morning, the next night still alive in our usual aliveness but clinging to our crosses and submerged in our minds with the children, clawing with them to breathe, rise from the cresting water, keep their heads above for god’s sake as long as they could, for god’s sake may the legion of angels have lifted their souls out of their blameless bodies before the hypoxia strangled, before those of us left behind warbling the cosmos wracked our senses to make it make sense, to find redemption for our gods and our savage governance—no emergency alerts, no disaster response; sirens drowned in the fellowship halls and house bills of mammon. Is it all on us, every loss for Christ’s sake, isn’t there a trail to the highlands of some verdant loveliness? For holy sake, bring us a map and compass, a chance to behold, all the missing children blossoming from the Guadalupe to Gaza to Iran to Sudan and the sons of Russia sent to slaughter. There’s got to be a path, a second chance, a field the children are playing on, their wizard hats and healing balm flashing under the moon, is this what they chose to do for the sake of us, for our unfolding consciousness, once upon a time before time and Camp Mystic, then to the river, then to the radiant fields of lantana where they must be, must, they must have.

Robin Carstensen

Robin Carstensen’s work is recently published in RiverSedge and many more. Club Plum Lit also recently published and nominated her flash for a Pushcart Prize, 2024. Her chapbook In the Temple of Shining Mercy won first-place and was published by Iron Horse Literary Press, 2017. She is the senior executive co-founding editor for The Windward Review, now in Volume 24.