Damaged Like Me: Essays on love, harm, and transformation by Kimberly Dark Review by Celia Jeffries “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.” –Muriel Rukeyser The last book that split my world open was Christina Crawford’s 1978 book Mommie Dearest. ‘How could she say such horrible things about her mother?” was the initial overwhelming response to the book. People didn’t believe her story, but I did. I believed every word. At the time the term ‘child abuse’ did not exist. It took one woman telling the truth about her life…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Lara Lillibridge Lost Girls is about missing girls, neglected girls, girls with missing mothers or fathers, girls who mature into women who lose their own children, or grow into obscurity as they age. The seventeen short stories, each between 3-16 pages long, are brief enough to read on a lunch break or during nap time, yet long enough to be rife with tension and often contain a haunting, mournful quality. The girls and women demand to be seen and remembered, and their stories remain long after the last page is closed. Lost Girls is a finalist for…
Review by Sherre Vernon Cindy Veach earned her MFA from the University of Oregon where she was an assistant poetry editor for Northwest Review. Veach is the author of two poetry collections, including Her Kind, and Gloved Against Blood. She has also published a chapbook, Innocents and is the coauthor of the script, Imprisoned! 1692. Her poems have appeared widely, in publications such as the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, AGNI and Prairie Schooner. Veach’s poem, “This Patch Where the Light Cannot Reach,” was selected for the Philip Booth Poetry Prize and her sonnet crown, “Witch Kitsch,” won for the…
Mother Figures – Storied Mothers In this, our second* “Mother Figures” folio, we feature “Storied Mothers.” Once upon a time, traditional stories, myths, and fairy tales were dangerous places for mothers. Mothers were either sainted, but doomed, or evil incarnations, warped anti-mothers to escape from or to vanquish. Either way, they’re not often main characters, but accessories to their children. Either way, they often disappear, victim of a thesis that the mother must be eliminated for the child to self-actualize. Here, poets interrogate and reframe some old tales to center the mother and give her an alternative reading and voice. Carol Alexander…
Carol Alexander O Wicked Stepmother She wasn’t even mine, I had to borrow her. In her likeness, we wore cheap brass chains and scarlet mouths honied with plausible lies. That woman spent her days letting the garden rot the pumpkins cave in upon stalks, field mice grow thin. When the soil thwarted her, sending up heady stalks she hired men to pave the plot. From her bitterness we tasted ordinary sins, from her etiolated beauty life’s mockery. The queen appeared in every hand. After she shuffled the world stopped for a moment sucking in its cheeks—what insatiable greed what…
Richelle Buccilli Cinderella Thinks About Motherhood after Lana Hechtman Ayers Praise the birds who still come to sing here. Praise the sunlight making dust appear biblical, possible spinning in its own cloud of light like a child imagining freedom. Even the walls sense something grows here, how they try to contain us restless and wild, the clamor of pots and pans, the music of water a whistle through silver pipes and foundation. No one sees us here the way small hearts do, finch, squirrel, and rodent. No one knows us here the way echoes of our own footfalls do.…
Kristin Indorato Mouths here we are at the end of the story and in this adaptation, the wicked stepmother is simply gone when the children return, having foiled the witch with a chicken bone and pushed her into the oven, they abandon the gingerbread house are led home by the traitorous birds who ate the breadcrumb trail laid down in lieu of the white pebbles the stepmother found caught them trembling like eggs under the moon and now the children are gobbled up in the arms of their father who is so glad to see them alive, and who…
Abriana Jetté Persephone Responds Fast ships slow snakes at the bottom of the sea. Every earth born creature stood still the day he came for me. The downward dive compels a Vesuvian festoon a vertiginous release that smells like ocean floor and moon, like him, but worse. After he had me, he prayed. Offered gifts. I took multiple sips of his wine. Whatever red stayed on my lips I wiped off on his. No one else knows this. Groveling young girl is a hard tale to sell to justify the weather. He shoulders the blame. Truth is, to be…
Tina Kelley Just One More, Mama “Wicked” and “step” are the only kinds of mothers. Name one mom left breathing in Disneyland. Orphaned: Bambi, Cinderella, Snow White. Scraping by with just dad: Belle, Jasmine, Ariel. Sent to inadequate foster care: Sleeping Beauty and Simba. When Kate and I play sisters she always makes us orphans. Mothers are mere learning tools, manipulables in the classroom, something to push against, to learn from, to erode, or try, until the limits push back. She says, If I kick it, I go to my room. She says, If I stick my tongue out…
Michael Montlack Stevie Nicks as Fairy Godmother How we run to her, extending our hearts skinned like knees, knowing she has the bandage. A twirl of gauze. Hoarse from all her hollering: Beware love! Look how it’s sent me spinning! Why—why do we never listen? Mesmerized by the melodies, perhaps we long to hurt … so we might have cause to hide beneath her cape, searching for some secret pocket where she stows the tonic she pours into her songs. Return to “Storied Mothers.” Michael Montlack is author of two poetry collections and editor of the Lambda Finalist…