Jendi Reiter Broken Family Couch I miss the neighbors who used to jump shirtless on the trampoline in the bramble woods they didn’t own. October, early, the sun is mooning through the fog, translucent disk, surprise of perfect geometry. Her boyish hair and rippling brown ribs, his black beard and plié legs an Edward Gorey sketch. Pre-dawn wires smoked, sparked — emptied of renters, the house burst out its curbside trash of wicker and mirrors. A mother, a husband, her children, their father, a baby. Their rose-colored couch sinks into the unweeded lawn. Everyone pretends someone else will take…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Nicola Waldron (29205) there was a woman who lived in a house of wax when she came home from teaching children to speak who had never before spoken she would feel the walls of the house the doorknob to check for signs of melting would push the door reach gingerly fingers inside feeling for her own imprint she liked to bring in sounds sometimes flimsy/hard (undone) there were no marks the children inside the waxen house her own offspring did not speak she never taught them their silence melted down around the arms of the couch sides of the…
Libby Maxey Contrafactum “Every house has its particular orchestra.” —Sylvia Townsend Warner in the woods, a bear bell’s chunnering drone the flickers’ enfilade in the garden, a chiming gamelan wind wash in the leaves inside, outside’s company now that May is almost June every bird singing singing into dusk frogs roaring high chorus our small dialogues cadence every day a common tune to which we set new words Libby Maxey is a senior editor with Literary Mama. She has reviewed poetry for Mom Egg Review and Solstice, and her own poems have appeared in Crannóg, Emrys, Pinyon, Pirene’s Fountain…
Veronica Kornberg A Daughter Leaves Home You’re moving clear across the country, your first real job, with no idea even how to sew on a button. Last of the packing done, and you hold out a black wool jacket, the one we found together in the designer section at Goodwill. You make those pretty-please eyes and my heart pricks—what else have I neglected to teach you? But with only a few minutes before you leave for the airport, it’s not the moment to say If a powerful older man shows an intense personal interest… If the subway entrance lights are…
Elana Bell Ruins As a child I loved to be found I slipped into the alley behind my house My mother called and called and I did not answer until I heard the net in her voice The ruins are invisible from the shore but once you arrive you’ve always known The stones are silent I take a photograph to remember Across the island olives fall from the tree My window opens to the sea. Elana Bell’s first collection of poetry, Eyes, Stones, received the Walt Whitman award from the Academy of American poets. Her second book of…
Melissa Andrés Pressed in Silence My Mother’s arms became a shawl to keep us warm in our aloneness, her smell, not of flowers, but of smoke taped our past against the cold – She is the beauty inside us all long before mirrors were invented. Melissa Andrés is an American poet. Originally from Cuba, she resides in New York and is at work on her first collection of poetry. Her influences include Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edgar Allan Poe and Virginia Woolf. She is currently a creative writing MFA candidate at Sarah Lawrence College (2020).
Toward a Peeping Sunrise, Carole Mertz’s chapbook, wakes in surreal opening, gathers momentum with “Dolly’s Broke,” buzzes forward into a frantic evacuation, then settles into her serene autumn poem. Mertz is “A poet of liminal spaces [who] navigates with lyrical sensitivity between…the singular and the universal.” (Kendra Boileau, Ass’t Dir. and Ed-in-Chief of Penn State U. Press.) Available at https://prolificpress.com/bookstore/chapbook-series-c-14/toward-a-peeping-sunrise-by-carole-mertz-p-310.html
Coming Soon: Mom Egg Review vol. 18 – 2020 “HOME” Welcome to Mom Egg Review’s eighteenth annual issue. We are proud to publish fine literary work centering on diverse experiences of mothers, mothering, and motherhood. The new issue of Mom Egg Review considers the nature of “home”— Is a home a place, a feeling, a center, a community? Home land. Home base. Torn between homes. Unhoused. Also home neighborhood, others’ homes, away from home. The earth as home. Can work be a home? Can a poem be a home? Mom Egg Review writers explore “Home” through the lens of…
Review by Cammy Thomas It took a moment to figure out that in Barbara Ungar’s new book, Save Our Ship, the little dots and dashes in the alphabetical Table of Contents were letters in Morse Code, having to do with each poem’s title. As it turns out, Save Our Ship is an SOS (…—…) to and about our world. Some of the SOS’s are on a large scale, as in “Naming the Animals,” an abecedarian listing extinct species, sometimes with notes: Passenger pigeon. Martha died alone at 1 p.m., Sept. 1, 1914, in the Cincinnati Zoo. Pinta Island tortoise.…
–M.A.M.A. Issue 41 Michele Landel, Art, and Ann E. Wallace, Poetry Ann E. Wallace, Poetry Closed Close the door. She looks at me like I am ridiculous. But I only left it open for a minute. A girl raised by a father has not had to think much about the reasons a family of girls keeps the door closed and locked. A family of girls knows the unwanted will enter closed doors, will penetrate locks uninvited. We do not need to leave the door open for them. “Closed” was previously published in Mom Egg Review vol. 17.…