The thin girl burns calories lifting hangers from the shopping rack, hungry as anyone for a bargain. She is not obsessed with her waist or the way her stomach laces her hips together like a rope bridge bent beneath the weight of the wind. The thin girl loves flowers. Find her in a meadow or at the bank, tucking a withdrawal slip in her wallet, in a coffee shop drinking chai, reading the poem about the scarecrow woman, feeling the deepest parts of herself swept up in a tornado of straw and chaff. The thin girl eats pancakes at the…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Ellen Miller-Mack – The moment I finished reading Monica A. Hand’s me and Nina, I felt an intense longing to be with Nina Simone. I went to her official website, www.ninasimone.com to listen to her music just in time to hear her sing “I was hungry and it was your world” from Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman.” Suddenly that line I’ve heard dozens of times had new meaning, and it got me like a punch in the belly. It’s the pain of exclusion, the toxicity of racism, in Nina Simone’s lifetime and in ours (“How it…
Review by Nancy Vona – Donna Katzin has created a haunting and gripping book of poetry that focuses on South Africa, during and after apartheid. Katzin is executive director of Shared Interest, a not-for-profit organization that provides low-income black communities with capital and technical support for creating businesses. With a foreword by Archbishop Emeritus Tutu and an introduction by actor Danny Glover, this book has deservedly received attention by high-profile activists and humanitarians. It’s difficult not to stumble into hyperbole when describing With These Hands: poignant, heartbreaking, hopeful. But these poems are heartbreaking and hopeful. The first section of poems,…
Fishing without a fishing pole is feeling vibration and tug is like playing a harp with the fingers rather than the nails feel the strings as they tighten, loosen feel the nibble at the other end and tug on the hook, pull it through the flesh below the water’s surface you catch fish this way play soft strung instruments the guitar, the harp, the psaltery you can catch a love this way too playing the strings softly, amiably especially the invisible ones at wrist and knee sewn on by a mother long ago with care and determination. Odarka Polanskyj Stockert…
I love having a belly full of babies. There are two in there, a boy and a girl, and my body gets busy making them arms and legs and hearts. I leave my job a few months early, supposedly to sit on my porch swing and sip lemonade. Instead, I give birth early, and no one can stop it. I hide from my boss a few months later. I’m at the grocery store, and I don’t want her to see that I’m not pregnant anymore. I don’t want to say the words out loud. That would make them real. I…
I brought our daughter with us to the last nursing home. Both her grandmothers were there to help me figure out the next step on our path. She was only five and we’ve been in these type of situations since she was three and her father was diagnosed with a Stage Four brain tumor. We were all horrified by the rotting smell and industrial hallways. Clearly, this wasn’t the way to go. “I think it’s time to bring him home.” my mother-in-law whispered. The anvil melted away from my heart. My deep sigh contained a trace of the tears that…
The Mom Egg at M.O.M. Conference The Mom Egg At the Museum of Motherhood Featuring: Holly Anderson Robyn Art Rosalie Calabrese Carla Carlson Stephanie Feuer Alana Free Theta Pavis Jayne Pierce Ana Silva Ekere Tallie MC Marjorie Tesser http://themomegg.com Monday, May 7, 2012
Life begins in water. Here, on the gravel beach, where the shifting tides rock clattering pebbles forward and back in their arms, and the murmuring sea whispers lullabies in our ears, I watched you. You were silver and grey like the sea. Stooped over. One hand curving sideways, shucking smooth skittering pebbles out to sea. The cliff’s arms encircled us. We ambled together, embraced, then pulled apart. Solid to liquid. I walked with my head bent downwards, scanning the gravelled earth for a mottled rock shot with rust, or a limpet shell, curved like a pregnant belly and all the…
I have lost twenty-four pounds. Most of it seemingly from my breasts. “They are like teenage breasts,” my husband says. He quickly adds, “That’s a compliment.” I have my doubts. Why do the breasts go before the potbelly? Yet that, too, has shrunk. I pull on my old jeans and look down at myself with amazement. Where did I go? Where did my new-mother-full-blooming-woman-body go? Am I a girl again? Someone at work says, “You dropped a lot of weight!” I resist an impulse to look around my feet for something fallen. Where have I dropped it? Where has fifteen…
Reviewed by Carol Dorf – Although it is “difficult to get the news from poems” Amy King’s poetry helps the reader notice and pay attention to what is essential. Her poetry juxtaposes disparate aspects of personal history, social context and language providing the reader with more complex understandings of our lives. The second poem in I Want to Make You Safe, “Follow the Leader of my Silken Teeth,” provides the reader with an understanding of King’s ars poetica, while referring to the art of Janet Cardiff. The poem begins, “And suddenly, art is a hand planted from the wrist/down into…