I am a maker. Thoughts are words, words are the building materials. I hesitate to say bricks as they, the words, I mean, are as malleable as play-do, as changeable as water. I am, though, inert. My being is set, not as a feeling person. That changes with the hour although there are the usual preoccupations, but as a worker, I am inert. To clarify: the usual preoccupations are family, friends, world, in any order, and surviving childhood. The work is the work. My father called me every weekend morning, for years, to come and play baseball. Each time, for…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Hire the twelve year old from next door: Helen of Troy with azure eyes rimmed with black lashes. She loves kids, her mother says. She cuddles the two-year-old, Invites the five-year-old to build puzzles And ram cars against each other. Sneak upstairs to the office, the room with boxes and boxes of pagesandstacksofpoetryessaysunfinishednovels waiting to be unpacked, sorted, edited, sent to literary magazine limbo. The ergonomic chair invites perfect posture. Slouch anyway. Boxed manuscripts are Lucy’s wardrobe, Alice’s looking glass, and Dorothy’s cyclone all in one. Who needs Valium when there are words? Nancy Vona holds an M.A. in…
by Christine Orchanian Adler – Motherhood may be a universal experience, but it is a deeply personal journey for every woman. For some, it is seemingly effortless; for others, the challenges can be crushing. In her chapbook, Turning Cozy Dark, poet Jacqui Morton turns to the natural world to seek solace in the earth’s rhythms, hope in its continuous renewal and bridge the distance between her own ‘before’ and ‘after’ journey into motherhood. Morton lets readers know they are in deep from the very first poem, “Unimaginable Loss”: He came into the world like a psalm. Slowly, like the foamy…
Review by Lisa Cheby – As anyone who has experienced or witnessed mourning knows, the process of grieving is not linear, but indeed a whirlwind of anger, blindness, and, in rarer moments, stillness and clarity with a weight as palpable as the eye of a hurricane. Thus is the experience of reading Sharon Dolin’s Whirlwind, an account of life after a divorce in the shadow of infidelity. Dolin’s poems force the reader to pass through the flurry of emotions, through the bands of this hurricane of being wronged, abandoned, and transformed into someone stronger. In “To the Furies Who Visited…
I dream I walk through a desert of stone. It once took months for letters to reach their recipients; packages of supplies to pass foreign customers – worlds gone by. Bananas were posted to prevent scurvy and luck-charms embroidered slowly. Once, we had more time. I dream I walk through a desert of stone, and the ocean is rock, the solitary line of horizon also solidifying. It is my new job to be lighthouse keeper in this country. Having reason, the planet loses its immensity. Lovers survived colonisation, and shipments to distant lands. A message in a bottle travelled thirteen…
An afternoon curling around us, not my house nor yours for tea– we sit in a borrowed mansion, the two grantees—one a painter trying to stop nomads from running. the other a writer talking about eyes, how they show what is being looked at. And as if we met in an another time each describes her mother’s frailty, lips, hair, the stories we tell being theirs. Now with respect for the afternoon pause we plan to walk past the falls in Vermont singing our children’s names, Donna, Peter, Mary, Donna, Peter, Mary, Donna… Rosaly DeMaios Roffman, IUP Professor Emerita, still…
In the midst of slicing onions, the poet Receives a message from her Kitchen Witch In almost-iambic-pentameter. Anxiously she searches for paper and pencil Before the elusive language Falls away like the peel. While she scribbles a furious shorthand, A piece of onion sticks to the page; Vapors cloud her eyes. She plunges her pencil into the onion And takes another stab at the poem. Rosalie Calabrese is a native New Yorker and management consultant for the arts. In addition to press releases and poetry, she writes short stories and books and lyrics for musicals. Her work has appeared in…
“Mommy!” “Don’t step in the paint!” “Mommy, look – look!” “Shhhh. I’m working.” …. right in the middle… Lost the line, color’s mud. “Alright, what?” Ow, too sharp! “Never mind.” “Whoa. OK. Where’s Margie, isn’t she taking care of you? “ (Got to find another sitter, no, never.. what am I gonna do?”) “Don’t you want to go find Margie? I’ll be done soon.” “No.” Out he flickers out he flies. Unidentified Flying Child. “OK, I stopped. What are you trying to show me? You know when I’m working, you have to pretend I’m not here.” “You’re wearing a invisibility…
Summer already and too hot, time for movement, blowing left or right even, if forward is too much to ask, hips shifting, knees flexed like basketball players, ankle-breakers, fast and then gone, a going somewhere, not just out, but an affirmative heading in the direction of, and this is moving and this moving is like victory and victory means a finding, a found, a there, a discovery, an opening to knowing. It’s not just about pleasure now. It’s not about the damp, veined carrot dipped in raw almond butter, the sound of the bite, smooth-bumpy chewing, sweet double-dipping of one…