Kathy Engel For that hour it’s the icefloes I can’t stop thinking about, cascade of endless blue, lonely cold & faces of grieving mothers I’ll always see, year after year, country after country – tonight I pray especially for…
Annis Cassells Two Daughters, Twice Blessed for Amina and Asila When your daughter reads your poem aloud on New Year’s Day And it’s the first time you’ve heard it read by someone else A tenderness blooms, expands throughout your…
Golda Solomon golda’s sestina ( after Enid Dames’ Lilith’s Sestina) –2021 Wrong and right for me grey through memory. The men I knew as a baby, Jerome I called Romeo. Myself nine years younger than Stanley my brother. There’s…
Carol Dorf A blessing on your head . . . As an old mother, I better get started with this. Sometimes I say, ok I managed to live until you are 25, could be worse. I really can’t promise…
Margo Berdeshevsky SHE WASN’T QUITE MY MOTHER…BUT… I She wasn’t quite my mother. My elder “mother figure” friend would have been 110 years young this May 10. These dark-lit, unlit days we have been led by those who have…
Donna Katzin For Ruth Bader Ginsberg At 87, she dies in childbirth on Erev Rosh Hashanah, as the new year struggles to be born. Who will nurture it now? We mourn the wisp of woman who exhausted all her matter,…
Hilary King In an Almost Empty Room with Ellen Bryant Voigt Last-minute funding blows the poet into town. Little notice, late notice, the difficult location at the commuter college downtown leave most of the hard blue chairs out of work.…
Tsaurah Litzky Alba for my Grandmother You were cunning, strong, fierce as a she-bear with cubs, no less then death could stop your bustling, your clatter, your burrowing among all your pots for that one small pan to fry me…
Anne Elezabeth Pluto Mother to Remember For MKS Your yahrzeit will arrive on the 20th of Av, 5780 Dog day August – 8th month – 10th day the Magus twirling the yikzor flame into silver tracks I haven’t been…
Golda Solomon my mother figure is jazz anna zack gave me life independence firecrackers announce my arrival round midnight feedings from infant to woman the blues hummed loud ‘til teats of notes chord changes/ jazz woke by a legend…
Lisa C. Taylor Heirlooms for Annie She darkened windows to halt vertigo, brewed broth from chicken necks for migraines, buried sickness on a plate twenty-two steps from the back door. I imagined her hairnet spun from spider webs. Dust motes…
Colette Tennant Tidepools Studying the insistent moon, tidepools are sturdy mothers. They hold parabolas of changing water, cover gray sculpins in the folds of their shadowed skirts, lift stars the color of sunsets toward the only light they will ever…