Jerrice J. Baptiste The Solution Her belly grew like a basketball not filled with air but with water where a wonderful creature was protected inside a hard like shell. She wanted a baby boy genius. She followed her own formula daily to increase the fetus’ intelligence. While listening to classical music, she dabbed in water colors as she sipped lavender tea. In the morning she strolled the local botanical garden, smelling each flower and introducing her baby to the name and scent of each one…this is a pink rose, an Asian Lily, a hyacinth… She inhaled, then walked to…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Lao Rubert Asking Your Permission for Maryam, born Feb 5, 2020 You’ve arrived. Ears, elbows, fingers precisely in place, controlling your world from a tiny perch. The news is blaring as your eyes flicker open bringing greetings from a different dimension. From whence did you come? May we bend down before you? May we ask your permission to stare? May we share your softness, your complaints, your eagerness to eat? May we sit in your space, absorb the being you’ve been becoming? May we stand in your presence, wash your feet, admire your lashes, touch the fluff of…
Sarah Dickenson Snyder Finding You Imagine that we could pick our mothers that there was a parade of them walking by and we stand behind some gentle barrier to watch and select from the mothers who carry spools of thread and pins pursed in their lips the ones whose fingers smell of onions and garlic the resolute who iron their sheets the scent of steamed cotton following them like perfume the strong and rural with chickens and goats close behind the ones with buckets of plastic dinosaurs and dolls weighted in their arms the dreamers with moons for…
Kelli Stevens Kane Moon Rocks (Mom, 1969) Oh! (wistfully) The moon rocks. Okay your dad was out of town. And while we were watching them come out of the rocket and jump down to the moon [on TV] I said, “I want you to remember this.” And I drove up the street to the park. And it was a full moon. It was gorgeous. So I parked the car and I said, “You see the moon? And you’re goin’, “M O O N. M O O N.” I said, “That’s the moon. Those people are up there.” And…
Margaret D. Stetz “Whistler’s Mother” How strange how wrong a title Arrangement in Grey and Black for what begins in reddest flows of blood and grows like bars of color layered on a rainbow the mother-child relationship encompassing serenity of blue and green of hope sometimes a rage of purple or yellow brightness signifying warmth kaleidoscopically fragmented, intertwined. ++++And yet how common this desire of the son to simplify to distance to abstract to paint the mother as an object in a room that he will leave, has left already, imagining age as placid paleness requiring nothing, satisfied…
Hilde Weisert Belly Is this what you think of when dying? The white tunnel not to Heaven but where you came from, a belly, your source. The hands guiding you, your mother’s hands, fussing to get you ready one last time? Hilde Weisert’s poem ‘Ars Poetica’ in MER 14 went on to win the 2017 Gretchen Warren Award (New England Poetry Club). Her 2015 poetry collection, The Scheme of Things, was published by David Robert Books. Her poems have appeared in Ms, Cincinnati Review, The New York Times, Plume, The Cortland Review, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, etc.,…
Lisa Briana Williams The Steamroller Tries to Remain Light It is too easy to say everything we were told about motherhood is a lie. More true to say I absorbed nothing but goodness until it came for me—that “goodness”—to wrangle with & prove what else good may be. Each person inhabiting may be is different—yet I try & try to find formulas: this honey for that bitter room: that sofa to rest on a tongue. I have images of myself as a child sitting quietly in a yard, abandoned & calm. But one child in a yard is…
Review by Jennifer Martelli The cover image of Susan Rich’s Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems is Caravan by the surrealist painter, Remedios Varo. This bright and complex image shows a woman at a piano in a small caravan outfitted with intricate pulleys and wheels, set against a shadowy landscape. The book is dedicated to her contemporary and friend, Leonora Carrington, the surrealist artist and political activist. Rich’s work reflects this same masterful and surreal shape-shifting and travel, as well as a precise palping of the world’s political heartbeat. While the collection signals movement—the titles…
Review by Emily Webber Deadheading & Other Stories, Beth Gilstrap’s short story collection, portrays women in the Carolinas as they endure hardship and process trauma, and explores our connection with the natural world and family. Gilstrap’s flash fiction has appeared in literary journals such as Wigleaf, Jellyfish Review, Ninth Letter, as well as the Best Microfiction Anthology. She creates stories lush with details and sensations, even in short spaces. She showcases these skills in the flash fiction and longer works that make up this collection. Place is not merely a backdrop in these stories; it is in the bones…
Review by Christine Beck Jennifer Jean’s new book of poetry, Object Lesson, is not an easy read. The topic that weaves her poems together is the objectification and pain experienced by women who are mired in, or have escaped from, what is euphemistically called “sex work.” Jasmine Grace Marino, founder and director of Bags of Hope Ministries, who was a sex worker for eight years and who has been out of that life for the past thirteen years, writes an introduction. She says about the film “Pretty Woman,” in which Julia Roberts stars as a prostitute, “…not once did…