Barbara O’Dair MONSTER Today I bought a shower chair. I’m not old, just dizzy. Recently, I had to sit down on the tile floor to wash my hair, insult upon injury—when I moved here, I pulled out the grip bar in the bathtub wall because it was ancient and unneeded. A couple lived in this house for 50 years, and when their son put it on the market, they were placed in separate facilities: the realtor told us that the wife had dementia whereas the husband was just old. One day, when my infant was asleep, the woman showed up, thin and…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Tzynya Pinchback MENARCHE The summer I turned thirteen. The summer before eighth grade. The summer I learned to climb a tree, launch from the neighbor’s not-up-to-code brick privacy fence, and tuck my body into itself, drop cannonball style into our swimming pool. The summer I limped home – salve of gravel and mud pressing closed the crevasse sliced into the back of my upper right thigh – after jumping a chain link fence racing my brother to the library. The summer I was bridesmaid in Uncle Michael’s wedding, when we lost the house and moved from Los Angeles to…
Amanda Quaid FARRUCA Just once, she thought the baby’s face looked like her mother’s— only in the blue light, only at a glance, a ghost rippling up the cheeks, the crinkled nose, something in the way she scowled at a songbird that surprised her: resurrection, genes like bulls charging forth from past to present tense. Amanda Quaid’s work was awarded the 2023 Bridport Prize. Her debut collection, No Obvious Distress, a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize, is out now with John Murray Press. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter, and she…
Joani Reese FEVER DREAM In the dark, the collector, cape and hood painted black, knocks three times at my sick mother’s door. He salutes the vast heavens, leans his scythe towards the wall, then saunters to her bedside to finesse her withdrawal from the world. His skeletal hands stroke her whisper-fine hair; he waits for the nurse to be busy elsewhere, then he shuffles her memories and settles himself down to read her as though she’s a book to be shelved. He stares from her eyes that have grayed from the green, takes her life for a test drive, wants to see what she’s seen. She dozes,…
Nancy Ring HOW BRIGHTLY Hot pink feather, glued by a child. It’s a bird I think, and that feather looks warm. Would that I could pluck it and wear it like a moustache, but it won’t salve these icy arms. Dragging my mother with me, my mother who is always, always cold. We pull our sweater sleeves down over our veined hands, our jackets pulled tight around us, she slow bending over her walker, one small step at a time. But today there is urgency. I magically make her race in hot pursuit. We pass more pink, the hot…
Nida Sophasarun SIRENS We sailed past a tanker to the mouth of the river where the monk chanted and flung holy water over shards of bone laid out in front of her picture. I had prayed days before over her face and body and asked if she could please not haunt me, knowing the spirit usually decides in the days right after. I dropped the clay urn onto the rough and muddy Chao Praya. The cap dislodged, and our boat moved on. I stayed a few days more and ate the papaya, noodles and curries over which, even as…
Jacqueline West WITH THE FIVE-YEAR-OLD AT THE BELL MUSEUM We bring you here to see dead things— green moth wings pinned beneath glass bells, bones ranged in drawers like silver spoons, rows of limp pelts slit from their flesh. Your fingers slip through silver fur. Around the corner, whooping cranes pose on impossible legs, forever dancing, forever still. No dust collects on their outspread wings. Grandest of all, the mastodon, long gone, still standing on its plaster stones, great tusks framing your small self. Your smile. The boxes of minor specimens: extinct pigeons, endangered wolves, owls with their gold…
Sati Mookherjee MY DAUGHTER THE TREE My daughter was born the year she turned fourteen, the year I was born, her spine rose curving into the tissue of sky, she spurned true for lordotic, posture for pose. I told myself: What doesn’t bend, breaks. She lived right by the gaping well. Was born the year of the tree – I used to rake the fat fallen leaves, praying. I’ve shorn shoots, pulled off wire-sharp vines, scratched its bark as tenderly as if she were mine. Because she was mine, I mean. Combed the thatch of her hair, washed…
Review by Lara Lillibridge Skip It, Spice Girls, vanilla body spray, Dr. Pepper Lip Smackers and frosted eyeshadow. “We’ve grown up when being captured on-screen is still a novelty.” Sarah Fawn Montgomery captures all of the desperation, longing, and joy of a 1990’s girlhood in this slim but powerful chapbook, where girls “…learn hesitation more than certainty.” A time when sexism and sexual assault were routine, Montgomery grows up on the page, graduating from high school teachers who sleep with students to college professors who do the same, learning and rebelling against a culture that tells girls how to…
Reviewed by Susan Blumberg-Kason Jamie Wendt is an award-winning poet, a prolific book reviewer, and a middle school teacher based in Chicago. Her latest collection of poetry, Laughing in Yiddish, was a finalist for the 2022 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry and a semifinalist for the 2023 Word Works Washington Prize, the 2022 Longleaf Press Book Contest, and the 2022 Brick Road Poetry Press Book Contest. Several themes run through Wendt’s new book. Immigration is a big one and it’s chilling to think that Wendt wrote these poems several years before the latest immigration and refugee crises, not just…