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The more I wandered, the more I wanted to wander. Movement gave me direction, and after finishing the Appalachian Trail, I spent years traveling, hiking, becoming.

What I know after nearly ten years is that Literary Mama is in itself a gem. As you spin it slowly in the sunshine, it sparkles and shifts, and some new facet is revealed with each new poem, essay, story, review, or profile we publish, with each new editor who shines their own light upon it.

But one week is not yet a pattern, not yet a reprieve from the tentacles of hypervigilance that buoy her and slowly strangle us.

When I think of my children, I see them almost as Russian nesting dolls, each containing within them all their prior selves.

This was the sudden loss of a forty-six-year-old man who had decades of life sliced away from him.

Later that evening, they sat alone in their apartment, wondering if they had made the right decision.

The alder is more beautiful dead than it was alive. When its leaves fell away, they revealed slender arms, silvery wrists of bark. Woodpeckers swoop and slip inside the craggy maw that has opened at the top of the tree. The birds are deepening the alder’s transformation. In death, it has opened itself up to the sky, and the birds have moved in. 

After years of love and care, I have no choice but to release this book.

Megan Mayhew Bergman’s stories explore women who dare to be discontent in their lives.

The best poems enter your body and you think with them forever. I hope to one day write a poem that does that work for someone else.

I tell him about Eostre, / goddess of spring, who / (stories say) saved a bird / with frozen wings