Age has found me with a tube of red lipstick, a missing front tooth and a partial I had to put in the lay-a-way cuz it cost too much to buy outright Got pesky moles removed from my face an early Christmas present from my friend who told me my skin would look like the excitement I felt the first day I went roller skating Age has found me with a bottle of red nail polish, books of blank pages and a calligrapher’s pen My back is sore, my right knee aches but my strokes are bold and long penning…
Author: Mom Egg Review
The history of my hair My curls These grays…. My canas Are the maps of my life Each strand confirms I’ve lived through some things I’ve been through some things I’ve seen some things My curls scream Africa Afrolatina Woman Choking on messages about hair That the world wants to force feed me How it represents my true beauty “Blow it out! Para que parezca gente!” “Sécate ese pelo porque pareces una loca!” “Use this cream it will straighten it!” “Ven ponte aqui!” “Come sit between my legs, I’ll do your hair!” “Tráeme el peine, y las bolitas! If I…
I leave the hard liquor and the loud talk, that special pot of New Years’ souse. I seek the quiet my elders taught: As the night turned, as the year turned, bad leg or not, my grandfather knelt before his sagging armchair, prayed the way a man prays; down on one knee, leaning on one elbow, bent forefinger and thumb pressing the bridge of his nose. My grandmother, in her plain, white apron over a flowered shirt-waist dress, knelt and leaned on the worn leather of a wooden side chair, head bowed, hands clasped. As the night turned, as the…
I do not recognize the hand that grasps mine… Strong, but no flesh-cushion smooths its bony contours. Brown, but bluish conduits of life bulge and writhe, While newly freckled skin sinks ’round visible cords of thick sinew. It seems I do not recognize… That as my Mother before, Both I, And my hands have aged. Christopha Moreland is a retired Pediatric Occupational Therapist. Her long-standing avocational interests include modern dance, music and the performing arts, as well as adventure sports. Creative writing is a relatively new venture and she is very much enjoying the journey to find her voice.
Mrs. Yip the funeral director called. “Your father must have loved you children so much, because when I touched his body the skin disintegrated in my hands.” My father’s will to live through his two years of terminal colon cancer never left me. He was fifty years old and I was twenty two when I made the funeral arrangements at Wah Wing Sang on Mulberry Street in New York’s Chinatown. My friend Arlan— whose grandmother had passed away in the recent past knew what to do having made her arrangements– had brought me there and instructed me on what to…
Springtime returns, burdened with poetry. Tulips nod by the water lily-dotted pool where layer upon joyous layer of color brightens. Colors will recede, the sunlight will change. I have been to Giverny. Paris to Vernon by train, taxi to Monet’s home, a young woman’s pilgrimage to the misty blue wisterias planted by the master’s own hand. A young woman, married scant three years, crossed over the Japanese footbridge. Always on the look-out for rare varieties, he bought young plants at great expense. “All my money goes into my garden,” he said. But also: “I am in raptures.” * A photo…
In the crisp clear air of winter nipping at autumn’s backside, the neighbor’s persimmon tree stands two and a half stories tall. Its canopy naked of leaves, reshaped by the drag of its fruit: tear- and globe-shaped shocks of waxen orange gloss tethered to white branches, frescoed on a blue sky, refusing to fall to the ground as easily as my silver-gray hair cascades into the brush. A shocking sight the thin mat entwined in the dark bristles. Curious about these thin roadmaps of everything I was; I pull; finger a strand; feel the waffling of it; crinkly kink of…
Curator’s Statement – Lorraine Currelley It was my honor to curate Mom Egg VOX Gallery, January 2016. A welcomed opportunity to curate a gallery whose theme is near and dear to me; Age and Aging. I reached out to a group of distinguished, accomplished and well respected poets and writers. I specifically wanted individuals with a respect for craft. Persons I knew would speak courageously and candidly about their experiences and perspectives in authentic unapologetic voices. Our gallery members are diverse and multi-faceted as shared in each bio. Some are members, supporters and individuals who have…
Review by Bunny Goodjohn – Angie: “I believed it was best to jump headfirst into what you are most afraid of. For me, that had become a certain type of man: dangerous, huge, and hairy, a skewed vision of my birth father. I went after the spitters and snarlers. I attracted them the way rancid meat draws flies…” (119) There is no doubt that Linda Sienkiewicz knows families. Whether writing the Hungarian Vadas nest of “spitters and snarlers,” the Schirricks and their barely concealed animosity, or the Lowsleys where love teeters on an edge honed sharp by lies, Sienkiewicz hands…
Review by Kerry Neville – If clothes make the man, then shoes, according to It’s All About Shoes, make the woman. This book, subtitled, A Collection of Essays, Poems and Stories About Women and Their Unusual Relationship to Shoes, examines the emotional but serious relationship women have with footwear, from three-and-one-half inch “black satin spike heels” to ergonomic “Earth shoes”; from “lotus shoes” once used in Chinese foot binding to combat boots that “soak up blood” in Iraq. The collection is divided into three parts: “The Past,” “The Present,” and “Coda: Thoughts for the Future.” “The Past” often addresses the…