Curated by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach In her poem, “Postlude,” J.L. Conrad writes, “I avoid horoscopes because / I do not want to know how it will all end.” The poems in this September folio—the month of the autumnal equinox—examine how we look to the sky, to the stars, and to old lore, for transformation, for protection, and for those answers in that sometimes-terrifying cosmology of motherhood. Moons, stars, cauldrons, gemstones, crystal, mirrors: these are the tools the poets use for divination, for divinity. Ajanaé Dawkins’ lines in “How to Witness a Miracle Without Converting,” create incantatory sounds,…
Author: Mom Egg Review
J.L. Conrad Postlude ++++++or, last things first He is born in the year the world is supposed to end. I avoid horoscopes because I do not want to know how it will all turn out. Pain centers itself in the spine. Toes wind and unwind. The back arches. There is a tendency to remove oneself from the site of trauma, to speak of oneself as another. A wet cloth on the forehead. On the television—is this possible?—a crackling fire. When we leave the room, there are towels on the floor, water in the tub, white sheets tangled on the…
How to Witness a Miracle Without Converting Ajanaé Dawkins My mother swapped prayer for sharp screams when my sister crowned. The epidural settled on one side until the nerves in her left hip became stars, dying down the dark of her thigh. At 17, I watched a girl- child emerge covered in only-God-can- name. Maybe, blood-light. Star-vein. Water- sky. A boneless sea creature who knows some- thing about the universe sitting next to ours. I don’t want to go back nor do I want to die this way—making daughters. My body has a tenure of chaos and blood. It’s…
Carolina Hotchandani So the Humans Reproduced For the world required another mirror— proffered by the eyes of the child. For the ocean was insufficient. For the water on windy days withheld reflections, giving back the crests of waves— their foam and spray— and nothing more. For the mirrors, chiseled and polished by hands, were flat, so the humans whirled before the glass in search of the third dimension. For children’s eyes were curved like the Earth the sun lit daily. For children cried as light pierced their eyes, and what the humans heard was need. It was not theirs.…
Review by Lisa M. Hase-Jackson Deborah Leipziger’s first full-length collection, Story and Bone, brims with the lyric enthusiasm of one intrigued with word play and musicality as it follows the long tradition of mining one’s own life for inspiration. With heightened attention to the interconnectedness between nature, home, and matrilineal ancestral bonds, Leipziger utilizes both received forms and free verse in a freely-arranged, eclectic collection that, beginning with “Sugaring,” which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Lily Poetry Review, contemplates the definition of home and the essence of one’s origins: for my Nonna, all deserts began with recreating…
Review by Jessica de Koninck With a keen eye for the ironic and with dark humor, A Temporary Dwelling (Spuyten Duyvil Press), Jiwon Choi’s third poetry collection, engages deeply with impermanence and loss. Jiwon Choi is a poet, teacher and New York urban gardener. Much of her work explores the Korean diaspora. Actual dwellings, like the apartments in which she grew up and in which she lives, and dwellings as metaphor for the body, the community, the nation, culture, religion, the land, the planet, the universe, form the heart of Choi’s collection. The poems are in deep conversation with…
Review by Deborah Leipziger Fierce and gentle, Anne Elezabeth Pluto’s poems in How Many Miles to Babylon hold all of the essentials of life: love, death, memory, and books. In this powerful collection, the poet dances with the dead, recalling them with love and urgency. In these plaintive poems Pluto reminds us that grief has its own necessary beauty. Anne Pluto writes gorgeous love poems and requiems. In her poem “Valentine”, for the Beloved, she writes the silver moon in my hair throw a rope around the constellations and bring it all to me. Loss permeates this lovely book.…
A Literary Reflection by Ellen Meeropol I approached reading this novel with the mixed emotions I feel when beginning any novel set in the activism of the 1960s. With fascination, because my world view and personhood was formed in that landscape. And with trepidation, because the author might get it wrong. That period of intense political activism and personal change has been the frequent victim of stereotyping and caricature. Randy Susan Meyers gets it right. Art student Annabel and lawyer-to-be Guthrie, fresh from Freedom Summer in Mississippi, answer an ad for Puddingstone, an intentional household in Boston’s Mission Hill…
Katherine Hagopian Berry Mother Cauldron I have ignored you tucked my broom in the hall closet, sickled the sock drawer my wands for rolling pins my cards for games. You must find a desert for me, sunbaked and steep a dry rock river, a flowtide forever, I am your arroryo daughter, never and sideways there is no container I won’t upset so wandering jew, so pothos, so valley lily, so spider, so fern. I have never in my life cut a rosebush back and no matter which color I think I am choosing everything always blooms yellow which might…
Ree Pashley Our weapon is a Needle A guide to giving emergency injections The moment might erupt without fissures or symptomatic tremors: she is normal, he is happy, and then—crisis. Often, a potentially life-threatening crisis. One requiring an emergency injection. It’s a measure you have practiced administering in a sterile, white room to an inanimate object. No urgency of time. No actual syringe-through-the-skin. But this is no scenario, this is happening right now. In your kitchen. At a busy playground. In the middle of a parking lot. Parents and caregivers, this is how to give your child an emergency…