Review by Janet McCann As a crone poet whose childbearing years are decades past and mostly forgotten, I found this collection brought everything back graphically. The physical and metaphysical elements of childbirth became real again—hyper-real. The poems evoke strong body imagery that resounds with soul-deep reverberations. The sensory images pleased me immensely, though they did not make me want to go through that experience again. It is also satisfying to read a sequence of poems that represents a personal narrative that is also a shared women’s story, a myth that is also a truth. Samantha Kolber received her MFA…
Author: Mom Egg Review
MER Vox Quarterly – Winter 2020 December 15, 2020 Mother is Speaking: An MER VOX folio Curated by Keisha-Gaye Anderson Mother is speaking. She is the quiet voice that speaks the loudest, especially when we are out of balance. From state violence to a global health crisis, the call for healing is louder than ever. These poems and stories speak from the perspective of the cosmic, divine, limitless mother. The mother who lives in the ocean, the trees, in every form of life on the planet, and also within the deepest depths of our subconscious mind. Mother is speaking.…
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Mother is Speaking: An MER VOX folio Curated by Keisha-Gaye Anderson Mother is speaking. She is the quiet voice that speaks the loudest, especially when we are out of balance. From state violence to a global health crisis, the call for healing is louder than ever. These poems and stories speak from the perspective of the cosmic, divine, limitless mother. The mother who lives in the ocean, the trees, in every form of life on the planet, and also within the deepest depths of our subconscious mind. Mother is speaking. These works reveal what she has to say about where we’ve…
Awotunde Judyie Al-Bilali Miracle Again we split open and don’t die life crowns from within every woman every where Awotunde Judyie Al-Bilali is an actor, director, playwright, and producer. She has worked off-Broadway and in regional theater nationwide and is currently Associate Professor of Theater for Social Transformation at the UMass Amherst. As a Fulbright Scholar in South Africa, she created Brown Paper Studio, an applied theatre methodology. She is the author of a memoir For the Feeling: Love & Transformation from New York to Cape Town, and Halcyon Days, a book of haiku.
Barbara Conrad Beauty Queen Her shoes are bolted to the linoleum floor. Practical flats, black and rubber-soled. In a top drawer next to the sink, fistfuls of used tin foil — no waste, no wishes. Before she swapped her office job for a new last name and this tidbit of a life, before she was my mother, she might have been a beauty queen (or a kindergarten teacher she once told me). Now she stands at the window dreaming of fairies with green wings dancing on the lawn. I’m making this up — but look. One is holding a…
Breena Clarke Mama Ascended I have communicated with those who would know. Mama and Papa and Harold and Alice were welcomed in the afterlife, following their harrowing deaths. Their souls were luminous. They said that Mama ascended in the most beautiful sea-green, diaphanous summer dress that ever there was, that there wafted an aroma of gardenia and that there was an infant ready to become the new vessel for her soul. I was heartbroken not to have died at Mama’s side as I had always planned to do. I had accepted the near certainty that I would leave Mama…
C. Jean Blain The Road Called Home She knows this life is round because she keeps coming back. First born of the last born. The only daughter of the only son. She is always brown and braided. Ten toes firmly planted like she never left this ground. Grandma said a woman’s place is wherever she stands. So, she stood. Stood up. Stood in. Stood out. Look at her- Standing. Our ancestors- standing. They are asking for your voice. Remember, there is a road called home and you are always her. C. Jean Blain is a writer and educator, a…
Dayna Patterson God the Mother Speaks of Coprophagia with a line from Maxine Kumin A star implodes and feeds a nursery of new lights. My design. A latrine fly, hungry, presses spongy mouthparts to brown liquid, also mine. There’s no such thing as waste. Only recycling. Fecal meal a redigestion. Pikas haul soft green pellets to the den. Sparrows pick seeds from a steaming cowpat. And you, adventurous kin, drink urine in space. Let anyone with ears to hear listen. You are like toddlers I lay down for a nap, and when I return, the crib, your lips—they’re smeared…
Holly Iglesias OH DEAR Holly Iglesias is the author of three collections of poetry, Sleeping Things, Angles of Approach, and Souvenirs of a Shrunken World‚ and a critical work, Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry. Holly has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.