DeMisty D. Bellinger On Raising Black Kids in a new century when the civil rights movement seemed ages ago and one, learning about the Rev. Dr. King, asks me if Grandma is Black and yes, I say, she is…
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Alise Alousi I Am Not Your Mother after reading “Whose Mother is Nature Anyway?” Annabel Kennan, Hyperallergic November 2022 I am not your mother. I can’t carry you along the eroding beach nor across the dirtied river. I am…
Elisabeth Weiss Detention Camp Children skateboard into the sweetness of what cannot last. Rachmanes derives from the word for womb. That little violet face shut in a cage. Palms grow hard in a border town where everyone is afraid.…
Jenn Givhan Apples Fall We ride into the orchard at the edge of town my children on hay bales beside me, bumping along. What does it mean to fall, my daughter has asked me for a poem she must…
Ingrid Andersson Nova Stella I knew from the out-of-the-blue lull that can befall hard labor, bestowing sleep, that she was fully dilated: I pronounced her complete. The woman roused, turned dilated eyes to me and said—with blinding depth…
Danielle Jones A Love Poem Without Subtext Because sometimes the best way to say a thing is to say it: a river is as wide as a river, a knife as sharp as a knife. My love for you…
Judgment “Are you a good witch or a bad witch?” — “Rating” Mothers “Are you a good witch or a bad witch,” Dorothy asks Glinda, who has no problem naming herself as good. When we apply the…
Blair Hurley Breastfeeding and the Early Sacrifices of Motherhood What they say about early motherhood amnesia is true: the first few months I was a mother are mostly a blur now, and looking back on them, I’m not sure…
Maram Al-Masri Poetry from The Abduction (forthcoming from White Pine Press in Spring 2023) Translated by Hélène Cardona The Abduction refers to an autobiographical event in Maram Al-Masri’s life. When, as a young Arab woman living in France, she decides…
Cristi Ackerman Wells My Mother “I was adopted when I was two weeks old.” So goes the beginning of my life story. I have always known I was adopted, but I never knew my biological mother. Her existence…