MER VOX QUARTERLY – SUMMER 2019 INTERVIEW: KEISHA GAYE-ANDERSON Curation and interview by JP Howard POETRY AND ART BY KEISHA-GAYE ANDERSON POETRY FOLIO: MOTHERHOOD AND GUILT Curated by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach Marjorie Maddox, Rebecca Hart Olander, Jules Jacob, Meg Leonard, Cheryl Clark Vermeulen, E. Kristin Anderson GALLERY: ART BY NAOMI LAWRENCE Curated by Ana C.H. Silva AUTHOR’S NOTES Sarah Cannon On Writing The Shame of Losing Lara Lillibridge On Writing Mama, Mama, Only Mama BOOK REVIEWS
Author: Mom Egg Review
Motherhood and Guilt A MER VOX Folio Curated by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach Is guilt inevitable when a mother spends time focusing on something other than her child/children? Is feeling guilty just part of the deal – one of the prices of mothering or being mothered? What does it take to push back against the notion that a mother is selfish if she pursues self-care, writing, a career? The poems in this folio ache with cognitive dissonance: the need to choose mothering over self, the need to choose self over mothering and the constant struggle to assuage the guilt.…
Interview, Poetry and Artwork featuring Keisha-Gaye Anderson Folio curated by JP Howard for Mom Egg Review VOX Online JP – Congratulations on your new books! I know that Everything is Necessary has just been published by Willow Books and your other collection, A Spell for Living, is forthcoming from Agape Editions. Tell us about the process for writing each book and the process leading up to publication for both. Keisha-Gaye – I’m quite excited to have both of these books coming out within the same calendar year. In terms of the process, I would say that the books emerged…
Art by Naomi Lawrence I admit I cyber-stalked Naomi Lawrence. Her flower creations started appearing around El Barrio, in NYC, about 2014, on metal fences; bright spots of improbably large flowers floating in front of abandoned lots. Blue iris, orange daylily, crocuses, cherry blossoms, daffodils, hibiscus, lotus, magnolia, and rose, thrilling in their audacity. My young daughters liked to point out the unexpected yarn art of their Spanish Harlem neighborhood to visiting playdates. City tree trunks, usually looking so sad in their untended pits, threatened by erosion, litter, and neglect, suddenly sported colorful stripes or patchwork, warmed and…
E. Kristin Anderson Southern Cold Tonight I want to take my feet beyond the answers, just as wild as the television. I keep writing. This bitter mouth shook your name from home, slowly here. And the room is throwing wide the world and living and dying and loving are left in shadowboxes down the hall. I could steal peppermint, a picture, the memory close at the door—but the sleepy sweet of fear at three in the morning is enough before dawn. Over the ache down my spine I forgive and hold grudges and know the spell to resist the…
Cheryl Clark Vermeulen The Suckling Leading Lady Let’s say Homer is a woman (Shakespeare for that matter) and an eye is burned through on a figurehead swollen with water. Splitting across an arm or a leg, desire has fallen or is false or passionately kissing the woman goodbye. Adrift, at night, the streetlamps pearl. I’m here and I’m nothing but miles and gusts of music and skin putting on something a bit more commodious. My face is a plaything pale and fatty. I do not rattle. Last night, every night, I feed the babies white neurology. My sights have…
Megan Leonard POEM WRITTEN WHILE I WAIT IN THE COLD ROOM AFTER THE NURSES HAVE GONE OUT BUT BEFORE THE DOCTOR COMES IN Megan Leonard’s poetry can be found most recently in Sharkpack Annual, Transom, and Reservoir. Her digital chapbook, where the body ends, is available through Platypus Press. Meg lives and works on New Hampshire’s seacoast.
Rebecca Hart Olander Dysmorphia I’ve been a Super-8 movie camera in a pond trying to film my confidence, a wife, and a conversation full of silences. My job was to make things up. I have proof. Home: butter, salt, mirrors, a corset. Four different kinds of heartbreaking. I know where everything is: children, dust mites, poetry projects. A rusted-out childhood, small, changed and never recovered. Wild strawberries. Little buckskin jacket. Book of cats. My dad, favorite cowboy, scared of dying. A struggle to read this enemy climbing under the same roof. The annexed answer: we love too much to choose.…
Jules Jacob Broken Sonnet for Relapsing Daughters this song was yours clean without loss or metaphors yet comfort’s counterpart is pain is what I can’t spare us, is what quits speaking and walking, sinking to the carpet keening night of its stars. To pain is the trembling cat running to not away, sacrificing mirror neurons to dispel my dis-ease when you try to leave this startled earth. The dark waits still cells search black holes before they were known. If found we return rearranged. Don’t say nebulae can’t reappear. Please. No more lectures…
Marjorie Maddox Regret I was so tired of stepping in it until it rose to my ankles, my calves, clinging to my shins like tar as I tugged my unshaven limbs this way and that, so, so tired of it, my flecks of almost-fur coming off in the thick grasp of it, so tired until it rose to my knees, then thighs, gulping in all things varicose and cellulite, so, so, so, so until it belched itself higher to my waist, my breasts, my shoulders, shook with the shimmying of my spasmic attempt to breathe the teaspoon of desire…