Elizabeth Fergason Behindland/August Losing my cousin to her body. Me, in my daddy’s old tee shirt covering freckles and a stick shape. Her, so lush, so comfy cushion. Summer sleeps beneath the stars out at the campground near the seashore. Arms not circling but butt to butt, tangential warming. Faces turned away from one another, mine to the dying embers of the campfire and hers toward the sounding ocean, to a future awakening. To the boys who stand in the sand and whistle. That bikini, oh God, I’ll never forget it, all strawberries and faded sunlight and overripe innocence.…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Jennifer Jean NATURE Zuma Beach We crowded the ice cream truck. Sweat & took a dip. Crowded the boom box. Messed with some words to Jackson’s Human Nature—why, why? (cuz they screw us that way!) We ran over there with a dog & his frisbee. SPFed each other’s napes. Watched this teen girl destroy five, prize-winning sandcastles. Kick spires & shell borders. Stab at sculpted faces. Fill moats with bits that people called meat. With crushed cans & straws & foil chip wrappers. We watched cops charge up. But: they didn’t cuff her—so, we turned to our beach ball, the…
Quinn Rennerfeldt Goodwill in the era of girls Her pink pen etching hearts into the top of my hand during our high school math class. End of semester. Breath peach- sweet and warm on my arm. The drone of lecture a lazy bee in our periphery. We are cocooned in the back of the room. I am not sitting, I am hovering. I am not still, I am static crawling like ants in the sand. I am not breathing, I am holding. And holding. Holy. Until her shapes are complete. Outlines filled in. Gel ink and her vicinity…
Mary Lou Buschi Spotting I found myself in the passenger seat of Colleen McGowan’s car doing donuts on the grass in the make-shift park hidden by overgrown Bayberry—Janet Jackson’s Pleasure Principle on volume 10. I had always thought Colleen was one of the quiet ones, not like the girls who ran through the hallways owning space. Yet, there we were spinning, fueled on volume and speed. My home felt just like that spinning car. I survived by learning to spot. I fixed my gaze on the lower right-hand crack in my bedroom window while the details of my brother’s…
Susanna Rich Last Night Before Viet Nam Ron and Skipper drive a base Jeep from Fort Dix to Ocean Grove, walk the boards to the neon lights of Asbury Park, find Mindy and me queued up for sundaes, ask to cut in, treat us, these young men in fatigues, arms straining their polo sleeves, buzz cut, clean-shaven. Ron and Skip are #47 and 48 in our summer tally of guys we meet. Ferris Wheel into the dark sky, bumper cars, hot pretzels. Skip grabs the brass ring on the carousel, wins me the Kewpie baby doll from among prize…
Nicole Callihan summer sorrows all spring robins everywhere but now most mornings mostly mourning doves on the wire or the wires and my left eye bloodshot in the mirror because I went to the car to cry told Eva she had robbed me of a single moment of joy in a pandemic when I tried to dance in the parking lot while we waited for food at a picnic table the soggy onion rings the softshell crab I order every year and never enjoy but I order because I remember once in my mid-twenties loving softshell crab so much I…
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:…
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,…