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…
Author: Mom Egg Review
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…
Manny Vega As someone who has lived in Spanish Harlem for over a dozen years, my curiosity about the legendary Manny Vega, whose “Byzantine Hip-Hop” style lights up the neighborhood in murals all over El Barrio, has increased by the year. I finally got to meet Manny when he set up a mosaic teaching workshop for the community at a pop-up space provided by Hope Community, Inc. on 104th St. His warmth towards each child and parent who came through the door was notable and infectious, and he helped students produce over 50 mosaics of their own. As soon…
Anastacia-Reneé Mommy, Mommy, Mommy the airport kid has beautiful droopy eyes because he is sleepy & cold & at a weird place when he’s usually in his safe small car bed. the mom looks absolutely worn out & the older airport kid is practically singing: mommy mommy mommy mommy & she tells her airport husband they shouldn’t have gotten a red eye with the children & the droopy eye kid pulls on her shirt & says he has to poop & mommy mommy mommy mommy gets so upset because she’s with out & hungry & all out of snacks…
Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz Weaning Today I said goodbye to you while “papa” held you atop the front porch, me below, blowing kisses and waiting for you to mimic my movements of palmed stretched hands from lips to air in your direction. Sometimes this works. “Bye bye baby,” I’ll say, then blow a kiss, wave. You’ll pucker at your palm and leave your flesh there to suck, smiling, forgetting to release the hand forward. Or with the hand that is wrapped around papa, you enclose your fist but very loosely, gathering the fingers in a ball, releasing again and again, so…
Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie Writing Around the Edges “I learned to write around the edges.” Wanda Coleman I wake up every day at 4AM while the house is quiet. I write for three hours until the children wake up. I make them breakfast and take them to school. This is how I have written all of my books. (Bullshit.) I had a third baby and I don’t write much poetry these days. I write in my journal often. I do readings. I just got a box of my new poetry book Strut. After a long delay my first children’s…