Anya Kirshbaum In the Midst of Catastrophe, She Blesses What Falls I’m here to confess the asian pear tree in our yard had a year of unabashed bounty, fruits hanging like succulent yellow baubles, so heavy the crown drooping, so close to toppling. And how it was a joy upon first discovery that I could hardly stomach. Glowing like some gaudy garden of riches. The waste the idle glut some kind of beautiful dagger. And that I almost made sake and pear sorbet. I say almost— a truth of which I am slightly ashamed. Now the rotting fruits stink…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Merie Kirby The witch I have become I plant cosmos and zinnia, flowers that hold their own crowns in their centers. I plant foxglove, so that at the new moon a fox will come and slip her paws into the soft mittens of the flowers. I memorize recipes for buttermilk pancakes, meatballs, and negronis. My cat is white, my little dog is grey, my plastic cauldron holds candy once a year. I shrank my herb garden to basil, rosemary, sage, mint. If the walls of my house were gingerbread I would have eaten them myself long ago. Standing in…
Nicole Greaves Scars On a late Friday night in the sauna, women gather, stripped down to their underthings or just wrapped in a white towel becoming spools. Even though we melt like candles, it’s not as hot as my mother’s country where I stood in my great-grandmother’s yard becoming wood like the cows who did not move when the flies settled on them. We sweat and sigh as our scars begin to glisten and ripple, come alive with their burning. You could unzip us like coats, and we could almost step out of ourselves, but no, we’ve spent too…
Anna Abraham Gasaway The Kenmore Refrigerator The light’s gone out but it still keeps things cold and freezes—Sears has gone out of business, so ten-year warranty’s no good. No repair person will come and visit this relic; it was the cheapest version—had no frills, no ice maker; we figured that’s the first thing that would break—but no, it was the side shelves; they have a weak middle—we duct taped them round and round. It’s filthy with ghosts of salad-dressings past, celery and greens left languishing, tuna from the Land of the Lost, weird smelling rot at the back. These…
Ana María Carbonell El Laguito I walk down the dirt road to a shortcut through a few pines that once felt like forest follow the path to granite rocks marbled with white stripes like the skirt steaks we always ate because they were so cheap, to the small beach at the edge of our laguito where I learned to swim, the fishy beach where I’d bring buckets and nets to catch minnows who’d nip if I didn’t keep moving sometimes they’d bite my mother too when she floated between breaststroke or the crawl sun on her face, her white…
Diane Raptosh As for Your Grandma Concettine Let x = any number of grandmothers / Let’s say yours never praised your name / Let’s test / Let’s circumflex / My history = your grandmother ^my mom^ me > you / Let’s wand | Let’s witch / Let rooster bones stew / Let the clouds whoop / Let marrow steam / Let’s dress ourselves in drips / Let’s lax / Let why walk / Let fat hollow out its stock / Let’s intersperse love with buckled knees and straightened backs / with sleepers snugged in twos like sticks || Let…
Keats Raptosh Conley Your mother, whose name I could never pronounce Dear Mom, Today we killed the rooster and as we boiled his bones I thought of the grandmother whose name I could never pronounce but reminded me of the Tom Petty song— ya never slow down ya never grow old. How she used to sing the praises of bone broth, of collagen, never of me. The rooster stock dresses the windows in steam, and I imagine her own bone marrow full of sardines and stubbornness. Potent as black garlic. We are all broth-built. Do we make ourselves or…
Review by Jennifer Pons Rebecca Foust’s seventh book of poetry, entitled Only (2022), investigates the fleshy corporeality of woman, mother, and citizen. With accomplished craft, intelligence, and vision, the collection traverses the acts of remembering and reflection, revealing the universalities of what is at stake in the human story. Foust’s poems hover between worlds; they eclipse time and history, risking what is recollected and imagined to speak truth. Ultimately, these poems resonate and ascend as they wrestle with regret, grief, trauma, birth, love, and what is lonely, reaching toward what must ascend in hope when reality is both fact and…
Review by Melissa Ridley Elmes Connie Post’s poetry has been published in over 60 venues including the American Journal of Poetry, Atticus Review, Boston Literary Magazine, Crab Creek Review and Toronto Quarterly. Her first full-length collection, Floodwater, was the winner of the 2014 Lyrebird Award from Glass Lyre Press, and her second collection, Prime Meridian, was a finalist in the 2020 Best Book Awards, 2021 International Book Awards and 2020 American Fiction Awards; she has also published two chapbooks. She is the recipient of five prizes for her poetry, including the Crab Creek Review poetry award. Between Twilight, Post’s…
Recent Releases in Poetry and Memoir Mary Buchinger Bodwell, Navigating the Reach. Salmon Poetry, 2023 “How does one learn / to navigate the reach / its treacherous rocks?” asks Mary Buchinger in the title poem of her new collection. The “reach” she refers to is not just a stretch of ocean between islands off coastal Maine. This book is about the churning cross-currents of grief. Buchinger’s poems recount difficult months before and after her father’s death, and take us deep into the inescapable labors of sorrow, memory, and longing. Immersion in the “reach,” however, also reaffirms and deepens the poet’s connection to…