Martha McCollough On Mother’s Blue Hat High out of reach / netted lacquer cherries tremble and shine / inviting the bees, her perfect children / not us so waspish and barking / busy with accident — thinking the pearls were pop-beads and now they’re all over the floor we try on her tall shoes / tiny oceans rock in the glass heels inside minuscule oysters spin layers of nacre / glimmering and breakable / it’s not forgiveness if we go by in a blur restless continents sidle to her knee / lay our heads in her lap we bad…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Sarah Sousa Hex Mother conceives the sun in the dark hours before morning, grows large, and births the sun at dawn. The promise of the sun, at least, she keeps. The sun is steadfast, we say, crediting it not Mother, though she’s the one who births it every morning like a warm egg, she’s the one split open by its passage. She does this for us. But the moon, that which the old farmers called a waxing and waning poem, the moon is vexed and swells monstrous. The moon has waxed for near six hundred days and all the babies…
Jane Poirier Hart How to Iron a Shirt: Lessons for an Imagined Son 1. Start with the collar. Spread it on out on the board, underside up. Press from points to the middle. Turn over. Now press the right side. The collar will be smooth when it curves around your neck. (Smooth under the hands of girls you haven’t yet met. A crisp, buttoned collar can hide a rosary of crimson hickeys.) 2. Next, the yoke. Pull the shirt onto the tapered end of the board. Flatten. Press one half. Turn. Press the other. Use the tip of the…
KT Herr Sealskin, to her selkie Into a middle drawer you tucked me weary & drack–– I feared tearing grew rank, patient & cracked along the fold like spent leather nestled among the t-shirts. How you itch strangely-clad in all that landlocked traffic. Will you mourn mollusk-mouthed & turn mewling back to your native coast? Will you prod my slackness at your hip; measure our return against the long bright pane of regret? And who will teach us to remember how to wake a body to its home’s emphatic music? In Scottish folklore, a selkie is…
Jennifer Franklin Eurydice in Hades I thought it would be dark, tucked into the earth like so many fighting seeds. But there is light enough to see my body, its fissures— collectors of secrets. There is light enough to see fatigued faces, houses where I insulted what I was above ground. Here, below plants that stretch, hover, guard my rooms into oblivion, I learn what nothing is. The rain-drenched body, its broken kneecaps, my sour stench escaped from my bay window, grew wings, and left me. I carve angels, not for protection but for the face I never had.…
Hilary King Joan of Internet Slut They say on Twitter Whore They say on sub-threads Burn this bitch They say when she speaks up about #gamergate #metoo #anything She lived simply once, spinning wool beside her mother. She saw things and she spoke what she saw. Trolled and doxxed, she changed her address, her handle, her hair. Still they came for her. Still, they come for her. Still, she fights, Thread, she writes, Part 1. Hilary King is in her 50s and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Her poems have appeared in Fourth…
Anne Graue Piece of My Heart Come on. The rain fell on the long drive across New York, along the southern tier—each mile stretched out before and after with bare trees, creeks, and winding snow. The ice hanging from the rocks in still photos of black and white. We traveled to hear you sing, to find what we had created, our daughter’s voice atmospheric, adrift in melody, aerated with grins and glimpses, then bursting in mezzo soprano brilliance across the room, the salon with sofas, wingbacks, and armchairs facing the piano and you like Erato or Calliope, singing Scottish…
Carol Berg Origin Story: Breath Particles can appear out of nowhere, science says. What our breath contains—frescos, cathedrals, mountain paths of green. What does the clementine exhale—what knowledge of the sea’s wind? When the oak tree’s leaves fall, does the tree sigh? The swirl of the leaf to the ground, a song? The sun-soaked meadow humming with insect dreams. Carol Berg’s poems are in Crab Creek Review (Poetry Finalist 2017), DMQ Review, Hospital Drive, Sou’wester, The Journal, Spillway, Redactions, Radar Poetry, Verse Wisconsin. Her recent chapbook, The Johnson Girls, is available from dancing girl press. She was a…
Siân Killingsworth Inanna Speaks My manifold guises traverse the earth spinning facts, fictions, and associations I rest on pallets of red ocher gold of a goddess I warm my body with lions weak bodies of men writhe in worship I transform them to women, madder, much more stable armed and dangerous, they call me poisonous cinnabar culled from a small gland, an 8-pointed star a mighty rival challenging stature theological and ideological they call me mystical or carnal, depraved, a shepherd husband and many more— a lush lifestyle, love and passion slow changes of mind over centuries, men gird…
Currents – March, 2019 Donna J. Gelagotis Lee’s second award-winning book, Intersection on Neptune, winner of the Prize Americana for Poetry 2018, has been released. The collection of poems about life in New York and New Jersey is published by The Poetry Press of Press Americana. For more information, please visit www.donnajgelagotislee.com.