Christina Springer
Author: Mom Egg Review
Keisha Molby-Baez Seeds Planted My birth name Keisha My heavenly name Child of God My family names daughter, sister, niece, aunt My union name wife My universal name friend My poet name Coco The best name of all, Mother Mother of three Listen Understand Care Respect Inspire Relate Embrace Empower Offer Comfort Support More open to change Talking less Listening more Trusting my own capabilities Sharing my opinions and journey Letting go and living more in the present Taking healthy breaks Screaming loud within my head Confident there is no reason to apologize I’m not alone, but feel lonely…
Julia Lisella Charlotte’s Zinnias Each pop of brazen orange or hot pink quivers as Charlotte’s legs cross over her hand-made fence her basket following in the mess of multicolored swiss chard and flowering basil. I head the tops of the green stalks as we talk of the zinnias, amazing and flourishing. Bees. Their deaths and births discussed. And chard. How you can freeze it. Charlotte knows how to enjoy a good day as they come less often in New England Augusts when you’re 83. How can you Not love the summer? Charlotte says recommending I take one more…
Radhiyah Ayobami how maybelle survived new york who needed the north / when there was the smell of gardenias at night as she slept between two big sisters in a hollow / of skin & smell so when girls at the schoolhouse / got their monthly / she knew what it was & how a fullgrown breast looked like mama’s cinnamon loaf on christmas eve & on sundays even halfgrown girls wore socks / homemade ribbons the color of dandelions there were barefoot mornings in the creek / weeping trees with leaves rustling the ground stolen peaches / lemonade from mason jars when…
Catherine Esposito Prescott Palm Blossoms From down the block they look like a layer of snow. Hundreds have fallen from the palm tree, flowers white and yellow- green, round, orbital like planets from another galaxy with tens of spokes, biological antennae, lining their luminous surfaces, superball-sized unlit firecrackers, the least expected blossoms thrown in our path. There are so many ways to fall in love with this world. Possibilities after Wisława Szymborska I prefer books. I prefer children. I prefer nonlinear to linear time. I prefer waking up before sunrise. I prefer cooking to take…
Allia Abdullah-Matta Allia Abdullah-Matta is a poet and teacher-scholar who uses creativity and artistic expression as instruments of social justice activism and transformation. She is an Associate Professor at CUNY LaGuardia, holds a graduate degree in Africana Studies from Umass Amherst, and expects to complete an MFA in Creative Writing from The City College of New York (CCNY) in 2019. Her poetry has been published in Newtown Literary, Promethean, and Marsh Hawk Review.
Jen Karetnick Brief Portrait of Millennials as a Nebulizer; Or, There Are Reasons to Breathe Without disruption, without deliberate thought. Without disconnection like a dropped call on a highway far away from a cellphone tower. Without asking permission from the surrounding environment that weighs on us like parachutes filled with lead instead of air. Recognize that the struggle to draw deeply these days, to exhale fully, does not stem from the asthmatic lungs of our children’s generation but from ours and the one that formed these primary organs, inflamed between us. We can only write a prescription for…
Maria Mazziotti Gillan Even After All These Years Even after all these years, a plate of spaghetti gives me comfort, the food my mother made three times a week when I was a child in the 17th St. tenement, that food we ate every day the year my father was too sick to work, so we had spaghetti and HO Cream Farina, that food that fills some hollow place inside me. Our mother made loaves of homemade bread, stirred the tomato sauce that we called gravy that was nothing like my mother-in-law’s gravy, which was brown, that was…
Marianne McCarthy Dodging Bullets in the Unseen World This work attempts to explore the notion that there exists a kind of reciprocity between our visible world and the unseen world, through which spirits or life energies reluctantly recycle. In this balanced but mutually myopic process, a death in our realm is a cause for great celebration in the invisible world, as a birth or a homecoming. Accordingly, the joy and anticipation that greets a newborn baby in the visible world, is felt as a loss in the unseen world, as a beloved spirit sadly “passes” into the realm…
Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen For many people, the study of poetry is intimidating. Reading and writing poems reminds some of the onerous task they had to surmount in order to graduate from middle school. Thank goodness for clear-eyed writers who can actually create a book on how to compose poetry and how to really enjoy doing it, too. The title of Diane Lockward’s newest book The Practicing Poet: Writing Beyond the Basics may, to some, be slightly misleading suggesting that this book is more suited for seasoned language mavens. Rest assured, however, this indispensable book is filled with…