IDRISSA SIMMONDS DAWN PRAYER CALL on the line with my dying mother i choose words that land soft as fingers in the sweet of her scalp. sometime ago I became her patron saint of hope and faith a calm…
JESSICA GOODFELLOW NIGHTSCAPE WITH RANDOM INTERSECTION Late at night a telephone booth becomes a cage, a trap— its overhead bulb a spotlight. Someone has been watching me— a pantless man. He body-slams the folding door. Dropping the phone, I…
JENNIFER FRANKLIN PHILOMELA AT THE LOOM He thought when he took my tongue, he could keep me from telling but my fingers speak for me now. I sleep by day while the arrogant sun cuts the window as his…
#MeToo a Vox folio Curated by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach Featured Poets Jennifer Franklin Jessica Goodfellow Idrissa Simmonds Lesléa Newman Rebecca Hart Olander Zeina Hashem Beck Eileen Cleary Everyday, we are witnessing women speaking out, giving their…
From The Mom Egg Vol. 12 – 2014 Fay Chiang REINVENTION The fall comes The daughter leaves for Spain with her partner to teach English and then travel North Africa and the Mediterranean— happy and healthy and young my heart…
A folio curated by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach Motherhood poems have a certain reputation of being overly sentimental and happy. Traditionally, they have not reflected the fact that the motherhood experience is highly complex, involving identity, body image,…
Maggie Smith Overheard Nothing is yours. All of this, everything, is ours. When my daughter, age seven, says this to her little brother, I stop sliding the white plates into the kitchen cabinet and peek into the playroom. So much…
Kelli Russell Agodon Post-Partum Depression in Volvo For weeks, depression wrote her letters. Now darkness is so close, she feels its tongue in her mouth. In the slow motion of impact, car hitting tree, she imagines Plath, how that was…
Karen Skolfield Raven Versus Crow “If a raven got in a fight with a crow, who would win?” my son asks. “Why would a raven fight a crow?” I ask. “It’s a strawberry,” my son says. “They’re fighting over…
Stephanie Bryant Anderson My Sons (on dead fathers, the Celestial mother & other mothers) I. Child #1: diagnosis, extreme intelligence / anxiety / OCD My son 4, said the trees are closer than the moon. And the…
Erika Meitner Interval “I know backwards the grief of life like chance” – Bernadette Mayer o the music, we have to hurry and drive and sit and call and wait and once, we were silent we stood in a darkened…
Sarah Browning In Mind, Two Months “The most spectacular thing in the world is in my mind. That’s where everything is happening.”– Toni Morrison The runny sound of baby poop. The pull on my nipple, the yank. Washing my…