Rebecca Brock Good Housekeeping (America, during Covid, during Trump) She keeps trying to get her house in order pretending with the rest of them that the sun won’t melt the earth, that the seas won’t burn, that the land won’t disappear under water or ice or our own triggered destruction. She keeps going back to the dishes, to the meals, to washing the clothes, to worrying over the state of the carpet which is funny in a sad way if you knew the state of her house– the way the windows leak, the way the doors have to be snugged…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Lisa Romano Licht In the Midst of Fear, My Daughter’s Choice Taught Me to Step Aside Yesterday, as my daughter pulled into the driveway after work, I anxiously opened the garage door. Leaving her jacket, bag and shoes behind, she went into the downstairs laundry room. After tossing her clothes and face mask into the washer, she scrubbed her hands and put on the robe I had left there. Then she went upstairs to shower. I followed, wearing gloves and sanitizing doorknobs and light switches. I don’t know how my twenty-two-year-old arrived at this moment in time. Her…
Chelsea Reiter Pregnancy Loss in a Pandemic Is Just Like You’d Imagine In a pandemic, you’re privileged to move from a place where the numbers are high to a place where the numbers are low. In a pandemic, you’re privileged to get pregnant after 10 seconds of trying, and even more so when your best friend is pregnant too. In a pandemic, you’re privileged to have Nick, a husband with a steady gaze, strong hands, and beautiful blue eyes, who is offended by the “10 seconds of trying” remark. Oops! In a pandemic, your co-workers don’t get suspicious when…
Alexandra Umlas Sheltering with Daughters Sometimes a shelter is a house. Sometimes a house is a home. Sometimes a home is a prison. I tell myself that you are not missing out, that I can be friend, teacher, mother, fence, blanket, glass of water. For fun, I brew your first cups of coffee, stirred with heaping tablespoons of sugar, tempered with milk. I ex-out everything in March, make bread with expired yeast, mourn its tired, tentative half-rise. We clean floorboards, dust shelves, scooter through the park every afternoon at 4:30, the dog zagging around us, the nature center’s gates…
M.M. DeVoe Lemon Chicken Rice Soup for the Soul I never expected the pandemic to result in good things for our family, but it did. My daughter was thirteen when the pandemic hit, a young thirteen, still mourning the fairy-wings and tiaras she had pitched in a fit of middle-school transition the summer before. As store shelves emptied and the world closed in, she and I were quarantined in a loft apartment in Manhattan, searching for a new normal. My job as her mother, I thought, was to keep things positive. I had been moved by “Life is Beautiful”…
Review by Nadia Wynter In Mama Phife Represents, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, an island woman from Trinidad, a mother, wife, friend, poet, an artist, gives the world a peek inside her grieving heart after the death of her beloved son, Malik Izaak Boyce Taylor, known globally as Phife Dawg, the underrated soul of the acclaimed hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest. As she mourns her public-figure son, mom’s world crumbles into a sea of vivid memories, a sea of infinite tears and a sea of sad faces around the world saying, in an attempt to console the inconsolable, “Sorry for your…
Reviewed by Suzanne Edison Jessica Gigot is a farmer, poet, teacher, and musician. She is the author of Flood Patterns, (Antrim House Books, 2015), and her writing appears in such publications as Orion, Taproot and Poetry Northwest. She teaches poetry workshops and eco-poetics through Richard Hugo House in Seattle, WA and on her farm, Harmony Fields, in Bow, WA. Additionally, she writes about food, sustainable farming practices, and is featured in a TedX Talk, The Poetics of Food, 2017. I met Jessica as a fellow student in a poetry workshop during this pandemic year, via Zoom. Though we live…
Reviewed by Emily Webber Tara Isabel Zambrano’s short story collection Death, Desire, and Other Destinations delivers on what it promises in the title. Zambrano highlights our desire for human connection and our yearning for the things we cannot have or have lost. So much of 2020 has asked us to endure the opposite of desire. We’ve been asked to forego simple pleasures like eating a meal with a friend to grand celebrations for weddings and births. We’ve been asked to shrink down our worlds and to contain our longing for human connection. But Zambrano’s stories take us to a…
Pandemic Parenting: An MER VOX folio Curated by J.L. Scott Parenting is always a challenge, even in the best of circumstances. Parenting during a pandemic, when fears for safety are high and opportunities for distraction and activity are limited, is especially challenging. Sometimes, though, the challenges we face end up shedding light on some aspect of ourselves, our lives, our children and yes, even our parenting, that ends making things better. The following works come from mothers covering the gamut of challenges, from the heart wrenching to the heart warming, during this time of Pandemic Parenting. Featured: Jane Yolen Susan McGee…
Review by Cammy Thomas Patrice Boyer Claeys grew up in Pennsylvania, graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Manchester, U.K. Her first book of poems, Lovely Daughter of the Shattering was followed a year later by The Machinery of Grace in 2020, both from Kelsay Books. She has been nominated twice for Best of the Net. This is a gorgeous book, made entirely of lines taken from other poems, but absolutely clear in its unified voice. I can’t see how she did it! The book is in three sections, the first about the death of the speaker’s mother, the second a…