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…
Author: Mom Egg Review
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…
Review by Kimberly Bowcutt A Daughter’s Work is Heartless by Nature, by Caledonia Kearns, elucidates the godlike wisdom and mortal labor required to forge a relationship between a mother and a daughter. Kearns crafts the language and symbolism in her poems with precision. She vividly conveys the moments of loss, pleasure, and joy which are inherent in the complex love between a mother and a daughter; moments that can make a mother feel like a goddess or remind her that she is completely and uselessly mortal. The Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone informs both the structure of this…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor In this unique debut collection of prose poems, Callista Buchen, the author of two chapbooks of poetry. examines the darker side of pregnancy and motherhood. From the imperfect act of mothering to the loss of a baby, her poems dwell in the world of expectation, disappointment, and realism. It is the first book I’ve read about motherhood that posits the permanent and fleeting ways in which pregnancy alters a woman, for becoming a parent is, in itself, an act of transition. The violence of birth is manifested in a poem, “I can’t remember the…
Review by Sherre Vernon Shirley Camia is a Filipina-Canadian poet and the author of four poetry collections: Mercy; Children Shouldn’t Use Knives; The Significance of Moths; and Calliope. Her collection Children Shouldn’t Use Knives won the The Manuela Dias Book Design and Illustration Award in 2018. Mercy is a collection of poems that travels through a daughter’s journey of losing her mother. In the very first poem Camia tells us that the mother has begun a journey; by the fourth, we know she is bedridden; by the fifth, hospitalized. The entire collection continues down this timeline: hospital, death, a public…