MOTHER FOLK: Folktales, Wisdom, and Lore in Motherhood MER Mixed Genre Folio Curated by DeMisty Bellinger Featuring M.A.M.A. Issue 53 Featuring Dayna Patterson, Poetry, and Jessica Caldas, Art
Author: Mom Egg Review
Lisa Ampleman Unremarkable My deepest sadnesses are completely ordinary. Not the predicament of roundworms as the shuttle Columbia, making its way homeward, is eaten through by heated plasma, leaving their thermos falling solo through the stratosphere. No word can capture that experience, but so many lose a pregnancy that there’s a name for their children born later: rainbow babies. The phrase harnesses the mythology of a watery disaster, a promise of future safety. I kept thinking my sorrow was something special, but it was extraordinarily common. The star-scar in my navel where they…
Nicole Brooks The Mother Speaks I shrink to a diamond My daughter palms. I’m squat As the littlest Russian doll. She relishes my dispersion Of light, holds me to the Morning sun. Secures me In a golden ring’s claws, Bands her broken love Vein, marrying my pain. I Weigh on her hand. She Springs me from the prongs, Clicks me into a locket Worn against her chest. It is too much. She hot glues me To a magnet. A day of Holding coupons Fast to the fridge — She sees it is wrong. Places me in the Black Forest…
Susan Calvillo Urban Legend I don’t make love, orgasm, or stimulate my nipples forget about cuddle napping, doing yoga, or cat cow poses I don’t practice labor positions with squats, lunges, or deep pliés I refuse to sit upright on the couch, in bed, at the table, or anywhere really I don’t pace, or vacuum, or decorate the babies’ room while watching my favorite amateur baking show (Just Desserts) all to keep those buns in the oven longer… no—I am the laziest self I can imagine don’t tell me they are old wives’ tales don’t make a myth…
Olivia Cronk excerpt from “Mothering as Archive as Textural Surface” With Visual Art by Anne Zielenski Fleming A Quipu That Remembers Nothing consisted of [Cecilia Vicuña’s] act of thinking about a quipu—the knotted cord method of communication used by Andean peoples beginning around 3000 BCE . . . there are no material remains . . . of Vicuña’s imagined quipu, aside from her recounting her thought to others and writing about it as a little note after the fact. This “mental thread” stretched from her mouth to this page like an oral history, told first to herself and then…
Jamie Etheridge We are (not) fish tales She can’t breathe and I can’t breathe because we are underwater. Only she has no gills and I have no fins and we are not fish. This is not a fairytale. Not a folk tale. Not a story at all. My girl is a baby with ocean skin. A toddler with bangs that swim into her amber eyes and a laugh that plunges the epipelagic zone. Arms outstretched, legs kicking, her body tunnels through the colors of the sea: aqua, turquoise, drowned, indigo. She is a child of prismatic light. Then one…
Cheryl J. Fish Abecedarian: Spit Three Times After a compliment, after a friend or stranger remarked how Beautiful, your grandchildren, my grandmother spit three times. Concentrating on our foreheads, saying “poo, poo, poo.” Delivering protection against that dreadful Evil Eye. Emitting saliva prophylactically on Fallible children. Ancient physicians, even Maimonides Glorified the value of saliva and spittle. How that evil eye originated or where it could lead, no matter. It meant Grandma Becky found me worthy, pulled me close. Justice would be served from the well-meaning Kindness of others, no longer at risk from an ironic jinx. Let us…
Megan Gannon Dispatch from Another Familiar Fairy Tale We did not abandon them there, though it was my idea: the two of them alone together in the wilderness of a Midwest shopping mall at Christmas, not holding hands but bound by their word and the rareness of the occasion to stick together. In the event of an emergency they have her cell-phone, his maleness, their long-limbed, always-competitive swiftness to get them to safety. Each of them with a few folded bills—the crumbs we have left to give them—in their pockets to buy gifts with. They wander the well-marked paths…
Heidi Fiedler Selkie Past the wolves, and goblins too, The seals fatten in the sun, Transforming from solid to liquid As they dive through swirls of seaweed. There our selkie swims free. Ebb. Flow. Crash. Want. Need. Love. When the moon is full, she rescues a fisherman, Longing for fire and family, Wanting more, Not knowing it might feel like less. Ebb. Flow. Crash. Want. Need. Love. She slips off her pelt and slides into bed, Dizzy with comfort, Then a salty, fevered kiss. Ache. Pull. Push. A child is born. She happily drowns in milk, skin, and precious…
Hannah Grieco This is a story about a girl who fixes and lifts and carries and if she stops, who will know she’s somebody, and if she stops maybe she’ll be nobody, a nothing, a space where a person was, where a mother would have been, if she hadn’t stopped lifting, this girl in the story who fixes and fixes, this girl who carries. Back to Mother Folk Hannah Grieco is a writer in Washington, DC. Find her at www.hgrieco.com and on Twitter @writesloud.