Schrödinger’s Mother by Shinelle L. Espaillat “You’re always tired.” They are almost pouting when they say this. You have heard this phrase from four different people this week. Your tiredness would likely baffle your single-mother mother and her single-mother mother and a whole line of ancestors whose labor literally built the world. You are not wading in troubled water; you are not withstanding water hoses and snarling Dobermans to demand your right to exist. But you still feel like Atlas. You want to find a way to express this to your almost-pouting progeny. You want to tell them: Yes,…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Mothers, Mothering, and Ongoing Conversations Mixed Genre Folio Edited by Mary McLaughlin Slechta The voices in this folio—a hive of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and art—hum with the conversations women have with their children, partners, mothers, and themselves. You will hear the pride and guilt of working mothers/artists, the frustration of adult children debating parents, both deceased and living, and the joy of others sifting memory for lessons and meaning. One poet opens our ears and hearts to the tender whisperings of guardian angels, while another, in communion with the moon, contemplates self and the passage of time. Three…
Motherconversating by Denise Lewis Patrick Osmosis… I remember being buttoned into a sleeveless, white-dotted Swiss dress. My mother had sewn it, as she did most of my clothes. She was crying, heavily pregnant with my sister. We were minutes away from getting into a car as part of her grandmother’s funeral procession. Mommie had been her favorite; everyone knew that. It was August, and probably very hot. We were both tense. But her sadness was one thing. My mix of confusion and fear was another. Before the white dress, my mother had distractedly strapped a thick Kotex pad between…
Jenny Molberg HEREDITARY – Yyvonne Deakins Collins, Elaine de Kooning, 1968 She spoke and the breasts heard singing. Heard song and called back. Fern closed in around her face. Without a word, the room brimmed lemon, lemon and veins of green while the fountain calmed itself in the yard. She held the cancer. It wasn’t her child but she tended to it. Generations passed through the twentieth century until a duct opened and sang my great-aunt into the place above my mother’s heart. Originally published in MER 24 Jenny Molberg is the author of three collections of poetry,…
Mother Bone by Mary Willette Artist Statement Mother Bone is one part of a series of pelvis explorations that I began while I was pregnant and thinking about my relationship to my body and time. Our pelvis cradles our intimate histories and creates a portal for our futures. In a year where days and months had somehow blurred together, stood still, and raced ahead all at once, I was left with an opening to consider the deep time of my body and its internal rhythms. My son was born in the fall, and I started collecting leaves on our walks…
MER Bookshelf – August 2026 Sarah Jefferis, Lucky to Have You, Finishing Line Press, May 2026, poetry Lucky to Have You is a collection of narrative lyric poems that meditate on romantic loss and love. Loss and luck are synonymous; luck always appears amid heartbreak, and in moments of unexpected luck, aged sorrow rears its wrinkled forehead. The collection comprises three sections: “Lucky to Find You,” “Lucky to Keep You,” and “Lucky to Lose You.” These imitation love poems travel up and down the East Coast- from Virginia to New York- and shadow all kinds of marriages that died…
Review by Tessara Dudley Before I know the names of every tree and birdsong along the saltmarsh, I will hold my daughter. And I will finally understand that it is possible to be both the doe standing in the clearing and the fawn leaping through the meadow, scared, and on her own. “Leap” (3) In her poetry collection, Everything Is Water, Chelsea Krieg develops two major streams of experience: on the one hand, giving birth to a child and being a parent; on the other hand, the strain of caring for a partner battling cancer, and the potential loss…
Review by Rebecca Jane The Presence of One Word reawakens a reader’s senses, inviting quiet charms to bloom with meaning. This collection shares deep inner peace that the poet has discovered on her journeys—to a grandmother’s house in Greece, a coffee shop in Vienna, the moor’s resonating with the spirits of the Brontë sisters, and beyond. Andrea Potos is a masterful observer. Her eyes notice a place where the heart of autumn finds rhythm, and she encourages observations to express astonishment, gladness, longing, or love. Her expression has the power to alert us to the poetics of a spider…
Kathy Nelson BEFORE I DIE Some great uncle passed it down, that curio, that heirloom, that tour de force— seamless wooden links lifted from the branch, whole, already interlocking, as if by magic, with nothing but a pocketknife. Let me be that whittled willow chain I lost. Let me be that blue bird I gave away, the one with white-tipped wings my mother kept all her life—ceramic, not a chip or scratch. Let me be the last letter from my father, loping, looping letters across a lined legal pad. Your mother and I miss you, we’re so glad you’ll…
Review by Katy E. Ellis Joanna Streetly is a prize-winning Canadian poet and non-fiction writer who emigrated from Trinidad and has lived on the unceded territory of the Tla-o-qui-aht on Vancouver Island for the past thirty years. The poems in All of Us Hidden sweep the reader into Streetly’s past as a young stepmother new to Canada and whose two stepsons disappear (presumably drowned) when they are adults. Streetly’s collection grapples with this loss as well as the loss of her mother, the birth of her own daughter, and the dire relationship humans have with Mother Earth. Every poem…