Synkroniciti is grateful to welcome back Houston poet and writer Stacie Eirich with her prose poem/memoir essay, “At the Nature Center, 18 Months after the tumor was found.” Walking through the woods while listening to Elgar’s haunting Cello Concerto in E minor, Stacie reflects on the mutability of life and the shifting expectations that accompany a cancer diagnosis. Her child’s cancer has been responsive, yet the revelations are dearly bought, their surrealness slow to fade. And still, everything seems richer: the light, the music, the fragile beauty of the natural world. Gratitude here extends beyond recovery, becoming a lens through which the ordinary is transformed.
“How could I have known then what was to come, what had already been born? Our lives as changeable, as fragile, bendable as these limbs of sagging green, this sky rushing above in spiny patterns of mist.”
Stacie Eirich is a mother of two, writer and singer near Houston, Texas. She has written poetry, short fiction and nonfiction published in literary journals, magazines and anthologies. Her latest book, Hope Like Sunlight, published in December 2024, is an illustrated memoir of her family’s journey to a cure for their child from pediatric brain cancer. All proceeds from the book go to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital & Ronald McDonald House.