Lindsay Adkins Untitled Shoreline unmoored from ship: everything here must help. Coloring books, supervised showers, phone calls might fasten me to myself. Poems. I’m tired. Last night my father became visitor, sat with me in the dayroom. He said he wants to see me this summer beaching with my daughter, laughing, making a windy mess of our hair, running into the ocean’s heaving stomach. He didn’t say it that way—I distend memory, words. When I was young, I’d put my hand in his, walk low tide or sit on the barnacled furthest-out rock. I’d point—what’s that? Point—what’s that?—He’d answer:…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Elisabeth Adwin Edwards Nectarine When they appear at the market, heaps of them, shoulder to shoulder in their smooth, sunny jackets, summer’s in full swing. My mother turns one after another in her long fingers, scanning the skins for a bruise, a blemish, the slightest indentation. At home, after washing, she places the chosen ones in a brown paper bag and leaves them on the windowsill. In a day or two, in her cupped palms, they give in, just a little. With a paring knife, she slices one into sections. I watch her lay them on the plate, those…
Jessica Purdy The Elephant’s Child “Go to the banks of the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees, and find out.” — Rudyard Kipling On Cape Cod even rocks have a scent. Resonant as if the sun is distilled within them. I’m here now. There’s this wooden ladder become part of the earth on its side at the top of a hill near hydrangeas. The sandy, random way things fall. The scrub pines’ fragrant too, and spongy deadfall. Ferns curled and browning. Something scuttles in the underbrush. Sunned skin and moss. Each turn a new vibration.…
DW McKinney Sun Tea When the dust storms dwindle and the air is thick with heat, I pull a 1-gallon jar from the cabinet beside the kitchen sink. My mother gifted me the jar, an imitation of her own, which is an imitation of my grandmother’s jar. I rest the heavy glass in the sink’s basin and unscrew the lid. My hands become my grandmother’s, slick with dishwater and smooth from years of Jergens All-Purpose Face Cream. Water laps up the sides of the glass and catches generations of silent anticipation and gentle glee. When the jar is full,…
Kyle Potvin The Clock Turns Back 1965 Birth mother, my first mother. Small, startled breaths. How did you learn you were pregnant? * In the cruel November air, did you pray, hand on womb, dread pounding your unmarried body? * I imagine delighted rebellion had risen inside you, far from home, in the hours, days, months before. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Ticked a clock. Until it stopped. * Did you hear that year the death list of Washington women included1: Mother of three who died during an abortion attempted by a 45-year-old practical nurse, police said. 26-year old who…
Flame Nebula, Bright Nova by Sherre Vernon Author’s Note I did not know that Flame Nebula would shine so brightly until it was nearly finished. I could only tell you that I had lived much of my life under a metaphor of flame. As a child I was caught in a conflagration of emotions and tensions that ultimately separated me from any hope of intimacy with my mother. Though this estrangement hurt me, I mostly put it out of mind until I found myself on the verge of motherhood. For my mother, who is often associated with smoke in…
Review by Carla Panciera In her debut collection, Pelted by Flowers, Kali Lightfoot writes, “It took years to learn the language of myself.” She takes her readers along on her journey of discovery. Lightfoot is a master of juxtaposition. Even the book’s sections are studies in contrasts: The early years of her life growing up in Michigan as a child surrounded by peers at summer camp and in her high school band, with her time spent alone in the wilderness as a ranger. A traveler whose poems transport us to Kyoto and Lesvos and the Outer Cape, and a resident…
Review by Sherre Vernon The ‘80s were shoulder pads and pearls. The ‘80s were for Jennifers and sex and space—and The Queen of Queens gives us all of this and more. Martelli’s speaker has “orbited over three decades” and shows us “[e]verything then / is happening again” (18), particularly for women. This speaker, the gray pearl of the first poem, shouts through “five types of hunger…The hunger for love. The hunger for freedom from bondage of self. The hunger for cock. The hunger for full moons. The hunger to know” (33). This is a collection that eats what the…
Review by Christine Salvatore What washed over me as I read Marina Carreira’s new book of poetry, Tanto Tanto, can only be described as raw emotion. The title means “so much, so much” in Portuguese, and it is a fitting name for the poems that follow. In every poem, a love song is sung, not a sentimental song, but a song of grit, rejection, joy, confusion, and passion. The book is broken up into six sections and each section begins with a poem entitled “Tanto Tanto.” Dedicated in part to “all the queer daughters of immigrants,” the book opens…
Review by Ana C.H. Silva From the very title of her latest full-length poetry collection, Sweetbitter (Sundress 2021), we understand that Stacey Balkun will purposefully use the power of syntax to open up stories. Her subject matter is, in part, the lives of 90s adolescent girls in Possumtown, NJ; the effects of a chemical plant and atomic testing on a community; the way stories have power over us and, ultimately, how we also have power over our stories. Balkun skillfully uses the contrapuntal form, the technique of erasure (of 90s rock lyrics, of engineering documents, newspaper articles), and many other…