TWO POEMS FROM DAYE PHILLIPPO SOON, SPRING Snow is falling softly past the windows, no wind to drive it, so the flakes take their time, turning, some rising a bit again like the clouds of gnats one sees stirring by the roadside in fall. Mother Goose preening her feathers, my father used to say of snow like this, snow intending no harm, not blinding drivers or the woman walking out to her mailbox on its leaning post by the gravel road. Motherly snow, gently blanketing the garden and house, fences and fenceposts, giving the mailbox a little peaked…
Author: Mom Egg Review
THREE CREATIVE NONFICTION PIECES FROM MARIA BENET IMPRINT At the end of Spielberg’s film, “A.I.,” David, the prototype robot child built with the sole purpose to love unconditionally, survives for millennia in a world ravaged by uncountable and unaccountable transformations that leave it extinct of humans. He is found submerged at the bottom of a watery world by ethereal robots endowed with goodness, who see in David the alpha point of their lineage. When David learns that the world has been emptied of humans, he has a wish he wants his rescuers to grant him. His wish comes…
Jacqueline Doyle CHEATED When Dina arrives at the Social Security office at 9:15 am, clutching the envelope stamped URGENT, there’s already a long line at the door and no seats left inside. The waiting area looks more like an auditorium than a waiting room, with orange plastic bucket chairs lined up in ten to fifteen rows. Well over a hundred people jostle each other, many standing in the aisles, some with babies in strollers and children crawling at their feet, others alone, beaten and hollow-eyed. Homeless maybe, on permanent disability. Any one of them could be her daughter.…
TWO POEMS FROM STEPHANIE NOBLE UMBILICUS Umbilicus, long since buttoned, now invisible, a tightrope I walk, no safety net one misstep a fall from grace. COURTSIDE Perched on bleachers we watch our grandson, Number 22, and his black-jersey teammates play ball against a team in baby blue. Our eyes follow the ball, hands ready to applaud a basket, a maneuver, good sportsmanship. My ears wrestle with the squeak of shoes like tires on turns in a parking garage, referee whistles, blaring buzzer. At our side our eldest’s deep voice Rumbles right down to the soles of…
Devon Balwit MENTATION On the bus, I talk to myself, reviewing the day’s tragedies. For each humiliation, I shake my head like a dog clearing mites or like a person battling Parkinson’s. The oddness intensifies as I throw up my hands to punctuate each inner whatever. Someone watching is bound to pity me but for the wrong reasons, thinking me unable to afford my meds. Freud marveled that a stroke could erase all but the final word heard before the trauma. With get or no the patient’s sole lexicon, think of the power required to reveal love or enmity…
Karen Rile RUNNING ALONG THE SCHUYLKILL My daughter skates faster than I will ever run. I struggle to keep her in my line of sight as she strokes past the boathouses. Men my own age follow her with their eyes. They get between us on eleven-hundred-dollar bikes– “On your left, lady.” I accelerate past the ache bubbling in my ribs. But when the river bends they’re gone. Nobody but me on this poor stretch of gravel. An orange swallowtail rises from the water’s face, drawn, I have read, to the salt of our sweat. Nobody but me sees, nor…
Theresa Senato Edwards Excerpt from “Wing Bones” Explaining Heredity to the Youngest Sister Theresa Senato Edwards has published two full-length poetry books and two chapbooks. Poems from her newest manuscript, “Wing Bones,” can be found in Stirring, Gargoyle, The Nervous Breakdown, Thrush, Hermeneutic Chaos, UCity Review, Rise Up Review, Diode, and Rogue Agent. Edwards was nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and is Editor in Chief of The American Poetry Journal. Her website: https://tsenatoedwards.wixsite.com/tsenatoedwards
Jenna Lê DOPPELGANGERS 1. Mother made a doll, a shrill squealer, two feet tall, saliva-dribbling, shivering as if in nicotine withdrawal. Now the doll and her sisters high-step around the amphitheater. In thickening suspense they tiptoe along the bleachers. As they centrifuge into the wall, their mascara smudges, smears. Their flat eyes dwindle small. Maybe they are not from here. Their stretched-out skins grow warm like the human flesh they’re parroting. Their yarn braids turn to keratin. There’s nothing wrong with my parenting. 2. Every doll is heartbeat-less. When Mother gave me my start, she wadded my gaping chest…
Sonia Greenfield GHOST BABY Sprung from a dream, a clot, a stolen heartbeat, and she settles into the arms of a stranger, but when I look again, it is only the face of a stranger’s baby. The ghost baby slips into my womb and shifts but when I whisper, Are you there? I get no answer, only a trickle of blood. The ghost baby wants me to take us to the park and push her swing until we are left to wear the town’s frost and moonlight like a sateen sheath. She feeds endlessly, cries bitterly, and expects to…
Rachel Barton EVERY DAY THE SAME WISH —after Elizabeth McLagan Let this worn down sadness escape like the milk moons in his near-empty glasses from various ledges, I rinse and drain at the end of the day, the week, repopulating the cupboard’s Big Empty as if they have always been there. It’s as if he’s always been there, that I could call him from another room, and he would appear—my shining boy now brittle as glass in a fog of meds and drifting somewhere across town, the Big Empty of him, a mirror of my heart breaking. His coming and…