ESSAY Oh, that’s where my parents used to—Grandma cuts off her sentence, spins around and starts again, climbing the stairs towards us. “That’s where my parents put me during storms.”
Heirlooms
Chloe Firetto Toomey
Chloe Firetto-Toomey is an English-American MFA candidate in nonfiction at Florida International University, where she served as a teaching assistant, and poetry editor for Gulf Stream Magazine. She currently teaches creative nonfiction at FIU, and Everglades Correctional Institution, while completing her thesis. She is published in all three genres and two of her lyric essays have recently been awarded finalists in Tupelo Quarterly Open Prose Contest, and Diagram 2018 Chapbook Competition, and was a semi-finalist in the Honeysuckle Press 2018 Chapbook Competition; she is also the recipient of the 2017 Christopher F. Kelly Award for Poetry, Academy of American Poets Graduate Competition. She lives in Miami Beach with her fiancé and two stray cats.