Pooja Ugrani Thud! A familiar sound drops like a boulder in my belly a second before I open the door. The skull that hit the floor, now bobs up to greet me, to my relief. Guilt boils over. I let…
Browsing: Poetry
Meghan Trask Smith First Fever The fosterling burning in this bed calls out for her mother in a fever dream, a woman who is not me. Her mother is handing her unicorn earrings when I wake her for Advil.…
Eloísa Pérez-Lozano Lucky I stroke the wisps of hair on your head and caress your soft and spoiled skin as you suckle mi seno in our bed to the soundtrack of crickets outside. I think about how safe you…
Jennifer L. Freed “Have You Locked up the Knives?” In answer to Ms. K, Department of Children and Family Services Staples, thumb tacks, twist ties, tooth picks. The tips of unfolded paperclips. The spirals of wire binding her college-ruled…
Nicole Hospital-Medina the PAPER poem I found the paper on the kitchen counter under the peacock blue Parenting magazine. ~ I would enter a forest of animals, a zebra, el loro, the ugly ducklings. I would decorate a river…
Margo Berdeshevsky God Bless The Child That’s Got His Own (for labor days poised to shatter) My friends are losing mothers and fathers My world is losing air Today my father died, he says to me My…
Jennifer Franklin APRIL 2020, NYC The winds shake the windows. It has rained for six days as if the gods are punishing us for hubris and hatred. Without school to tire her, my daughter cannot sleep through the night…
Nicole Callihan From Yesteryear (3/26) And even if I were. And even if I were. If there are 24 hours in a day and 6 people in a house, 12 hands to be washed, and also bodies, 2 of…
Patricia Starek Simple Request The request was simple Can my child come say hello to your child? With appropriate social distance of course It has been 8 weeks since this 7-year-old has seen a friend in the flesh…
Karen George Frida Kahlo’s My Nurse and I, 1937 I. Infant with an adult head, held loosely, near falling from a wet nurse’s arms—face covered by a dark mask, a grimace. Lush foliage reaches her shoulders. Sky of…