Radhiyah Ayobami how maybelle survived new york who needed the north / when there was the smell of gardenias at night as she slept between two big sisters in a hollow / of skin & smell so when girls at the schoolhouse / got their monthly / she knew what it was & how a fullgrown breast looked like mama’s cinnamon loaf on christmas eve & on sundays even halfgrown girls wore socks / homemade ribbons the color of dandelions there were barefoot mornings in the creek / weeping trees with leaves rustling the ground stolen peaches / lemonade from mason jars when…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Catherine Esposito Prescott Palm Blossoms From down the block they look like a layer of snow. Hundreds have fallen from the palm tree, flowers white and yellow- green, round, orbital like planets from another galaxy with tens of spokes, biological antennae, lining their luminous surfaces, superball-sized unlit firecrackers, the least expected blossoms thrown in our path. There are so many ways to fall in love with this world. Possibilities after Wisława Szymborska I prefer books. I prefer children. I prefer nonlinear to linear time. I prefer waking up before sunrise. I prefer cooking to take…
Allia Abdullah-Matta Allia Abdullah-Matta is a poet and teacher-scholar who uses creativity and artistic expression as instruments of social justice activism and transformation. She is an Associate Professor at CUNY LaGuardia, holds a graduate degree in Africana Studies from Umass Amherst, and expects to complete an MFA in Creative Writing from The City College of New York (CCNY) in 2019. Her poetry has been published in Newtown Literary, Promethean, and Marsh Hawk Review.
Jen Karetnick Brief Portrait of Millennials as a Nebulizer; Or, There Are Reasons to Breathe Without disruption, without deliberate thought. Without disconnection like a dropped call on a highway far away from a cellphone tower. Without asking permission from the surrounding environment that weighs on us like parachutes filled with lead instead of air. Recognize that the struggle to draw deeply these days, to exhale fully, does not stem from the asthmatic lungs of our children’s generation but from ours and the one that formed these primary organs, inflamed between us. We can only write a prescription for…
Maria Mazziotti Gillan Even After All These Years Even after all these years, a plate of spaghetti gives me comfort, the food my mother made three times a week when I was a child in the 17th St. tenement, that food we ate every day the year my father was too sick to work, so we had spaghetti and HO Cream Farina, that food that fills some hollow place inside me. Our mother made loaves of homemade bread, stirred the tomato sauce that we called gravy that was nothing like my mother-in-law’s gravy, which was brown, that was…
Marianne McCarthy Dodging Bullets in the Unseen World This work attempts to explore the notion that there exists a kind of reciprocity between our visible world and the unseen world, through which spirits or life energies reluctantly recycle. In this balanced but mutually myopic process, a death in our realm is a cause for great celebration in the invisible world, as a birth or a homecoming. Accordingly, the joy and anticipation that greets a newborn baby in the visible world, is felt as a loss in the unseen world, as a beloved spirit sadly “passes” into the realm…
Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen For many people, the study of poetry is intimidating. Reading and writing poems reminds some of the onerous task they had to surmount in order to graduate from middle school. Thank goodness for clear-eyed writers who can actually create a book on how to compose poetry and how to really enjoy doing it, too. The title of Diane Lockward’s newest book The Practicing Poet: Writing Beyond the Basics may, to some, be slightly misleading suggesting that this book is more suited for seasoned language mavens. Rest assured, however, this indispensable book is filled with…
Review by Lisa M. Hase-Jackson In this, Mary Meriam’s third full-length collection of poetry, dreams are as integral to reality as are expressions of longing, immersion with the preternatural world, and politics surrounding gender identity. Relying largely on a variety of forms to deliver wide-ranging content, this book invites the reader to consider and recast the paradigms of all things feminine. Early poems in the first section of the five that comprise the collection draw on dreamscapes for their potency, entreating in “Life Study” to Let me not list, let me not repeat. But come inside to my longing dreams…
Review by Michelle Everett Wilbert In this powerful and exquisite collection of poems, Jamie Wendt, a graduate of the University of Nebraska MFA program whose poetry has been published in various literary journals including Lilith, Raleigh Review and Minerva Rising, locates the interplay between the material and spiritual inheritance of land and people through themes of place, and displacement. In poems of vivid imagery and a strong, narrative voice, her experiences and questions are lived out while allowing that there is mystery that can only be accessed by the act of choosing, and choosing again, over a lifetime. Central…
Review by Bunny Goodjohn The airport monitor indicates George’s flight is on time and I think about what I’ll say to welcome him home. Love isn’t the first word to come to mind, which is, I suppose, progress. (“Salt and Blue” 11) I rarely pull my opening block quotes from the first story in a collection and have never, I believe, used the first two sentences. And yet, this has to be my choice for my review of Lisa C. Taylor’s IMPOSSIBLY SMALL SPACES: Carol’s reflection on progress—her emotional rehab from love to . . . something else—hands over what…