Janel Cloyd Bloom There are some days I forget how to bloom how to unfurl my leaves I forget how to open my velvety petals to the welcoming of the sun There are some days I forget that I…
Browsing: MER Online
Keshni Naicker Washington Blue To whatever two-legged and four-legged souls that walked by, I must have been a spectacle. A grown woman lying face down on the beach. Hadn’t even made it to the waves. My zigzag trail of…
LeConté Dill Growing Tired after Erica Garner Us Daughters Dutiful Heart broke open You Can’t Breathe either Sleeping Beauty—no kiss can wake you, Mama, can make you whole. No maternity leave for activists, name you “warrior” The real revolution…
Lisa Wujnovich I Want to Come Back as a Live Oak Quercus Virginina, curvy southern hardwood, fooling the ignorant, like me, thinking she’s deciduous and sheds her growth. I want to come back with wise beards, hung mossy from…
Melissa Coss Aquino Visions of the Mother We Need (excerpt from the novel Carmen and Grace) We put the holy water on our foreheads in the sign of the cross from the small marble basin at the entrance, as if…
Mireya Pérez-Bustillo Everything You Need to Know About the 5th Grade She knew that the vision would come on the corner elm tree because she was so good in school she heard that Our Lady came to the three…
Pamela L. Laskin Shared Room: A ghazal To Elissa, 64 You sixteen and me eighteen we shared a room college and its chaos inside our room graduation, jobs, a wedding in bigger rooms after came the babies no longer…
Sherese Francis She Who Is The Image of God There’s a holiness that She carries in Her hands, like a Moses budding a kaleidoscope of butterflies fluttering to freedom. She crafts with a mother tongue whispering in Her body,…
Jane Yolen Grandlings Between us, we have eight, all of whom but one, have a fall of decisions before them. Only one is out of school. How ancient our own concerns of education now seem, new shoes, a date…
Susan McGee Bailey Rainbow Time Months into Covid-19, time has lost all precision. Days and weeks have a pleasant, blurry quality similar to my daughter’s rainbows. The ones done in water color, no clear lines of demarcation, one color…