Tezozomoc Tezozomoc is a Los Angeles Chicano Poet and 2009 Oscar Nominated Activist and has been published by Floricanto Press, Gashes!: Poems and Pain from the halls of injustice, a collection of poetry. He has also been published in the following journals: The Oddball Magazine, Spitpoetzine, and The Silver Stork.
Author: Mom Egg Review
Jane Yolen Mysteries Birth is not mysterious to the mother whose body is cradle and cafe. Who listens for breath, feels a whale swimming in the sea of her. She sends hand signals against her skin, is rewarded with a kick. She is the first house, the first home, both comfort and comforter. So why this mystery about writing something down? Just open your mind Take a gulp of air, bear down hard, and push. Jane Yolen has published over 383 books, with 400 in sight! She has received 6 honorary doctorates for her body of work from six New…
Brad Shurmantine The Big Yard Stunned, still moving in a sick green haze my widowed mom stared at a sea of blueprints and chose the one with the biggest yard, a field big enough to swallow up our pain and terror—a place to land. But her three boys saw a baseball field, saw home plate and stepped off the bases. That hedge was the end zone (poor bushes, whittled away by goal line stands). Season after season after season side yard touch football quick slants toward Grandview Road pinpoint passes waited or going long sailing over the boxwoods…
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…
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