Memories of Mother Inspiration or irritation, role model to be followed or not, our mothers imprint their lives upon our own. These works by MER writers remember and reveal mothers in fiction, poetry, and creative prose. Featured: Tsaurah Litzky – The Sweet Potato Plant – Prose D.O. Moore – Mother’s Day Visitor – Poetry Jennifer Dickinson – No One’s Darling – Fiction Golda Solomon – She Did the Best She Could – Prose Catharine Clark-Sayles – Yahrzeit Moon – Poetry Vivian Montgomery – Her Study, Her Story – Prose Art by Rebecca Spilecki, “A Common Thread” Rebecca Spilecki is…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Vivian Montgomery Her Study, Her Story My mother kept the door to her study open at all times. This is how we knew her work was meant to be interrupted, a sideline to us, a thing she did when there wasn’t something being asked of her. The room was right there on the second floor, at the top of the stairs, the obvious place for an aimless child to go straight into when she wasn’t sure what had brought her upstairs in the first place. My father’s “studio” was in the attic, discouraging in its mustiness and quiet. And of…
D.O. Moore Mother’s Day Visitor My hours hover in abeyance—not the hummingbird suspended in a C before my window’s trumpet-flower feeder. Instead your pause, assessing me. You, turquoise purse and heels, waiting for me to sleep or at least consent to lemon Jell-O when I’d prefer ice cream, to this Home when that spa in Gibraltar would do better. Even one of those tin-wall motels on Route 3. On Tupper Lake in George’s sloop you were just six but already too refined to skinny dip. And me? Within the water’s glistening I laughed and splashed you, prim on the deck…
Golda Solomon She Did the Best She Could Friday nights at dusk she lit the Sabbath candles. Her ritual: hold a lit wooden match to the bottom of each tapered candle, melting the wax so the candle stood on its own in the silver plated candlestick, and then placed on the rickety silver plated tray. The flames had their own lives making shadows on the walls. She covered her head with a white cloth napkin, began the rocking gesture back and forth, saying blessings in Yiddish. She didn’t teach me the prayers. Outsider to my own religion, I watched from the edge of the foyer. She wept for…
Catharine Clark-Sayles Yahrzeit Moon Full moon at 3 AM, bright and round, ducking through fast-moving cloud, wind wuthers through the chimney, moans across the downspouts, rattles trees, the house a creaky ship in storm-frothed seas, across the valley – scattered lights: porch lights, streetlights, windows, a car turns up a twisted drive. Neil posts it is his mother’s yahrzeit. He asks for prayers. Minyans are uncertain in a time of viral plague, as we huddle away from smiles and touch, the comforts ritual brings. My mother died three years ago, I add a prayer for her, I can’t manage Hebrew…
Jennifer Dickinson No One’s Darling Etta puts on her pink dress with the slit up the skirt. Lipstick. Powder. Mascara. Rhinestone earrings. Her fur coat. If she’s going to have an audience, she has to look her best. The blonde is on duty. Etta can never remember her name. Blondie whistles. “Etta darlin’ why you so dressed up?” Fuck her. Etta’s eighty-five. No one’s darling anymore. “You aren’t gonna wander off on us like last time, are you,” Blondie says. “Remember?” Etta can’t. She can’t remember shit anymore. But she doesn’t want Blondie to know that. She already hears them…
Tsaurah Litzky The Sweet Potato Plant When I was little my mother and I lived with my father’s parents in their house in Brownsville, Brooklyn. My mother told me my father was away in France fighting in a big war to save the world from a bad man named Hitler. She showed me a picture of my father smiling, wearing his soldier’s uniform. He looked nice. One day my mother and I went to the Woolworths on Pitkin Avenue to buy me my first coloring book and crayons. The Woolworths had a plant section. My mother told me to pick…
Review by Mindy Kronenberg In Where The Eye Wants Coast, her eighth collection of poetry, Linda Opyr presents poems that are quietly but powerfully wrought, a collection of transformative moments summoned by life’s seasonal gifts and losses. Published as Covid-19 was emerging as our contemporary crisis, these poems hold a special poignancy for their reverence of the ephemeral nature of existence and those rites of passage that become more precious even as they recede with time. Opyr’s craft is in creating lines that shimmer like gossamer while they gently anchor the reader to the intangible aspects of our lives.…
Review by Lisa C. Taylor Lori Desrosiers’ third full-length poetry collection, Keeping Planes in the Air builds a narrative about the ways in which family history plays out in the most mundane of moments. The poet grapples with power and perceived power, like a mother conjuring safety for her children when they fly, praying that the planes would stay aloft. The rational and irrational trade stories as family legends are passed through generations. The poem, “My Grandmother Shoplifted” tells a story of longing for glitter and trinkets, perhaps as the grandmother’s mental acuity deteriorates. This longing for power, both…
Review by Carla Panciera Veronica Montes’s The Conquered Sits at the Bus Stop, Waiting, winner of Black Lawrence Press’s Spring 2019 Black River Chapbook Competition, includes eight pieces of flash fiction. Her first collection, Benedita Takes Wings and Other Stories was published in 2018 by Philippine American Literary House. Though Montes’s rich language and startling imagery are arresting, it is the women themselves who compel the reader. Perhaps it is the rigid requirements of the genre, but these characters do feel isolated. Thus, an intimacy exists between them and the reader. Montes’s stories are also reminiscent of the oral…