Reviewed by Libby Maxey At seventy pages, Show Her a Flower, a Bird, a Shadow is too long to be a chapbook, but it has that feel: focused, intimate, slight yet substantial. Peg Alford Pursell’s stories tend toward poetic microfiction; most of them could fit on a single page, although this edition gives them ample breathing room. And they do breathe, swelling and contracting through each living, human moment. “The breath is the breath is the breath” (3), as we’re told at the end of the first story (“Day of the Dead”), and that sounds like an invitation to…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Reviewed by Julia Lisella Odd Mercy is aptly named. Alzheimer’s, explored in a crown of twelve unrhymed but solidly structured sonnets called “The Little Mommy Sonnets,” allows for odd and unexpected mercies— Some people study for years at the feet of a master to learn how to live in the moment. Your sharp tongue dissolves to a soft fog, my armor melts, the clear moment before us like a plowed field. (3) The sonnets make up the first half of this slim volume of poems by Gail Thomas. In them, some of the symptoms of…
Reviewed by Judy Swann When my friend tells me this loss will open the way to all the others in my life I think of the way I am drawn (86) So says Wisconsin poet Andrea Potos in “Every Body She Carries,” one of the eighty-eight poems in Diane Lockward’s uncanny anthology The Doll Collection. How do we become who we are, how are we drawn? For little girls, dolls have been an integral part of becoming. My grandmother used to call me her “Dresden doll,” after all, and sometimes I still am. Much of…
Reviewed by Sarah W. Bartlett Poet Laura Foley is not new to publication having won a couple of poetry contests and been read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac. She is the author of six collections of poetry, all of which have received rave reviews. Into the bargain, she has a unique photographer’s eye trained to unusual perspective and subject matter. You really need to visit her website to see what I mean. Her perceptive eye and heart, perhaps enhanced by her Buddhist training and work as a prison and palliative care volunteer, make themselves known in her…
Human Trafficking in the United States Am I their mother? They took them from me My captors Tore them from my arms as they emerged from my womb My babies One after the other I cried after every missed period Had 9 months to prepare for my loss Had 9 months to dwell in my failures This is the life I’ve been given Dropped in this world that sees me only as a vessel A dumping ground for sin and hate But sex and drugs don’t equal love Giver of life, I am but do not call me a mother…
The Girl in the Apartment Below As the train whistled past the lonely road, She stood still. The stale neon lights illumined the plastic smile on her lips. Her burdened shoulder drooped. Yet, she waved. She was all but ten. I got a glimpse of her sorrow beneath, I blinked, and she was gone. Why didn’t I share my journey with her? She was all but ten. –Srividya Kannan Ramachandran Srividya Kannan Ramachandran is an artist based in New York, NY. She was born in Pondicherry, India and has lived and worked in 14 cities.…
Gluttony Moves In to Stay The mother worries and hovers, pecking things. Brings a slimming duvet, toes to nose. Daughter’s eyes skitter, blink Morse code: what did you bring? What is she hungry for? What does she want? Siblings and neighbors ask through a cracked door. Answer: Whole birds, wheat fields of bread, fruit, ripe to rotten, fish, smoked, other-world crimson. Daughter sneaks things to eat, pens to scribble. Writes her autobiography on tissue paper, used napkins, paper plates. Soon burned by the keepers in rusty barrels. Fire eternal, high flame, smolders peaty earth. Pop psychology, short for popular always…
Second November Two years alive without you day into night somehow winds a life. Day into night in rooms where women are dying where Mrs. Richman waits for the scary angel to come, that last doctor who says no, I don’t think you’re going to make it this time. She waits for her sons to come visit the same ages we were twenty eight and twenty nine, old enough to lose their mother. In rooms where women die and bring life invoking your name into my face mask I pray you’re proud of me I wonder if I’ll ever be…
The Mother I kept them close when they were young. The boys could roam as far as the mulberry in Schiozzi’s yard qnd the empty lot by the East River. They’d wrestle in the grass, send spitballs across the dinner table, wear me down with bicker and clash. Over the years, threads unraveled. The oldest yanked himself loose. The second unfurled without a ripple. The third untangled silent as stone, sliding out the side door without goodbye. Strands slipped away, like rope paying out through a sailor’s palm. Now these boys have come home men. Home again to sail Dad’s…
What Mother Means Clara Lemlich young Ukranian immigrant gave a Yiddish speech I’ve Got Something to Say after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire 20,000 immigrant women all joined to make a union all those women at last night’s Clara Lemlich awards women in their eighties nineties hundreds still fighting still taking care of us all I have always looked for mother figures. Of course I had a mother. She tried in her way. I wanted a different kind of mother a different mother. Warmer, braver, standing on picket lines, not so afraid of what anyone might say, even the neighbor. When…