Dara-Lyn Shrager Twenty-One My child no longer calls this place home but my name is mother. I drive toward his apartment in the metal north, into the clang of a city with its trapdoors and sooted drifts. A…
Browsing: MER Online
Sarah Dickenson Snyder What is Unseeable and Real That vibration in the space between me and someone I love or maybe not love or maybe not even know, like a stranger sitting next to me on a plane and…
Care A MER VOX Folio of Poetry and Prose “Care” is a word with many shades of meaning. Although not strictly a contronym, it is a “Janus word” of a sort, in that it gazes out in…
Rebecca Brock Chocolate Heart, Valentine’s Day 2018 Unfurling small fingers, loosened with sleep, I find a fistful of melted chocolate—a heart: heated, sweet. I am careful. I warm the water, fold the cloth, and try to clean the cup…
Wendy Brown-Báez Weathering The Storm In the 1980s, I was part of a group that lived off-grid in the countryside of eastern Oregon. We shared a dilapidated barn, a cabin and a main building on five acres at…
Lorraine Currelley A Woman’s Legacy ancient women dream of love, passion, tender touch and thirsty kiss. we’ve known murdered rainbows and aching bed. there is no escaping naked heart and mourning. this legacy we carry as women. we know…
Erin McGuff-Pennington She Knew Nowadays all it takes is Call the Midwife, one glass of wine, and I’m an overflowing tub of emotions, soupy water sloshing over the sides. I doubt there’s an end to it—other than the very end—but…
Aimee Pozorski It’s Nothing You Did A woman is most vulnerable flat on her back, knees to her chest, panties dropped to the floor. Darkness surrounds her as the room’s shadows whisper. A wand scans the woman suspicious…
Skip Renker A Widow Honeymooning near the rim of a volcano, who wouldn’t catch fire? She laughed when he re-phrased St. Augustine: “Better to marry and to burn.” She stopped smoking. He didn’t. In restaurants, diners at other tables…
Christine Stewart-Nuñez Excess Rex My preschooler fears fire, typhoons, and lightning storms. He doesn’t chatter about the Prairie School gas station we scrutinized on vacation; he asks about the wildfire described on the plaque across the street. The burn…