Dawn Paul VEINS My mother lies on her back on the big double bed lifts her right leg, straightens it, pumps her foot. See how swollen my ankle gets? Her ankle is smooth, shiny scribbled with thin red veins. She lifts the left leg, her pajama leg droops. I wish I had nice legs. Her legs are lumpy with bulging blue veins that twist and double-back on themselves like a range of rounded hills. My legs didn’t always look like this. I am eight. Her legs have always looked like this. They are my mother’s legs, her varicose veins, her…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Virginia Chase Sutton CONSTELLATIONS On the skin inside my upper arms are galaxies of bruises, some as fresh as this morning, one or two for each day when Mother inspects to see if I’ve lost weight. I haven’t. She pinches me, hard. I stick to my diet she says, twirling the skirt of her new blue shirtwaist dress. You must as well. The flesh of my inner arms aches and I hide them by holding my breath and my contusions close to my body. I’m not allowed to eat much. My slender sister has no worries, could pirouette in…
Kathleen Aguero SELF-PORTRAIT AS A GERANIUM Here’s all I’ve got: one showy cluster of red blossoms, fancy hat on a scrawny neck rising above bare stems and gently ruffled leaves with their dark inner border, peach fuzz. Leggy, untrimmed, I’m Americana Red in a green plastic pot, a scatter of brown blooms dusts the soil beneath me. I know how I must look straining toward the window close enough to kiss it, better yet tap out, break through. Look at me. Let me out. Look at me. Let me out. Petals weighing nothing. SELF-PORTRAIT AS AN EMPTY BOAT Water licking…
Michelle Reale THIS YEAR MY SORROW DROWNS ITSELF This year my sorrow drowns itself. I can’t be responsible anymore. Here is where I’m at: you’ve nailed my hair to the floorboards, and I lay quiet, all shallow breathing like certain death. You claim to see the shadow of a dowager’s hump and fiddle with a fragile bone at the base of my neck. You predicted a distance between us while you filled the air with the ghosts of other bodies you have seen, those you have feigned affection for. Was it a dream when you claimed extreme deficiency, ugliness…
Review by Sarah W. Bartlett Woolsey and Lee are well-qualified for this undertaking. Woolsey parents four children (one set of triplets) in Northern California and blogs at The Hip Mothership about raising multiples and general parenting topics; and is additionally widely published. So, too, is Lee, who works at home in Malaysia parenting four (one set of twins). Their combined publication list is extensive. This collection of writings is remarkable for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that the two women live half-way around the world from one another. Yet their partnership reads like a close friendship,…
Paintings Making Art, Not Babies. (2017) oil on canvas Painting Outgrowth (2017) oil on canvas Tiger Mum (2017) charcoal on paper Buoyancy Aid (2017) oil on canvas Video Eggs (And God Remember Sarah, Genesis 21:1) (2013) video animation. Sarah Lightman Artist Statement I am endlessly fascinated by the autobiographical project: how to visually portray, through texts and images, lived experience and complex feelings. Since my undergraduate at The Slade School of Art (1995-2001) I have been making a graphic novel of my life formed of hundreds of pencil diary drawings, The Book of Sarah (Myriad Editions 2019). I have…
Eggs (And God Remember Sarah, Genesis 21:1) (2013) video animation. Sarah LIghtman Art, Artist Statement and Bio
Review by Kerry Neville An autobiography purports to be chronological account of a person’s life, a progressive recounting of the accumulation of cause and effect events. A memoir, however, is not a recounting but more of an accounting, a clear-eyed, introspective examination of significant (large and small) moments of the author’s life that, when gathered together in narrative, create meaning threaded through time. In short: an autobiography is the straight running stitch, while a memoir is the longitudinal and transverse warp and weft. Similarly, Ana Castillo’s memoir, Black Dove, is less a linear reckoning of the self over time…
Jill McDonough CAREFUL Josey kisses me Christmas morning in the kitchen and it’s so good we end up having sex on the floor. But we are old ladies now, laugh together while we stagger slowly to the ground, first one knee then the other gently down, ginger, hands braced on thighs or holding on to counters, cracking up and laughing all through the middle-aged lady sex on the kitchen floor, which is still hot as fuck, still more than any of us could have hoped to get for Christmas. Josey laughs while she says Careful and we remember flinging ourselves…
Kirun Kapur SPRING Then, through the window, I could just make out a cormorant immobile on a buoy, head high, wings fully open, a totem, black mark against morning. I was about to turn away when it shifted, twisting, slipping into the water, first otter, then eel— a moment later I could have sworn a girl with dark hair surfaced. No time to blink and the bird was back, swallowing prey, lifting its head, pressing wings to the sun. I watched to be sure it was real, a bird who can escape—change shape after shape— who can become a girl…