Gianna Russo Locket & Altar The moon is waxing or waning— whatever. It’s been seven years, the bare kitchen table set to remember. She’s in the dog star, ++++++she’s with the great bear. Some nights she’s waiting behind a door. She’s a girl with a thirties smile. She’s phlox in a crystal vase. The prayer candle, Mother and Child, ++++++silver forks, Thanksgiving plates. She’s the wrist watch with its black bonnet. A filigree of ashes ++++++sealed in my locket. Gianna Russo is the inaugural Wordsmith of The City of Tampa. She is the author of All I See…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Carla Panciera Incantations I liked the name Rose for a daughter. Rose quartz, in the hands of the right carver might yield a six-rayed star from an inclusion. I was pregnant and had begun to read things like tombstones and movie credits for ideas. Considered naming her Ruby. Pigeon blood is the most valuable ruby, and I liked that name, too. For a gemstone. But then I miscarried and had enough red. Our first daughter was born in July. Had I called her to me, suggested a portal? We chose another name, a bloodless one. Named our middle daughter…
Deborah Leipziger Dear Moon If I could untether your lunar sentence, your alphabet, what would you say? Am I the only one listening to your lunar cadence, awaiting your language of light? When I was little, I thought you were God watching over my breath, my silver sleep. Illuminate the tunnels where the captives are hidden. Do not forget our babies in incubators, struggling to breathe. Help us to encode your light, your phases to create a cuneiform of sky, hieroglyph of light. Guide the warblers, thrushes, and buntings, all night’s migrants, crossing the inky dark. Teach us the…
Cynthia Marie Hoffman 12 Moon Funeral I am vacationing in the county of doors. On the third floor, my bedroom door opens to the night, a black room where a vinyl record plays the call of an owl. I have this recurring dream I’m stuck in a stairwell where the hatch above my head is too small to squeeze through. Today, I climbed the spiral staircase in the lighthouse tower. I had to squeeze through the hole in the floor of the lantern room. Far below, waves banged their heads on the rocky shore. My baby was stuck for…
Curated by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach In her poem, “Postlude,” J.L. Conrad writes, “I avoid horoscopes because / I do not want to know how it will all end.” The poems in this September folio—the month of the autumnal equinox—examine how we look to the sky, to the stars, and to old lore, for transformation, for protection, and for those answers in that sometimes-terrifying cosmology of motherhood. Moons, stars, cauldrons, gemstones, crystal, mirrors: these are the tools the poets use for divination, for divinity. Ajanaé Dawkins’ lines in “How to Witness a Miracle Without Converting,” create incantatory sounds,…
J.L. Conrad Postlude ++++++or, last things first He is born in the year the world is supposed to end. I avoid horoscopes because I do not want to know how it will all turn out. Pain centers itself in the spine. Toes wind and unwind. The back arches. There is a tendency to remove oneself from the site of trauma, to speak of oneself as another. A wet cloth on the forehead. On the television—is this possible?—a crackling fire. When we leave the room, there are towels on the floor, water in the tub, white sheets tangled on the…
How to Witness a Miracle Without Converting Ajanaé Dawkins My mother swapped prayer for sharp screams when my sister crowned. The epidural settled on one side until the nerves in her left hip became stars, dying down the dark of her thigh. At 17, I watched a girl- child emerge covered in only-God-can- name. Maybe, blood-light. Star-vein. Water- sky. A boneless sea creature who knows some- thing about the universe sitting next to ours. I don’t want to go back nor do I want to die this way—making daughters. My body has a tenure of chaos and blood. It’s…
Carolina Hotchandani So the Humans Reproduced For the world required another mirror— proffered by the eyes of the child. For the ocean was insufficient. For the water on windy days withheld reflections, giving back the crests of waves— their foam and spray— and nothing more. For the mirrors, chiseled and polished by hands, were flat, so the humans whirled before the glass in search of the third dimension. For children’s eyes were curved like the Earth the sun lit daily. For children cried as light pierced their eyes, and what the humans heard was need. It was not theirs.…
Review by Lisa M. Hase-Jackson Deborah Leipziger’s first full-length collection, Story and Bone, brims with the lyric enthusiasm of one intrigued with word play and musicality as it follows the long tradition of mining one’s own life for inspiration. With heightened attention to the interconnectedness between nature, home, and matrilineal ancestral bonds, Leipziger utilizes both received forms and free verse in a freely-arranged, eclectic collection that, beginning with “Sugaring,” which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Lily Poetry Review, contemplates the definition of home and the essence of one’s origins: for my Nonna, all deserts began with recreating…
Review by Jessica de Koninck With a keen eye for the ironic and with dark humor, A Temporary Dwelling (Spuyten Duyvil Press), Jiwon Choi’s third poetry collection, engages deeply with impermanence and loss. Jiwon Choi is a poet, teacher and New York urban gardener. Much of her work explores the Korean diaspora. Actual dwellings, like the apartments in which she grew up and in which she lives, and dwellings as metaphor for the body, the community, the nation, culture, religion, the land, the planet, the universe, form the heart of Choi’s collection. The poems are in deep conversation with…