Author: Mom Egg Review

When you go dancing do persons other than friends ask you to dance? Strangling words pierced lips where love, passion and need once lived. My gray crown counting each subtle cruelty. Long ago in my lover’s arms I convinced myself I was loved, beautiful and desirable. This was love’s magic. I became Cleopatra and Nefertiti bold and courageous. Now, love punished me for aging. With each passing year my lover’s desire and lust becoming closeted. I became the aged woman kept at home while youthful beauty danced in daylight. Survival taught me to kill the love I felt. Learning to…

I lay awake Thoughts of times past The sound of your footsteps pacing The sanctuary of hot coffee Silver of your hair glistening under a single kitchen bulb Silver the age of restless Awakened long before dawn Silver doesn’t need much sleep I ponder your thoughts, away in the unfamiliar Surrounded by darkness, praying for sunshine Fear of the un-known, confused, frustration My wide eyed doe In the middle of traffic, stumbling in the rain Heart pounding Seeking peace, comfort, freedom Hoping, praying that the next set of head lights belong to the familiar And comes to a screeching halt.…

My mother loses the tip of her nose to melanoma. She loses her last sweetheart Art when his daughter forced him to move across the country. She loses her friends one by one as they died. She loses her swim class when I won’t let her walk on the slippery pool walkway. She loses reading novels she loved when her left eye goes blind. She loses her short-term memory to the mini-stroke. She loses walking unaided to scoliosis. She loses her house she’s lived in fifty-eight years when she falls and breaks her hip. At the nursing home she asks…

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…

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…