Heather Lanier Origin Story with Porcelain Duck In my hand is a porcelain duck with turquoise eyes that look like they’d bat if only porcelain duck-eyes could move. It stands, the duck, if you put it on my dresser. But I’m the one standing, in a crib tall as me. I grip the figurine and banging it back and forth between two bars. Clang-clung, clang-clung. One sound flat, one sound full. Clang-clung, clang-clung. The carpet is fern green. The windows are two and tall and streaming with backyard light in a land I don’t know is called Pennsylvania. I…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Kristine Kopperud When you ask if I miss Dad I know you’re asking if he was ever even here, with me, but more, with you. I know that behind the door to your room, which is missing its stop for the number of times you’ve slammed it, you sometimes still finger fraying pictures of him, your young memory scrambling to unquestion what you see in them and what you don’t see of him now, to protect the stories you peg to those pictures from the disjointing I forced on you, unwillingly but as naturally as dreaming, in making you…
Cynthia Neely A Sturdy Well Built Home For weeks we watch the white-headed woodpecker whittle out a nest in the once-stout beam or our house, the rotting wood irresistible. A nest that might befit a mate – tempting her with a tapped-out invitation –pulled in by the promise of a flawless home. We listen hushed, at the first pale squeaks and hisses, anticipating a perfect perch from which to watch the metamorphosis of bright white egg to fully-fledged flyer. When I was pregnant for the first time (and at 35, I assumed for the last), we carved out space…
Dzvinia Orlowsky Our Dolls Were Naked Our dolls were naked, but our cats stayed partly clothed—a ribbon here, a brown felt hat there, two holes cut and fitted for their ears. My sister and I wanted them pretty for when the priest came to dinner. They’d mew in the hallway, plunk heavy onto their sides. We waited for the priest to remove his hat, smile, extend his cool hand to touch our faces in approval like Christ to his believers. Instead he murmured that we were cruel, headed straight for hell. My sister’s baby doll was large, shiny, round-faced.…
Donna Peizer The Haircut “Lisa,” I want you to get your hair cut,” I said for the umpteenth time using the voice that insists that mother knows best. My 13-year-old looked at me and sighed, worn down by the broken record I’d become. “Okay, but I don’t want it cut too short. Everyone will think I’m a boy,” she said. I scoffed. “No one could possibly mistake you for a boy, sweetheart, no matter what you do with your hair. You look nothing like a boy, and besides, you always wear earrings.” I could barely contain my excitement. It…
Sally Quon Bad Mom I should have left the night I told him I was pregnant, when he beat me until I thought for sure I would miscarry. But I was young and scared, living in a city where I knew no one. I was too proud to admit I’d made a mistake. Too proud to ask for help. I imagine, sometimes, what life would have been like if I had left that night, how different my daughter’s life might have been. Ah, but regrets are something I can’t allow myself. After all, if I had left that night,…
Lisa Taylor Epiphany Nature can be both soothing and instructive. I am working from home and using the back porch as my office. It’s peaceful. I can work and still enjoy the antics of local creatures. Birds, anoles, snakes, butterflies, squirrels, and tortoises are frequent visitors. A mourning dove sits on her nest in a palm tree, nearly invisible to the casual onlooker. The nest is little more than some fluff tucked in the “boots” of a scruffy cabbage palm. I hear the dissonant sound of a crow approaching; and watch as the mourning dove slips soundlessly backwards—off the…
A History More Complete – Suzanne Frischkorn’s Fixed Star (JackLeg Press 2022) Reviewed by Sunni Brown Wilkinson How do we understand the self? Such work is both an uncovering and an inventing, a mixture of history and imagination, an exploration of heritage and a discovery of how one chooses to approach the world. This theme, of the fraught nature of identity, is explored throughout Suzanne Frischkorn’s newest collection Fixed Star. The speaker in these poems asks, What does it mean to disappear? To lose the little sea inside you? The poem “What It Means to Be a Cuban-Hyphenated”…
Review by Ana C.H. Silva Much to the credit of Jessica E. Johnson’s full-length poetry book, Metabolics, published by Acre Books, I couldn’t read it at all until I managed to still my frenetic end-of-year energy. Caught in the throes of the family/work juggle and holiday preparations, I couldn’t quite catch onto the words. It wasn’t until after the new year, when I caught a cold, that I finally felt quiet enough to sit down and give over my real attention to this slender, beautiful, thought-provoking volume. At that point, I read it all in one go with great…
Review by Jamie Wendt In her new collection of poems, Crow Funeral, Kate Hanson Foster writes about the beauty and stresses of motherhood. The book begins with the title poem “Crow Funeral,” which sets a melancholy tone for the collection and introduces a superstition of keeping children out of danger, which will carry on throughout the book. The death of a crow coincides with the downing of an airplane that remains unfound without any answers about its crash and disappearance. Questions about God’s existence and involvement arise, which the poet returns to again and again throughout the book as…