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.…
Author: Mom Egg Review
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.
A Catalogue of Small Pains by Meghan L. Dowling Reviewed by Meghan O’Neill Packaged as a novel, Meghan L. Dowling’s debut A Catalogue of Small Pains unwraps into so much more. A quilted collection of lyrical vignettes, pamphlet excerpts, images and captions are sewn together into a multigenerational story of mothers, daughters and sisters, their struggle and trauma hidden from the world in a sometimes all too familiar way. “They gave us the viscera of these stories. Scrawled up in syllables, the words expanding, keening. A hundred years of filaments popping on the tip of a tongue” (8). Through her…
Throwback Thursdays by Margie Shaheed Review by Mindy Kronenberg There is something particularly poignant and wistful about reading a posthumous collection of poetry, and, in some cases, a bit startling when reviewing it. Margie Shaheed’s personal and evocative vignettes of growing up and into womanhood lift off the page with such vibrancy and immediacy that the reader immerses in each moment and rite of passage rather than simply being a witness to a series of intimate, narrative events. In these fifteen poems we feel the indignation, determination, bravery, and spirited persistence of a contemporary black woman who grappled with the…
Perdido by Elaine Terranova Review by Judy Swann Perdido, the word itself, is so many things: the title of this book, the title of a poem in this book, a sprightly jazz standard about squandered love, the Spanish adjective for “lost,” the name of a man who read his poems at the “North Star on Mondays,” (72) a street in the New Orleans Central Business District near what is now the Super Dome, and a thousand other riffs that are meaningful to me in my experience that may not be meaningful to you in yours. And that’s just the start…
Not For Nothing: Glimpses Into a Jersey Girlhood by Kathy Curto Review by Julia Lisella Set in the early 1970s on the south Jersey shore, adult women who came of age in the early 60s still get their hair done into beehives and their men listen to Jerry Vale and swear never to be seen in jeans. Little girls don Mary Janes and dance for their father’s paisans and regulars at Fred’s Texaco station. Families gather for Sunday dinners. But the story takes surprising turns as our narrator watches with dark and steady attention as mother and father split…