• Home
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Links
  • MER Journal
    • Latest Issue
    • Back Issues
    • Subscribe to MER!
  • MER Online
    • MER Quarterly
    • MER Literary Folios
    • Poetry
    • Fiction
    • Creative Prose
    • Essay
    • Interviews
    • Book Reviews
    • Craft
      • Authors’ Notes
    • Art Gallery
      • Special – Hybrids
  • News & Events
    • News
    • Events
      • MER 18 Virtual Reading – Voices From HOME
    • Currents
      • Announcements
      • Highlights
  • Shop
    • All Issues
    • One Year Subscription
    • Two Year Subscription
  • Submit
Facebook Twitter Instagram
Facebook Twitter Instagram
MER – Mom Egg Review
  • Home
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Links
  • MER Journal
    • Latest Issue
    • Back Issues
    • Subscribe to MER!
  • MER Online
    • MER Quarterly
    • MER Literary Folios
    • Poetry
    • Fiction
    • Creative Prose
    • Essay
    • Interviews
    • Book Reviews
    • Craft
      • Authors’ Notes
    • Art Gallery
      • Special – Hybrids
  • News & Events
    • News
    • Events
      • MER 18 Virtual Reading – Voices From HOME
    • Currents
      • Announcements
      • Highlights
  • Shop
    • All Issues
    • One Year Subscription
    • Two Year Subscription
  • Submit
MER – Mom Egg Review
You are at:Home»Curated»Challenging the Traditional Motherhood Poem»Erika Meitner

Erika Meitner

0
By Mom Egg Review on September 13, 2017 Challenging the Traditional Motherhood Poem, Poetry

Erika Meitner

Interval

“I know backwards the grief of life like chance” – Bernadette Mayer

o the music,
we have to hurry

and drive and sit
and call and wait

and once, we were
silent we stood
in a darkened hospital

hallway mute on a sunday
until someone said
go home, so still

we wait—and time, it ticks
like a hammer driving nails

into lumber. the frame is up
on the house down the hill
that blocks the view of (our)

mountains that don’t belong
to anyone, that no one can claim
and all we can do is

hang on, wait and swear again
that we’ve never been busted
(meaning caught, meaning broke)

answer all the questionnaires
on felonies (violent and non-)
and register once more

with every required
government agency
and wait to be chosen

(three hundred and eighty seven
days and counting) to get
decided upon:

this visitation—angels, infants, birth-
parents, gutter punks, fragile boxcars and

beds of pickup trucks, unnamed memories
obscured by feedback of so many items elsewise
to lose, that we wait on to be lost: a name
like reverb, your fortune the second
joyful mystery, a coming where
someone leapt and someone else remarked

I just can’t believe it—
it’s like she told me

and told me
and told me.


Erika Meitner is the author of four books of poems, including Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry series winner, and Copia (BOA Editions, 2014). She is an Associate Professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she directs the undergraduate and MFA programs in Creative Writing.

Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email
Previous ArticleSarah Browning
Next Article Stephanie Bryant Anderson

Comments are closed.

March 30, 2023

Yours, Creature by Jessica Cuello

March 30, 2023

Barnflower by Carla Panciera

March 30, 2023

Mother Kingdom by Andrea Deeken

March 30, 2023

Everything’s Changing by Chelsea Stickle

March 30, 2023

Dragonfly Morning by Elina Eihmane

March 29, 2023

Coming Soon–MER Vol. 21!

March 29, 2023

April Poem-a-Day Challenge

March 29, 2023

Poem of the Month – April 2023

March 14, 2023

Save the Date! MER 21 Launch Reading May 21 in NYC

March 14, 2023

MER Online Quarterly – March 2023

Copyright © 2022 MER and Mom Egg Review
  • About
  • Advertise
  • Submit
  • Contact

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.