Jessica Bozek Lost Constellation: Noctua Without drugs I lack the imagination it takes to look up and see an animal in a scattering of stars. Rotate the shapes and a different bird emerges: solitaire, thrush, mockingbird, owl. Pictures overlapped as astronomers competed to colonize the southern sky. One autumn evening in 1822, Hydra’s tail became a perch and Noctua appeared. Words crowd the starlines as the child crowds the mother. I need a bowl / I need a sky. I can’t wash the cherries myself, she complains. Someone always gets the last word. The owl now a ghost…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Anna Crandall To: E Dear, Out of the black dark of: coyotes yawping their humanoid songs to the shine of the paved-bright street-light city, your cries, too, barren animal greed. My thistle-thorn, my kismet, my moon-crescent fingernail hanging suspended in my womb, I need. Write you letters on the day you were born. Think like words can take this torn thing and mend. Leaves falling into a rush of water, fever-dream, time-lapse scream: I keep little pain. Just your first animal yelp and the way we were strung together, wet laundry, flapping, pinned to each other, sodden, the…
Alexis David A Topography of Motherhood The fog lays over the hollow hills and I am here dreaming. I pair the sound of death with the taste of ginger. The moment of birth with the memory of bones. Before I take my tea, the rain comes. The streets are full of lanterns. The fog lifts and I fold my legs beneath me. I wipe your chin with a cotton cloth. Alexis David is a book critic, poet and fiction writer who holds an MFA from New England College. Dancing Girl Press published her chapbook The Names of…
Andrea Deeken Silent Treatment White static on the television, a wave rising at my back. A wall of grey clouds skimming towards my car. I am driving away from you. Since we last spoke, Spring has come. The birds are busy making their nests. The geese are on their way back—see how they fly in such haphazard Vs—change course sometimes, the way I change lanes when late to work. My favorite flowers grow in ravines: purple hyacinths, yellow dandelions locked in the fists of my only child who collects them in jars for our kitchen table. Still, I look…
Carol Dorf Ignore Them: Memorial Day Bees swarmed by our front door – I ignored them – the way I had been taught I guided my child to do the same – Ignore them my mother would say Meaning bees – meaning wasps – meaning boys and their calls A few hours later the bees found all the holes in our old brick chimney For weeks a beekeeper visited to capture the swarm – The new queen ignored an attractive box ten feet away Little gates prevented worker bees from re-entering after they left to forage – Later…
Caitlin Gildrien The Stone Sits Down to Dinner It is loud with children debating the most powerful Pokémon and the stone is grateful she doesn’t have ears. One child does not like her lasagna, though last week this child had seconds and asked the stone if they could have lasagna again. The other child does not like the bread with the stuff on it, and the stone would like to scream that she didn’t put garlic on that slice, she set it aside purposely, just try it for god’s sake, but the stone doesn’t have a voice. The…
L. Bellee Jones-Pierce Early May The robins are late this year. I thought they’d never nest. Their piles of sticks and grass, dirtied cobweb nets, waxed and waned like a moon at the corner of our porch, growing and then blowing off the slats and into the gravel with the wind. More than a month since they began, the birds take turns warming eggs. Finally. The plump one— the one I see most—will stay when I come outside, watchful while the lock jangles. I wonder where the other goes when it startles, sudden wings and sound. Small things…
Amy Lemmon Fracture Season My god the breaks we lived through— snapped eyeglasses, chipped dinner plate, pillowcase ripped, mug handle cracked, bent door-closer, crushed a bit more ++++++with each door-swing. No surprise, after all, to find ++++++two years later an ankle turned, a tiny fracture, chit of bone dislodged. Oh how we tried, but no— no boot or brace, no velcro, no gorilla glue or black electrical wire, no duct tape, epoxy, patch, or threaded needle could set this home, this body back to rights. Amy Lemmon’s poetry collections include Saint Nobody (Red Hen Press) and The…
Xiaoly Li A Small Goddess This freshly store-made tofu we stumble upon, grassy, nutty, melts in the mouth. That purple corn, chewy, earthy— your favorite, the stubborn root woven deep in us. I don’t mind a pilgrimage to scattered shrines for specialties: Costco for wild mushrooms, plump with rain, and jackfruit chips that crackle—unleashed; H-Mart’s tilapia, silver-scaled for steaming, chives’ biting memory folded into dumplings. For you, these wheeled offerings— our second chance to lift the weight we carry. Redo those years— I was an ocean away when you learned to walk. Here, I pull this new green…
U-Meleni Mhlaba-Adebo Her Voice in the Wind Some days, I hear her. +++Not in dreams, +++but in the wind. It brushes past my cheek, +++carrying a lesson, +++a warning, +++a blessing. She speaks in birdsong, +++in the kettle’s whistle, +++in the way the light +++hits the sink. +++She’s not gone. +++She’s just quieter now. +++And I must lean in +++to hear her. U-Meleni Mhlaba-Adebo is a Zimbabwean-American poet, educator, and marathoner based between Boston and Lagos. She is the author of Soul Psalms (She Writes Press). Her work has appeared in MER and Write on the Dot. A …