HOW TO SURVIVE A DICTATOR → Call your mother-in-law who lived through the Third Reich. She may tell you to keep a chicken, collect firewood from the graveyard, or burn the stamp collection for warmth. All of these are…
Poem for the New Year My daughter said she would go outside her comfort zone, would pull the string on a booze-bottle popper. When her hands didn’t burn, she popped another. Said she’d try harder at school, listen in History.…
Instructions for Motherhood Gut the herring. Cover your body in ash. Thorn with the blood that grows from the roses. Layer dirty linens with hot water and lye. Beat the caustic bleach that forms. Seed the ingredients for medicines and…
Winter Baby Tell me the truth, I said to my friend, who had just given birth. How bad is it? You won’t believe the blood, she said, for which truth, I am indebted. And January, especially, is no time for…
Sunflowers Just inside the gate, the rise and fall of dying sunflowers: disheveled petals and downcast eyes. Then a flick of wing and I realize a sparrow is locked in a kiss of life, face deep in the flower’s, seed…
Aleppo in the Heart of the Living Room Every soul needs a proper chaperone to say nothing of a champion. Especially after sloshing around this broken world. My heart lacks a tenant, though each chamber stands wallpapered and ready for…
Origami I’ve read about women who say they can’t write New mothers, their arms a cramped night, crescent They hold what they cannot yet tell. My baby was milky paper to me then, a smooth sheet, the inverse. But I…
IDENTITY A folio edited by Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach The poems in this folio consider the “Mom” identity from both the mother’s and child’s viewpoints and speak to the complicated relationship that exists between the iconic Mom and…
Laurette Folk Retreat She came in the guise of my dog to lure me away, as Apollo lured Achilles away from the walls of Troy. I saw her from the window running through the marsh and had a choice…
Elisabeth Weiss Lost Mother Beautiful one of long ago who knelt with us when the house filled with a veiled peace useless to resist, when we knew the smell of your dress in the folds of sleep, in and…
Dede Cummings Day Hike —for Sierra The snowshoe hare tracks have no trouble telling us the way. Our breath is hard and fast startling even the gnarled branches from their slumber. The etched mountain does not beckon from afar: rather…
Dawn Paul My Life as a Dog The boy with his crooked tooth, his dying mother, her face like a haggard angel, the scruffy, scratching dog. The boy and I astonished and sickened to watch the kindly farmwife jerk…