Jennifer Case Things People Tell Me When I Write About Motherhood From an esteemed essayist I have long admired: “Yes, we need to talk more about what women gave up when they left the home.” In a cream envelope, containing a Xerox copy of an 1860s parenting manual, instructions on how to hold a baby properly to reduce colic and keep the baby happy: “Maybe these will help you.” Scribbled in the margins on an essay about loneliness and online parenting forums: “Post-Partum Depression?” From someone who clearly has never had a child in daycare: “The writing is strong…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Derek Davidson Medium Start with blue, a cadmium wash spilling through Mom’s studio window, covering drafting table, stool, bookshelves, blue a patina before Mom registers the incoming dark and turns on the light. Then a click of the lamp and dimensionality, fullness; our cones take over again, rounding objects, coloring the room though softly, no solid lines separating things. Books, chair, stool, brushes spiking like Spanish bayonet from a coffee mug—all share shadows, blending into everything else a little, the room keeping its evening-dim, shaded and Baroque. This is fifty years ago, Baltimore. My memory’s doubtless gotten more wrong…
Amy Gallo Ryan Water’s Edge Fifteen fingers worm through mine, burrowing and squirming as they pull hard for leverage. My kids and I are always touching, it seems, but today the physicality has a kind of kinetic fervor. The shrieking, the seizing, delighting in the danger of water chasing us down and sand shifting underfoot. “Here comes another one!!!!!!!” The waves are no more than whispers of foam by the time they reach us, my children’s response preposterously outsized, but I understand that their experience of it is real. Their little nervous systems, still so new, have been overloaded,…
Melissa Mowry Cinderella & I Before I hit the uphill climb of my long, winding driveway, I take a steadying breath and lock eyes with myself in the rearview mirror. Back to reality. My ascent is slow, plodding. As our beloved home emerges in the frame of my windshield, all I feel is a sinking sense of dread. I have always been something of a homebody. Naturally, I assumed that by the time I returned home from my first graduate school residency—seven days on campus, eating cafeteria food and sleeping in a dorm room—I would be longing for the…
Sharon Dolin Two Questions after Marianne Moore My mother would ask, “Is he tall? Is he a good kisser?” whenever a new man entered my life. I always wondered, Did she mean just kissing or was she asking if he was a good lover? Despite having had several boyfriends before she married—even one who proposed after her first breakdown—she only ever had sex with my father. Since by then he had left her, perhaps she was living through me. Now that she’s been gone for over thirty years, and I am older than she ever was, I feel her questions…
Jennifer Garfield ghazal for the meadow of my heart forgive me: this morning i walked through a meadow damp and buzzing. i thought, what of the meadow of my heart? even i can barely stomach it. like a poem about childbirth and vernix. forgive the mother brain meadowed by constant tenderness. being a poet is so embarrassing. having a body that screams, i have a cervix like a meadow freshly seeded! i write the sappiest couplets, so cringe i could die. and the child, meadow- sweet, is light as a lark in my arms. exposed. elemental. remember the cows…
Amy Lee Heinlen In a poem just like this one a woman, once womb, feels the waistband of her jeans how easily her ribs have become lost under belly she wants to focus on words, the bright click of her fingers quick over the keyboard, as spring tosses dyed-bright color over the bland landscape humidity adding a nice wave, some body to her hair but she wants to focus deeper, write something to sustain, not only her, but you, and me something surprising and true, with the kind of clarity you and I could have written ourselves say sage,…
Vicki Iorio The S-Trap After rescuing my daughter’s beheaded bobbing Barbie heads from my toilet’s S-trap, Dave, the plumber, tells me he’s really an artist. We sit at my kitchen table scarred with glitter and science project stickers. He draws my profile on a piece of notebook paper with broken crayons. I emerge from the blues and pinks; a dash of orange for my regrets. I tell him I’m really a poet, not a housewife. Hungry, I offer him sardines, the only food left in my cupboard. He turns the key with the skill of a surgeon. We are…
Katie Kalisz First Book I want to bury the boxes of books in the yard, somewhere the dog can’t dig them up. I want to do it while it’s raining so the pages get soaked, the ink bleeds out of the words, the pages return to their purity. But it is winter. The ground is frozen. I have missed my chance. Instead, this book becomes another child to nurse through the cold season, through the risk of flu and other epidemics, under the constant gray sky. Something else I must tend and nourish. Something else to lug around town…
Cathy Cultice Lentes Red Pens I’m grown now a survivor of childhood and motherhood my own children growing going gone but when I give my aging parents my new poem freshly published needing to hear words like wonderful clever miracle child I see two old school teachers glasses hooked on the ends of their noses red pens poised. Cathy Cultice Lentes is a poet, essayist, and children’s writer; author of the poetry chapbook, Getting the Mail (Finishing Line Press, 2016) and coauthor of the epistolary poetry collection, Stronger When We Touch (The Orchard Street Press, 2023). Cultice Lentes…