The_Mom_Egg_09_files/The Mom Egg 7

The Mom Egg
2009
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The Mom Egg
2009
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Lucky 7
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Editor and Publisher
Marjorie Tesser
Founding Editor
Alana Ruben Free
Founding Publisher
Joy Rose
Mamapalooza
This issue of The Mom Egg is dedicated to
Alana Ruben Free and Joy Rose,
whose vision, dedication and open spirits inspire
and to the two awesome Dorises—
Doris R. Altman, my mother,
and Doris Tesser, my mother-in-law.
The Mom Egg, an annual journal of poetry, fiction, creative prose, and art, publishes
work by mothers about everything, and by everyone about mothers and motherhood,
and is engaged in promoting and celebrating the creative force of mother artists, and in
expanding the opportunities for mothers, women, and artists.
http://themomegg.com
Contact: [email protected]
With huge thanks to Sue Altman for logo, Amanda Laycock for design/layout, and the creative
team at Palisades Center Apple store, for website help. Cover photo by Heide Hatry.
The Mom Egg is a member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP).
The Mom Egg is made possible with a re-grant from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses,
supported by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. The Mom
Egg is also grateful for the assistance of The Motherhood Foundation.
The Mom Egg 2009©Marjorie Tesser, 2009. All rights reserved.
All rights to the individual pieces in this volume revert back to the authors.
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The Mom Egg
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Contents
Shanna Germain HARVEST AT LA VIRGEN
1
Shanna Germain BEARING
2
Odarka Polanskyj Stockert
ODE TO THE EGG 4
Theta Pavis
AMNIOCENTESIS
5
Sabra Ciancanelli BABY SHOWER
6
Blueberry Elizabeth Morningsnow
OF THE TWO BEINGS
Judith Arcana
On that day,
9
Elizabeth Aquino THOUGHTS ON A PICTURE OF SOPHIE IN AN
ANTIQUE SILVER FRAME
10
Nicelle Davis
COMMUTER’S LAMENT
12
Mitzi Grace Mitchell
LIVING BATTLEFIELD
13
Lindsay Illich
FIRST WORDS
14
Jennifer Jean
MY SHOAL
15
Emily Hayes
BACKCOUNTRY WYOMING 16
Michelle Augello-Page
DOING THE DISHES 17
Liz Brennan
FOUR PROSE POEMS 18
Eileen Apperson PHOEBE AND THE DEAD CAT
19
Nancy O. Graham A CUSTOMARY BIRTHDAY 21
January G. O’Neil WHAT MOMMY WANTS
23
Nicelle Davis
MILK SHAKES
24
Jenn Blair
SNACK
26
Wendy Levine DeVito
ORLANDO
26
Kristina Bicher
CANNONBALL
28
Amy Newday
GRAVEYARD BURNING
30
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
NOVEMBER COME 1970
31
Gwendolyn Joyce Mintz LIL’ REVEREND
32
Wendy Jones Nakanishi SONS AND MOTHERS
34
Jennifer Edwards
HE IS
36
Denise Emanuel Clemen HOLDING CORY
37
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
UNFINISHED GIRL 1950
39
Sarah Conover
HOW TO BE A GIRL
40
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Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie
LEARNING TO SWIM
42
Tania Pryputniewicz
RISING SIGN 45
Puma Perl
JOCKO
46
Lee Schwartz
DAUGHTER 47
Alice Shechter
SOMETHING LIVE
49
Estelle Bruno
NIGHTFALL 50
Helen Ruggieri
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE: A FOUND POEM IN
SUBJECT LINES
51
Golda Solomon
AN ORDINARY DAY
52
Talia Reed
SHE THINKS EVERY DAY WILL BE TODAY 54
May Joseph
WALK INTO THE NIGHT
55
Amy Simon
CRYING IN THE KITCHEN 57
Joy Rose
SOME THINGS ARE NOT MEANT FOR THIS WORLD
Roberta Fineberg LONELY PAINTER
62
Samantha Villenave
IT’S NOT WORKING 63
Scott Owens
SARA NEVER WANTED CHILDREN 65
Lisa Williams
1925 66
Monica A. Hand
MOTHER’S MILK
68
Jessica Reidy
THE HARP-SNAPPER 68
Diana M. Raab
APARTMENT BUILDING
69
Alana Ruben Free
FEAR AND DESIRE 70
Joan Mazza
PALINODE FOR MOM 72
Kathy Curto
TWELVE STREET AND CRUMB
73
Arfah Daud
WATERING 75
Donna Katzin
MA MAY
77
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
AFTER CHEMO
78
Kyle Potvin
TUMOR
78
Golda Solomon
DAY 2 79
Nancy Gerber
EVA SAYS
80
Ellen Saunders
THE DECORATOR
81
Mary Meriam
MY MOTHER IS THE STAR 81
Jane Pease
ASHES TO ASHES
82
Connie Colwell Miller
A DEATH
83
Malaika King Albrecht
MOTHER LEAVING THE FIELD OF
FORGET ME NOTS 84
Gail Peterson
SHE’S IN THE GARAGE
85
Ada Jill Schneider SURVEY
86
Judith Skillman
BECALMED 87
Sarah Cavallaro
MY SON
90
Marian K. Shapiro
PEACE RALLY 90
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Connie Colwell Miller
A SIMPLE POEM
91
Caledonia Kearns I’D LIKE TO PUT MY MARRIAGE ON THE WALL
Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie
HAIKU FOR ROSES 92
Rethabile Masilo THE GROTTO OF CHEHRABAD
94
Tami Haaland
JOURNEY
95
Lindsay Illich
POEMS AND BODIES 96
Fay Chiang
DREAM
98
May Joseph
MEENA ALEXANDER: WRITING CHILDHOOD
AND THE INDIAN OCEAN (Interview) 100
Alice Campbell Romano THE PRODIGAL SON’S MOTHER
by Mary Rose Betten (Book review)
Cassie Premo Steele
THE EARTH IS A FALLEN WOMAN 111
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Contributors
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109
116
Art
Robyn Beattie 44 ESCARGOT BEGONIA
Orna Ben-Shoshan
3 HARVEST
88 HOUSEWIFE
93 THE LAST SUPPER
99 MILK TREE
Heide Hatry 98 EXPECTATION
Jessy Randall 27
MOTHERHOOD
MOM TORTURE
NINE CIRCLES OF MOTHERHOOD HELL
Mary Reilly 4, 17, 22
Rachel Rinehart 29, 79
Ellen Rix 1, 31, 39, 65,, 91, 97
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Shanna Germain
HARVEST AT LA VIRGEN
The mountain rises high and straight as
a mother’s tit; two-thousand meters
above body level, wind up, wind up
to the point of nipple and milky cloud.
Here, women rise before monkeys howl,
draped in plastic gowns to protect from rain.
Me too, me too, crinkly in my clear dress.
Picking baskets slung low on our hips,
we labor up the hillside, holding hands
with coffee trees. The women carry babies
like monkeys, all eyes and fingers silent
gripping, cradled between back and branches.
Altars of red. Women whisper, madre
Maria, bendiga este cafe. Amen.
And then they pick. Berries multiply in
baskets, make them waddle beneath the weight.
There is some secret here I do not know,
how to pluck a ripe berry from its home,
bearing down between finger and thumb, lips
parting to speak Spanish the words I’d ask.
My basket stays basket, stiff jute ribs
rounded, container asking to be filled.
Day’s end is marked with clouds, water breaking
across babies and backs. Down the mountain
and nothing for it but the fruit of this
day’s labor, weighed for measure and money.
Ellen Rix
x
The women bow over, suckling babies.
Above, monkeys crown the trees and howl.
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Shanna Germain
BEARING
Sometimes the dead come back as tomatoes.
My mother flowers first, ever early,
into sweet salvos before she turns overbearing,
offering armfuls of yellow and gold guilt.
First of July, my dad arrives in quiet
color, craggy-faced Dutchman of mid-season.
Here is his smell of soap and sulphur,
never richer than now, in these deep pink lobes.
Come harvest time, it’s like a family reunion around here:
Even Auntie Ruth arrives right on time, round
body wrapped in her Purple Cherokee coat,
coating my tongue with her nicotine dusk.
And by late August, my first lover,
red and robust as an Arkansas Traveler,
finally blooms right where he was planted,
something I’d begged him to do for years.
September comes. My husband does not believe,
eats tomatoes that are just tomatoes, skin
and flesh without a past. How to explain
to his big teeth chewing?
Before first frost, he is ready to cut the cords
of vines and roots, turn the soil to try again.
I follow as he buries already fallen
life held up only by makeshift crosses.
Last row, and I finger leaves in hope of new buds,
inhale fading glories for the scent of sea,
but at row’s end, there is only this: white
marker of an Early Girl, almost taken root.
Orna Ben-Shoshan
HARVEST
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Odarka Polanskyj Stockert
ODE TO THE EGG
Theta Pavis
Consider the egg
its smooth surface
its clean line
and shape
how one would travel
around on the surface
as if
on a roller coaster ride
how delicate the shell
when it is dropped
or tapped on the edge
of a metal mixing bowl
how you can separate
the yolk from the white
how it all starts
in the melding of the two
how if we wait
patiently
nature takes its course
and the egg is fertile
AMNIOCENTESIS
The amniotic sac, that
portable sea-sack within.
Unseen sea, wet and
globular. Your private tidal
basin, wet estuary with
hope and salt, private ocean
after ocean wave, drifting you
in the confines of body, waving
fingers finding ocean’s mouth.
Next week the doctor wants
to guide the needle in. The
doctor’s face says needle.
But I wonder what your
face will say in the secret
wonder sea. Will you think
the tide’s gone out? Will
you head for shore?
how it transforms
into a small life
fluffy and hopeful
delicate and determined
Mary Reilly
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how it will grow to have
a very sharp beak
a powerful wing
and a dangerous claw
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Sabra Ciancanelli
BABY SHOWER
Still dark, early morning, almost spring, I lather my swollen belly so big I barely
fit in the steamy glass enclosure. If I drop the soap now, it’s done. I’m not the
only one running out of room. Gone are the days when I feel him flit from one
side to another taunting, teasing, convincing me he truly has a life of his own.
Back when I was still getting used to the idea, rationalizing throwing caution to
the wind had been the right decision, that Solomon needed a sibling because the
few only children I knew grew to be self-centered and lonely.
Later, his large sweeping movements transformed my stomach into something
like a cat under a blanket but now he is still, like a tired fighter he throws a
punch now and then but most of his time is spent waiting for the bell to ring.
In hours I’ll be numb from the heart down. Cut along my scar from the last
time, I’ll be no worse for the wear. Abruptly we’ll shed one another. He’ll
emerge red-faced and stunned, and I’ll be sewn together like an empty purse
with a fresh scarlet seam to mend.
Birth by cesarean is more like hatching. I wonder if nature sees us as less
responsible, if that is why we must transform ourselves, carry our young inside.
Or maybe this evolution is necessary, the gradual sacrifices, one less cup of
coffee here, no wine with dinner there, easing us into motherhood the way one
enters the cold ocean. I think this as fear finds me once again. Water streams
down the drain and I’m filled with dread realizing we’re almost there, at the
moment before he breathes on his own, when life hangs on a string.
My last, I think, though no one truly knows for sure, futures and plans change so
but I tell myself this, just in case, creating a memory etched with purpose the
way known lasts always are.
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I see him in my mind’s eye in black and white like his flimsy ultrasound picture
on smooth shiny paper; proof a daughter wasn’t in the cards for me. Still
unnamed, I wait for a glimpse of his face, for him to look like a Henry, or a Cyrus
or something I haven’t ever thought of, for him to tell me through the depths of
his eyes or the curve of his mouth.
It’s time. So often the future seems so distant hanging out of reach and then
inevitably, it drops at our feet. Up to now, I’ve been able to put off this certain
end with checking off lists of things to buy and do, chase away the anxiety that
creeps from behind my heart and sits like a stone in my throat.
The hot water turns my skin pink, a little too hot, I think turning it down. Before
I know it, I’ll be back to my old self, to scalding showers and sushi dinners, to
odd comforts that I’ve been deprived of since that faint line on a plastic stick
announced his existence.
I hold my stomach in my hands. Soon he’ll be in my arms. We’ll size up one
another. His tired eyes against mine. I’ll count fingers and toes, push my breast
inside his mouth and thank God when he sucks.
Forget the classes, the practiced breathing, the gatherings of women on folding
chairs ohhing and ahhing at preciously small sleepers; birth is fierce, unlike
anything else in this world. Why would we think it should be any different?
I read somewhere in every mother’s body exist the fetal cells of her children.
For reasons no one knows they remain in her bloodstream for as long as twentyseven years. Not a mother alive doubts this.
Closing my eyes I feel a longing already. Our numbered days have come down to
hours, minutes. Gently he kicks, unaware.
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Blueberry Elizabeth Morningsnow
OF THE TWO BEINGS
I became you, a moon in my body
Bones growing bones in an earth made of air
You looked into your hands and slept there.
(An owl is hooting and it sounds like talking
There is a transparency of counting inside me
There’s an owl combining with an owl to make an owl)
Absorbing water’s a life for the sunflower
An unending orange grace ending in being
But the flood of the human trillium
Judith Arcana
On that day,
is the trill of green all alone
-He had to watch me suffering & the new person coming in
A story will come out— a new person is here
Some impossible-split self is catching. . .
I saw yellow sun in the blue sky
red leaves falling down the air
turning slowly through no wind
the trees let go, leaves fell away.
Then you kicked off from my spine
like a swimmer at the wall of the pool
to churn the length of your lane
and rise, head first, into air.
and it’s a power that opens everything; a throat—
We are almost doors. Poems try. This is
like nothing
Ghost:
That’s an easy one—the “elemental force” is the simple longing to be part of
existence
Lake:
I never was born
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Elizabeth Aquino
THOUGHTS ON A PICTURE OF SOPHIE IN AN ANTIQUE SILVER FRAME
The frame is a tarnished silver oval. I had to cut the picture of Sophie to fit
it. She is wearing a pink, pleated bonnet and jacket, a terribly expensive
ensemble from good friends. A narrow satin ribbon is tied in a bow under her
chin. Her cheeks are round and her mouth is pursed. Her eyes are half-closed,
her eyebrows delicate frames. She is five weeks old and perfectly beautiful.
She is well.
Sophie was a normal baby for the first twelve weeks of her life. I nursed her
blissfully in a white rocking chair while spring rain pattered on the roof of our
walk-up apartment in New York City. I carefully put her in the Baby Bjorn and
took the bus uptown to a baby group meeting, led by Arlene Eisenberg, the
author of the famous book “What to Expect When You’re Expecting.” I didn’t
expect to be rushing her to an emergency room only a few weeks later, so when
Sophie was diagnosed with infantile spasms one Tuesday afternoon, as far as I
was concerned, I had a new baby.
The loss of the old baby was so sudden and so severe that I had no time to
mourn her. Instead, I buckled down with the new one. We were admitted into
New York Hospital where we were to learn how to inject high dosage steroids
into her thighs. Within two days, the baby’s appetite was so enormous and she
was so terribly irritable, that my milk supply diminished and I was unable to
keep up. A chipper young doctor on the night shift came up from behind me in
the parents’ room where I stood at a window, my forehead pressed up against
the plate glass, my shoulders shaking from the sobs. She put her hand on my
shoulder and said, “Breastfeeding isn’t all that important, you know.” The new
baby needed something more.
I read somewhere that every baby is born with his or her parent’s hopes and
expectations. As the weeks wore on that terrible summer after Sophie was
diagnosed, I thought that my hopes and expectations were lost. I had lost
Sophie, the baby I carried for forty-two weeks and that I had labored for fortytwo hours and that had been cut from me, finally, on March 8th, 1995. But while
my initial grief was for what I believed to be a real death, the death of the
baby I thought I had, my mourning was for a lost Sophie. Someone who was lost
but whom I might yet find. I realized this because on the night before we were
to have an MRI of her brain in an effort to discover a cause for her seizures, I
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held her tightly in my arms. She was quiet for a minute and gazed intently into
my eyes. I had felt sick all day with anxiety and uncertainty but in that moment,
I felt an overwhelming sense of peace. I almost heard her say in my head, “I am
alright. Everything will be alright.” I had read about the seven stages of grief
and realized that I might very well be stuck in the denial stage, but I didn’t care.
I didn’t care profoundly because I knew that I had not lost Sophie but that she,
herself, was lost. And I could help to find her.
The last movie I saw before I gave birth to Sophie was based on a story about
selkies called “The Secret of Roan Innish.” Celtic mythology relating to the
sea is magical, and what have always fascinated me were the stories of selkies
– seals who could shed their skins and take human form. A female selkie leaves
her skin and comes ashore as a beautiful young woman. Mythical sea creatures
are generally frightening and hostile, but seals, with their soft, mournful eyes
are transformed by myth into gentle earthly beings. They appear to understand
the depths of human emotion as simply as the depths of the ocean. If humans
capture her skin, the selkie is forced to stay human and is described, generally,
as a fine but melancholy woman. However, if she finds her skin, she immediately
returns to the sea, leaving those she loves to mourn for her.
Sophie’s hair is soft and curly and her features are fine. She holds herself
delicately, almost gingerly and is often described as otherworldly. When we
began taking her to an osteopath in southern California after a good year’s
worth of fruitless medical treatment in New York, we noticed that her symptoms
subsided by the ocean. To this day, Sophie is transformed by the ocean. The
moment her bare foot feels the sand, she pulls insistently toward the water. We
have said that the water is pulling her toward it, so dramatic is the change in her
level of alertness. She doesn’t have seizures by the sea. She looks out, over it
and smiles a half-smile. I like to think that like a selkie she remembers her lost
world and that she is actually lost in ours. She shed her skin and was born to me,
pulled unwillingly into a world that insists on keeping her.
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Nicelle Davis
Mitzi Grace Mitchell
COMMUTER’S LAMENT
LIVING BATTLEFIELD
I sing doo-wop as I drive the 138
Freeway as if traveling Ecclesiastics’
silver cord towards my endless and excessive devotion
to books. A radio forecast predicts
a dust storm approaching. I change
stations to find a rhythm. Beat
the dash like a cowbell. Consider
filing my nails to the shape of goads.
At the red light, I draw a dark
line correctly across both eyelids. Attach fake-lashes with glue
made from grasshoppers guts picked
off the car windshield. Rub the blue
ring bruise where you mistook
biting for kissing. The almond trees
are blooming. You are unfolding
like a blossom. I am always
returning. I lost your first
steps to the indifferent ground. I miss
your face shaped like mine.
We only have a few years
to spend like shadows on the wall.
I’ll make you silhouettes. A rabbit.
Alligator. Pigeons circling home.
I hold on by the fingertips;
All I see is face, and hand
Reaching up to grasp my own,
Wordless face, wrinkled and ancient,
Imploring eyes that ask: just hold.
My arm is burning; hand cramped hard;
Shoulder stabbed by a sharpened stake.
Toddler arms of steel grip my ankles;
Squeezing tightly, they pull left and right.
Cherub lips cry help me, cuddle me, love me.
At my breast a tender mouth sucks;
Feed me, I need your very blood.
Hard little gums hold on like a vice,
As tiny fists pummel my flesh;
Nourish me, care for me, now it screams.
My other breast is stroked, caressed;
A rough hand scratches my belly low.
Shake loose the others and turn to me;
I need your love, your care, your look.
Urgently, urgently it asks for more,
As it pulls my nipple and bites my lips.
Pushing and struggling, they fight,
On the battlefield of my living body.
Pulled this way, stretched that,
I try to hold on to one tiny piece of –
Myself.
I catch the alphabet in a hand-bound
book for you. None of the symbols spell
how your laughter sounds:
a thousand wings escaping
from the bent metal cage of my throat.
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Jennifer Jean
MY SHOAL
Lindsay Illich
FIRST WORDS
It was as if his voice searched the world
over for a word, the smallest word
conceived, and when he found it,
his voice pressed it between his thumb
and forefinger to make it smaller
still, so small it became a tiny
pebble he tossed in the shoreline
of his mouth. He is tasting
his first word’s salt, its lightness
and strum. He is hearing
the first word shape into shelves
of continents, a word never
uttered the world over. It
is his. It is mine. It
is the first day and night
dawning on his tongue, the world’s
blue luminosity humming
the first chord of creation,
a world just now set in fierce
motion. It is ours. It is ours.
shoal: 1. A large school of fish or other marine animals;
2. A sandy elevation constituting a hazard to navigation.
I only love my children
when they slumber. When I can pause and
muse on the day:
muse that I have put to sleep
those bared teeth,
rhythmic caws, bellowed
NOs, urgent nicks and bruised
little egos that bulge
when I strive
to converse with other mothers.
Only after a spell, only in that pitched
pool of memory,
my eldest son can be one
half not bad. I see him leaping
in the tub. I see my face in his. He longs
to reel and bathe.
He doesn’t care if the current’s cold.
He has one toy, a driftwood boat.
It’s just enough
joy. And my whole brood fits too, into that
teeny pitcher tub, that vast soapy deep:
wrist over shin, ecru skin colliding,
and a wreck of hair plaiting,
surfing, sinking—
a bathwater kelp bed in reef knots.
They breach and sputter
squawk for shampoo;
their formless din rolls
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one over the other—a slick shoal
I know
as hazard, as perfect.
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Emily Hayes
BACKCOUNTRY WYOMING
For Benjamin
Even after we had seen hundreds
of bison, when we no longer pulled
to the roadside for bull moose and baby
elk, after our cameras captured the bald
eagle and the trumpeter swan in flight,
his eyes, still curious, searched tree
lines for bighorn sheep and mule deer,
as we rounded the corners of the park
to watch the sun sink below Yellowstone Lake.
He will not remember this trip, the snow
that clung to the hills of the east entrance,
our afternoon at Mammoth Hot Springs, near
the Montana line, or the fly fishermen
who flung their art on the waters
of Pelican Creek, but, tonight, his sleep
is full of geysers and grizzly bears,
sage brush and blue spruce, backcountry
Wyoming, so far from home.
Michelle Augello-Page
DOING THE DISHES
Today while doing the dishes
I glanced over at my daughter
lying on the floor in the living
room, reading a book, and I
paused to wonder about her mind
her perception of time and space
how her world is centered
Mary Reilly
THE SINK
I felt the gentleness of my hand
on the plates, the running water
on my wrists, I watched my daughter
who once called my body home
assert her space on the floor, kicking
out her feet and stretching her lean
body against the hard wood grain
I smiled and washed the silverware
glinting in the dim light, every act
was purposeful, every gesture poetic
my hands are powerful, even
in this domestic chore
the sink empty, I washed it down
and returning the sponge to its place
I rinsed it clean.
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17
Liz Brennan
When minnow dies
we place her in a tiny porcelain dish and set her on the window sill to await burial.
Overnight her miniscule remains shrivel. We bury her halfway between the yellow
hibiscus and the columbine, close to the spinning pinwheel. Slight and evanescent,
we knew her for a day. It takes a single finger to make a hole that’s big enough
Flinging rocks over the fence
of the kindergarten play yard my son hits a bystander in the face, causing the
man’s lip to bleed and swell. I arrive at school to pick him up since he was sent
home early, and the next day we keep him home. Only yesterday I caught him
trying to crush a baby spider that was scuttling across the kitchen counter with
his thumb. I reacted strongly. “What are you doing? Don’t harm that tiny spider!”
Why?” he asked. Then I lied. “Because it will bring you bad luck.”
Last week there was a day that I roamed
through the house in a fit of too little sleep: Who left their shoes here where I
can trip on them? Who left their dirty dishes in the sink? Who used the last of the
butter? But today I have presence of mind to notice the focused concentration
of my son snapping blocks of Legos together in the back room, the calm industry
of my husband outside watering the lawn. On the couch my black cat starts the
process of washing himself, and slowly begins licking a front paw.
Early July and already the orchard smells strongly
of apples. Tree limbs heavy with green fruit drop their excess to the ground. I ask
my son to help me add vegetable scraps to the worm bin, but he kicks his soccer
ball around the yard. I offer to take him on a walk, but inside the house a Popeye
cartoon is playing in the bedroom. Later after blackberry picking I put a band-aid
on his scratch and he sits on my lap in his playroom, there for him to hang his
tiredness on. The first day of summer has passed, and with it the lengthening of
days. Already our time together is growing shorter.
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Eileen Apperson
PHOEBE AND THE DEAD CAT
I was excited at the fact I was about to tell my three year old daughter that our
cat had died. I know it was the wrong emotion, but I had longed to be the great
comforter, the mother that made every ill of the world acceptable.
The neighbor had gently rapped on the door as we were getting ready to head
out for work and school. “There is a dead cat in the yard over there. It looks a
lot like George,” she said apologetically.
As with most news of death, my first response was denial. “I think I saw George
this morning in the backyard. Let me check.” I opened the back door calling,
loudly at first, “Here, kitty-kitty-kitty-kit . . .” my voice fading by the end,
realizing it was more unsettling calling a dead cat than confirming the death.
Once in the neighbor’s yard, I stood over the mangled fur that was George.
Damn, was my first thought. How am I going to get this cat buried and make it
to work on time? I’d do what I always did if I needed a difficult job done and my
husband was gone, call Dad. It was then, once that was settled, that I began to
swell with that nearly guilty feeling of enthusiasm. It was a moment that would
make me feel more like a parent. I was about to explain death to my child. She
would probably be scared and confused at first, but then I would calm her, saying
all the correct words to ease her sadness.
After making a quick call to Dad, I turned off Sesame Street and sat in front of
my daughter. “Phoebe, honey, I need to tell you something. George died. He
got hit by a car.” Phoebe stared blankly, never looking at me but over my left
shoulder as if I had never turned off the television. Her lips parted, and I tried
to make out the swelling of a tear that never did appear. “Phoebe?” Still, no
reaction at all. “Do you understand? George won’t be with us anymore, and I
am very, very sorry about that.”
Then, as if the processing were complete, she closed her mouth, looked me
straight in the eyes, and adamantly said while nodding, “I will take care of him.
He will feel better tomorrow.”
19
“Honey, he won’t be here tomorrow.” I tried being more specific. “Grandpa is
coming over to bury him.”
“He will feel better tomorrow,” she assured me again.
Nancy O. Graham
Dad pulled up to the house, removed a well-used flat shovel from the Cadillac’s
enormous trunk, and heavily asked, “Where is he?” Moments later dad returned,
George’s stiff body sprawled across the shovel. He dropped George and the
shovel in the trunk, slamming its lid.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking him home to bury him. Softer dirt there.”
“Smaller,” Agnes says, watching the girls blindfold her baby, her Kate. Can she
really be eight?
We got in our car and followed, prepared to show Phoebe the finality involved.
“George was hit by a car. His heart stopped beating, he stopped breathing, and
he died; but we have our memories of him. In fact just last night we were on
the back porch with George and you gave him a wet Willy. Do you remember,
Phoebe? We all laughed. You made George very happy on his last night here. It
is okay to be sad about George dying.”
“That’s so obsessive,” Erin agrees. “Whoever invented that birthday game
wanted back in.”
“I sometimes wish Kate could go back in,” Agnes admits. “I had nice big slices of
cake when I was pregnant.”
“Cake in Latin is placenta,” Marjorie says, drunk and pedantic. “It’s Mom we’re
here to celebrate, when all is said and done. To Agnes!”
A CUSTOMARY BIRTHDAY
In the kitchen, the women have their own little party. Marjorie hands Agnes a
lucent sliver of cake and a third beer and shares her theory that the whole point
of Pin the Tail on the Donkey is to stick a tail—“Read ass, ladies” on an ass’s ass.
“Get it?”
As we approached the house, Dad was on the ditch-bank, pushing the “burying”
shovel into the sandy dirt. He looked up briefly and returned to his work.
The women clink glasses. In the living room, Kate pins the tail on the donkey’s
heart, takes her blindfold off, and mock-wails. Agnes, feeling a bit gravid, as
she always does on Kate’s day, contemplates purple helium balloons; distended,
tied off, their cords kinked, they press against the ceiling as if sensing the sky
beyond.
“What is Grandpa doing?” Phoebe asked.
“He is putting George into the ground,” I replied. “Because he is dead,” I
insisted.
“Take one,” Agnes urges a departing girl after the presents have been opened.
“Rub it on your sweater.”
Her voice, the persistence in it, rose to meet mine. “He is okay, Mommy.” Her
replies were reassuring and earnest, a reaction that was more than coming to
an understanding of death. She was trying to comfort what she saw and heard
as my hurt in the situation. She had not only failed in her role as George’s
protector by letting him die, she was not able to console me.
The car was silent as we continued to work and school. Phoebe and I were
processing. The moments prior were not what either of us wanted them to
be, George’s death aside. I could not soothe, fulfill that role of nurturer that I
envisioned. It was not about the cat, death or feeling the role as parent, in the
end. It was about Phoebe’s first attempt at loving me back.
20
The girl makes friction. Like magic, like a mother, the balloon follows her to the
door, hovering while she says thank you and goodbye.
“Hold tight to that ribbon,” Agnes says.
Kate lightly slaps her mother’s arm. “We’re not babies, Mommy.” No, they
certainly are not. In Kate’s face, these days, Agnes can see a young woman
peering out from behind what’s left of her little girl.
Each guest leaves trailed by a balloon. Outside, some girls, not meaning to, let
go. Their cries, good-humored but pricked with shock, come through the window
as if through fluid, muted but painfully sensible, to Agnes, where she stands at
the glass watching the fugitives rise toward the sun.
After a few days, the last balloon drifts to the floor, shrinks, gets stretch marks.
When Kate pops it with a safety pin it sighs in a way that reminds her of her
mother.
21
January G. O’Neil
WHAT MOMMY WANTS
after Kim Addonizio
I want a pair of Candie’s.
Make them cheap and tacky.
High-heeled wooden stilettos
(stiletto, from the Italian word for “dagger”),
white leather upper with silver studs along the sides.
Open-toed pumps, with just enough wiggle room
for my toes painted No, I’m Not a Waitress red.
I want a pair of Candie’s.
Make my legs curvy and dangerous.
I want to strut down the street
in a pair of Daisy Dukes and a halter top
past O’Buster’s fruit stand,
past Coffee Time donut shop with its real cream bismarcks
and apple cider crullers, past the wobbly scaffolding
and morning commuters at the train station.
I want the hard hats on break
to drop their coffees and shout,
Nice gams!
I want women to take one look at me and think
Here comes trouble.
I want to be a tawdry wench,
the kind of woman mothers warn their sons about,
the kind that makes a priest give up religion.
I want my husband to strip me naked
bend me over
leaving on just my Candie’s
as if he were cheating on his wife
and getting away with it.
Mary Reilly
CAKE!
22
23
Nicelle Davis
MILK SHAKES
I want to do something bad, something naughty, something on the verge of
disgusting. I take myself out for a cheeseburger and fries. The plan fails to be
very scandalous, but is fattening. Today I give up the notion of being perfect.
Today I don’t care if my pre-pregnancy pants ever fit again. Today, since I can’t
get what I need, I order what I want.
put my husband in charge of marketing while I handled the manufacturing. We
could beat the system of large-scale capitalism and go back to the days of the
cottage industry. We would function as a team, a family. With my husband in
house and on hand to look over baby, I would use both hands when devouring a
cheeseburger.
The smell of pickles and vomit waif into my car from the drive-thru line, but I
don’t let that deter me. I successfully make it through the drive-thru and park
outside the burger-joint. I am ready to take a giant bite of bun and cow when
J.J. begins to holler.
I recall the inquiries for milk written with the cadence of single-adds: Middleage gentleman in desperate search for fresh breast milk. The fresher the better.
Willing to pay top dollar. Willing to pay travel expenses. Willing to pay extra for
option to personally extrude. Please contact.
The baby-books say that not attending to a crying baby will instill a sense of
worthlessness in a child. I turn my eyes from the burger to the baby back to
the burger. J.J.’s cries begin to increase in size. I feel myself and burger being
pressed to the side door of the vehicle as J.J.’s voice balloons. I franticly fumble
for the door and launch myself out of the front seat and into the back, screaming
you’re-worth-it you’re-worth-it, pulling my shirt over my head.
I catch sight of a man in white pick-up truck gawking into the backseat of my car.
His arm gyrating rhythmically as if his hand were…no he is not…down his pants…
yes he is. I feel a fever of temper roll over my entire body. How dare he jack-off
to mother and child. I am not a milk prostitute. This, small child at my breast,
is sacred. My joints begin to cramp and before I know it my free hand is firmly
griped on the burger, I angle the other hand to open the car door still cradling
baby J.J.’s head. I stand up from my car and pitch the burger at the man’s
windshield. Looking forward from this upright position I realize that the man was
only trying to buckle a seatbelt with a faulty clasp.
I hold J.J.’s head in one hand and the burger in the other. This one-handedness
makes both feeding and eating cumbersome. I forfeit the burger into the car seat
and concentrate on suctioning my son to my breast, which is no longer mine but
his. I feel an overwhelming surge of worthlessness with this loss of breast. As
J.J. snorts and slurps a bottles worth from my body, I begin to seriously consider
pumping to sell.
I had come across this seedy business of milking while doing an internet search
on breastfeeding. Five dollars an ounce plus shipping is the going rate for
mother’s milk. At the rate that I find myself in an unofficial wet t-shirt contest,
milking would be a very lucrative business. More lucrative than poetry at any
rate and if I sold enough milk our family could afford to give me a day. My
husband would no longer insist that he had to work. No one would have to work,
so long as I kept pumping. Pumping would become a new form of work. I could
24
J.J.’s head slips back into my arms exposing my entire nipple to the man in
the white truck. He looks in confusion at the burger, then me, then the burger.
Standing exposed, I smile apologetically and give a timid wave before jumping
back into my car. I hide J.J. and myself under a blue flannel blanket. I sit staring
for a half hour at the small farm animals printed on the fabric, focusing on a cow
with her pink udders waving like a hand from between her hind legs.
25
Jenn Blair
SNACK
Just when I believe I have banished them
one will appear. Audacious in the corner.
Taunting by the floorboard in the hall.
A puzzlement and wonder, the one out
by the curb. When I dropped a load full
on the airplane floor—that was the
christening—actual moment I finally
became a parent. Go back through
history and shake its hem and some
will undoubtedly fall out of the sumptuous
robe folds of queens whose distinct
shame it was to bear only daughters.
Find them not quite buried in the mud
of the trampling hordes rushing over
the Barbary plains. Sucked whole
into the vacuum cleaner, they survive
to write a memoir of hardship, dust,
and errant hair. Surely some are tucked
away inside the royal tombs amidst
the pyramids, these happy circles,
frolicking rounds, felicitous O’s.
Wendy Levine DeVito
ORLANDO
My son gives me little landscaping rocks
and I put them in my pocket
as we make our way to the pool
with a giant slide in the middle.
What am I if not ordinary?
Jessy Randall
26
27
Kristina Bicher
CANNONBALL
I stopped taking pictures
after ten summers at the lake.
Photos disappoint in the end:
striated sundown
prized fish
languish on film, even children
can’t breathe in that
sticky emulsion.
Babies no longer
cry at two a.m.,
gone the stomp and charm
of toddlers, preteens now
in braces, in tents
read by flashlight, invent
elaborate games, emerge
from the woods at dusk
wearing crowns of fern.
Grown-ups cleave
to books and beer
low talk and strange jokes.
Some days we don’t move
for hours, but just sink, sink.
One day I do swear
I will shake
off the clattering lawn chair, fly
down the slippery dock, plunge
into the drop-off with a war whoop:
cannonball!
and join the six heads bobbing
in blue and red and yellow lifejackets.
Rachel Rinehart
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29
Amy Newday
GRAVEYARD BURNING
Fists of her favorite orange tiger lilies tap my study
window. My grandma is thrilled that I am writing a poem,
just not this poem. Why won’t you write a poem
like that one with the sun going down and tomorrow
so full of potentiality? I’ve pitched her letters, tossed
the inspirational poster taped to the inside of her closet
door. If I’d saved either, I’d quote them now,
but that’s the trouble with a fresh start
in an old house: what’s gone is gone and what’s left
is mostly gone, moldy and mouse-chewed. I’m trying to write
a story of replacement: rotten boards exchanged for shiny
vinyl siding, crumbling chimney bricks traded
for fieldstone. The sagging porch becomes a leaky
sunroom. The metal roof’s peeled back like a scab. You were
so full of potential. Now look, it must be three
weeks since you’ve vacuumed and the Lord knows
when you were last in church. Listen, I’ve been talking
to Jesus again and he says it’s not too late for you
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
NOVEMBER COME 1970
For Malik and Mikal
there were no dahlias
the November my twin sons were born
trees gathered empty
house ill-shaped with winter
too soon they came
twenty minutes apart
careening out of my child’s body
eyes trouble-brown slick as okras
one a small colored warbler
the other a blue waned wind
dark as Volta river
my obsidian spine an unbearable raft
how that river pushed against my bones
and we fell and stood
torn away at the trunk
an exquisite ache at the grounding.
to teach kindergarten. So you can make the ghosts
sleep in the yard, but you can’t stop their gossiping. Do
you see why my thumbs are in my ears, why I’m singing
lalalalala? Damn lily scrapes the window-screen,
whispers, The sun’s going down like a graveyard
burning, and you’re missing it, you’re missing it again.
Ellen Rix
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31
Gwendolyn Joyce Mintz
LIL’ REVEREND
When he was born, the midwife turned the tail of that first letter of his name
so his birth certificate read ‘Jimothy’ and not what his mama had intended.
Still, Shirley Wilson aimed to raise him like that child in the Gospel, taking him
to church, Sunday school and the Sunday evening Bible classes from the very
beginning.
“A Good Woman Can Raise A Good Man” -- that was the sermon one Sunday,
that story of a Biblical mother and grandmother teaching a boy the ways of the
Lord. Shirley sat up a little straighter in the pew, smiled down at her boy before
glancing over the congregation. Couldn’t none of those women say much more
about his daddy leaving months before he was born ‘cause they had those badassed heathen boys couldn’t nobody do anything with, and she had her son.
Some in the congregation had given him a nickname when he was four. He was
sitting on the counter in the church kitchen while the women fixed the food
for the First Sunday potluck, patting his hands to the music coming in over the
intercom and reciting short verses.
Oh, how that boy made her proud! He absorbed everything; seemed all she had
to do was take him to the church house, and until he was eleven, he was happy
to go.
And, to her dismay, it stayed with him.
Shirley stood in the doorway, her eyes roaming her son’s bedroom. Where had
all those posters of grimacing black men, guns and half-dressed women at their
side, come from? On the floor was a pair of Converse high tops she couldn’t
remember buying for the thirteen-year old gangly boy sprawled on the bed.
“I’m going now.’’
“I ain’t going now,’’ he replied.
Week after week, it was the same thing. Shirley thought if she could just get him
back to the church –
But Sunday after Sunday, he said he wasn’t going, and then there was that
Sunday she didn’t have to argue with him about going to the Lord’s House
because he hadn’t made it back to hers the Saturday night before.
Later, when he was going to that place for delinquent boys, she decided it must
have been something that midwife had done, turning that first letter of his name
and, somehow his life, all wrong.
One Sunday morning she was dressed, collecting their Bibles when she realized
he wasn’t stirring around.
“Boy, it’s time to get up.’’
“I ain’t going,’’ he mumbled, his face smushed against his pillow.
“We always go to church on Sundays.’’
“Why is it only on Sundays that we go somewhere together?’’ he asked.
If he was bringing up that school program again -“I had to work,’’ she told him. “It ain’t like I can take off for everything you
want me to come see you do.’’
“You mean anything.’’
Shirley’s head snapped back. “What did you say?’’ In case he’d forgotten, she
reminded him of the commandment about honoring one’s parents. He countered
with the scripture about not irritating one’s children. Then he said “I don’t feel
good’’ before turning toward the wall.
“Where’s our Lil’Reverend this morning,’’ someone asked Shirley as she entered
the church. She said he wasn’t feeling well; it wasn’t bearing false witness
because some kind of ill had come over him.
32
33
Wendy Jones Nakanishi
SONS AND MOTHERS
My three sons are annoyed that I persist in calling them ‘Baby’. As they are now
aged twenty, eighteen and fourteen, I suppose their irritation is justified. Still,
it’s a habit I find hard to break. We live in Japan. Occasionally my boys invite
friends over to witness the reprehensible behavior of their American mother. I
try to control myself, but the endearment escapes involuntarily. I hastily exit the
room to the chorus of muffled giggles.
I never call my Japanese husband ‘Baby,’ so why is it my automatic address
for my boys? My Japanese mother-in-law would never dream of addressing my
husband in such familiar terms. Early in our relationship, Takehito confided that
he couldn’t recall his mother ever holding or hugging him, let alone kissing him,
even when he was a child. I regarded my mother-in-law, or ‘Okaasan’ (Mother),
with mingled if suppressed displeasure and surprise for years afterwards, until I
came to understand that Okaasan was simply observing Japanese custom, that
frowns upon physical displays of intimacy and affection. Similarly, Okaasan found
it difficult to disguise her own surprise and displeasure when she would see me
cuddling and caressing my own boys, when they were small.
Japan’s is a formal society. My husband told me that once he had reached the
age of eighteen, his mother began using the ‘respectful’ address for her son:
Takehito was now elevated to the status of a Takehito-san. Okaasan repeated
the process for her second son, my brother-in-law Toru, but her eldest child,
a daughter named Mitsuko, now aged fifty-eight, is still known by the tender
nickname ‘Mi-chan’.
I had much to learn on my arrival in Japan twenty-four years ago. I came to
Japan for a job. I was already thirty when I began work at a small private
university here. When I met Takehito, I was longing to settle down, and he
felt the same. At thirty-three, he was already pushing the acceptable limit for
remaining an unmarried man in Japan. We couldn’t have been more different.
He was a taciturn, kind, man still living with his parents; they worked as a team
on the family farm, growing greenhouse carnations, oranges, and muscat grapes.
Although my grandparents had owned a farm in central Indiana, I had left that
world far behind. I had got a doctorate in eighteenth-century English literature
at a British university, and my whole life revolved around my love of books.
But appearances are deceptive. Takehito and I soon learned that we had a great
deal in common. We both wanted children and were beginning to feel panicky at
the rapid passage of time. We knew that we were marrying not only for romantic
love which, until quite recently, was never highly-regarded in Japan anyway, but
because we wanted to make a family.
34
I needed to keep working. My eldest boy is a rather anxious type of person, and I
sometimes wonder whether he imbibed the tension and unhappiness I contended
with in his first year of life, when I was finding it hard to accommodate
parenthood with full-time employment.
Poor Taiki cried a great deal when he was a baby. Sometimes my husband and I
felt at our wits’ end. We tried everything we could to placate and please him,
but it was our second child, another boy, Kei, born a year and a half later, who
would sooth Taiki’s misery. Taiki would gaze at his little brother in fascination. I
never saw him strike Kei or seize any of his toys. He seemed impervious to the
feelings of sibling rivalry or jealousy that might easily have surfaced.
When Kei was four I got pregnant again. It was not an accident. My husband and
I had felt our family was not yet complete. When the doctor inadvertently let
it slip that my third child was a boy, he worried that I would be disappointed.
He imagined I must have wanted a girl. In fact, both my husband and I were
relieved. I had had a troubled relationship with my own mother and worried
that I might re-enact our difficulties if I had a daughter. Too, I couldn’t bear
the thought of raising a girl in a country where she would face routine sexual
discrimination.
My boys and I are very close, but there is a problem whose pain cannot
easily be intuited by anyone not similarly circumstanced. We speak different
languages. My Japanese remains appalling and their English not much better. We
communicate by interacting with each other in a more physical, playful manner
than is common in Japan. I hug and kiss them. They love to be chased and teased
and tickled. Makio begs to have his feet rubbed most evenings.
Perhaps our loving relations are partly attributable to our lacking the common
vocabulary that would allow us easily to argue: I don’t know the ‘bad’ words
in their language, and they don’t know those in mine. Maybe it’s because of
cultural reasons: the Japanese emphasis on social harmony. In Japan, it is said
that mothers have special relations with their sons. This adage is true for my
boys and me.
35
Denise Emanuel Clemen
HOLDING CORY
Jennifer Edwards
HE IS
July 11 2009
Gone
Baking
farther than a mother’s arms can reach
speaking words
wise and foreign
to her ears
under Himalayan sun
burning life-times
and karma
kept secret in his skin
Present
in meditation
more real than
daily drudgery:
dirty dishes
undone homework
imposed expectation
Learning
to feel, expand, and know
she exhales
gives him up
loves him more
lets him go
I am stepping out of a taxicab in front of the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Los
Angeles. My hands are trembling, and it’s difficult to unzip my purse to pay the
driver. I feel as though I might do something strange like give him my entire
wallet without noticing. I clutch my purse and walk to the door with selfconsciously even steps like a drunk laboring to pull off an impression of sobriety.
Then I scan the lobby for a young dark-haired man.
Twenty years and eleven months ago I handed my son back to the social worker
at Hillcrest Family Services in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and then walked out the door
to my mother’s car sweltering in the humidity. Now I am stepping into the
gleaming and deeply air-conditioned Sheraton. The coolness is soothing, and I
gulp it in as though I’ve just surfaced from a long underwater swim.
My son and I exchanged photographs recently, and I recognize him on the
mezzanine overlooking the lobby. He has pale skin, closely cropped dark hair,
and the intense eyebrows that come from my mother’s side of the family. He
spots me, and now our eyes cannot look away.
“Cory?” I say.
“Denise?” he answers.
“I could use a drink,” I say, and take him by the arm and steer him into the
hotel bar. The waitress leads us to a tall round table with two stools in the back
of the room. After years with thousands of miles between us, we sit only two
feet apart. He looks a little like his father; a lot like his five-year-old halfsister, Colette. He has a dimple when he smiles like my two-year-old daughter,
Madeleine.
36
I’ve only recently explained to Colette and Madeleine that, before Daddy,
I was in love with someone else, and that this guy and I’d had a baby. One
afternoon when I thought the timing was right I pulled out a music box in the
37
shape of a grand piano that my boyfriend had given to me as a present for my
sixteenth birthday. It played “Somewhere My Love”, the theme from the movie
Dr. Zhivago, when you opened it. He’d pasted a picture of us from our junior
prom onto the red felt underneath the lid. “I was too young then to be a good
mommy,” I told my daughters, pointing to myself in my J.C. Penney’s pink and
white prom dress. “But now your brother’s all grown up, and he’s coming for a
visit.” They took the news in much the same way I imagine they might have if I’d
told them we were getting a pony.
Later that night, after the bar, after dinner, my family sits in our living room.
My son and I slouch back into the sofa, exhausted from being in the presence of
one another. Our skinny bare feet are on the coffee table, our matching pale
freckled arms are at our sides, and we sit next to each other, almost touching.
It’s been twenty-one years since I held my son at the adoption agency, and now
I have no idea what to do with the current of energy that’s crackling around us
telling me to take him in my arms.
When my daughters were given to me to hold after their births, I touched their
faces, held their tiny hands, and refused to let them out of my sight. After my
son was born, I was sent to a ward on the top floor of the hospital reserved for
unwed mothers and women who’d miscarried. None of us had a baby to hold.
It’s after midnight when I give Cory a ride back to the Sheraton. I pull my
blue Toyota mini-van into the passenger-loading zone. We’ve already talked
for hours, but we sit in the dark with the streetlights and the glow from the
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
UNFINISHED GIRL 1950
After the bus accident near Christmas
my mother went into labor
I wonder if she held my twin brother
a dead crow, his wings limp
pulse gone, his lungs a warm whistle
just beginning to caw
his small breath, could you hear it mama?
did you touch it or just tuck it in
the flannel purse that is your heart
and later could you even hold me
your daughter, your Carol
your Christmas song, your unfinished girl
your little amaryllis about to bloom
Sheraton lobby illuminating us, and reach for one another’s hands. Then for a
long moment, we hold each other.
On the way home, I can’t stop crying. I keep turning on the windshield wipers
thinking it’s raining.
Ellen Rix
38
39
Sarah Conover
HOW TO BE A GIRL
Imagine a summer years ago when you
marked your height by your mother’s legs.
She is teaching you how to be a girl.
It needs no words, so you follow her close
as the humid summers of Long Island Sound,
through the labyrinth of women’s public showers
and changing rooms at the beach.
Raised above the concrete floor, the wooden planks
hold the fascination of both walking on air
and the risk of falling through, but never mind,
your mother has led you into a small curtained cubicle
and tugs off your bathing suit sticky with salt water
and beach, roughing your sun-parched skin.
Soon, there’s the smell of Cashmere Bouquet powder
she always uses. There’s the empty, upside-down
cups of her brassiere as she fidgets with hook and eye
in the woods you saw last year disappearing
right into the earth near Lake Winnipesaukee.
The room is small, just large enough for both of you.
You bump comfortably. You don’t know the word
sexual, you are simply a scientist and it’s all observation
and relevant fact-finding about new landscape
and the future. Looking in the flimsy mirror above you
hung by a tack, she dabs her lipstick on, encourages
her fine hair to a crown. You watch.
Something just like this will happen to you.
For now, you’ve pulled on your panties, then
your blue shorts and buttoned your cotton blouse
of yellow flowers. Something has seeped into you
as soft as talcum powder snow.
Before she’s done, you pull back the curtain,
the sunlight rushes in, and you step out first.
clasps in front, and below that, a mean vertical scar
from the last baby, a cross-hatched lightning bolt stitched
on her belly. And below that, a few tufts of fawn-soft fur
that vanish between her thighs like the stream
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41
Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie
LEARNING TO SWIM
She was the baby of the family
curious and neon
magic unraveling her singing braids
there was music coming off of her:
violins and batas
pianos and castanetas
sounds her momma couldn’t relate to
sounds that reminded momma of sin
imagine
sienna sunflower girl
knee high
southern tinged
tangos and rumbas tickling her feet
imagine
the first time the branch of the peach tree
ripped her skin because she’d been caught
moving to some rhythm
moving to some rhythm not born of the church
it was everything-her
sound, her scent, her earthspeakbrought the hands, the belts, the switches down
and she tried,
when she left their house,
she tried to conjure her dance again
hear the whispers under her feet
she pulled watercolors around her waist
wore amber and amethyst on wrists and shoulders
42
she chanted and wound her way through jazz
but no one could read the smoke signals
of her cigarettes
“death would be sweeter than any of this”
and when we met
she was 35
and I was newly born
and she was still drowning
but she gave me studios to dance in
trumpets
screaming magentas
muted blues
congas
tarot cards
modeling clay
she kept judgement in a locked box too high for me to reach
she stepped aside
my mother stepped aside
she’d evacuated her own dreams
courted death many times
when I met her
she was still drowning
but somehow
she took me to the water
and somehow
she taught me to swim
43
Tania Pryputniewicz
RISING SIGN
for Natalie
Hers is the Ram with striated curls
of horn, fossil grey and ash white,
what it bookends in its tiny brain
hers to know: when to rut, when to ewe,
when to descend the pigeon thin trail,
forehead ridged and fuzzed,
eyes clear as the cantaloupe sky
rinsed green-gold with the leftover
sun of dusk. Of the caterpillars
falling out of the maple tree onto her arm
she says if you keep one, every day
when you wake up, you’ll wonder if its dead
and then you’ll hope it dies cause you’re tired
of worrying whether or not it’s alive;
then you’ll feel bad for wanting it to die
but once it’s dead in secret
you’ll be relieved. I’d let it go--besides,
do you even know what it eats, glaring
Robyn Beattie
at her seven year-old friends, taut,
nested with expectations like the lime
and scarlet rims, furling coreward,
of escargot begonias, with the same precision
of a contour map or the innermost wick
of one’s thumbprint, leaning north, south, or
somewhere in-between at its own certain
degree, unlike any other.
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45
Puma Perl
Lee Schwartz
JOCKO
DAUGHTER
Jocko was always a leader
When his friends were changing
their names to Hawk and Speedy Pete
and Morning Glory and Sunshine
He stayed Jocko
Everyone knew who he was
When your back is facing me
I don’t know if it’s you
or my husband of twenty years,
the loping shoulders, muted curves, feet akimbo.
Tuesday and Sunday
were his tripping days
Everyone hung out on
the faded oriental rug
Played Jimi Hendrix,
Otis Redding, the Dead
Jim Morrison was risky
Someone might wind up
in a tunnel before“The End”
was halfway through
Someone gave Jocko
a Laura Nyro album
Nobody had heard of her
The needle hit the turntable
just as they were peaking
She sang “Emily” and
the girls in the room looked
at each other and fell in love
All the boys lost their girlfriends
to Laura Nyro that day
Even their leader, Jocko
46
There is the man in you,
the way one lip goes up,
like Elvis in song,
you are poised for a larger arena.
Pattering bare fingers on table tops,
a thunder stride that shakes the floor,
naked knees under shorts middle of December,
no swivel hips, no lipstick, no party heels..
The man in you coming out,
defying the soft voice, rosy cheeks, sweet smile,
the nest of short hair under P Ditty hat,
my daughter wearing men’s underwear.
You adore tiny women, nosegays of girls,
bird bones, small wrists and fingers,
jewels you can hold in your hand,
in the curl of your lap.
47
Alice Shechter
SOMETHING LIVE
The pixie fragile femmes
I always longed to be,
the ones boys asked to dance
and made out with behind the gym.
That lizard in the tank over there?
I was never chosen to play the girl -I waited years to claim my guiles;
to know the power of my sex
to coax heat in a man.
Climbs gingerly up on his grey rock and cranes his scaly neck up, up toward the
Is this what I see when I look at you,
daughter,
the frozen pelvis, the locked breasts,
the man in me.
Big boned and square jawed,
my name, my duality,
you re comfortable in your maleness
Is this your inheritance?
Unicorn and Amazon wrestle to claim you,
at eighteen I see all your calm and courage,
you let yourself be drawn
by the silent pull of who you really love.
Used to be the guy from the dairy farm on Old Dutch Broadway in Elmont;
Sidling up to the glass wall, he watches me with his flat unblinking lizard eye
Calculating.
bare yellow bulb,
Light and heat for a small lizard in a big glass tank.
Does he know it is my hand on the switch, my hand in the bag of reptile pellets,
mine on the neck
of the bottle that fills his bowl of water?
I doubt he gives it a serious thought; I’m sure he never thought about much
except calculating the distance, how far from him to me, how hard/easy to get
me up
on the corral fence, snared finally by the majesty of gentle horses snuffling at
the tufted grass.
Presses up behind me, keeps me from falling off, drapes casual arms around my
shoulders,
Rubbing with raw bony hands at the nubs on my little girl chest.
Not any more, of course not. Now he just wants a nice bug.
A jumping cricket--a writhing meal worm. Something pulsing live to eat for
dinner.
Please, he cocks his narrow lizard head, I’m so tired of those dry old pellets.
No.
Nothing live is getting sacrificed here. It’s enough
That any idle drift of my imagination toward love or lust
Every urge toward desire and its satisfaction by whatever means
Is mediated by the memory of a long red face
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49
Lank hair and a threadbare checked shirt
Hips so skinny they barely held his pants up
And a wily whisper: want to see how French people kiss?
Curious me; of course I did.
Helen Ruggieri
FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE: A FOUND POEM IN SUBJECT LINES
And thereafter on the switch of my arousal, his hand, forever.
So no crickets, no worms.
A rock. A bulb. Water. Pellets.
And in the other glass tank, a rat, growing fat and shiny on mammal pellets,
happy enough,
But not above the thought of something pulsing live to eat someday, not at all.
Estelle Bruno
NIGHTFALL
Do you want brilliant virgin
youngest bewitching school
Betterlooking Ladies doing
The hottest pick daily
Young Virgins at hard ccor
Fair Just Teenie and nice
Joyy eighteen at hard
excellent innocent teen
Do you like stunning g Woman
Just beautiful Ladies suuc
lux largee Orgasm
Graceful just eighteens
Do you want pleasant virgin
Youngest adorable Schoolgirl
Have you ever seen lovely
delightful Bitch at horcoree
Young better-looking Lady
As in a Degas painting
they sit side by side
in the bar
she is worn out, sad
scrubby bows on her hat
also her shoes
An old fedora pushed on
the back of his head
a pipe hangs from his mouth
She worked hard for him today
He buys her a du vin
her reward
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51
Golda Solomon
AN ORDINARY DAY
It’s a good day
Sun crashing through mortar haze
It’s a good morning to shampoo her hair
Pull of comb through tangle
Clean squeak of almost forgotten normalcy
She holds her son
Lets him play peek-a-boo in her damp waves
His laughter and then
Familiar rat-a-tats, repeats
The blast catches them unaware
Both are headless
Her body, strong curves and strong legs
She wears the slings and arrows of unresolved conflict
Her armpits sweat paper mache headlines
His libidinal physical response
Remnant of a next generation, gone
Is war a dance of men’s erections?
Orna Ben Shoshan
HOUSEWIFE
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53
Talia Reed
May Joseph
SHE THINKS EVERY DAY WILL BE TODAY
WALK INTO THE NIGHT
We halve and section out the clinging parts
of wondering what we’re made of; those
sick seeds scattered around us, the comingtogether that is empty and fruitless.
The revolution had delivered everything it had promised for Mary Muna,
The diving and maiming, the interstate storming of dirty water she lies in.
The ocean she won’t walk in.
diddlysquat blossom
bourgeois bliss, company housing and lavish parties. It had been hard living in
the shadow of anti-colonial warfare. Her father would disappear for long periods
during the internecine skirmishes against the British. Mary had dared not ask him
any more than a searching look on her face. The silent leavings, the strangers
passing through, and a mother who kept the world simple through all the chaos,
was all she could remember of the time.
It was with relief that Mary left Kenya for Dar-es-salaam, a hotbed of 1960’s
grievous drinking whirlwind bubbling
darkening the gates of Elsewhere and Nowhere.
revolutionary zeal. Westerners, Asians and Africans were under her husband’s
She breathes/sinks in the chaos she grows
thick and wavy Lake Michigan her own
rows of corn her own children coming apart
like husks, folding down tearing into the dank
kernels.
was not lost on her. As the utopian headiness of the Sixties drew to a close,
Some hearts can’t catch their breath.
We worry about these.
What kind of breath does this storm have?
Thick drear. Their strange rhythms embossing our
ear. with their odd time signature.
no one can unlive his heart.
management. This was unthinkable during her childhood, and the novelty
the buoyant days and heavy drinking nights began to wear away the veneer
around the Munas. Underneath the bonhomie and boisterous barbeques
seethed a darker current. By the early 1970’s Mary was disenchanted by Muna’s
extravagant binges. Muna increasingly stayed away from home, and Mary would
call my mother frantically in the middle of the night looking for her husband.
Mother had been Mary’s confidant over the years. There had been comfort in
their shared knowledge of colonial trauma and a catholic upbringing, one Gikuyu,
the other Malayalee. They had bonded on exchanging African and Indian clothes
and food, sharing their fears about their husbands infidelities. Both women
bore the silent humiliations of botched up marriages with men who were first
generation executives in the newly independent Tanzania.
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55
Amy Simon
One evening at the Muna’s sprawling ranch, things did not seem right. A roasting
goat, or the aroma of glowing charcoals usually welcomed us. This visit was
CRYING IN THE KITCHEN
different. Mary Muna had been crying. My parents had been summoned as
mediators. As we children played, voices escalated. At one point we heard a
Once again, I find myself crying in the kitchen.
thud. Shortly after, Mary Muna ran naked past us children onto the verandah,
howling into the balmy night. Her clothes remained strewn on the tiled floor.
And, as usual, with good reason.
Mother never did explain what happened that night. It was a time when Idi Amin
I got divorced this week. On a Wednesday. In between Tuesday’s religious school
classes, Wednesday’s 7AM choir practice and Thursday’s recital. Right smack in
the middle.
was fomenting terror around East African Asians like my parents, leading to our
hasty departure from Tanzania shortly after. Mary Muna had been a vivacious
woman with a gutsy laugh. What led her to stagger into the darkness?
A disturbing photo in our family album of Muna and his Goan vampish secretary,
the red platform shoes-clad Jane, in a wetlook mini skirt, beer glass in hand
took sinister undertones in subsequent years. She is leaning against the post of a
slaughtered goat strung on a metal hook. A bowl of blood overflows beneath the
decapitated goat, hung inverted, throat serrated. Shortly after Mary returned
to Kenya for treatment in a sanatorium, Jane moved in with Muna. Mary
subsequently took her life. For Mary, that walk into the night was darker than I
had imagined.
Wednesday morning. Eight Thirty. Court. DIVORCE.
Had my last legally married Monday. And Tuesday. No more married Wednesdays.
The last tiny bit of hope/fantasy that we could ever again be a “real” family is
gone and I am sad. I tried – I know I tried but the stark reality has hit me hard
right in the face. No more maybes. Finality. Closure.
So in between school lunch tickets and kissing owies and monitoring the
teenager, the schlepping and negotiating, the usual everyday heroics of single
parenting – DIVORCE. The ending and the beginning.
I sat in a courtroom, for hours, enclosed. Watched a judge decide people’s lives.
Shared air with broken couples, in a room filled with collective mixed memories.
Shared air with strangers, with whom I had so much heartache in common. Little
windows into shattered lives, dashed hopes, crushing disappointment. Shared
air heavy with oppressive sadness, arid anger, simmering frustration. We all had
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57
Joy Rose
SOME THINGS ARE NOT MEANT FOR THIS WORLD
that day. Our wedding day; the plans, the pictures, the cake. The memories of
what was and apparently could never again be. A couple. Now a couple of weary
parents, sharing failure and kids. We all loved, once, each other. So I sat, on a
Wednesday, manipulated and humiliated by an insanely dysfunctional family legal
system. Victimized by extortionists posing as lawyers, stealing glances at the
man I once so loved. Each couple sitting at the same table separated by space or
lawyers in their designated seat – petitioner and respondent. Sitting together and
so apart before a judge with her papers and her opinions and power and she used
everything.
DIVORCE. Children suffer. A family fractures and slowly re-groups and re-invents,
adjusts, deals and heals. A wife is left to mother two young girls, hyper aware of
the future effects of her present behavior. Trying to maintain dignity and grace,
she carries on –hopeful, fearful, and finally, grateful because now, firmly on the
other side of sentimentality and fantasy, she reminds herself that she is lucky to
be out. It was a really bad marriage. It’s way better now.
So after wine and dinner and tea and tucking in, I cry in the kitchen because I
loved him and he squandered it. Fool. I cry and I cry. Not because I miss him.
But because I misjudged him.
The loft was five flights up. One hundred and fifty steps of peeling grey
paint, wood and art ground into Soho history. She was only blocks away
from the place she’d lived when she first moved to New York. The world
is small, she thought. Even though she was feeling as if she might be the
smallest thing in a world of small.
Her young daughter trudged after her. Both carried bags of groceries,
though there was hardly a kitchen in the new place -- only a hot plate
and toaster. Hopeful. She was hopeful as she lifted the bag of soup cans,
bread and juices towards the top step. She would remind herself: she
was, and would be, hopeful.
She had fallen in love with a bartender. She’d been married, but
unhappily so, or maybe not unhappily so, until she fell in love with the
bartender.
She’d spent the night with him. But only once. That was all it took.
The roots of her religious upbringing had seeded their exactitudes firmly
in her soul. Every karmic and psychic cell of her demanded a price for
whatever pleasure she’d deciphered from the brief encounter.
“Penance.” She whispered as she placed the things one by one on the
shelves.
She moved methodically through the kitchen and remembered the
night she slept in his arms. Actually, she didn’t sleep. She stayed awake
memorizing every inch of his chin, neck, nose and closed eyes. She’d
buried her face and breathed in the scent of him. She memorized him.
Wine and smoke. Wine, flesh and smoke. Wine, sex, flesh and smoke.
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59
“Yes,” she’d said. “Yes” and again “Yes”. Then ‘yes’ became a river
leading out to the sea where her tiny boat became lost from the bigger
vessel which was the ship she recognized as her family, and as it slipped
further and further, like a frightened wooden mass into the vastness
of a giant mystery, all she could do was cry out from the distance,
“Goodbye. Goodbye”.
That one night was the only time in her life she’d ever been in love.
She wondered where her children had come from if they hadn’t been
blessed by some kind of perfect union. They were so well formed. Then
she remembered how love appeared differently at twenty than it did at
forty. How it was impossible to be happy for more than a moment at a
time, when so much of life was occupied with saying goodbye, changing
locations, jobs, switching up friends and trying to fulfill obligations.
She was worn down by world events, hospital visits, the death of her
father, girlfriends’ mastectomies, ovarian cancers and divorces. Her
own close calls with mortality and the NBC nightly news reports of
everything from war to poverty- induced hunger, to California tree
sitters losing sight of their missions, had depleted her to the point
where she couldn’t find her own small island of happiness within the
greater ocean of despair.
The one night in the hotel though… yes. One night yes, she felt
everything slip away. She was light! Outside the thick Holiday Inn
curtains, a world of trouble dispersed with every breath the bartender
took. She breathed with him.
Then she whispered his name and she took this for a sign of love, which
it might have been, but sometimes things that are clear in the dark
grow muddled at day’s first breaking.
The next morning, over breakfast, he was sick and irritable. He’d
drunk too much and couldn’t shake the headache or foul mood. She
propped him up as they walked back to the car while she cheerfully
talked about the sea. Eggs. Bacon. Tarmac. Spark plugs.
On the drive home they were silent. The New Jersey wetlands looked
cleaner than she remembered them. They were vast and empty
with reeds of tall grass waving a brown farewell to summer -- a
relatively small expanse of nature, hiding a buried treasure of debris
-- a rapidly disappearing tract of land slowly being swallowed by a
hungry population. She watched a flock of gulls negotiate the distance
between a garbage pile and the blurred edges of the marsh where it
crept into water. She thought of her daughter. Her marriage. The man
sitting next to her. The cigarette that burned between his fingers. The
fingers that had stroked her hair and felt her breasts. The words that
had fallen between them. Silence. The road. The road spinning itself
underneath comings and goings, comings and goings and comings and
goings. The long road leading to moments, days hours, and back again.
She knew then, from the way the space outside her car struck like a
silent holding, some things are not meant for this world.
She lost herself in his stupor. They sipped wine as they watched t.v.
and talked of nothing but old war stories. He amused her. She laughed.
Then, later when they were drunk, he pulled himself on top of her and
whispered her name.
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61
Roberta Fineberg
Samantha Villenave
LONELY PAINTER
IT’S NOT WORKING
The pink glint of her freshwater pearl necklace caught the eye of a selfprofessed topdog with a mustache. She hadn’t responded to an alpha in a
long time; stirrings of sexual feelings both surprised and excited her. Real or
imaginary? She didn’t like the facial hair or the yammering in that stop-dead-inyour-tracks lofty accent meant to intimidate. He did know a lot about Italianate
baroque furniture, no matter.
He’s passing the baton. My locally renowned geeky German gynecologist can do
nothing more for us. The man I chose to bring my future offspring into this world
acknowledged with authority yesterday that our test results are really, really not
good, and that if we want to have children, fertility treatments may be our only
chance. We were given an appointment with a specialist. Can someone please
tell me how many men are going to be needed for me to have a baby?
Behind the strange beat of his words on art was repressed passion, bottled up;
so it felt to the tiny mouse of a girl with a soft whispery voice, too embarrassed
to speak to him. The art expert liked girls, or women, like her; but he couldn’t
express his feelings—so many years of obfuscation led to disingenuousness: he
had followed for too many years his own brand of artspeak. Besides there was
no money in his activities, which meant it was difficult to commit to women and
family. He didn’t even have health insurance.
Two summers ago, I was pregnant. It only took my husband and me a two-week
vacation in a beachside villa. Oh, that and a year of trying beforehand. We were
caught by surprise and surprised by joy until as quickly as this life was thrust into
my womb it made it’s way onward. By the time I began bleeding we were back
home and my husband was away on business.
The mouse told a friend, an elephant, of the strange meeting with the art dealer.
“Would you meet him on a street corner if he called you?” the elephant asked.
“For a detached 15 minutes of fame.” The mouse thought again and said to
her friend who never forgot anything: “I wouldn’t touch that mustache with a
ten-foot pole—A man who thinks poetic is a dirty word.” No, she wouldn’t meet
the furniture salesman posing as arbiter of high art; unless they met in daylight
where she would eliminate the possibility of becoming his fool.
She could conceptualize an incandescent crescent moon on a crisp night as well
as the next mouse; she marveled at the naturalness of the turning of the seasons
and she embraced music. Beauty still moved her even though it had been years
since she had had a show.
I stayed alone, watching movies one after the other, willing myself into a hollow
distraction from the reality I was facing. I wept beyond my own understanding,
sometimes waking in the night with bitter, heavy sobs. Before I actually was
pregnant I wasn’t concerned about what might be my inability to grow and
nurture a child within my womb. Losing one was an experience I would wish on
no one.
“If it worked one time, it will work again,” friends and loved ones parroted in a
matter of fact monotone.
I didn’t want it to work again. I wanted the life that my body had so
mechanically rejected to come back. I wanted that child. It was not a puppy
or broken toy to be replaced with another. That was what my heart said. In my
heart, he was already able to run and play, though he never would.
One person close to me robotically cited words she had surely read on Wikipedia,
“You know, if you lost it there was surely something wrong with it.”
Those were the words of my doctor, of the lab technician who, after taking my
blood to confirm the pregnancy, took blood a second time to confirm my falling
hormone levels. Those same were words clumsily trying ignorantly, mannishly,
to help when spoken by my helpless husband, as I lay curled into a ball, hurling
grief in his arms. But I could not take those words from another woman,
especially one who was herself pregnant.
62
I told her that I knew she was trying to help, but that was a stupid thing to
say, something she would never dare to say had she herself passed through this
63
herself. I told her that I hoped she would never have to understand the feeling
of someone saying these very words, living it on the inside while well-meaning
daggers cut to the heart with cold pragmatism. I told her this gently and with
kindness, though it was difficult not to punch her in the teeth. She stood, silent,
not grasping the meaning of my words but bearing the wisdom (or mercy) to not
continue her own discourse.
Two weeks later she called, she was bleeding, and scared. I told her to go to the
doctor right away. Don’t be like me I said. Don’t listen to anyone who says it’s
normal, go, maybe it’s nothing, but go all the same. “Get dressed and go right
now,” I commanded her, hoping that my instincts were wrong.
She called back two hours later. It was over. I felt guilty for the words I had
spoken before, as if they in their power to create and destroy had brought
this curse. I pitched in to listen, to be there, and I was glad that though my
wound was yet fresh, another could draw strength from it. I was able to give
the consolation I had wished for but not received. Two months later she was
pregnant again. A beautiful girl will be born in one month, perfect as her creator.
I am glad for them. I simply do not understand why not one time in now almost
nine months she has asked me if I am doing okay.
I would tell her that I am happy for her, and that she can stop being
embarrassed, that her girl will be beautiful, that I hope her hair is as wild as her
mother’s curls. I would tell her that it’s hurtful to leave hanging words unsaid in
months of silence, that a simple, “How are you?” when you don’t have an answer
can sometimes suffice. That when I said those words hurt me, I did not mean no
words at all while reality is rubbed in my face. It would only be normal.
My gynecologist said that considering our results, the fact that I was pregnant
once was a wicked stroke of luck, because according to medical evidence, it just
isn’t happening. I am relieved to finally hear such grim news. Relieved that we
can now be taken seriously, our darkest fears confirmed and justified, and that
we can now move on to a solution. I cried in front of the doctor when I heard
his words. I cried with a head spinning lightness I expected neither he nor my
husband was able to understand.
Scott Owens
SARA NEVER WANTED CHILDREN
imagined they’d slow her down,
had even been told she might not be able,
had planned her life around their absence.
Maybe that in itself had been enough
to justify in her own mind
her early reckless abandon.
She thought little of it when she was late,
didn’t even notice until it was almost
the second month. When the home test
confirmed and the doctor made it certain,
she didn’t feel the immediate joy
one might expect. Lost in a fog
of disbelief, she wandered past
her favorite haunts, coffee shops,
night clubs, all the places
she used to live, all the places
she’d been with men, waiting
for some meaning to be made clear.
Nothing came. No epiphany,
no purpose, no plan. Only a sense
of responsibility. Only that and fear,
fear that she wouldn’t be enough,
fear of how this would change things,
fear of what it would do to Norman.
I was finally able to breathe.
Ellen Rix
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65
Lisa Williams
1925
While Leon was at work, finding jobs as a carpenter, Sarah liked to sit on the
bench outside Moishe’s Delicatessen, near Boston, and watch the people go by.
Sophie Goldman, pink kerchief tied beneath her chin, came in each and every
day. Cookie, her neighbor with the slight limp and stooped back, liked white
fish. Boris Cooperman, a large man with a sagging belly, known as the sage
of the neighborhood, would brag about his days in the Czar’s prison in Russia.
He had been arrested for revolutionary activity. Only a big fat bribe got him
released so he could flee the country, as long as he promised not to ever return.
Still, he longed to see the worker’s state. But an accident at the docks had left
him lame, and now he would never get back to the motherland. Sometimes
Boris would sit on the bench next to Sarah with a cigar, the smells of his smoking
blending with the odors of fish and meat.
Sarah knew they had thrown the body deep beneath the water, outside of Kiev.
And her mother died alone, nibbled by fish, falling over rocks.
A mother scolded her child for running too close to the street. The way the
bright sun collided with the cement pavement reminded Sarah once more of
the light on windows and the quiet that precedes the sounds created when glass
suddenly is forced to shatter.
She should go home and clean her house. The clothes from yesterday were lying
on chairs, the breakfast dishes with thick layers of syrup and crusts of French
toast filled the sink.
Five dollars in an envelope for her mother. Five dollars from America, from her
father in that faraway land. Five dollars and a letter of divorce.
Time always went by quickly when she could hum the songs silently to herself.
Still she must go home. First there was the marketing, and then getting dinner
ready for the two of them. She would busy herself. She would not forget the
torn letter, the ink trailing down paper, and her mother in a gray dress, bending
on the floor.
At nineteen, Sarah was with child. The gentle kicking in her belly made her feel
closer to her mother, as she sat, during the day, at Moishe’s Delicatessen; the
clouds only covered up the dark and glittering sky. The buildings eclipsed her
view. The fatigue made her slip beneath the surface of voices.
She would go home and make some meatballs, some spaghetti. He always
came back from work hungry. A whole loaf of bread, he could easily eat. In the
beginning, their nights were filled with lovemaking. Leon believed his passion
for his young wife would certainly heal her.
But the reality was they had little to say to each other at the dinner table. Leon
would look askance at the clothes strewn throughout rooms and wonder, what
have you done with your day?
He did not, and could not, understand such sadness.
But the songs always arrived in the morning, when she sat on the bench in front
of Moishe’s Delicatessen, especially on days when the sun was especially bright,
glistening like quartz on the pavement. Her mother still sang to her. She just
had to listen and wait. And why, Sarah wondered, did her mother always sing to
her of love that was never returned?
“Cookie, don’t forget you owe me for the fish and other things from last week,”
Moishe, the owner, told her.
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Monica A. Hand
MOTHER’S MILK
When the farmer plants seeds and forgets them or feeds a sick cow,
does he expect a healthy harvest, sweet milk?
If a mother stops trying, will the children?
When the mother walks into traffic looking for the forest, are the children
blinded by headlights? Will strangers veer away?
Is a mother’s milk bitter if she eats bitter greens?
Do the children turn away from the tit?
Jessica Reidy
THE HARP-SNAPPER
I once thought love was an understanding
people came to like a last resort.
I believed this when a hurricane swallowed
my childhood, my mother
became a jealous wind and let debris
molest me. I clung
Diana Raab
APARTMENT BUILDING
A mammoth structure
resembling a Chinese medicine bureau—
pull out each drawer to unlock
the mysteries and surprises within.
Reminds me of the lingerie dresser
my mother placed a feather
on the top of to keep me away from negligees
that were meant only for the eyes of her lovers
and not those of her little girl
who now fifty years later does the same.
Still a curious girl, I sneak glimpses
through each apartment window,
spot overflowing trashcans, unmade beds,
kitchens with dishes piled too high.
Stepping back from the structure I notice
how it’s warped
and how easily it sways.
to evergreens—their needle-elixirs
fermented my vision. The branches
were the hundred Avalon roses
and I unsheathed them swiftly collecting
thorns in the swollen mounds of Venus
just under my thumbs.
The gale threatened. I shouted back, “you are my mother”
The gale doesn’t speak. It murmurs and shrieks.
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69
Alana Ruben Free
FEAR AND DESIRE
Excerpt
Act II. Scene II.
(Eden beside her mother who is driving.)
EDEN. Mom, watch out! (Under her breath.) You are not the only car on the
road.
MOTHER. Just be thankful that I am taking you to the airport at all. (Mom honks)
That driver doesn’t know where they are going. For that matter, neither do you!
Stop your searching. It will get you nowhere! Can’t you see you’re only two
feet away from a pot of gold: marriage and a job, and you are turning around
and heading in exactly the opposite direction. You have one of the best business
degrees in the world! And, a hard working boyfriend, going places. Do you think
Adam is going to wait for you? We didn’t raise you to be irresponsible. Do you
ever think about anyone else, especially me—your mother. I am here working day
and night to pay for your education, and you are going on vacation.
EDEN. Mom, I am going there to work. I have a job there.
MOTHER. Working on a kibbutz. That’s not working. Getting a job at a company
in your own country, that is working. Your father and I have no intention of
supporting you, so you just better think about that while you are picking peanuts
on the kibbutz. In six months, you better be back on the plane to come home,
or you’ll be sorry. You don’t come from the kind of family where you can just do
what you want. Work is an important value to this family.
get married, I got married. When my parents told me to go to work, I went to
work. I didn’t just hop on a plane and take off and leave them. I haven’t worked
everyday of my marriage and saved money for your education, so you can play
around afterwards. Life is not a game. Get that idea out of your head. You
cannot do whatever you want. Your grandparents, aunts, uncles, great-aunts and
great-uncles, they are all furious that you are going to Israel and not getting your
career on track. They want to know who the hell you think you are? A princess?
EDEN. Mom, I have graduated college. (quietly) You can’t really stop me.
MOTHER. Well, I am the one who gets judged by your actions. Remember that.
And I am the one who has to take care of everyone while you are away. You
better be careful, that’s all I can tell you. Because I don’t know what I would
do with your father if anything happened to you. He’d be a wreck, and your
grandparents, as well, for that matter. And I would have to deal with them all.
So you better think about that while you are over there and the price that I will
have to pay if anything happens to you!
(Eden opens the car door. Looks in. Car door slams.)
EDEN. (Under her breath.) You mean money.
MOTHER. Yes, I do mean money! Work is important because money is important!
And with your degree you could be making real money and not peanuts on a
kibbutz. Don’t even think about staying in Israel. When my parents told me to
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Joan Mazza
Kathy Curto
PALINODE FOR MOM
TWELVE STREET AND CRUMB
So many times I showed your ways
of smothering, quoted your guidance,
labeled it destructions. You, who had
no guide at all for a mother, yours—
indifferent, aloof— went swimming
in her slip, sifted through trash cans
in our middle class neighborhood
in Brooklyn when she visited, while
you had me polish silver candlesticks
and taught me to set the table. You
coveted fish knives and parfait spoons,
silver ladles and crystal decanters.
Sometimes when my mother has it up to here with Grandma Lucy she calls her
Crumb. Not to her face, only to our faces and some other people’s faces, but
that’s what she calls her. Crumb.
All that harping, Don’t get fat,
and correcting my double negatives,
you offered a fierce ardor: I love you,
you little bastard. How can I spin
that statement to make it positive?
You sent me to college, made sure
I wouldn’t be trapped by poverty,
like your parents, or have
a limited vision for what could be,
taught me to look at everything
and say, “How beautiful!”
1977
“So help me God,” my mother said to Aunt Tina when she was on the phone with
her a few months ago. She was stuffing green peppers and her hands had big
globs of rice and meat on them so I had to hold the phone by her ear. “Tina, I’m
telling you I saw her glom two anisette cookies off of that table and stick ‘em
right in her duster pockets! I’ll be God damned.”
I thought she was done talking about Grandma Lucy stealing the anisette cookies
but then she said, “What am I, an idiot? Right from the friggin table, for cryin’
out loud! She’s such a crumb, that one!”
Soon after that she said, “Tina, I’m making stuffed peppers for Charlie down
the street. Cataract surgery. I gotta go.” So I took the receiver away from her
ear, unhooked its cord from the hanging part on the wall and then let it twirl all
around until there were no kinks left. Then I hung it back up. I love doing this
with the phone. It’s one of my favorite things to do. Besides nobody else in the
house ever does it so if it wasn’t for me the phone cord in the kitchen would
probably be all knotted up twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. I bet
nobody ever even thinks about that.
Crumb is not even her best one. I swear to God we have these cousins or friends
or something. I mean I’m not sure we’re really related by blood, they’re just
“paisans” like my dad says, but all my life I never heard my mother call them
anything but Twelve Street. She probably means Twelfth Street but it always
comes out Twelve Street and that’s what she calls the whole family. And now
that’s what we call them, too. But not to their faces, either. I know they have
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their own individual people names but as messed up as it sounds I only know one
of them. Josephine. Josephine Lombardi. My mother says Josephine has a heart
of gold and has a cross to bear with that sister of hers. I don’t know the sister’s
name, though. Josephine with the golden heart and the cross is the only name I
know and, as far as I’m concerned, everybody else is just Twelve Street.
Arfah Daud
Lots of times when Twelve Street comes down to The Shore from up north they
come to our house first, before going over to Seaside. My mother usually makes
chicken cutlets, fried peppers and tomato salad. She tells them they should
put something in their stomachs before going to the beach. Lots of times she
calls my father at the station to tell him to come home for lunch and to say
hello because Twelve Street is stopping by. I think he likes to come home when
company is over in the middle of the day. It’s mostly in the summer when that
happens-I mean nobody I know from up north goes to the beach in the winter.
WATERING
“And, Freddy, bring some quarters home so they don’t have to walk all over
God’s creation trying to make change for the meters.”
II
I was thinking about this the other day in church. About how sometimes my mom
calls Grandma Lucy Crumb behind her back but at the same time how she makes
her bouillon after she gets her gums scraped by Dr. Pirraglia and how if we’re
out shopping and Grandma Lucy is with us she rushes her home so she can watch
her stories. I was thinking about this because the priest was talking about how
good people make mistakes and about how we need to ask for forgiveness. I am
pretty sure Grandma Lucy doesn’t know my mom calls her Crumb but if she did
I think she’d forgive her but she probably wouldn’t stop putting cookies in her
duster pockets. I even think Twelve Street would laugh if they knew that’s what
my mom called them. Or at least Josephine Lombardi would. I know that. It’s
the sister I’m worried about.
I
Rain.
From the window I watched it drip.
Dark and cloudy. My kind of day. Every morning
my mother watered her plants, especially her orchids, as I lay in bed
listening to water as it plopped on the sodden earth.
My mother longed for liberty so she learned to drive
and took possession of the car. She had never been anywhere
except the times she came to visit me in America
and that one time to Mecca, with my father.
III
Me—I don’t talk much but when I do it’s like
thunder on a clear day. I always get my way.
I did nothing after school, roamed around town in my father’s
Munsingwear bent low over the racer.
Mother warned me, Be gentle girl
and behave lady-like or no man will marry you.
Forced to cook, clean, and care for the house,
I hated doing housework. I hated plucking bean sprout tails
for my mother who cooked them all the time. It is shameful,
said my mother, to serve bean sprouts with their tails trailing.
IV
Before rain the weather is humid.
In the mornings, my mother listened
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to the house finches sing Siap! Siap! Siap!
It’s time to welcome unexpected guests.
They came to scout—to see if I was good
enough to be arranged. My mother prepared
drinks made from boiled roots and bitter
leaves for me. Medicinal herbs were picked and eaten raw.
Good for blood circulation and body heat.
Bitter. For years I consumed it.
My mother—she believes in all these superstitions.
The house finch singing at one’s house
means good luck. Someone is coming for
a daughter’s hand. The roots and herbs
cleanse the body. The men prefer
radiating cleanliness,
not perfumed.
V
The rain stops.
It seldom rains here in America. Every evening
I water my plants. I do not listen for the calling
of the house finch. Dried roots and bitter leaves
my mother sent me
are bagged away in the pantry.
Donna Katzin
MA MAY
In her hands
bottles come alive.
Around the plastic torsos
swelling bosoms and bums
take shape beneath cloth
conjured by Nomalizo.
She hums and wraps
the shy brides
in rainbow skirts
stitched by Nosimpiwe
and beaded blankets
that hold them close in
the Khayelitsha winds.
She and Rose Siyanga
crown stocking faces
with bright scarves,
smooth their midnight hair
and spangle them with galaxies
of jubilant earrings and necklaces
until they are ready.
For a moment
she caresses them
like daughters
lost to AIDS,
and granddaughters
who must stand strong
in new homes and take
their rightful place
in this land.
Ma May and her colleagues are clients of Kuyasa, a Western Cape NGO that organizes groups to
save and lend for housing.
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Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
AFTER CHEMO
Golda Solomon
DAY 2
that summer her jaundiced mouth
a yellow harp played graceful
against the mirror of sky
ever so slightly her dull hair shined
eyes cleared fingernails sparked a lovely pink
portions of the good earth returned
her left breast a bleached cloth
returned to bulge under peach grains of linen
white blood cells those raging tortured cells
sang melodious
Today it’s Monk with Roy. The Roy Haynes birthday broadcast, WKCR
Chords chop the piano as I watch water chopping the Hudson River
Roy’s licks, ice blue sticks— rhythmic repeats I hear as dirges.
This frigid morning
Day 2 of my son’s rehab
I know he is not cold today having slept in a bed
with a blanket
Kyle Potvin
TUMOR
My neighbor walks
for miles each night.
A mantra drives her, I imagine,
as my own boy’s chant drove me
the summer of my own illness:
“Push, Mommy, push,”
urging me to wind my sore feet
winch-like on a rented bike
to inch us home.
I couldn’t stop;
Couldn’t leave us
miles from the end.
Rachel Rinehart
SELF PORTRAIT
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Ellen Saunders
THE DECORATOR
Nancy Gerber
EVA SAYS
Eva says,
You’re heavy
You know?
You should lose weight.
I know.
Everyone tells me.
I say this to Eva,
But subtlety is lost
on those with dementia.
She points to my mother,
Does she know?
She knows, I say.
While next to her
my mother’s head
bobs like a float,
keeping private time.
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She died before we moved to the new house,
before the new dog arrived. My mother,
with her blue eyes blazing, how she’d study
a living room as if it were a painting!
One day, while in the old house, we arranged
the two wing- chairs to view the hydrangeas
with their heads of lavender filling up
the window. “Like flowers in glass vase.”
she said. As she left, she leaned down to press
her lips against the face of my old lab,
decorating his black brow with a trace
of red lipstick. She peered into the brown
pools of his grateful eyes and said, “ I think
you’re the most beautiful dog in the world.”
Mary Meriam
MY MOTHER IS THE STAR
My mother wanted me to be a star,
but now she’s silent, pointing desperately—
my face, her lips, my chin, right here, too far—
hooked up to tubes and wires, begging me.
She’s always been so hard to understand!
Her hands are waving, waving. What, Mom? What?
You want a kiss? She sighs and grabs my hand.
I kiss her face all day, though years had shut
this touch from us. My darling, now, I call her
and kiss her, your little child is giving you
a million kisses. Isn’t this how we were,
me telling you with kisses what is true?
With words, I tell her it’ll be all right.
Yes, she nods and slips into the night.
Based on the last page of Lillian Faderman’s
memoir, Naked in the Promised Land.
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Jane Pease
Connie Colwell Miller
ASHES TO ASHES
A DEATH
feeling unwell, she skipped her shower
and lay down in her gardening clothes,
the scent of geraniums deep in her stained hands
When I died, sudden, like a jackrabbit struck
by desert tires, it wasn’t what you thought.
a daughter found her the next evening,
a surprised look on her rigid face
she’d often thought of leaving a letter behind
a guide for burial, but it never got done.
they did the best they could, not knowing
she wouldn’t have sanctioned
the morbid familiarity of embalming
no man, doctor or lover, had seen her body for years,
and the embarrassment of this exposure,
whether dead or alivehad been a frequent thought
but it was done; the soil was cleaned from her nails
and her body was dressed
in a style and color she hated
later, they cleared out her desk and dresser drawers,
returned her library books,
divided her china,
and ignored her geraniums.
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Living, you imagine the worst, tear of lung,
wings of pain, hot spasms until the sweet release
that is death settled over me. But for me, dying was not this.
Rather, death wormed between me and my pain, shucked me
from my insides, a numbing balm against the shock.
Body went one way, I went the other, a blanket
wrapped about me like fat space. I floated in that place
between dream and lucidity, I float there still. Here, I hear
your small cries for me, the earthly eatings that scoop you hollow
as a gourd. You must forgive me for some coldness, child.
Your grief is like a girl’s first heartbreak, yanking fists of hair
to salve the boy-done hurt—it is a silly pain, really, and it is only
false comfort I could give you. Your pain is a mumbled memory,
a phantom of the me that lifted off and settled here to wait it out.
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Gail Peterson
SHE’S IN THE GARAGE
Malaika King Albrecht
MOTHER LEAVING THE FIELD OF FORGET ME NOTS
She doesn’t see us waving
at the edge of the field,
our arms mere wheat in the wind.
She holds no love or grudges.
The past shrinks, an indistinct
point on the horizon. All’s forgiven.
She’s flying her hat, running through
the pure blue toward what might be light.
Let us remember
that when we are finally
reduced to the size
of a plastic pouch,
snugly tucked
in our velvet bag,
squared away
in our little gray box,
when our opinions
carry as much weight
as we do
and we wouldn’t know
ourselves from lint,
some next of kin
may file us,
perhaps alphabetically,
in our own filing cabinet
— organized at last —
or at least stashed
for the time being.
Under what letter,
I wonder,
might I be found?
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Ada Jill Schneider
Judith Skillman
SURVEY
BECALMED
How would you answer this survey?
Would you do things differently
if you were given the opportunity
to reverse a past decision?
The cherry in flower,
the children gone, the lust for lust
grown now into a different creature,
one who sits in a patch of sun…
Could you have done things differently?
Were you obliged by tradition
to reverse an intuitive decision?
Did it alter the course of your life?
The sky-ships gone from round to rough,
nibbled at the edge by portraiture,
where youth is seen for what it was—
the down curls, the blue gaze…
Were you obliged by tradition
to conform to the norms of the time?
If you altered the course of your life,
did you settle for less than the stars?
Is there another way from here
to there? The willow gestures, hemmed
all around by the same kite strings
that bind a woman to the hours.
If you conformed to norms of the time,
did you please everyone but yourself?
Did you settle for less than the stars
and did you try to make the best of it?
Her figure changed by what
she cannot help—that pear rusting
on the sill, this apple pressed against another
in the crystal bowl. Whatever demon possesses
Do you please everyone but yourself
and live through your children’s dreams?
Are you trying to make the best of it?
Do you feel it’s too late for you now?
a mother will be released to wander
over these lands changed from exotic
to familiar, transformed by sleight of hand
from courtyard to garden.
Do you live through your children’s dreams?
Have you given them every opportunity?
Do you ever feel it isn’t too late?
How would you answer this survey?
The fountain at the center
of the square holds its nymphs
and cherubs above water—both
equally innocent, and left behind.
The cherry squanders beauty
more slowly than snow, ousts its scent
into the dream of a glass ball where both child
and woman lived under a single roof.
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Orna Ben--Shoshan
THE LAST SUPPER
Artist’s Note:
“The Last Supper – A Moment Before The Dawn of a New World”
Homage to the great master Leonardo da Vinci. A fresh, contemporary
interpretation to the world’s famous masterpiece.
One of the world’s greatest masterpieces was completed in 1498 on the wall of
Santa Maria delle Grazie church in Milano, Italy. Leonardo da Vinci was 40 years
old. It took him 4 years to complete his masterpiece. Five centuries later, “The
Last Supper” continues to inspire artists of modern times, who re-created the
scene, giving it their own interpretations and presenting it in contemporary
versions.
Being born in the land where the history actually happened, I took the liberty
to create my own version of “The Last Supper”. My own version of “The Last
Supper” ignores any religious aspects, and offers a new meaning to the subject
of festivity. Here I took da Vinci’s creation in a different direction: instead of
a last supper before the ending of a life, my own version shows a last supper
before rebirth, a moment before a latent potential materializes. This is a
celebration of a night before new souls are incarnated: The boards on the walls
show Hebrew letter-combinations, which compose the genetic code of the
universe. The Large moon in the sky symbolizes the feminine energy of revival
and rejuvenation.
A significant symbol for birth and new beginnings is the feminine figure, which
carries the seed of life. The figures in da Vinci’s original masterpiece were
replaced here with twelve pregnant women, who are expecting to give birth the
next day. These women are the vessel through which new souls are incarnated.
Their “Last Supper” is a celebration for their forthcoming fulfillment. One male
is present in the scene to demonstrate the balance of a human society. A night
of full moon symbolizes the feminine energies of creation and realization. The
large texts on the walls are letter combinations of the Hebrew Alphabet, which,
according to the Kabbalah – compose the genetic code of the universe. The
essence of this scene is of hope and expectation for good outcomes. During my
creation process, I chose to be loyal to da Vinci’s genius composition in order to
let it reflect through my work.
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Connie Colwell Miller
Sarah Cavallaro
MY SON
Lives in New York
comes by to eat
sometimes
doesn’t answer his cell
only text messages
he knows I’m computer moron and cell phone moron
but an expert with money.
Marian K. Shapiro
PEACE RALLY
We seniors, silver-haired or bald
stand silently holding our signs:
NO WAR. PEACE IS PATRIOTIC.
WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER.
Breaths mist. Fall drops
into winter. We unearth
our boots and long underwear
from storage. We find last
year’s lined mittens. Pulling cell
phones from our pockets, we
assure our children and
their children, busy in their
kitchens, that we
are fine, thank you.
90
A SIMPLE POEM
for Elise
This is a simple poem.
In my native tongue,
I show you: my daughter
feeds in sleep, one mitt
clutched against my breast,
two feet in a fat pirouette.
If I say it right, you see: not
my daughter, but yours, or the son,
his body lead, his feet warm
as coals in your hand.
Now go back:
as a child, you loved a seed,
poked it in a dirt-filled cup, fed it right.
In your mother’s home, you
willed it grow, it did.
Its limbs lengthened slowly.
Its mouth opened and swallowed
its round cheeks.
Its yellow eyes began a terrible knowing.
You think you do not miss that seed,
happy as you are in your garden.
Then you see another (did yours
start out so small?) cupped
in someone else’s palm.
Ellen Rix
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Caledonia Kearns
I’D LIKE TO PUT MY MARRIAGE ON THE WALL
After my daughter was born I thought I was through
with poetry, then my husband left and one night as she slept
words came back. I found them in the sink with Cheerios
and broccoli stems, wrote them out with soapy hands.
I’d like to put my marriage on the wall,
a painting of nine squares, one for each year.
I’d like to sit on my tan couch, play tic tac toe,
indifferently placing X’s and O’s in that grid of years
as if losing was about strategy, missing the center square.
I lick my fingers and it all comes back to flesh —
how we meld, muddle through, or separate. It’s a delicate balance
being true, loving, as I do, the child and the man.
If I tell my daughter she can be a mother,
give up nothing, I’m a liar. You might think it goes without
saying how the body so easily betrays. The angel
left the house in 2003, but I keep offering Erato a cup of tea
when she stops by, to thank her for calling over the sound
of running water, when it stopped being enough, being the mother.
Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie
HAIKU FOR ROSES
Roses have taught me
it’s fine to have thorns. All bright
blossoms need limits.
Orna Ben-Shoshan
TWO BRIDES
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Tami Haaland
Rethabile Masilo
JOURNEY
THE GROTTO OF CHEHRABAD
You are riding in the back, as always.
The fog comes up and the road is icy.
There’s a point between water and fire
where lies my dream, where a woman without fear
navigates the continent on her way
to the sea, a sparkle in the eye as she goes,
a tempest caught in her dress,
driving her into voyages across time.
I’m a salt man, and I watch her stoop
as with the grace of a goddess she scoops water
and lifts her cup of love,
raising the chalice that keeps us alive,
that contains all the fire and water,
all of it, and the rage of our winter,
knowing that my siblings and I live in
this hollowed out cavern we call heaven.
The sun goes down. You catch
glimpses of the center line, a white-rimmed edge.
And now the downhill part, curving
with patches of gravel.
Of course there is a destination
and there will be towns along the way.
The dog wakes. Both children scrape ice
from their windows. Somewhere above,
you see through angular crystals
how the nearly full moon dispenses light,
and you come to a shallow valley,
snow-covered sage brush, fields
where pheasant and turkey feed
in the daylight. But this is late,
the day creatures are asleep,
and your family continues on in the dark.
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Lindsay Illich
POEMS AND BODIES
Except for this poem, which keeps
happening. Except for the son
who is all future tense.
Except for the love that counts
itself unfinished as a felled
tree waiting to become someone’s
Shaker chair or becoming etagere.
Except for this body, which is
the poem, that leans into the morning
light like a finish line
and into the day it goes
and lives forever, as all poems
want to do, and bodies, too.
Ellen Rix
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Fay Chiang
DREAM
I had the strangest dream early this morning. A dachshund wearing a cone
shaped party hat and a starched white Elizabethan ruffled collar around its
neck is prancing on its hind legs.
Next to the dachshund a friendly-looking clown juggles three colorful balls and
another clown twirls three hula hoops around wrists and waist.
Downstage center a tightrope is suspended about four feet above the ground.
Cut to wide angle shot of this scene and I am walking slowly across this
tightrope.
POV: I am looking down at my feet taking small measured steps.
There’s circus music, gentle not garish, playing; and then I hear the voice in my
head say:
“A mastery of grace.”
Orna Ben-Shoshan
MILK TREE
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Heide Hatry
EXPECTATION
Excerpt
Artist’s Note
“Expectations”
Still photos excerpted from a video of a performance piece.
Finally unconstrained by social roles and expectations,
female artists are free to create without regard for
convention, whether cultural or biological, including
reproduction and nurture.
The work embodies the desire to break with entrenched
gender roles and to leave a mark in the minds, or
stomachs, of its viewers.
You can read something about it at
http://jameswagner.com/mt_archives/006762.html
http://jameswagner.com/mt_archives/006771.html
http://hungryhyaena.blogspot.com/2007/12/galleryreport-december-5th-2007.html
http://www.heidehatry.com/
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MEENA ALEXANDER:
WRITING CHILDHOOD AND THE INDIAN OCEAN
an interview by
May Joseph
Meena Alexander: Writing Childhood and the Indian Ocean
On November 7, 2006, as she was writing her book Quickly Changing River,
Meena Alexander was interviewed by May Joseph in New York City.
Tiruvalla, and also my father’s house, which has now been sold, with the very
old paddy fields all around it. (My father’s house) was an ancestral house,
which I speak of in a poem called The Storm. And then I turned five on the
Indian Ocean.
In fact, I’ve just finished writing a small prose poem piece for my book Poetics
of Dislocation called Crossing the Indian Ocean. I just finished it today. About
having my fifth birthday on the water, just on the ocean, and what that means
to me in terms of my poetry. So childhood wasn’t just emplacement, it was also
being cast loose on the waters, very young. And not knowing what the other
side would be, well, not knowing what the other part of the world would be.
And going to a different language and a different place, a different climate, so
that everything that I’d known and loved, or known and loved and feared, was
left behind. I didn’t even know what the word “behind” meant. And I didn’t
know what it meant to go back and forth so that you didn’t just have one place,
you had several places –and then perhaps you had no place, or you had many
places again.
Childhood in fact established for me very early the materials of my writing.
J: Meena, I’d like you to talk about writing childhood.
A: Ah, writing childhood. Well, where to start? I have a poem I wrote a long
time ago in a volume called Stone Roots. The poem is called Childhood, and
there are lines that run:
Quite early as a child
I understood
flesh was not stone...
Childhood for me really is the ground of much of what I write. Privileged
territory. Privileged not because it is a locus of nostalgia, really, as because
I think it’s in childhood that the sensations, the bodily sensations which
animate what I write, are most intense and vivid, and the connections between
consciousness and things is powerful and unmediated in a way, and the world is
live and quick.
And I think that those first recollections, as indeed Wordsworth spoke about
them, I mean those are very strong for me. So that childhood even as it is
ground, is continually returned to and reinvented, and becomes… a powerful
source from which I write. If I were a painter I would think in terms of dipping
my brush into the colors of childhood. Also, for me childhood is Kerala, the
southwest coast of India, and both my mother’s house, which you’ve seen, in
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And I think that is what I want to say in the end. Years ago I had an office
at Hunter next to Philip Roth. He was teaching there for a year. He said
something very interesting to me. He said, “Meena, if you are a writer, all you
have is what you’re born to, it’s just this stuff, this biography, there’s nothing
else.” And I guess it’s taken me many years to realize the deep truth of that.
You just have this pot of stuff that you’re given at birth. And you make of it
what you will. But nevertheless, it’s already made in some fashion. And that’s
a very compelling and disturbing thought, which really, if one lays it out in the
sun and looks at it, teaches one great humility.
J: You talk about your birthday aboard the ship on the Indian Ocean. How does
the Indian Ocean play in this space of writing childhood?
A: The Indian Ocean … In Kerala, one was always aware that this was land
bounded by the Ocean, in fact of course the earliest myth of Kerala is that
Parasurama flung an axe into the water and out of it rose the land of Kerala.
And the axe, curiously enough, was bloodied because he’d committed
matricide; he’d killed his mother, because he thought that she was lusting after
another man, not his father. So there’s this whole rather violent myth of origin
to the land that I come from.
But the water’s always there, the Indian Ocean has always been there. When
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I was a child we’d go to visit Kanya Kumari and the three seas were pointed out
to me – the Bay of Bengal in the east, the Arabian Sea in the west, and south of
us and all around, the Indian Ocean. For centuries there’d been peaceful trade
back and forth between the coast of Kerala with Rome and Persia and China.
Ancient Roman coins were found on the coast. All this of course well before
European colonization in the sixteenth century.
really do not necessarily accord with the truth as your perceive it. But you use,
you deploy those languages, you use them.
The Indian Ocean as I learnt to read it, became a site of extraordinary hybrid
inventiveness, a manifest if you wish, for the making of poetry. The ocean allows
you to conceive of a life which has multiple anchorages, and yet is not bound to
one specific place. I think of Gandhi, and how he kept crossing the Indian Ocean
and I like to think that many of his most radical thoughts, as they came to him
were freed from the specific pressures of place.
J: In Fault Lines you explore that unsafe place of desire and memory through
writing in the section Dictionary of Desire. Can you elaborate on the role
memory and desire play in your writing?
In fact place is naturalized power, when you go out onto the ocean something
else happens, you have to throw away that other chart. And so for me, the idea
of the ocean as a space where one might rethink what land has enforced, is a
very interesting possibility, and is really just something I’m just now starting to
unravel.
J: Childhood is an ongoing excavation to you. The last section of Fault Lines
stages a powerful return to childhood. Could you talk about how the new edition
of Fault Lines works into your longer project of writing childhood? Tell me about
“Stone Eating Girl”.
A: Well simply, she is a girl who eats stones. Writing Fault Lines I had to face a
great disturbance that lay at the heart of my childhood that I actually could not
put into words before. Which is why it was very important for me to attach it
to this book, albeit giving it a rather odd shape. But it isn’t just tacking on. In
a sense, I remade the forms so that I have an echoing list of chapters where you
have the same title with variation. So that in the older edition, you know, the
older section, in chapter title there’ll be another chapter title. And they’re not
exactly the same, you know—the same material will be returned to, but with
difference
And in a sense for me it also lays bare the way in which the past is continually
returned to and never the same, so that the notion of difference lies at the
heart of our awareness or access to the past. There is a kind of simplicity there,
and an intensity of apprehension. Not that one need necessarily lose it in later
life, but you might, and you have to in a sense, develop shields and armor to go
through life, but I believe there is something very simple and pure in how a child
can see the world. And then, perhaps, almost in order to survive, one learns to
forget, one learns to dissemble, even to oneself, and one learns languages which
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And I think poetry becomes this powerful cleansing pool into which one might
jump and return hopefully alive and renewed,. And memory is like that, right,
it’s not a very safe place.
A: Well, I think, in that section called Dictionary of Desire, I think, if I recall
correctly, I was talking about some words that I strung together in different
languages, very simple words like, girl, book, tree, I think stone, perhaps, and
writing them down in English and in French and in Arabic, and in *Malayalam*,
as if those elements could then constitute the world for me. And of course
this is the dream of poetry, as a child you write single words and a poet writes
images. So I think that, in a sense, it was an attempt to build up a world freed
from taxonomies, or should I say rather, freed from hierarchies. A world that
stretched out… as much of the world as you’ve experienced could come into the
poem, so there are multiple languages in the poem and whatever you’re writing
is a dictionary.
And desire of course is what makes you turn to the world and renew yourself
in the world, as opposed to apart from the world, right? In that sense desire is
always for the Other, and the Other is always in the world. Insofar as the Other
is in oneself then you turn to that part of yourself and try to face it, so there’s
also this section called Dark Mirror.
J: In your work, Gandhi’s experiences and traumatic childhood converge. How
do you see those connections?
A: In The Shock of Arrival I have a whole section on Gandhi cutting the hair of
the girls in Phoenix Farm. Do you know the story? It’s in South Africa, the boys
and girls were playing together in the water and then some of the boys started
teasing some of the girls, and Gandhi felt that the girls—there was one particular
girl who was being should bear a mark on her body so that this would be a sign to
the boys not to torment her again. So he took her aside and over the protests of
the women of Phoenix Farm he cut her hair off, which is barbarous, and he says,
this hand which is writing this took up a pair of scissors and cut off her hair. And
in what I write I try to imagine what it might have been like for this child.
And so I think that there is something in the project of nationalism, in the ethical
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project of nationalism, as it is conceived, that can be extraordinarily damaging
to individual persons. I was brought up in almost this religion of Gandhism, of
nationalism, as an ethical imperative, and its austerities, and its this and its
that. And no doubt it was an enormously powerful force in one’s childhood and
in one’s growing up, with the whole world of decolonization after the taking
apart of colonialism.
But nevertheless, there are aspects to it which are very disturbing, and I think
one needs to speak about. And for me the way to speak about them is very
personally, because that’s the kind of writing I do. I’m not a historian or a critic
or even a cultural critic; I mean, I’m a poet in this. So that for me the way to
understand history if you wish, or even to get at history, however one might
catch it by the tail, is really to go back into the great simplicities of ones early
life, when things were as they were given. And then try to think about how one
might have questioned them or revolted against them. And also what damage
was done. Because it is also a narrative of damage, I think.
So I think that through both the sexual travel, and the national, the making of a
nation, and what that had to do with disturbances at home.
J: Well, when I say political I mean there’s a kind of detailed investigation of the
uneasy space of childhood that is easily pushed under the rug.
A: Right.
J: Childhood is incredibly painful, formative and critical to the formation of the
nation. Yet children in the end are the forgotten story.
A: Family and nation. It’s the patrie, the fatherland, right?
J: How do the themes of childhood and shame meld in your work?
A: Shame is very important. I was always brought up in this traditional way.
Where you’re supposed to be ashamed of many things including your our own
body. And shame was considered very powerful. It was a fierce pedagogical tool.
It seems like a very weird way to say it, but you’re supposed to be ashamed and
then learn how to behave. Its all at the level of your body in the world and how
others see you. Particularly for girls, you know, that you were supposed to be
ashamed of certain things because that was the way you grew up in the core of
society.
J: The last section in the revised edition of Fault Lines is disturbing.
A: It is quite dark.
J: A pathos, an unflinching look at deep melancholia haunts the text. The
question the new edition of Fault Lines raises is, what is the politics of writing
childhood? Why return now?
A: Because it’s there for me to deal with. Because I have to. That’s as simple
as the answer gets. It was just something I had to do. Now what is the politics
of that I don’t know. You’ll have to… And so the question about the politics
of it is something you would ask a reader, I think. At least not… because as a
writer I don’t know. I did it because I had to do it. Is there a politics in that?
Surely, but I don’t know what. I mean that is for someone else to unpack.
One thing you have not mentioned is that this was written in the aftermath of
911, and it’s a whole chapter entitled Lyric in a Time of Violence, a poem, and
people saying that, well, you wrote this traumatic piece on childhood in the
aftermath of a larger event which was shared in space. So if you want to go at
it that way, that’s one way to get it.
What did you mean? If someone asked you what would you say?
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And of course for me as I grew up, I struggled with what it meant to write, to
write the truth of the body, even what it might mean to write from the body, as
someone who had learnt shame I think this idea of shame located in the body,
and being ashamed of one’s body then became quite complex. When you went
into multiracial situations or multiethnic situations, when you crossed certain
borders where who you were was not taken for granted, or not good enough, at
such times what you were taught to learn and absorb early in childhood took on
a whole other valence. So I’m not talking just about intimate family spaces or
gender or matters of desire. I’m also talking about border crossings, territories
and proscriptions. And I think that this is where Gandhi is also important,
because he went to South Africa and instead of being ashamed of being an Indian
he told Indians to burn their passes. In other words he refuted very powerfully
from his own version of a tradition, this imposition of shame on the body.
But then he went back to India and he realized that Untouchability was a terrible
sin. Still as often happens in radical social thinkers, even as they challenge
something that is damaging to society at large, they retain within themselves
blind spots. It’s always like that; look at Gandhi, look at Marx. They are part of
history in that.
This question of shame is also something very deeply personal and it’s almost
something that you can’t wash yourself free of, and that was fascinating to me
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and something very terrible. And I had to try and think about that in a sense so
that it becomes actually quite important in what I’m writing now.
J: Your books Shock of Arrival, Illiterate Heart, Fault Lines, Quickly Changing
River, and Poetics of Dislocation, all grapple with “multiple migrations,” and
the task of working childhood through perpetual displacement. Could you talk
more about this palimpsest of place in childhood that weaves through your
work?
A: Well, right from earliest childhood I knew that there was another place. I
was born in Allahabad I wasn’t from there. I went back to Kerala because I
come from there, but I didn’t live there for extended periods. So place was
very powerful, filled with other people, other children, other families, the
sun, the moon, the grass, the clouds, you know, the air. I traveled a lot as a
child, even within the boundaries of India, and at the age of five went off to
North Africa. But I knew that there were many places. What was constant was
my parents and the familial structure. But places kept changing, houses kept
changing. And so I think that the thing I’m writing now is almost like a kind of
floating childhood.
That is why the ocean becomes very important for me because that is where
you have a floating house - on the water. It’s the boat. And I think that it’s
also very provisional. There’s something that you’re forced to reckon with,
because even as the force of childhood affections are such that you want
to hold on forever, and you are holding on forever or what you think is ever,
there is something in the nature of the sort of mobility that one had that
forces one apart. Whereas words like globalization meant nothing at the time
this transnational ability that we had was enforced on me as a child. I didn’t
choose it—I just went with my early life with my parents. That inevitably
structured my work.
And I would even like to argue that it has an effect on what one might call the
ontology of ones work – in the nature of poetry, something which implicates
Being very powerfully, and even allows for it, opens it, opens it up as it
were. I think of Heidegger’s essays on poetry and thought, collected in Poetry
Language Thought.
Place for me is manifold. It can be luminous. It can also be something that is
shattering, and shattered in that sense.
J: As a closing thought, your writings investigate the space of dwelling through
childhood. Could you speak to that?
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A: Well I think that this idea of dwelling, and Heidegger talks about it precisely,
in his writings you see the path and you see the stone, and you dwell… and for
him to dwell in that fashion is to dwell poetically. Because this is what poesis
is: it is dwelling on earth, keeping a residence on earth. You see, that for me
is the great task of poetry; which is to allow one to dwell. And it is particularly
difficult in some ways, or seems to be difficult in some ways, if one has had
a childhood where dwelling cannot be taken for granted. I don’t just mean
dwelling in the deep sense, I mean just ordinary habitations. And so what I’m
trying to do is to think of diasporas or ... diasporas through childhood. And
it seems to me that a whole other set of markers are cast into view. Not with
kinds of things that we talk about in adult knowledges, in the adult production
of knowledge if you wish, but as a child deals with it sensorially and with an
intensity that perhaps adults have learnt to be fearful of.
J: Thank you. We will close here.
Interviewer: May Joseph, Pratt Institute, NYC, November 7, 2006
Edited by Meena Alexander, February, 2009
Edited by May Joseph September, 2009
Meena Alexander was born in India, raised there and in Sudan and went as a
student to England. She is Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College
and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Her fellowships
include those from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright
Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Arts Council of England, and New York
Foundation for the Arts. In addition to three earlier volumes of poetry published
in her twenties when she was in India, she has published six volumes of poetry
including the collections, Illiterate Heart (2002), which won the PEN Open Book
Award, Raw Silk (2004) and Quickly Changing River (2008). She is the editor
of Indian Love Poems (2005) published by the Everyman’s Series. Alexander
has produced the acclaimed autobiography, Fault Lines (1993), chosen as one
of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 1993, and revised in 2003 to incorporate
significant new material. She has also published two novels, Nampally Road
(1991) and Manhattan Music (1997); a book of poems and essays, The Shock
of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (1996) and two academic
studies, one of which is Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy
Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley (1989). Her book of reflections on poetry,
migration and memory Poetics of Dislocation appears in 2009 in the Poets on
Poetry Series, University of Michigan Press.
www.meenaalexander.com
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May Joseph is a Tanzanian born writer, and founder of Harmattan Theater in New York
City. She is the author of Nomadic Identities and is currently completing a book on
urban life called Metro Lives. Her play Henry Hudson’s Forgotten Maps was performed
at Governor’s Island for the FIGMENT festival, Summer 2009. Joseph’s poetry has
appeared in The Mom Egg and Bowery Womens: Poems.
THE PRODIGAL SON’S MOTHER
by Mary Rose Betten
Finishing Line Press
Book Review by Alice Campbell Romano
Photograph of Meena Alexander by Marion Ettlinger.
Yeah, yeah: wastrel younger son induces his father to give him his inheritance
now, while the father still lives. Son takes the money, leaves home, squanders
all, and though dad has a perfect son at home on the farm, any parent knows
that the father never stops pining for his lost boy. When the prodigal returns,
starving, homeless, the father offers unconditional forgiveness. The responsible
son, who has been slaving away managing the farm, is furious. “Then,” as Luke
has it, “the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine
is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was
dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’”
And that’s where it ended. Until now.
At last, we have Mary Rose Betten’s mythic, compelling, re-imagination of
the tale, selected as book-of-the-month by Finishing Line Press.
The brothers—in any earlier exegesis—were little more than symbols:
repentant sinner vs. righteous legalist. No one wondered, How did they get this
way? What was their mother’s part? Poet, dramatist, actor, Betten has the chops
to pose these questions. She tells a riveting wrap-around story. Using, to vivid
effect, the theatrical language of ancient drama that demands to be read aloud,
Betten paints real women struggling to love, understand and forgive. We are in
these places, in these women, right from the start. The prodigal’s mother recalls
weaning her baby, tempting him with a shiny cup, but choosing not to curb his
greedy, infant excesses because,
….to me his zest was beautiful.
I wanted him to love me with that same zest…
…I tried whispering while he drank, “the boundaries of the cup…”
…perhaps had my whisper been more insistent...
We live the tragedy of a family disintegrating, thanks to a spoiled boy’s
disgrace. Like the milk, and later wine, even when the boy is far away, “…his
dark deeds trickle from gossiping mouths…”
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The father bids the servants hide food in the hedgeways
should his son
return.
Servants mock him,
“The old dog waits for bones!”
It takes guts for a contemporary poet to revisit a story so rooted in myth
and Biblical mores. Betten creates a credible context not only because she’s
studied the era, but because she brings her thoughtful, contemporary woman’s
insight to the motives of her narrators: the guilty mother, and a tomboyish
serving girl who has allied herself with the angry brother. The prodigal returns;
the girl escapes towards Galilee…
Past the barley tubs, past the vineyards, past the waving wheat…
carry the sorrow away, away.
Carry the sorrow into the hills. Carry the pain away.
Beware, as you read The Prodigal Son’s Mother: nothing is predictable.
Yet, because the author is so skillful, there are no cheap surprises. Each small
detail planted early plays out as the story reaches its climax: Chekhov’s gun
does fire. We are all forgiven.
Literary Essay
THE EARTH IS A FALLEN WOMAN
by Cassie Premo Steele
It has become such a cliché that we see it on bumper stickers, mostly on old cars
with bad exhausts: The Earth is Our Mother. But what does this mean? What does
it mean to project a gender, and a foundational relationship, upon an ecosystem
that, strictly speaking, does not speak our language?
On the one hand, there is something vaguely comforting about it. Earth takes care
of us, the saying implies. We come from her. She gave us life. She feeds us. She
loves us. We made it this far, we say to ourselves, so everything is fine. Underlying
these feelings is the expectation that mothers have endless supplies of energy.
Mothers never quit. Mothers never leave. Mothers don’t die.
And of course they do.
The other implication of the statement is that there is an inherent separation
between us and the Earth. Who wants to live with his mother forever? Of
course, we’ll grow up and away, of course we’ll leave her, of course we’ll become
independent and won’t need her any more.
So there is a crucial ambivalence at the heart of this simple phrase: we expect the
Earth to be endlessly giving and yet we don’t really need her at all. Think of this
ambivalence as a chafing between your thighs. It is such a small thing, really, the
way the skin touches when you walk. But on a hot day, the rubbing grows more
painful, and soon there is a rash, and redness, and maybe blood. It hurts so much
you can’t bear to walk.
In my Ecopoetry classes, I take the students to a nearby Arboretum several times
in the semester. Inevitably, a girl in a skirt will come up to me after class on the
class day before we meet at the Arboretum. “I have a question,” she says. “Will
it be outside?”
Alice Romano lived for decades in other people’s fantasies—as a translator of screenplays,
dialogue, subtitles--in Europe, and on both U.S. coasts. Poetry & Spirit, founded by poet Keven
Bellows and Rev. Peggy Krong at Westwood Presbyterian Church (Los Angeles), allows Alice to
develop her own poetic voice. She’s edited and produced three collections of P&S work. Grace
Revealed (2008) is the latest, with photos by son Robert Romano. This past September, Concise
Delight printed a trio of Alice’s short poems. Alice is working on two more book reviews. With
playwright Oliver Mayer, she co-led an IWOSC (Independent Writers of Southern California)
intensive writing workshop: she loves the excitement of rubbing brains with wonderful writers.
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I think, if we are to be more honest and more helpful to the Earth, we might change
the slogan. Instead of all this unconditional love we expect from the Earth, all her
nurturing and feeding us and all our pushing away and growing up and leaving we
do to her, we might put it this way: The Earth is a Fallen Woman.
Because our relationship with the earth is less like the relationship between a
mother and child and more like between a man and a raped woman. That gut113
sinking feeling you get when you read those words? That’s it. That’s how she
feels.
After she kills the rapist, she confesses it right away to Angel and refuses to run
away with him, expecting her capture and punishment to come swiftly.
As an example of how this works, let’s take a look at a novel about a fallen woman:
Tess. We can read this novel for what it can teach us about our culture’s treatment
of fallenness-- and as it is set at the dawning of the industrial modern age, we
might say it witnesses to what happened when we raped the earth.
Here is what I imagine when I hear each of Tess’ confessions: Gold. Silver. Oil.
Uranium. Something from the heart of her, from her core, something elemental,
essential, that she reveals in the hopes of gaining security, respect, love.
The central drama of the story is this: Tess, a young woman from a poor family, is
raped by a wealthy man. She gets pregnant, names the baby Sorrow, and then he
dies. Later, she falls in love with another wealthy man, the son of a preacher, and
she has a dilemma: does she tell the new love about her past?
Her mother advises her not to. Her mother says no man can really understand her
innocence and will only blame her for what happened. But Tess doesn’t listen to
her mother. She writes a note to her fiancé, telling him everything. Good news:
he treats her no differently. They make plans to be married.
But on the morning of their wedding, Tess goes into his room to fetch something,
and discovers that the note was tucked under a rug, was never read.
The Earth has written us such notes. We did not read them.
They go through with the wedding, and on their wedding night, the husband, aptly
named Angel Clare, clear one, innocent, heavenly, has a confession of his own:
he once met an older woman and was seduced by her for forty eight hours, and
regrets it now and wants Tess’ forgiveness. Of course she forgives him. (The Earth
grows back. She gives us crops once again.)
But each revelation opens her further to degradation, abuse, disrespect, and
abandonment.
On their last night together, just before the police come to arrest her, Tess and
Angel come upon Stonehenge. She says, “And you used to say at Talbotthays that
I was a heathen. So now I am home.”
He replies, “I think you are lying on an altar.”
And she answers, “I like very much to be here.”
Here Tess symbolizes the Earth, the fallen Earth, the dying Earth-- and yet she is
not abject, not voiceless, not void of emotion and preference. She is on the altar
as a sacrifice, yes, but also as a savior, yet to be transformed, yet to provide a kind
of salvation in the next life. Angel does not believe it, that they will meet again
after death, but perhaps it is her faith that all along has allowed her to speak the
truth to power even as it condemned her further.
The Earth too has spoken its truth to our power. Climate change asks us to witness
the continued degradation. Are we listening?
But Tess decides this is her chance: she will make her own confession, put it out in
the open, and have a new start. She tells him about the rape.
Her mother was right. He doesn’t understand. He blames her. Says she is a
different woman now. She insists she is the same Tess. He leaves her and goes to
Brazil to seek his fortune.
The tragedy has just begun. Throughout the rest of the novel, at every turn when
Tess has a decision to make about whether to say something or remain silent, she
speaks. And her speaking only increases her misery.
When her rapist meets her again, she tells him about the baby, only drawing him
to her more.
When Angel Clare returns from Brazil, she tells him in great detail about giving in
to the rapist again, marrying him so that her family will be cared for.
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Cassie Premo Steele, Ph.D, is an award-winning writer and the author of five books
and hundreds of essays, poems and stories on the themes of mothering, creativity,
healing and the natural world. She lives in Columbia, South Carolina, where she leads
workshops and coaches individuals in using creativity to live lives of balance and beauty.
She has a column on LiteraryMama.com called “Birthing the Mother Writer,” and she
finds mothering to be the most challenging and fruitful source of inspiration for her
writing. Her website is www.cassiepremosteele.com
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CONTRIBUTORS TO THE MOM EGG 2009
Malaika King Albrecht’s poems have been or are forthcoming in many literary magazines and
anthologies, such as Kakalak: an Anthology of Carolina Poets, Pebble Lake Review, The Pedestal
Magazine, Boston Literary Review, New Orleans Review, and Letters to the World Anthology.
She is a co-editor of Redheaded Stepchild, http://www.redheadedmag.com/poetry/ an online
magazine that only accepts poems that have been rejected elsewhere.
Eileen Apperson received a MA in creative writing with an emphasis in nonfiction prose and a MFA
in poetry from CSU, Fresno. Past students in her creative nonfiction classes have been published,
won awards, attended creative writing conferences, and entered creative writing programs.
Eileen says the nonfiction writing class is a godsend, as Eileen feels she learns as much from her
students as she hopes they learn from her. “They inspire me with their passion and purpose.”
Elizabeth Aquino is a writer living in Los Angeles with her husband and three children. Her oldest
child, a daughter, is fourteen and has a severe seizure disorder with developmental disabilities;
she also has two typical sons, aged eleven and eight. Her work has been published in The Los
Angeles Times, Spirituality and Health Magazine, the online journal Slow Trains and in the
anthologies, A Cup of Comfort for Parents of Special Needs Children and My Baby Rides the
Short Bus. She is currently working on a book about raising a child with severe disabilities and
posts regularly on her blog, a moon worn as if it had been a shell. http://www.elizabethaquino.
blogspot.com.
Judith Arcana writes poems, stories, essays and books. Her new chapbook 4th Period English
works like a play – poems in the voices of high school students talking about immigration. Among
her prose books is Grace Paley’s Life Stories, A Literary Biography. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
http://www.juditharcana.com.
Michelle Augello-Page is mother to two daughters. She received a MFA from Adelphi University
in Creative Writing and is currently a teacher at an alternative elementary school. Recent poetry
has been published in Copper Nickel and Mannequin Envy.
Robyn Beattie’s photography show “Hidden worlds--A closer look at tiny treasures” debuted
in the Graton Gallery in Sonoma County, California, summer 2009. One of five children raised
by Bohemian parents in the Healdsburg redwoods, Robyn writes, “I see my art as a form of
archaeology, digging amongst the stuff of life to find those small gem-like segments, revealing
these tiny, close-up worlds.” http://www.robynbeattie.com.
Artist Orna Ben-Shoshan conceives the images she paints through channeling.
She has been an auto dedact artist for the past 30 years. Her artwork was exhibited in numerous
locations in the USA, Europe and Israel. http://www.ben-shoshan.com
Orna Ben-Shoshan is the co-creator of “King Solomon Cards”, a new and innovative divination
tool. http://www.k-s-cards.com
Kristina Bicher lives and writes in New York. She received a Master of Arts in Writing Degree from
Manhattanville College and a Bachelor’s Degree from Harvard College. Her professional work has
been in the museum field. This is her first publication.
Jenn Blair is from Yakima, WA. She is a Park Hall Fellow at the University of Georgia where she
teaches British Literature. She has published in Copper Nickel, Melus, and The Tusculum Review
among others. She and her husband David live with their daughter Katie in Winterville, GA.
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Cheryl Boyce-Taylor - Born in Trinidad and raised in New York City, Cheryl Boyce Taylor is the
author of three collections of poetry, Raw Air, Night When Moon Follows, and Convincing
the Body. She holds Master’s Degrees in both Education and Social Work, and has led writing
residencies for Urban WordNYC, Poets House, Poets & Writers and The New York Public Library.
Her texts Water and Redemption have been commissioned through Duke University, Jacob’s Pillow
and the National Endowment for the Arts, for Ronald K. Brown/Evidence Dance Company.
Liz Brennan lives in Sonoma County, CA. Her stories have appeared in a variety of journals
including The Prose Poem: An International Journal, Key Satch(el), Lift, Paragraph, and Texture.
She is author of the chapbook Sewing Her Hand to the Face of the Fleeting (Quale Press).
Estelle Bruno’s poetry has appeared in Eden Waters Press Journey Anthology, Poesia, Istanbul
Literary Review, Re:Verse, The Long Island Quarterly and The Mom Egg. Her humor piece
“Immobile Car/Immobile Phone” was published on the New York Times Opinion Page. She lives on
Long Island and has three grown children.
Sarah Cavallaro is a writer who just finished a screenplay “Bitter Sweet,” which is about an artist
who created a chocolate Jesus. She is a film producer who started Emerald Films, which produces
art installations, commercials, and documentaries.
Fay Chiang is a poet and visual artist who believes culture is a spiritual and psychological weapon
used for the empowerment of people and the many cross communities she works with. A staff
member at Project Reach, a youth and adult-run community center for young people at risk in
NYC’s Lower East Side and Chinatown, she is also a volunteer with the Orchard Street Wellness
and Advocacy Center, Zero Capital, Dramatic Risks, the Pine Ridge Project, and NYU/APA’s
Basement Workshop Documentation Project. A breast cancer survivor, 7 Continents 9 Lives, her
collection of writing spanning the past 36 years will be published by Bowery Books in November
2009.
Sabra Ciancanelli holds an MFA in writing from Goddard College. Her work has appeared in
Brain, Child and Guideposts.
Denise Emanuel Clemen has been a mother since the age of 16. Publications include the
Georgetown Review, three WriteGirl anthologies, Two Hawks Quarterly, and Literary Mama.
She’s recently received fellowships to The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio
Center, Ragdale, and will be an Auvillar Fellow in France in the fall of ‘09.
http://deniseemanuelclemen.blogspot.com/
Sarah Conover is the author and co-author of four books on world religions for children, including
Kindness: a Treasury of Buddhist Wisdom for Children and Parents, and Ayat Jamilah, Beautiful
Signs: a Treasury of Islamic Wisdom for Children and Parents. She is also the contributing coeditor of a book of essays on the spirituality of parenting, entitled At Work in Life’s Garden:
Writer’s on the Spiritual Adventure of Parenting. Her poetry has appeared in a number of
literary journals and anthologies. She teaches English to senior citizens in Spokane, Washington.
Kathy Curto lives in Cold Spring, New York with her husband, their four children and one big
dog. Her work has been featured on NPR, MOM WOW, in live performances of The Art Garden
and Letters to Our Ancestors, and in Lumina, The Beacon Dispatch and The Journal News. Kathy
is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and Hunter School of Social Work and in 2006 she was
awarded the Kathryn Gurfein Writing Fellowship of Sarah Lawrence College. She is a member of
the Millrock Writers in New Paltz, teaches Creative Writing at Empire State College New York and
is an Adjunct Professor of Sociology at St. Thomas Aquinas College.
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Arfah Daud was born in Malaysia and grew up listening to the pantoums. She graduated from the
MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles in 2005. Her poems have been published in Susan
B and Me, and she was awarded Third Place at Cal Poly State University’s Annual Creative Writing
Contest in 1999. The winning poem was published in the Literary Annual, Byzantium.
Nicelle Davis lives in Lancaster California with her husband James and their son J.J. She received
her MFA from the University of California, Riverside. She teaches at Antelope Valley College.
Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in A cappella Zoo, elimae, Moulin, PANK, Pedestal
Magazine, Redcations, Verdad, and others. This is her first attempt at the art of creative prose.
Wendy Levine DeVito lives with her husband and two young children in Weschester, New York
where she also teaches. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Ampersand Review,
Literary Mama, and Poetica.
Jennifer Edwards (Jen/ed) is a writer, performing artist and Sustainable Stress Reduction
consultant. Her work has been featured in national publications including the New York Times.
Ms. Edwards teaches in New York City, leading workshops through institutions including Columbia
University, NYU, and the American Heart Association. http://www.jened.com/
Roberta Fineberg is a photographer in New York City who likes to write short shorts in her free
time. Recently her writing has been confined to 140 words or less and is posted on her micro
photo blog @ http://twitter.com/amusepro. Her photography can also be viewed @ www.
robertafineberg.com.
Alana Ruben Free is a playwright, poet, and writer. She was founding editor of The Mom Egg, and
co-edited the publication for six years, and is the producer of the documentary, The Last Stand.
Her play, Beginner at Life, has been produced in Australia and Italy, as well as New York City.
http://www.beginneratlife.com.
Nancy Gerber is the author of two books, Portrait of the Mother-Artist: Class and Creativity in
Contemporary Fiction (Lexington, 2003), and Losing a Life: A Daughter’s Memoir of Caregiving
(Hamilton, 2005). Her writing has also been published in The Mom Egg, Hip Mama, and
Mamapalooza Magazine.
Shanna Germain’s award-winning poems, essays, short stories and novellas have been widely
published in places like Absinthe Literary Review, Best American Erotica, Eclectica, Harrington
Lesbian Fiction Quarterly, Juked, Salon and more. She is a Pushcart nominee, as well as the
recipient of the Rauxa Prize for Erotic Poetry and the C. Hamilton Bailey Poetry Fellowship. A
native of New York, she spent her quarter-life crisis in Portland, Ore., and is currently living on a
wild island in Scotland. http://www.shannagermain.com.
American Poetry for the 21st Century, and Obsidian III.
Heide Hatry is a visual artist and curator. She grew up in Germany, where she studied art at
various art schools and art history at the University of Heidelberg. Since moving to New York
in 2003, she has curated several exhibitions in Germany, Spain and the USA (notably Skin at the
Goethe Institute in New York, the Heidelberger Kunstverein and Galeria Tribeca in Madrid, Spain;
Out of the Box at Elga Wimmer PCC in NYC; Carolee Schneemann, Early and Recent Work, A
Survey at Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge, MA and Meat After Meat Joy at Daneyal Mahmood
Gallery, NYC). She has shown her own work at museums and galleries in those countries as well
and edited more than a dozen books and art catalogues. Her book Skin was published by Kehrer
Verlag, Heidelberg in 2005 and Heads and Tales by Charta Art Books, Milan/New York in 2009. The
solo exhibition Heads and Tales traveled this year to several places in the US and Europe. http://
www.heidehatry.com.
Emily Hayes is a mom to three-year-old, Benjamin and a high school English teacher in southern
Illinois. She has an MA in English Literature from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and
writes poems in her spare time. Her works have been previously published in New Scriptor, a
literary journal for Illinois educators.
Lindsay Illich directs the Temple College Writing Center and teaches undergraduate English
courses. She completed her Ph.D. from Texas A&M University in 2008. Her work has appeared
in Gulf Coast, The Texas Poetry Journal, The Dos Passos Review, Hurricane Blues: Poems about
Katrina and Rita, Boxcar Poetry Review, Cranky, and Sojourn.
Jennifer Jean’s poems have been published in North Dakota Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, Santa
Clara Review, Southern California Review, Caketrain, Megaera and in numerous other journals;
she co-directs the performance series Thursday’s Theatre of Words & Music; as well, she teaches
writing at Salem State College. http://www.fishwifetales.com/
May Joseph is a Tanzanian born writer, and founder of Harmattan Theater in New York City.
She is the author of Nomadic Identities and is currently completing a book on urban life called
Metro Lives. Her play Henry Hudson’s Forgotten Maps was performed at Governor’s Island for
the FIGMENT festival, Summer 2009. Joseph’s poetry has appeared in The Mom Egg and Bowery
Womens: Poems.
Donna Katzin is the founding Executive Director of Shared Interest, a social investment fund that
unlocks credit and technical assistance for low-income black South Africans. She has learned a
great deal from the 1.8 million people the organization has benefited since 1994 -- and also from
her children, Sari and Daniel.
Nancy O. Graham’s poems have been published in Aught, Chronogram, BlazeVOX, Eratio, and
Invisible City. Her chapbook Somniloquies is available from Pudding House Publications. Her
fiction has appeared in Prima Materia, Café Irreal, and Pindeldyboz.
Caledonia Kearns is the editor of two anthologies of Irish American women’s writing, Cabbage and
Bones, and Motherland. She has an MFA from Hunter College, and lives in Brooklyn, NY with her
daugthter.
Tami Haaland is the author of Breath in Every Room. Her poems have been included in the
anthologies Letters to the World and Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart, as well
as in journals such as Calyx, High Desert Journal, Five AM and others. She is co-editor of Stone’s
Throw Magazine.
Rethabile Masilo is a poet from Lesotho and also edits Canopic Jar, the online journal. His poems
have appeared in Orbis, Canopic Jar, Ascent Aspirations, Ouroboros Review, Concelebratory
Shoehorn Review, Bolts of Silk and Babel Fruit. He has recently put together and submitted a
collection for publication. He and his wife have been married for two decades and have two
children they enjoy playing soccer and ping-pong with. He lives in Paris, France
Monica A. Hand is a mother, grandmother, writer, book artist and poet currently residing in
Harlem, NY. Her work can be found in Days Before I Moved Through Ordinary Sound: The
Teachers of WritersCorp in Poetry and Prose, Aunt Chloe: A Journal of Artful Candor, Black
Renaissance Noire, Naugatuck River Review, Gathering Ground, Beyond the Frontier: African
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Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, sex therapist, writing coach
and seminar leader. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/
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Putnam 1998), and her work has appeared in Potomac Review, Möbius, Permafrost, Slipstream,
Timber Creek Review, The MacGuffin, Writer’s Digest, The Fourth River, the minnesota review,
Personal Journaling, and Playgirl. Her chapbook Mom’s Little Destruction Book was runner-up
twice in the Permafrost Contest, and her poem, “When We Were Students” won 1st prize in the
Skyline Magazine Summer Poetry Contest, 2007. She now writes poetry full-time in rural central
Virginia. http://www.JoanMazza.com.
Mary Meriam’s chapbook, The Countess of Flatbroke (afterword by Lillian Faderman), was
published in 2006 by Modern Metrics. Her poems and essays have appeared in Literary
Imagination, The Gay & Lesbian Review, Windy City Times, Rattle, A Prairie Home Companion,
and Light Quarterly, among others. http://home.earthlink.net/~marymeriam/vita/vita.html
Connie Colwell Miller writes, edits, and teaches in southwestern Minnesota, where she earned
her MFA in creative writing. Her collection of poems Bodywearers was published by Sol Books in
2008. She lives in Mankato, Minnesota, with her husband and two children.
Gwendolyn Joyce Mintz is a fiction writer, poet, teddy bear maker and a mom to seven. Her
chapbook “Mother Love” was published by Unlikely 2.0 Press and is available for download/
viewing at
http://www.unlikelystories.org/mintz0607.shtml
Mitzi Grace Mitchell is a Registered Nurse, who has worked as a gerontological specialist for
over twenty years; she’s currently pursuing a PhD with a focus in that field. In addition to being
a Lecturer at York University in Toronto, Ontario, she is a wife, a mother, a daughter, and a
granddaughter. She lives in Vaughan, Ontario with her family and a small cocker spaniel, Freckles.
Blueberry Elizabeth Morningsnow lives with her husband, baby, dog, and cat in Iowa City, where
she writes, plays music, and teaches composition at Kirkwood Community College. Her poems
have appeared recently in Thermos and Wicked Alice. She graduated in 2008 with an MFA from
the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, from which she is the currently the recipient of the 2009-2010
Alberta Metcalf-Kelly poetry fellowship.
Wendy Jones Nakanishi spent her childhood in a tiny town in the northwest corner of Indiana.
After getting a degree from Indiana University, she got an MA and a Ph.D. in eighteenth-century
English literature at Lancaster and Edinburgh Universities (Britain) and has been working fulltime at a private university in Japan for the past twenty-six years. She has published widely in
her academic field but in recent years, also has been writing essays and articles about her life in
Japan.
Amy Newday writes and gardens in Shelbyville, Michigan, next door to her mother and in a
house that formerly belonged to her grandmother. She is an MFA candidate at Western Michigan
University. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry East.
January G. O’Neil is a senior writer/editor at Babson College. Her first poetry collection,
Underlife, will be published by CavanKerry Press in November 2009. She is a Cave Canem
fellow, runs a blog called Poet Mom and co-hosts the New and Emerging Writers Series, a literary
reading series in Arlington, MA. She lives with her two children in Beverly, MA. http://poetmom.
blogspot.com/
Scott Owens has received awards from the North Carolina Poetry Society, the North Carolina
Writer’s Network, the Academy of American Poets, and the Poetry Society of South Carolina
for his four collections of poetry and more than 400 poems published in various journals and
anthologies. He is co-editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review, Chair of the Sam Ragan Poetry Prize,
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author of “Musings” (a weekly poetry column), and founder of Poetry Hickory. He teaches
creative writing at Catawba Valley Community College and has been nominated for two Pushcart
Prizes.
Theta Pavis is a poet, journalist and editor. Her work has been published in numerous journals,
magazines and online sites. She blogs for the New Jersey Moms Blog and is the founder of Ink
Stained Mothers, a network for moms who write.
Jane Pease is a mother of six and a grandmother many times over. Now in her 70’s, she is a visual
artist and a poet, a gardener, and a lover of beauty. Her poetry was read in public for the first
time in May of 2009, both at a CSCC literary open mic, and at Mamapalooza Columbus.
Puma Perl is a poet and fiction writer who believes strongly in the transformative power of the
creative arts. Her work has been published in over 100 print and online journals and anthologies.
Her first chapbook, Belinda and Her Friends was awarded the Erbacce Press 2009 Poetry Award;
a full-length collection, knuckle tattoos, will be published early in 2010. She performs her work
in many venues, in and out of New York City. She lives on the Lower East Side and has facilitated
writing workshops in community-based agencies and at Riker’s Island, a NYC prison.
Gail Peterson is a professional writer: from educational product development to advertising and
newspaper promotion. Her poetry has appeared in Blue Unicorn, Poetalk, and The Bay Area
Poets Seasonal Review. Recently she won the Grand Prize in California’s “The Poets Dinner”
contest, sponsored by the Ina Coolbrith Circle.
Kyle Potvin is principal of a public relations firm in New England. She was named a finalist in
the 2008 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Competition. Her work has appeared in publications including
The Lyric, Iambs & Trochees, JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), and The 2008
Poets’ Guide to New Hampshire as well as online in Literary Mama and The New York Times’
“Well” blog.
Recent poems by Tania Pryputniewicz appeared in The Spoon River Poetry Review and the on-line
zine Linebreak; her cover art and an essay appeared in Labor Pains and Birth Stories (Catalyst
Press, 09). She lives in the redwoods with her husband and three children. A kitchen laptop user,
she updates her blog at: http://poetrymom.blogspot.com/.
Diana M. Raab is a memoirist and poet who teaches writing at the UCLA Writers’ Program and at
conferences around the country. Her latest book, Dear Anais: My Life in Poems for You (2008)
with a preface by Tristine Rainer, is poetry winner of the 2009 Next Generation Indie Award and
other high honors. Her memoir, Regina’s Closet: Finding My Grandmother’s Secret Journal (2007)
was the recipient of honors including the 2008 National Indie Award for Excellence in Memoir and
the 2009 Mom’s Choice Award for Adult Nonfiction. Her poetry and essays have appeared widely
in anthologies, literary journals and magazines.
Jessy Randall’s poetry comics have appeared in Opium and Rattle. Her young adult novel The
Wandora Unit, about love and friendship in the high school poetry crowd, is now available from
Ghost Road Press. http://personalwebs.coloradocollege.edu/~jrandall.
Talia Reed is a public school teacher in rural Indiana. Her chapbook This Admirable Miry Clay
will be published in May 2009 from dancing girl press. Her poems have appeared in literary
magazines including Main Street Rag, Wicked Alice, Tipton Poetry Journal, Switchback, Moria,
and Arsenic Lobster. She has written book reviews for both MiPOesias Magazine and Rain Taxi:
Review of Books, and she is a columnist for the art and poetry magazine O & S. This summer
she will be a participant in the Favorite Poem Project Summer Institute for Educators at Boston
University.
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Jessica Reidy is a New Hampshire born writer living in Ireland. She graduated from Hollins
University with a BA in English and Creative Writing. She is the recipient of the Nancy Thorp
Poetry Prize, and her work has appeared in Cargoes and Amaze, and is forthcoming in Frogpond,
Ribbons, and Big Toe Review. http://jessicareidy.blogspot.com/
Mary Reilly is a poet and artist living in New York City. Her poems and drawings have appeared
in The New York Quarterly, DEEP LEAP, and anthologies by Bowery Books and Vox Pop. She
maintains the (relatively) popular web log on myspace.com: total crap/ american. http://blogs.
myspace.com/maryreillydude.
Rachel Rinehart uses her life experiences to write narratives, poems and children’s stories.
She resides with her two daughters in Kansas City, Missouri, where she home schools as well as
teaches English as a second language. Rachel is currently working on a creative non-fiction thesis
for her MFA from Murray State University in Kentucky. Her other passions include nature, books,
photography and travel. [email protected].
Ellen Rix - Retired and loving it in Rockland County N.Y. Knitter, quilter, painter and maker of
anything that comes to mind. Wife and mother and delighted with life.
Joy M. Rose is President and Founder of Mamapalooza Inc, a company by women, promoting
mothers for social, cultural and economic benefit. She is also acting Executive Director for The
Motherhood Foundation. Joy Rose has been awarded the Susan B. Anthony Award from NOW-NYC
2009 in recognition of her grassroots activism and dedication to advancing equality and improving
the lives of women and girls. She was original founder of The Mom Egg, and is co-publisher of
the new magazine, Mamazina, debuting this year. http://www.mamapalooza.com.
Helen Ruggieri lives way, way upstate. She has had recent work in Prairie Schooner, Earth’s
Daughters, The Minnesota Review, hotmetalpress.com, and elsewhere. http://www.
HelenRuggieri.com/
Ellen Saunders’ poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, Pearl,
Calyx, Toronto Review and several others.
Ada Jill Schneider, winner of the National Galway Kinnell Poetry Prize, is the author of Behind the
Pictures I Hang (Spinner Publications 2007), The Museum of My Mother (Gratlau Press 1996) and
Fine Lines and Other Wrinkles (Gratlau Press 1993). She reviews poetry for Midstream magazine
and directs “The Pleasure of Poetry,” a program she founded, at the Somerset Public Library
Massachusetts. http://www.adajillschneider.com.
Lee Schwartz lives in Greenwich Village and Great Barrington with her husband. Her daughter will
be a freshman at Smith this fall. Lee has been an “Artist in Residence “ at the 92nd St Y. She has
workshopped with Sharon Olds and Bernadette Mayer. She has won 2009/2008 prizes in the Allen
Ginsberg Poetry Contest and is published in the Paterson Literary Journal as well as The Mom Egg,
Hidden Book Press, online poetry and The Villager Newspaper.
Marian Kaplun Shapiro practices as a psychologist and poet in Lexington, Massachusetts. She is
the author of a professional book, Second Childhood (Norton, 1988), a poetry book, Players In
The Dream, Dreamers In The Play (Plain View Press, 2007) and two chapbooks: Your Third Wish
(Finishing Line, 2007); and The End Of The World, Announced On Wednesday (Pudding House,
2007). She was named Senior Poet Laureate of Massachusetts in 2006 and again in 2008.
Alice Shechter is 61 years old. She was a working mom for many years and is glad to be back
writing after nearly three decades as the director of Camp Kinderland. She lives in Williamsburg,
Brooklyn.
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Amy Simon is an actress, humorist and producer who performs and writes about motherhood,
family life, and women’s history. Her critically acclaimed solo comic play “Cheerios In My
Underwear (And Other True Tales Of Motherhood)” is the longest running solo show in Los
Angeles, having debuted in 2003. She has also created and hosts “Motherhood Unplugged,” and
“Moms Who Write”, an on-going comic essay and music performance series and radio show on
KPFK Pacifica Radio written and performed entirely by moms. Based in Los Angeles, she is raising
two amazing daughters.
Judith Skillman’s Heat Lightning: New and Selected Poems 1986 – 2006 was published by Silverfish
Review Press, Eugene, Oregon, 2006. A new collection, Prisoner of the Swifts has been released
from Ahadada Books. Recipient of an award from the Academy of American Poets for her book
Storm (Blue Begonia Press, 1998), Skillman’s poems have appeared in Poetry, FIELD, The Southern
Review, The Iowa Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Seneca Review, and numerous other journals
and anthologies. www.judithskillman.com
Golda Solomon is a poet, spoken word performer, producer; a supporter of emerging poets,
performers and musicians, Professor of Communications, Speech and Theatre Arts, and Project
Director of Po’Jazz, now in residency at The Cornelia Street Café, NYC. Solomon is a member
of WOMENWRITEnyc. and Word Of Mouth Writers . She has a published collection of poetry,
Flatbush Cowgirl, 1999, and a companion CD, First Set, as well as a second CD of her poetry,
Word Riffs, recorded with Center Search Quest and Saco Yasuma. Her forthcoming collection
is Never More Than A Borough Away; Brooklyn Bops. Her poems are currently featured on the
poetry pages of www.jerryjazzmusician.com and The Mom Egg, and other literary journals, in the
anthology, Heal (Clique Calm Books), and in Gogyohka (Five Line Poetry). http://www.jazzjaunts.
com
Odarka Polanskyj Stockert is a New Jersey native poet and a long time collaborator of the Yara
Arts Group of La Mama, etc. in New York. Odarka is a harpist, poet and songwriter Poetry has
been previously published in Gathered on the Mountain & The Final Lilt of Songs, both South
Mountain Anthologies of New Jersey poets, Lunatic Chameleon, Literary Mama, Mamazine, The
Poet’s Touchstone (Poetry Society of New Hampshire), A Walk Through My Garden & Wild Things:
Domestic and Otherwise (Outrider Press), and The Binnacle. http://www.odarka.com
Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie is a poet, writer, herbal student, educator, performer and mother of
two. Her work has most recently been published in Go, Tell Michelle (SUNY Press 2009). Her
booklet “Mother Nature: Thoughts On Nourishing Your Body Mind and Spirit During Pregnancy and
Beyond” is available at http://www.ekeretallie.com.
Samantha Villenave is a freelance writer, oil painter, travel addict, foodie, and grumpy wife. She
was born in Anchorage, Alaska and has spent her thirtysomething years in wanderlust, cultures,
and diverse volunteer work in several countries across Europe, Asia and the Caribbean. She
now lives as an expatriate with her French husband and French dog in rural northern Provence,
specifically l’Ardèche.
Lisa Williams is the author of The Artist as Outsider in the Novels of Toni Morrison and Virginia
Woolf (Greenwood Press, 2000). Her book of creative nonfiction, Letters to Virginia Woolf,
was published by Hamilton Books (June 2005). Lisa has published poetry, essays, and reviews in
such publications as The Mom Egg, The Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Tusculum Review, The
Viriginia Woolf Miscellany, and For She is the Tree of Life: Grandmothers Through the Eyes of
Women Writers. She teaches writing and literature at Ramapo College of New Jersey.
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