Dwight –from a work in progress by Jacinda Townsend He’d heard his mother tell the story until it was legend. Her years on the North Carolina coast, attending college as an afterthought, an avocation secondary to her true purpose,…
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Fab and the Fates –from a work-in-progress by Sophia Russell Fabienne sensed an opening to broach the subject she was giddy about but also scared of. “This week I just have my classes, mostly,” she said. “And I’m going…
Schrödinger’s Mother by Shinelle L. Espaillat “You’re always tired.” They are almost pouting when they say this. You have heard this phrase from four different people this week. Your tiredness would likely baffle your single-mother mother and her single-mother…
Mothers, Mothering, and Ongoing Conversations Mixed Genre Folio Edited by Mary McLaughlin Slechta The voices in this folio—a hive of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and art—hum with the conversations women have with their children, partners, mothers, and themselves. You…
Motherconversating by Denise Lewis Patrick Osmosis… I remember being buttoned into a sleeveless, white-dotted Swiss dress. My mother had sewn it, as she did most of my clothes. She was crying, heavily pregnant with my sister. We were minutes…
Jenny Molberg HEREDITARY – Yyvonne Deakins Collins, Elaine de Kooning, 1968 She spoke and the breasts heard singing. Heard song and called back. Fern closed in around her face. Without a word, the room brimmed lemon, lemon and veins…
Kathy Nelson BEFORE I DIE Some great uncle passed it down, that curio, that heirloom, that tour de force— seamless wooden links lifted from the branch, whole, already interlocking, as if by magic, with nothing but a pocketknife. Let…
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor IBEJI A Fibonacci Poem The day after his birth she traced the blue hill ridge of his ear whispered Ibeji Light spilled in the streets of his grandfather’s ancestral home twin boy talking to trees. (In the Nigerian…
Curated by Karolina Zapal The birthing room is a liminal space. It changes us in ways we imagined and never could have imagined. In the room where I gave birth, I hemorrhaged and a midwife dove elbow-deep into my…
Jessica Barlevi [After the first child, I knew] After the first child, I knew. The prize at the end of the pregnancy is not the child. It is the stay. On the maternity ward. Where it is warm and…