Cheryl Boyce-Taylor In Her Lingerie Drawer Five Years Later In her lingerie drawer two pearl and crystal hat pins a black flip phone that says Samsung Verizon my brother’s blue stained drawings from when he was five a braid wrapped in decaying thread chopped off when I was eight pictures of a strange man sitting on a beach chair his arms around mommy grandmother’s neatly folded fruit cake recipe hairpins in a hard plastic squeeze-em change purse my son’s first passport stamped canceled 1975 a torn tithe envelope with two singles inside five dollars folded in lined paper and a…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Rosa Alcalá Homophonic Translation We like things written on us, juicy not the least of which what is your team the ironies I thought my favorite sweatshirt (damaged in print shop) said a coat of sugar, my budding coquettish-ness, my wild code switch still yet my narrowing field But cringe years later at the truth Côte d’Azur a place I’ve never been well what message was that to anyone on the bus? How would wet snow turn to fine sand for any of us In desert storms? on Jersey shores? {http://www.shearsman.com/browse-poetry-books-by-author-Rosa-Alcala}
Betsy Andrews On Neptune Memorial Reef Don’t laugh at me, I told that guy, advance of the morning neoprene stuffing, the South Beach merchandise vertigo—explosives and spear guns, holsters and knives— eddying against the incoming tide. I mean: time, a long line fashioned with barbs, the hardee-har-har of middle age hooking my teen self and yanking her gasping up through the fathoms to lay like a fish in the palm of that guy, who laughed. Could she imagine me, in that chlorine sea at the neighborhood Y where, wild creature, she saved herself, finning off childhood’s dangerous shelf and…
Billie Chernicoff Kimono 1. Refusal, acquiescence, travel. 10,000 hours to master the brush. 10,000 to master silence. A study of a sparrow, study of a moth. The sleeve, the arm. An hour to dress. 2. Ode to the nape of things. What can’t be seen even with two mirrors. 3. The Art of Washing the Kimono Undo the stitches. Drown each branch, blossom, cloud, mountain, stone, scroll, inkwell. Tell the river everything. Let it do its work. Sew again, finer. Save the old thread the still useful transient silk your mother taught you. Turn the ruined bird inside where…
Caroline Crumpacker End Road Concussive Event Car radio love song driving out past intention and singing the static between stations . I love you too, that one-trick pony of trying to have a girlhood an ambient refrain of head on porcelain. She is at the perfume hours and hours assembling a way of being a smothered creation repurposed as endless creation. That song is an assemblage of our abilities for repetition, an alliance between all the ways of being expressed as one attachment. We enter here: …
Betsy Fagin miraculous fishes surviving body feast days bosom ceiling already-formed tenderness the marvelously luminous genderfish fills their nets with the bell cure of souls not cranes of vigilance or safe-keeping, only ravens of heresy want knowns combust and survive dispersal {http://betsyfagin.com/}
Wendy Barnes Lament of the Swamp Hag I am not your paramour but made of your leavings, moss-haired, cypress-limbed and guts of chum and dogwood-chunked loam. This season turns you toward your fear, churning storms and waterspouts, the livid ocean squalls and dumps its entrails on the delta. I can read its plastic, glass, hubcaps, your errata spelling forth a ruptured past and a future we fall though and keep falling. I am the bog, the swamp, the marais, its big, meaty maw, selfsame. My nether aching never was for you nor tame, a kitchen garden waiting to oblige,…
Danielle Vogel from A Library of Light When I was small and still living with her, I wanted to write to all the dead people I had never met. I wanted to talk to those concentrations of energy I felt in the hallways of my house, my school’s stairwell, the damp corners of my yard. What I wanted to say couldn’t be arranged so I’d stay very still and reach my silence outward like a tactile glow, a static reaching to communicate with passing frequencies. Tonight, I’d like to write to a dead woman at the bottom of this ocean…
May Joseph Cricket Sounding Darkness March 5, 2016 An abandoned house with red tiled roof in decay rises across the small hill. It appears so much smaller, innocuous, from how I remember it. It is my mother’s childhood home in Quilt, Kerala. Once a sprawling home with a lush courtyard and the sounds of a large family, the crumbling ruin is now desolate, silent. Its melancholic aura betrays deep neglect. My mother stands with me outside the padlocked gates and murmurs in sadness that it is now filled with snakes, this place of her childhood, that she so…
Carol Mirakov kintsugi invisible irrelevant women having aged paralyzing animation of living & having lived ecstatic elastic disasters of time the perennial fuckable virgin apparition unlike animals we wince collapse bearing the seams of interconnectedness we should not be able to survive what we do amenable to chemical packages crows feet autocomplete surgery we having aged a cosmetic potential fill gold powder in patterns of biology to magnify lived pleasure & deference sparkling webbed faces flaunting biography molten angels who is walking tonight {http://www.archiveofthenow.org/authors/?i=61}