Lao Rubert Asking Your Permission for Maryam, born Feb 5, 2020 You’ve arrived. Ears, elbows, fingers precisely in place, controlling your world from a tiny perch. The news is blaring as your eyes flicker open bringing greetings from…
Sarah Dickenson Snyder Finding You Imagine that we could pick our mothers that there was a parade of them walking by and we stand behind some gentle barrier to watch and select from the mothers who carry spools…
Kelli Stevens Kane Moon Rocks (Mom, 1969) Oh! (wistfully) The moon rocks. Okay your dad was out of town. And while we were watching them come out of the rocket and jump down to the moon [on TV]…
Margaret D. Stetz “Whistler’s Mother” How strange how wrong a title Arrangement in Grey and Black for what begins in reddest flows of blood and grows like bars of color layered on a rainbow the mother-child relationship encompassing…
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…