Procreate Project, the Museum of Motherhood and the Mom Egg Review are pleased to announce the 42nd edition of this scholarly discourse intersects with the artistic to explore the wonder and the challenges of motherhood. Using words and art to connect new pathways between the academic, the para-academic, the digital, and the real, as well as the everyday: wherever you live, work, and play, the Art of Motherhood is made manifest. #JoinMAMA #artandmotherhood July 2020: Art by Afrooist, Words Wendy Carolina Franco Art by Sunshine Negyesi aka Afrooist She works across different media, ranging from live performances, painting and sculpture- using the poetry of hammering, beating, pulling, teasing and breaking, to express…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Review by Carla Panciera Sara Rauch’s first collection of stories, Electric Book Award Winner, What Shines From It, begins with an epigraph from an Anne Carson poem, a line of which states that “a wound gives off its own light.” In fact, these pages are populated by women who need healing and by those friends and lovers who, drawn to the light, attempt to heal them. In clear prose and in well structured narratives, Rauch applies the basic lesson of creating a story: begin with what a character wants. But as one of her character’s says, “Hope’s gotten me…
Muriel’s Cyclone Kathy Fish It begins with a snowman who catches Muriel’s eye. It begins with Muriel standing at the drawing room window of her tiny home. The winter cyclones, once rare, are now common, fierce as lions. But Muriel is unfazed. The sirens no longer go off. Muriel misses their godlike wail, a sound that had given her chills even as it soothed her, akin to the effect of a lullaby on an infant. She no longer seeks shelter in the southwest corner of her home. She no longer crouches in a closet holding a skillet over her…
The Return Tara Laskowski Our child was there, and then she wasn’t. A reverse birth, if you will. She was there, and then she went back inside, back to the lava-lamp-like existence, floating, warm, head upside down and skin thin and fragile and wet. We wept and deleted our words, ashamed of the naïve happiness we had felt just days before. Friends and neighbors brought things—tomatoes, asparagus, eggplant, zucchini. They said things that were supposed to comfort—what will be will be, there is always more grass on the other side of the water, any minute now, something will happen.…
Sparrow Mary McLaughlin Slechta Juanetta passed the abandoned house every year since third grade and paid it no mind. She didn’t pass close because now she was in high school, she walked in the street. But one afternoon, when the street was freshly tarred, she was hurrying beside the hedge along the property and without warning pitched forward and vomited. She ducked into the yard to think. Her sister had a baby at fourteen and looked like she was following in those footsteps. Mama never said, “None y’all girls worth a damn,” but inside her head Juanetta heard those…
Giving Up on the Professor Julia Strayer Most of us live underground now, which is fine by me. Under the city, under the streets, because that’s the only place safe for now. Scorching temps and fast fires left the earth coughing up dirt in the wind—too hot to survive above ground. Those of us not rich enough to buy our way out and cluster at the poles have turned into mole rats. It’s cool underground, even as the earth bakes overhead. Sometimes there are cave ins and people die. But I tell myself people died senselessly above ground…
When Words Clung to Paper Dawn Raffel The water rose slowly at first and then in a rush. This had happened so often that now we evacuated quickly, with maximum efficiency: children in hand, the papers stating our identity, laptops, cash, a few ragged photos, snacks. Off we went, up the desolate peak to wait and complain. Days, weeks. New children were born. Time swam. Nothing was drying. Rain became snow, and the water was sealed with an icy crust. The city remained submerged. * By springtime, those who were judged to be physically fit were suited up with…
Honesty Sherrie Flick The steam rises, it’s a choir rubbing up my fat belly, then swirling to a hallelujah at the ceiling. Thirty-six weeks. I’m an island of flesh in this clawfoot tub. The water laps at me each time I shift, topsy-turvy, then settling flat, somber again. The storm outside thunders down in heaving splats, polka-dotting the concrete, seeping in somewhere I’m sure. Water, water, water. Heat and musk and love. That’s what put me here in the first place. What I’d wanted was a kitten, alone in the big, old house, as it creaked and talked back.…
Feral Things Rosie Forrest When the siren first sounds, I am grateful to be settled in the basement, or perhaps the siren sent us to the basement during dinner. It smells like lavender dryer sheets, and my tongue works a shred of chicken loose from my molar. Against my chest the baby is asleep, or I am wishing her to be. “Is it a regular thing, these sirens?” I ask my husband. I haven’t lived here long enough to know. “Not every day,” he tells me. “In the summertime more often, but not every day.” “We should spruce up…
My Mother in Corners Claudia Smith I believed my mother was water, my father fire. Swarthy, salty-sweat, flash-fires she soothed and tempered. She scrubbed the hardened soap from the corners of sinks and counters, the pee from the grout around the toilet. He missed. His mother didn’t teach him properly. Mom complained when he wasn’t around, but not much when he was with us. When we camp, my mother keeps the fire. My father is the one who builds, but she stokes. She is the first one up and the last one to bed. We camp in the piney woods near a lake. We don’t swim, but we…