Lynne Schmidt Bodies Like Gods It would be easier to imagine that there was no blood. That she did not scream in agony as she waited for you to leave. It is easier to pretend that that lighting was soft, that your parents held hands until the doctor, with unstained gloves announced your smooth arrival. I have heard that a pregnancy body is the closest we will come to Gods – connecting the spirits to the blood of the earth. And yet – our first act of existence is hurting the women we come from, and then crying…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Hallie Waugh Invoking My Mother As I Sit to Write a Poem Winter nights I’d watch her at the sewing case, rolling thread between her thumb and forefinger. Out would pop a knot, as if mending the hem of my sleeve deserved magic. Her stories appear from midair, too. She tells of last year’s doomed vacation, follows the thread from missed flight to bad seafood and, finally, the twisted ankle that sealed the trip’s fate. I want to trace the thread back, through a line of women tethering each other with stories. Or better, back to whatever it is…
As I braid one of my daughter’s hair and the other waits her turn, I tell them what I am doing. I show them how to separate the hair in sections, how each braid is comprised of three parts, and how to twist the end around your finger to prevent the braid from unraveling. While doing this, I can’t help but to think of all the stories, the tales, the superstitions that I learned from my mother and aunts when I was growing up, getting my own hair braided. For instance, I think of the pattern of bad luck that…
M.A.M.A. Issue 53 Jessica Caldas, Art and Dayna Patterson, Poetry The Museum of Motherhood, ProCreate Project, and Mom Egg Review present M.A.M.A.: our collaboration celebrates the intersection of art and words. Wherever we live, work, and play, the art of motherhood is made manifest. #JoinMAMA @ProcreateProj @MuseumOfMotherhood @MERliterary Dayna Patterson, Poetry This poem was originally published in MER 19. Dayna Patterson is the author of Titania in Yellow (Porkbelly Press, 2019) and If Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020). A new book is forthcoming in February, 2023. Her creative work has appeared recently in Duende, EcoTheo, and Gulf Coast. She is…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Kneel Said the Night is a hybrid collection containing poems, prose, photographs, and drawings by Margo Berdeshevsky, the award-winning author of four books of poetry and an illustrated book of stories. She was born in New York City and resides in Paris. Her “Letters from Paris” have appeared online at Poetry International for many years. Berdeshevsky writes, “I used to visit with old women. I thought I needed to learn how to become one.” Perhaps that is part of what drew me to this book—I am 49, and she is a decade older and writing…
Review by Richard Hoffman “What you write about chooses you.” — Barbara Helfgott Hyett Eric Hyett’s Aporia is a chronicle of a year spent helping his mother and himself to accept a diagnosis — and more, the reality — of Alzheimers Disease. Hyett, co-translator, with Spencer Thurlow, of Sonic Peace by the contemporary Japanese poet Kiriu Minashita, offers us an insightful, poignant debut collection. In addition to the spare and piercing dialogue that is judiciously employed in these poems to convey the depth and complexity of the love between a son and his mother, there is also the concurrent fact,…
Review by Carole Mertz William Carlos Williams wrote in Spring and All (in 1923) that the heavy process of creating anew “begins to near a new day.” Of all the volumes mothers have written about their children and their experiences of motherhood, Marie Gauthier, with Leave No Wake, proves it is yet possible to share new thought and new creativity about this profound and universal experience, that of the parent who parents responsibly and lovingly. In creativity “everything IS new,” Williams further states. Gauthier’s syntax, and her genuine sentiment towards mothering, makes things new. Many of the poems in…
Review by Ruth Hoberman Mary Morris’s most recent book of poems—her third—draws its title from Rembrandt’s “late self-portraits”—three paintings he did in the years preceding his 1669 death at the age of 63. At the time, he had lost his wife, his beloved son Titus, and his money. The suffering is evident in Rembrandt’s face, but for many, the paintings also depict an inner light, a sense that he is on the brink not of death but transfiguration. Others see the portraits in less uplifting terms, as studies in bodily decay, with their sad eyes, wrinkled, blemished skin, the…
Review by Jennifer Martelli Colleen Michaels invites us into a world of sweet, fatty foods, illusion, and games of chance, where we might land at Foxwoods Casino, Paragon Park, Coney Island, or perhaps, a local bakery to buy blueberry donuts. The poems in Michaels’ debut collection, Prize Wheel, are as thrilling and dangerous as a carnival. Fanned out into six sections, the book is as breathtaking and as specific as fate; the poems guide us through and out of a funhouse maze, one filled with creativity, costume, danger, and a mother’s love. The first section, “Beat the House,” introduces…
Chelsea Fanning Virgin Mary as Teakettle Praise be to you, spattered with chicken grease and garlic fat, the cerulean of your enamel like a blue mantle, sanguine in its austerity. Down your throat holy faucet waters pour, impregnating your belly before you’re cast into the flames. Blue light caresses your sides heats up the sea inside you, tempest waves rising to a fever until you scream in ecstasy or terror. Originally published in MER 20, “Mother Figures” issue. Chelsea Fanning is a writer, poet, editor, feminist, witch from New Jersey. She has an MFA from Drew University…