Catherine Esposito Prescott Black Creek Trail or Annual Bike Ride During the Pandemic When Our Usual Route Is Closed New Year’s Day, 2021 Every vulture in Miami congregates on the outskirts of this landfill, and we ride past their murder without speaking, no, that is of crows, past their wake, a wake of vultures, a wake which seems perfect rather than prophetic—cloaked in full black, full mourning regalia, keeping vigil for this year— or wake as in the thoughts that simmer and spring me into day before first light or wake as in the Old English wacu, the strong…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Maria S. Picone The world is my mother’s gift always from her hands to mine soil pouring through fingers blood letting self run from her hands to mine insect buzz incandescing from her hands to mine amethysts winking starlit missives from her hands to my hands to gift world soil pouring blood letting buzz incandescing amethyst winking world circle making world to mother mother to me me to world world again to mother mother I gift you world the world this world my world my gift always from my hands to yours Maria S. Picone (mariaspicone.com/Twitter @mspicone) is…
Koss Untitled (Earth) mother earth, in her shifting plates and spinning transits her own aloof epic the slow weep of canyons’ wounds magnetic axis drawing in quiet defiance and divorces of continents and their denizens oh to be woo or new age or schooled in the healing grounding of earth’s bounties its jaspers so malachite mustard and red and then crystals’ ethereal qualities beaming their light streams and starbursts entombing their own minute cosmos then fossils’ ancestral properties their histories livered in mineral webs and for painters earth’s gift of pigments the richness of certain oxides warming ochers…
Jules Jacob Land of Collective Misunderstandings I wheel soil from a stranger’s yard. Steal clover to lure bees. Search online for mason jars and an apiarist willing to travel more than fifty miles away. I want chemical-free land but there’s invasive wisteria and wintercreeper in the yard, Roundup in the garage. I study consumer reports about cereals and snack bars tainted with glyphosate, pour Honey Nut Cheerios into my granddaughters’ bowls Jules Jacob’s poems are featured in MER, Lily Poetry Review, Plume, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. She’s the co-author of Rappaccini’s Garden (forthcoming White Stag Publishing) with…
Lorraine Currelley Domestics (For: Domestics, Our Unsung Heroines) gentrification invades our eyes with its growing visual stench. our love putting food on our tables, cleaning invader’s homes. it is our need we hear, when their children call us by our first names. we fold into ourselves, never dismissing this herstorical violation. diamonded mothers stroll casually, speaking on phones and window shopping. while we domestics disguised as nannies push carriages, with children old enough to walk. there is no equality in this poem, only constant reminders of ancestral enslavement, apartheid and their grandfathers jim crow. no neighbor, no friendship, only their…
Sandra Crouch The Miracle The way the bush beans begin with curls and winding our story grown from seed not with the motion of bodies meeting and meeting again but inside the thick yellowing leaves of the soon-potatoes, the flattened shape of an animal, sleeping A city garden holds no heavy weight of danger, no fierce predator but this gentle whorl of the feral cat who wails at night and by day rushes from our footsteps like the ghost of our first child We weren’t ready so we held in our arms the air and nodded gently like calyptras…
Jodi Boulton The Badlands They say they’re the result of two geological processes, deposition and erosion. What I know is this: The earth there rubs like dry, gritty clay and is the color of putty against my palms. Alligator fossils, Amethyst haze sunsets, and my childrens’ silhouettes against the striations and water marks – the architecture of ancient epochs. And now we stand in the kitchen our six hands molding the flour adding the water, salt, and egg, creating rugged peaks, our Brule and Sharps, on the cool black granite. Chemistry of rain, sand and wind, of water, salt,…
Review by Michelle Panik The book jacket for Dallas Woodburn’s collection of short stories, How to Make Paper When the World is Ending, describes itself as “the ghosts of what might yet be and the ghosts of what might have been,” which was intriguing enough to pique my interest. When the blurb subsequently posed the question, “How is each of us shaped by what haunts us?” I knew I had to read this book. While so many collections are organized around a subject matter, a setting, or a character, it’s rare that one operates within such an elliptical theme…
Review by Ana C.H. Silva Elina Eihmane, a Latvian artist, filmmaker, poet, and mother based in Taipei, Taiwan, has published a gorgeous, handmade feast of visual poetry, One Day at the Taiwan Land Bank Dinosaur Museum through The Emma Press (March 2021). Inviting to the touch, the book is 36 stapled risograph pages. The back of the book frames this chapbook-length work as a love letter from a mother to a son, but, importantly, the book also surrounds the mother writer with a healing compassion that reaches out to other mothers who have suffered difficult births and challenging postpartum…
Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi For My Daughter Not with the milk coursing through my breast but with the sap singing in my unwritten poems did I feed you. Long nights, until the glowing of dew on every lonely leaf; I was from head to toe a pair of open eyes, to cool your fever simmering the sea of my words . Long days, closing the white notebook of my desirous moments, I followed your tottering steps in the parks and playgrounds to reach the unreachable dandelions. Every morning breaking the pure silence of sunrise, with the noise of the juicer I…