Hilde Weisert Belly Is this what you think of when dying? The white tunnel not to Heaven but where you came from, a belly, your source. The hands guiding you, your mother’s hands, fussing to get you ready…
Lisa Briana Williams The Steamroller Tries to Remain Light It is too easy to say everything we were told about motherhood is a lie. More true to say I absorbed nothing but goodness until it came for me—that…
Karren LaLonde Alenier Granddaughter Clara Spera explores Bubbie Ruth’s big closet my mom Jane Ginsburg was never hamstrung by her mom’s inattention no rather she and her brother were often smothered it’s not as if Bubbie caused collapsed lungs…
Welcome to the December 2021 Mom Egg Review VOX: Ukrainian Voices While reviewing submissions for the upcoming MER 20 print issue we became intrigued by the poems by Jane Muschenetz, a Jewish refugee from Ukraine to the United States, that…
Halyna Kruk Translated by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky to Sylvia Plath O, Sylvia, he entrapped me in the calico fields of small squares. Yes, he ensnared me in hemmed flaxen fields. He wants to catch me, to encircle…
Natalka Bilotserkivets Translated by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky Fish Always in profile, gray and flat, a mermaid’s tail, cloudy crazed eye… Unhooking you, the hand holds onto your gills simply and cruelly. Always in profile and always mute,…
Ania Chromova Translated by Ali Kinsella untitled the old lady on the street offered my children some candies: are they yours? how darling. why only two? have some more. just two or three more. and make ‘em just as…
Jane Muschenetz DomestiCity When I close my eyes, the dishwasher sounds like a train on tracks. I am transported from Kitchen to Poetry As a child, I dozed on Soviet trains my American kids were soothed by cars Some mothers…
Dzvinia Orlowsky Newton’s Cradle “You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4th… with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness.” – Erma Bombeck 1.…
Mother in Objects – A Folio of Prose and Poetry Our latest Mother Figures folio depicts how objects evoke the mother: our writers explore, in prose and poetry, concrete representations of the essence of a remembered parent. Karren Alenier –…
Patricia Carragon i’ve put on my mother’s shoes & walked on city streets crossed asphalt & cobblestone gutters climbed various staircases to subways schools jobs apartments sometimes took elevators when available i felt the leather tighten heard soles sigh pain…
Linda Lamenza My Inheritance When the relatives drank the last drops of Crown Royal Whiskey, my grandmother washed the bottle out, soaked it until its label fell off. Polished, etched crowns surrounded its neck, diamond patterns made a crown, the…