Anna V. Q. Ross Heaven Knows It’s like this—some days, you wake up and the light in the field is like swimming or moving through a clear fog, something that pushes back, not startling but steady pressure, the wall-to-wall of the world cruising against your skin. Up ahead, a goldfinch flickers, and what is it that you can’t remember—the years ago No! you said to that boy in a Dublin bar before stumbling down a flight of stairs to be sick, the slick surface of the bathroom mirror slapping you back from the brink of a different bed in a…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Angelique Zobitz We manage limited resources against unlimited needs so we cleave to one another tight as wet clothes plastered to damp bodies we – open hydrants that lift one another off our feet choose belief in the enough soothe, press this kiss into the soft cheek, benediction in every breath freedom to cry into the heft of your chest sorrow and sweat you hold my quivering palm in your steady hand I lean into the precious community as contact sport draw water from communion full and manifold among the vine, care crafted in the creases a body composed of…
Mary Buchinger [selections from The Transformation of Material Things] a baby cries & I turn to see what’s the matter a woman robed in blue climbs steep cellar stairs emerges beside me into grey morning air the wailing baby cradled in her arms that’s her spiritual cry the woman explains & yes I feel it scrape inside ° After I wash the dishes I turn off the kitchen light & everything is dark It is a soft darkness with sharp edges I close my eyes to call to mind the map of this place the relationships of objects myself in…
Allison Blevins The Name in the Doorway My daughter waits in the doorway. She mouths Mom silently. My name floats from her mouth, hovers wordless above my body in bed. A blue and humming three-winged bird, my name waits and waits, lands softly on my mouth to wake my body from sleep, soft as the start of a pistol, soft as a lurching coaster, soft as a table leg in the night. My daughter is gone. Only the blurred and glowing outline of her body fills the frame. Maybe the stomach ached. Maybe the spider shadow crept. Maybe the…
Tina Kelley Like You Are, for Me Pa, your binoculars make me bionic. They transport me to three feet away from the warblers invading the oak. I can see one’s breast expand as it starts to sing, its beak trembling in proud vibrato. God is the ding in the windshield, always there, changing the seeing. You help me tell flycatchers apart. My first birthday after your death, my son reminded me, after the song, “Mommy, chocolate cake is more better than crying.” Clearest sight outlasts tears, shows eye rings and wing bars. Thanks to you, I am right with…
Adina Kopinsky Adina Kopinsky is an emerging poet living in Israel with her husband and three sons. She has work published or forthcoming in Rust + Moth, SWWIM Every Day, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among other publications.
Dayna Patterson Aunt Norma Aunt Norma is the tiniest silver spoon dipping into my little brother’s ear to fish out a golden bead. Aunt Norma is a crockpot of warm wax and strings for dipping candles. Aunt Norma is peppermint wheels and cinnamon candies, bowls of chocolate chips, gumdrops, and a dozen different kinds of sweets. She is home-baked gingerbread roof and walls, angled expertly for gap-free joining. She’s a plastic baggie of royal icing with the corner snipped for mortaring. She is a portable camping kitchen with a double gas stove for pancakes and scrambled or fried eggs…
Deborah Bacharach The Polyamorous Understand You Don’t Understand I wanted a husband. The pumpkin settles in by the dark door. She did not. I wanted a child, sideways teeth gone devil may care. She did not want one of her own. We wanted the same man but not—my son scrapes seeds from the pumpkin he peers in its dark depths— on the same days. He hugs the glow against his chest. She and I carry this son’s pumpkin, from her condo to my porch, her laugh skips then jumps in like a frog out of season that broke all the…
Jennifer Givhan Jer Bear & the Magical Thinking that Keeps Me safe. Meow meow I’m a cow croons the child beanstalked each night til he’s taller than me & the two plus two equals blue two lines that never bled across the moon & I imagine I dropped him each night before he sprang into another woman’s womb & I mother/tomb sang to him come home to me little boy for without you I will never be whole. he digs a hole in the backyard & says Jesus is coming soon. he’s making him a bed of soft dirt.…
Review by Jennifer Martelli In her poem, “Hurricane Necklace,” Rebecca Hart Olander writes Remember how you made those block cities, and my boyfriend knocked them down for you with a strand of Mardi Gras beads, shiny purple wrecking balls you two called a hurricane necklace, before he was my husband and your day-to-day dad? (2) As I was reading, I was moved to read this poem out loud for the joy of sound. This need to hear the poems, to feel them in my mouth, happened throughout Olander’s chapbook, Dressing the Wounds. I was amazed by the…