Keats Raptosh Conley Your mother, whose name I could never pronounce Dear Mom, Today we killed the rooster and as we boiled his bones I thought of the grandmother whose name I could never pronounce but reminded me of…
Browsing: Poetry
Cynthia Atkins Tapestry A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold—Carole King Who knew when I sat cross-legged on the floor eating a bowl of cottage cheese, resting the album jacket in the V of my legs—that…
Caits Meissner The Summer Phife Is Born A Cento made of lines pulled directly from Cheryl Boyce Taylor’s Mama Phife Represents The summer Phife is born we have the world by its chin. Say something sweet about…
Puma Perl Learning to Say No Keep your eyes open. Place your tongue along the roof of your mouth behind your front teeth. Do not smile. Smiles become yes, stretch into of course, and before you blink twice your clothes…
Jennifer Poteet Mother Comes Back as a Bee When I heard my name as a buzz in my ear, I knew she had come back as a bee. One, I hoped, without its stinger. My mother floated among my…
Elizabeth O’Rourke I Have Done Small Things today: have threaded the needle’s eye with the current favorite seafoam spool, have closed up the tear where the down spilled out of my daughter’s winter coat, have dragged the heavy bags…
Ambriel Floyd Bostic curating my daughter’s first period kit at age 10 three weeks before she leaves for camp maybe three years before she needs it I cull, fill baskets market aisles like fruit trees bounty heavy and over-ripe…
Hayes Davis Letter to Myself as a New Father January 6, 2009 I know this finds you flushed with new, marveling at her swaddled heft, tiny mouth suckling your finger. You’re picturing the sky butterscotch and currant, the magic…
Ellen June Wright Washing Day c. 1950 Hands finger a bright-white diaper, damp— then reach for a peg. She strains upward to grab the line; one more to clip and clip again as others flutter in the breeze, a…
Brian Clements A poem about mothers might contain a list of battles, homes, and film worlds where mothers appear, might comprise all instances of mothers of pearl, of invention, of babies and all wars, might list their unacknowledged legislation…