Skip Renker A Widow Honeymooning near the rim of a volcano, who wouldn’t catch fire? She laughed when he re-phrased St. Augustine: “Better to marry and to burn.” She stopped smoking. He didn’t. In restaurants, diners at other tables began to do all the talking. Their sweetest child grew into a smoldering adult. They moved a thousand miles from the ocean. She dreamed of rigging, the crow’s nest, a cavernous hold. A retirement cruise, deck chairs, brilliant stars— they rubbed and warmed each others’ hands. Dying, remembering the one necklace he ever gave her, he whispered “Beads…beads…” She dreams…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Christine Stewart-Nuñez Excess Rex My preschooler fears fire, typhoons, and lightning storms. He doesn’t chatter about the Prairie School gas station we scrutinized on vacation; he asks about the wildfire described on the plaque across the street. The burn and evacuation happened years ago, I said, but he still woke from nightmares where sparks landed on his back. He selects books: What Makes a Volcano? and The Ice Age. One snowflake means blizzard. I heard the radio say an ice storm’s on the way, he’ll whisper. Months before his birth, his dad texted: xavier rex. He liked the visual…
Elaine Terranova Tantrum Things are very hard in the world of a three-year-old. So much you are born not understanding. You can play in the street but only until supper. You get a spanking for the interesting white balloons the size of sausages you find discarded there and try to blow up. You can’t pee in a bottle like next-door Bobby, so must hurry home or wet yourself. After supper night comes but not always sleep. You are safe while there is light. Then the light gets put out. Now that you are three, no one touches you.…
Ann Fisher-Wirth Lebkuchen There is more and more I tell no one Jane Hirshfield Once a week, my mother brought me home to make Lebkuchen, my passion all that fall because it would ripen while I was gone and because it saved talking. I spent hours measuring and mixing +++and shaping ++++++and baking the bars stiff with dried fruit and honey, and she let me pretend— but pretend what? that I was helping prepare for Christmas? She would drive over to the Home and pick me up, then, as we neared the house, I would lie down on…
Bruce Moody The Embrace Its wings, its ribs, shoulders, its skin have a mind that desires — as the fires of spring desire — to be held, close, firm, firmly by hands. Hold me, hold me the flesh choirs, it solos, it arias and wails. The body knows its want. In the red breakfast nook in the kitchen one Sunday evening after supper. On one red bench, his brother and he. His brother against the wall. He on the outside. On the red bench opposite, his mother against the wall. His father on the outside. Light…
Review by Sarah W. Bartlett , Katie Manning’s website bio starts with “Upon first seeing a rhinoceros at the zoo at age 2, I said to my mom, ‘I want to be one of those when I grow up!’ I have settled for being a poet.” Author of five chapbooks and one full-length poetry collection, as well as multiple award-winner and founder/editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review, she has conclusively done more than ‘settle.’ Her poetry resonates at a gut level, as much for its content as for its simple, unadorned, straight from the heart language. While I have yet to…
Congratulations and best wishes to Emma Bolden (“Assumption”) and Kathy Fish (“Muriel’s Cyclone”)! Their pieces from “Riding the Dangerous Wave,” an MER VOX folio curated by Tara L. Masih, have been selected as finalists in fiction for “Best of the Net.”
Review by Julia Lisella Laura Page is a visual artist as well as a poet, and that sensibility of the visual comes through in this collection, not so much through the imagery Page chooses, but through this poet’s faith and pleasure in the physicality of text itself, the very shapes of particular words on the page, the textures of sound. Dove, Coyote is Page’s first full length collection, winning the Ghost Peach Press Prize in Poetry in 2019, selected by Dorothea Lasky. The poems are spare with most poems no longer than 5 or 6 lines. The collection is…
Review by Carole Mertz Motherland moves me more than any poetry I’ve read in recent months. Through Sally Thomas’s lines we experience Life as God’s sacred offering to us, and ordinary living, a kind of sacred offering in return. This giving and receiving, both ordinary and extraordinary, is present in almost all of Thomas’s poems, no matter what poetical form the author chose. (She uses the sonnet, sestina, villanelle, and other forms.) A memorable poem opens the collection. Thomas presents “Change-Ringing” (3) in six beautifully rhymed quatrains; the subject, a woman, recalls a time of nursing a child.…
Review by Laura Dennis At its best, flash fiction is a powerful alchemy that combines the best of poetry and narrative. It is also a perfect genre for the present time, when uncertainty and fear have robbed so many of us of our capacity for sustained attention. Still, when I read the structural premise of The Bitter Kind–a series of flash pieces with alternating storylines, written by two different authors–I had questions. How would the compact nature of flash interact with the demands of a longer form, even a “novelette”? I needn’t have worried. Tara Lynn Masih and James…