Tina Cane Come Correct Continue to verb Orlando urges me via early morning text I’m trying I write back Continue to create he says as I get out of bed raise the window shade distance means the end of snow days so I make a dozen snowballs and keep them in the freezer after lunch I give my son a stone to tumble in his pocket for when we walk the woods I call it his thinking stone instead of the worrying kind your thoughts are your own I tell him as are mine Pray here, you can…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Erica Charis-Molling Elegy for 12 weeks No lines or smiles on a stick. No calls down the hall to my wife, no calling my mom “Mimi” or to make an appointment. No morning nausea, at least not that I noticed. Did the food in the kitchen compost reach through my nose, up turning my stomach? Or did I taste pennies stolen from an unseen fountain? I wish I could re-member the tiny tubes of your heart or the shadow of your featureless face or the floating webbed paddles stretched out from port and starboard, little boat moored to…
Alexa Doran “I don’t want you to says he’s a killer” Oh honey I am angry too. Hansel and Gretel felt this same gravity when they finally saw through the heady scent of too much peppermint to the gnarl of licorice and bone broth whose steam left their bodies limp as used hankies. Still Americans had so much more warning than two fairy tale children banished to the open axle of forest. I do not want to forgive the President or teach you your cheek is your best defense against men who believe life is better embezzled than …
Sherine Gilmour Good Days Is this a good day? What is a good day? I think this is a good day. I do not know, and I am sad that my son has a mother who can look at the blue sky shattered between orange leaves and feel not knowing. We are driving home from the apple orchard. As far as I could tell, no one whispered behind our backs. No one eyed him as he stimmed. Did he stim? He probably stimmed. I do not remember, and that not remembering is like a good day. Is he…
Joan Kwon Glass I Ask the Pearl Diver to Bring You Back From the Dead Joan Kwon Glass is author of How to Make Pancakes For a Dead Boy (Harbor Editions, 2022) and current Poet Laureate for Milford, CT. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust & Moth, Literary Mama, Rattle, SWWIM, Porcupine Lit, The Wild Word, Lantern Review, South Florida Poetry Journal & others.
Dara-Lyn Shrager Twenty-One My child no longer calls this place home but my name is mother. I drive toward his apartment in the metal north, into the clang of a city with its trapdoors and sooted drifts. A week’s worth of mail blocks the door I push. Inside, I water the pincushion cactus where its pink eyes have withered shut. How I remember the white stove, the whiter tub. Noodles, laundry, tick of time. I tell my son twenty-one should feel something like powerful. He just says trying. I think I believe in his human body, the best…
Sarah Dickenson Snyder What is Unseeable and Real That vibration in the space between me and someone I love or maybe not love or maybe not even know, like a stranger sitting next to me on a plane and we find we have the same book and I tell her something I’ve never told anyone before and when I take my bag from overhead and walk on earth again something stays, as if my blood and bones felt it, and with me and my children, not any distance in the beginning, that sharing of skin, of course the divine…
Natali Bravo-Barbee – Flores de Femicidio The Prussian Blue cyanotype flowers of Natali Bravo-Barbee looked steadily at me from the wall. Part of the If Only exhibit at the Olive Free Library, the blue and white florals, each entirely themselves, intimated a deeper story. A body tag, shaped like those found in a morgue, hangs down from each Femicide Floral. Each tag names one of the 327 Argentinian women murdered by men in 2019. Sometimes found in trash cans by their loved ones, thrown away in the violence borne of the “machismo, jealousy, sense of superiority and entitlement,” their perpetrators usually are not punished for their crime.…
Welcome to MER VOX Quarterly – Spring 2021 Just in time for spring, we present an issue of MER VOX that looks forward to renewal, even as it acknowledges the inequities and hardships that continue to plague our world. In the face of sorrow, it’s revolutionary to preserve hope. In the face of injustice, it’s compassionate to remember and hold space for those damaged or lost. May this spring fulfill your hopes for growth and joy! POETRY FOLIO Healing and Recovery Curated by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach Featuring: Tina Cane, Erica Charis-Molling, Alexa Doran, Sherine Gilmour, Joan Kwon…
Review by Carole Mertz Each poem in I Wish My Father is written in three-line stanzas. Through these poems, the author portrays a loving relationship with a father who is in decline. In the process, we also gain glimpses of her mother who shared more than sixty years of life with her father. The narratives are strong in their revelations of the father’s character, his relationship with his work, his family, his habits, and his encroaching senility. Always the first line of the poem also provides its title. This technique often serves a double purpose, making us think twice…