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…
Author: Mom Egg Review
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.
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,…
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…