Thanks for your interest in MER! We publish creative work on mothers, mothering, and motherhood, in all its forms. You need not be a mother to submit, as long as your piece is focused on motherhood.
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We have reached our quota of submissions for Motherhood as Noise & Silence and have closed submissions. Thanks for sending work!
Past Calls
Call for Poetry Submissions / MER (Mom Egg Review) March Online Folio
Theme: Motherhood as Noise & Silence
Deadline: February 1, 2026
(or until cutoff at 150 submissions).
MER’s March folio will explore the theme of motherhood as Noise & Silence. To mother is to live with the constant oscillation between noise (kids, advice, to dos, societal expectations) and silence (naptime, playdates, shared custody arrangements, estrangement, empty nest).
We invite poems that engage this dichotomy of motherhood—work that inhabits noise and silence, moves between them, resists them, or seeks (or fails to seek) equilibrium. We welcome expansive, unexpected, and personal interpretations of the theme.
We encourage and invite voices from marginalized communities. Also, if you have work in a recent or upcoming issue of MER or a recent MER Online Folio please wait until the next call to submit.
Please send up to three unpublished poems (no more than one page each) in a single Word doc by February 1, 2026, to the form here. One submission per person please. If accepted, your work will be featured in the MER (Mom Egg Review) Online Folio in March.
We’re really looking forward to reading your work!
Cindy Veach and Anna V. Q. Ros
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PAST CALLS:
Closed to new submissions.
Short Call for Poetry and Hybrid Submissions: The (Re)Birthing Room
MER Online Folio Curated by Karolina Zapal
“The (Re)Birthing Room,” seeks poetry (up to three poems in one document) and hybrid works (of 750 words or fewer) exploring pregnancy, birth, and rebirth—the physical, emotional, and metaphorical spaces where new life, new selves, and new worlds emerge, for an MER Online Folio. Open for submissions Dec. 1 through 7, 2025.
The birthing room is a liminal space where transformation happens, sometimes quietly, sometimes violently, sometimes both. When I gave birth to my daughter this past January, I entered such a room: hospital-white, filled with my husband, nurses, a midwife, a doula. There, I experienced joy and fear, a postpartum hemorrhage, and a retained placenta. That room changed me in ways I both imagined and never could have imagined.
This folio invites work that considers birth and rebirth in their many forms, from the physical and emotional experiences of pregnancy and delivery to broader acts of becoming. Perspectives from new parents, nurses, midwives, doulas, and medical staff are welcome, as are reflections on loss, transformation, and emergence in all their manifestations: ecological, spiritual, creative, political, or cultural.
The birthing room might be a hospital or a home, a forest or a protest site, a body or a dream. It might be the earth in spring, a nation reimagined, or a self remade. Is the birthing room a location in the world, or something carried within us? What might a birthing room look like for the environment, for a government, for a self?
As the title suggests, The (Re)Birthing Room is open to multiple interpretations. The parenthetical “re” signals the cyclical nature of transformation: to give birth is also to be reborn.–Karolina Zapal
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