Susan McGee Bailey Rainbow Time Months into Covid-19, time has lost all precision. Days and weeks have a pleasant, blurry quality similar to my daughter’s rainbows. The ones done in water color, no clear lines of demarcation, one color blending into the next. Amy rejects these paintings and turns to her magic markers. “But Amy, your paintings are lovely, they’re like the rainbows we see in the sky.” She looks up. Pauses. Then returns to her drawing. Amy has developmental challenges and this is her first morning home in four months. She is fifty now, but retains the joy…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Serena Agusto-Cox Remote Work Home office view of the quiet yard. The birds bang their heads into glass, a moment of blindness. Mating songs, angry tweets, territorial posturing on feeders. Perhaps, my office is not soundless. Elementary school streaming, dogs barking over microphones, teachers calling out names, looking for answers from the disengaged. Whispered answers, requests to repeat the question. Draft client text, peppered with child-like giggles, rather than COVID-19’s spread. Remote work done by drones among distraction would be less human. In the distance my (l)only child marched into an age of social distance six inches between…
Rebecca Brock Good Housekeeping (America, during Covid, during Trump) She keeps trying to get her house in order pretending with the rest of them that the sun won’t melt the earth, that the seas won’t burn, that the land won’t disappear under water or ice or our own triggered destruction. She keeps going back to the dishes, to the meals, to washing the clothes, to worrying over the state of the carpet which is funny in a sad way if you knew the state of her house– the way the windows leak, the way the doors have to be snugged…
Lisa Romano Licht In the Midst of Fear, My Daughter’s Choice Taught Me to Step Aside Yesterday, as my daughter pulled into the driveway after work, I anxiously opened the garage door. Leaving her jacket, bag and shoes behind, she went into the downstairs laundry room. After tossing her clothes and face mask into the washer, she scrubbed her hands and put on the robe I had left there. Then she went upstairs to shower. I followed, wearing gloves and sanitizing doorknobs and light switches. I don’t know how my twenty-two-year-old arrived at this moment in time. Her…
Chelsea Reiter Pregnancy Loss in a Pandemic Is Just Like You’d Imagine In a pandemic, you’re privileged to move from a place where the numbers are high to a place where the numbers are low. In a pandemic, you’re privileged to get pregnant after 10 seconds of trying, and even more so when your best friend is pregnant too. In a pandemic, you’re privileged to have Nick, a husband with a steady gaze, strong hands, and beautiful blue eyes, who is offended by the “10 seconds of trying” remark. Oops! In a pandemic, your co-workers don’t get suspicious when…
Alexandra Umlas Sheltering with Daughters Sometimes a shelter is a house. Sometimes a house is a home. Sometimes a home is a prison. I tell myself that you are not missing out, that I can be friend, teacher, mother, fence, blanket, glass of water. For fun, I brew your first cups of coffee, stirred with heaping tablespoons of sugar, tempered with milk. I ex-out everything in March, make bread with expired yeast, mourn its tired, tentative half-rise. We clean floorboards, dust shelves, scooter through the park every afternoon at 4:30, the dog zagging around us, the nature center’s gates…
M.M. DeVoe Lemon Chicken Rice Soup for the Soul I never expected the pandemic to result in good things for our family, but it did. My daughter was thirteen when the pandemic hit, a young thirteen, still mourning the fairy-wings and tiaras she had pitched in a fit of middle-school transition the summer before. As store shelves emptied and the world closed in, she and I were quarantined in a loft apartment in Manhattan, searching for a new normal. My job as her mother, I thought, was to keep things positive. I had been moved by “Life is Beautiful”…
Review by Nadia Wynter In Mama Phife Represents, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, an island woman from Trinidad, a mother, wife, friend, poet, an artist, gives the world a peek inside her grieving heart after the death of her beloved son, Malik Izaak Boyce Taylor, known globally as Phife Dawg, the underrated soul of the acclaimed hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest. As she mourns her public-figure son, mom’s world crumbles into a sea of vivid memories, a sea of infinite tears and a sea of sad faces around the world saying, in an attempt to console the inconsolable, “Sorry for your…
Reviewed by Suzanne Edison Jessica Gigot is a farmer, poet, teacher, and musician. She is the author of Flood Patterns, (Antrim House Books, 2015), and her writing appears in such publications as Orion, Taproot and Poetry Northwest. She teaches poetry workshops and eco-poetics through Richard Hugo House in Seattle, WA and on her farm, Harmony Fields, in Bow, WA. Additionally, she writes about food, sustainable farming practices, and is featured in a TedX Talk, The Poetics of Food, 2017. I met Jessica as a fellow student in a poetry workshop during this pandemic year, via Zoom. Though we live…
Reviewed by Emily Webber Tara Isabel Zambrano’s short story collection Death, Desire, and Other Destinations delivers on what it promises in the title. Zambrano highlights our desire for human connection and our yearning for the things we cannot have or have lost. So much of 2020 has asked us to endure the opposite of desire. We’ve been asked to forego simple pleasures like eating a meal with a friend to grand celebrations for weddings and births. We’ve been asked to shrink down our worlds and to contain our longing for human connection. But Zambrano’s stories take us to a…