Joani Reese FEVER DREAM In the dark, the collector, cape and hood painted black, knocks three times at my sick mother’s door. He salutes the vast heavens, leans his scythe towards the wall, then saunters to her bedside to finesse…
Nancy Ring HOW BRIGHTLY Hot pink feather, glued by a child. It’s a bird I think, and that feather looks warm. Would that I could pluck it and wear it like a moustache, but it won’t salve these icy…
Nida Sophasarun SIRENS We sailed past a tanker to the mouth of the river where the monk chanted and flung holy water over shards of bone laid out in front of her picture. I had prayed days before over…
Jacqueline West WITH THE FIVE-YEAR-OLD AT THE BELL MUSEUM We bring you here to see dead things— green moth wings pinned beneath glass bells, bones ranged in drawers like silver spoons, rows of limp pelts slit from their flesh.…
Sati Mookherjee MY DAUGHTER THE TREE My daughter was born the year she turned fourteen, the year I was born, her spine rose curving into the tissue of sky, she spurned true for lordotic, posture for pose. I…
Donna Vorreyer MAKING TEA, I REMEMBER A LONG AGO SUMMER Honey hanging from the thickened dipper becomes a stream of spit from my teasing brother’s mouth, summer heat and hose water shimmering the scene becomes my mother’s favorite scrimshaw…
Tamar Jacobs GOOD WHOLESOME AMERICAN THING I sat away from the street on a curb mostly hidden behind a bush to allow them the illusion of independence and I heard people tell them, my sons, 7 and 9,…
Amanda Auchter IMAGINARY SON: WATER I could say there was a flood and my body the boat that kept you safe. But my body was only temporary, and would buckle come morning. I would let you live in each…
Melody Wilson The Smell of Lambing —after a comment by Barbara Drake A friend says she’s nostalgic for lambing, for the smell she loves but will never experience again. I imagine lanolin, grass, the birth of kittens—a scent so narrow…
Alexis David The Walled Forest —after David Baker’s “Can You Say It” There was a calling. Yes, the winter leaves. They were calling me— sparrows, soil, the blue tones of light and a rhododendron tree. It was a calling, yes,…
Mothering Along – MER Online Poetry Folio Curated by Cindy Veach and Jennifer Martelli In her poem, “Memo to the Absent,” Wendy Scher presents the Sabbath table set for two: the mother and the daughter. She writes, “We miss…
Julia C. Alter The Nursing Chair It’s an off-white chair, a chair that sits four feet from a TV in a house that’s somehow only five minutes from me. It’s empty, holding only the grimy imprint of a heavy…