Hess Love Crab Cakes Supposedly Hester was out of her mind, however, she was also brilliant. Hester made and sold so many crab cakes that she was able to buy her freedom. Hester was my great, great, great grandmother. The plantation that she was enslaved on is now a defunct mental asylum. Crownsville Hospital Center used to be the Maryland Hospital for the Negro Insane, and before it was a willow and tobacco plantation. Whether a plantation or Hospital, people regularly ran away from that place where the willow trees didn’t droop as all willows should. They’d run,…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Jonie McIntire Snow White in Hardin County Snow White started no revolutions, never protested her place among the dwarves, simply swept and cleaned and shaved herself pretty. She was nothing like my mother. In dungarees streaked with paint and threadbare, my mother fusses over cats and sunflowers peeking from her garden in the west field of her retirement farm. Her mother had read the fairy tales each night, along with the Lord’s Prayer, passing the secrets along – the wisdom of feeling blood-shame in dark pants. Weeding the peppers, I remember the thick pads, the talk over fries…
Chloe Yelena Miller Baking with my child The joke is I never follow the instructions. Me, the mom! I don’t bring the eggs or butter to room temperature or separate the dry and wet ingredients. He’s learning to bake with me, despite me. He reads instructions, stumbles over fractions, laughs when I jump ahead, skip steps. He wants to try cracking the egg. He tightens his grip on the white egg, fist already bigger than that egg. The egg explodes across the kitchen narrow enough that all of the walls are speckled with at least a drop of white…
Susanna Rich Knock on Wood, Grandmother Mumchy taught me, if anyone says anything good. And not just any wood. Can’t be a door, its jambs, or a windowsill. Knocking on doors or windows (as others might to be let in) is to invite Satan to whoosh your good luck away. A table works, a shelf or tree, but never a cane, for obvious reasons. Best to use a wooden pencil, one of those miniature golf ones, or a toothpick, which you should carry, anyhow, for your gums. Keep them in a snapping change purse, car ashtray, or the bottoms…
Lynne Schmidt Bodies Like Gods It would be easier to imagine that there was no blood. That she did not scream in agony as she waited for you to leave. It is easier to pretend that that lighting was soft, that your parents held hands until the doctor, with unstained gloves announced your smooth arrival. I have heard that a pregnancy body is the closest we will come to Gods – connecting the spirits to the blood of the earth. And yet – our first act of existence is hurting the women we come from, and then crying…
Hallie Waugh Invoking My Mother As I Sit to Write a Poem Winter nights I’d watch her at the sewing case, rolling thread between her thumb and forefinger. Out would pop a knot, as if mending the hem of my sleeve deserved magic. Her stories appear from midair, too. She tells of last year’s doomed vacation, follows the thread from missed flight to bad seafood and, finally, the twisted ankle that sealed the trip’s fate. I want to trace the thread back, through a line of women tethering each other with stories. Or better, back to whatever it is…
As I braid one of my daughter’s hair and the other waits her turn, I tell them what I am doing. I show them how to separate the hair in sections, how each braid is comprised of three parts, and how to twist the end around your finger to prevent the braid from unraveling. While doing this, I can’t help but to think of all the stories, the tales, the superstitions that I learned from my mother and aunts when I was growing up, getting my own hair braided. For instance, I think of the pattern of bad luck that…
M.A.M.A. Issue 53 Jessica Caldas, Art and Dayna Patterson, Poetry The Museum of Motherhood, ProCreate Project, and Mom Egg Review present M.A.M.A.: our collaboration celebrates the intersection of art and words. Wherever we live, work, and play, the art of motherhood is made manifest. #JoinMAMA @ProcreateProj @MuseumOfMotherhood @MERliterary Dayna Patterson, Poetry This poem was originally published in MER 19. Dayna Patterson is the author of Titania in Yellow (Porkbelly Press, 2019) and If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020). A new book is forthcoming in February, 2023. Her creative work has appeared recently in Duende, EcoTheo, and Gulf Coast. She is…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Kneel Said the Night is a hybrid collection containing poems, prose, photographs, and drawings by Margo Berdeshevsky, the award-winning author of four books of poetry and an illustrated book of stories. She was born in New York City and resides in Paris. Her “Letters from Paris” have appeared online at Poetry International for many years. Berdeshevsky writes, “I used to visit with old women. I thought I needed to learn how to become one.” Perhaps that is part of what drew me to this book—I am 49, and she is a decade older and writing…
Review by Richard Hoffman “What you write about chooses you.” — Barbara Helfgott Hyett Eric Hyett’s Aporia is a chronicle of a year spent helping his mother and himself to accept a diagnosis — and more, the reality — of Alzheimers Disease. Hyett, co-translator, with Spencer Thurlow, of Sonic Peace by the contemporary Japanese poet Kiriu Minashita, offers us an insightful, poignant debut collection. In addition to the spare and piercing dialogue that is judiciously employed in these poems to convey the depth and complexity of the love between a son and his mother, there is also the concurrent fact,…