Amy Ralston Seife Aleppo, February 2023 blanketed by his bedroom walls face down in rubble the cup he newly learned to hold filled with silent dust — his mother trapped in a distant corner when the world lurched and folded her milk bleeding into earth dreams him free floating toward the sun Amy Ralston Seife is a poet and short story writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lumina, Inkwell, The Ekphrastic Review, Literary Mama, Quartet, Indelible, Right Hand Pointing, The Five-Two, Plants & Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for the Best…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Jessie Zechnowitz Lim Following My Daughter Upstream Yes, I would like to slip quietly into a lazy river, to float downstream, buoyed by a swan-shaped raft with a beer in one hand. I don’t really care where it takes me, that it has no tributary or delta. Lazy rivers go in circles, if you’re familiar. But more than anything, I want to be with you, and you’d rather swim. So I haul my swan to shore, chug, and dive. You are long muscles rippling water off the back. You are drawn upriver, up through the damned rocky edges of…
Rachel Neve-Midbar In the Union We never ate the mollusks nor wore away at the sepulcherean seal. We joined forces with the many, arms woven through the crook of our neighbors’, we made our way forward. And where was forward? For wherever we ventured eventually the gate swung down, the spikes appeared, the signs all read closed. To stop us, to block us, to halt us in our tracks. We talked. We talked and talked, mostly to each other, our words spilling out like the red spit of oral infection or blood blocked that will spill from ears, nose,…
Natalie Marino Blue The temperature today is above one hundred degrees. The horizon is a hot violet while I pack the car to take my children to the ocean. The freeway will be full of other riders. I will see trees by the side of the road waving their cobalt hands, like wives holding dead soldiers’ navy suits at an afternoon funeral. The sky will have a sad face. Some lucky stars will hide in an indigo memory. I will get to my destination, but the beach parking lot will be closed in a cage. The water will be…
Suzanne Edison Spells and Prayers Before Antimatter Suzanne Edison’s first full length book, Since the House Is Burning, by MoonPath Press was published in 2022. Her chapbook, The Body Lives Its Undoing, was published in 2018. Poetry can be found in: Michigan Quarterly Review; Lily Poetry Review; JAMA; SWWIM; and elsewhere. She is a 2019 Hedgebrook alum and teaches through UCSF.
Marisol Cortez Don’t Wanna Tell 1. I don’t want to tell my 13-year-old about Adam Toledo I told him about Daunte Wright the other day but since then, Adam from Little Village, barrio not unlike our own, was killed by police too. He was 13 like my eldest and Daunte Wright, just 20, leaves behind a baby the age of my toddler. Just a year. I have often thought it is no coincidence that when the state kills in broadest daylight— extrajudicially, no recourse, no justice —it’s children who die. Black and brown, someone’s babies: no matter the age.…
Christy Lee Barnes I hear the sound that could have been a gunshot but definitely wasn’t so we keep walking. but could have been but wasn’t You bounce ahead, oblivious as you ought to be and so, so happy. Hell-bent on checking on your favorite water fountain to find out if they’ve fixed it yet. Just a few steps ahead of me. but wasn’t but wasn’t but could have been What use is instinct once hijacked? What calm from these forced breaths in and out, this counting five things…
DeMisty D. Bellinger On Raising Black Kids in a new century when the civil rights movement seemed ages ago and one, learning about the Rev. Dr. King, asks me if Grandma is Black and yes, I say, she is and that one asks if I am Black I say yes, I am, then she reads, her five or six year old self, more about the Rev. Dr. King in her made-for-kids biography of the man who fought for Black folks’ rights and working people’s rights and rights of women and rights of all asks Mama, am I Black? Well,…
Alise Alousi I Am Not Your Mother after reading “Whose Mother is Nature Anyway?” Annabel Kennan, Hyperallergic November 2022 I am not your mother. I can’t carry you along the eroding beach nor across the dirtied river. I am not the lush landscape, not bird song you capture on your phone, you can’t come home broken. You thought you heard a whale, a wail, a wailing. Assumed a woman’s voice, stance to view the mess. I am not the domestic trope remember the long rope how you would say many hands make light work then drop everything sail back…
Review by Barbara Ellen Sorensen Millicent Borges Accardi’s Quarantine Highway is an exploration of human beings finding new ways to be together in the midst of a pandemic. Her poems encompass relationships as well as separations and borders, and what we have found out about ourselves. In Accardi’s superb poetic voice, she invites the reader to reflect on what it means to be together while simultaneously being apart from others. Much like a highway, the poems invariably direct us toward something. Whether that something is positive or not, is entirely up to all of us. But the warning is…