HBAC PERFORMANCE MANIFESTO SLQS (Sarah Le Quang Sang) Procreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 52nd edition of this scholarly discourse. Literature intersects with art to explore the wonder and the challenges of motherhood. Using words and art to connect new pathways between the academic, the para-academic, the digital and the real, as well as the everyday: wherever you live, work and play, the Art of Motherhood is made manifest. #JoinMAMA #artandmotherhood HBAC PERFORMANCE MANIFESTO Sarah Le Quang Sang To the medicalised institutions, their medical staff and the health governmental bodies ARE YOU…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Eco-poetry: Nature Through the Lens of Motherhood We live in fraught ecological times, as unchecked-climate change threatens our planet. And though we—humankind—may be the invasive species, “we are,” as the poet Ashia Ajani writes, “nature, entangled in her movements.” The poems in September’s MER online folio explore this entanglement of natural and emotional landscapes. Written through the lens of motherhood, the poems delve into personal narratives that grow beyond the boundaries of the body, firmly rooting themselves in their ecospheres. These are poems that not only confront the political ramifications of neglecting our world, but poems that weave a…
Hannah Baker Saltmarsh Love, Earth Mother Do you know how many times I’ve started over, without you, on my own? Once, in a beetle’s floral gown, I scraped together a semblance of a planet. I breathe so quietly now like when after one of many global extinctions, two-hundred-and-fifty-two million years ago, you’d hear prehistoric, corseted dragonflies make love mid-air, iridescently as orgasms go. Leaf and root came back, feather and bone, they always do. Even if a bulb’s upside down, I shoot up canary yellows, lavender goblets when I want. I go where I want to go. If…
Anna Laura Reeve Exile Anna Laura Reeve is a poet living and gardening near the Tennessee Overhill region, historic land of the Eastern Cherokee. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Rust + Moth, Terrain.org, and others. Her first collection, Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility, is coming in 2023 from Belle Point Press.
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…
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…