@ Literary Mama
Read the most recent pieces at Literary Mama…
COLUMNS
Belonging by B.L. Pike
Being a senior mama, I qualify for all those dubious privileges of advancing age that our society offers. Senior coffee at McDonalds. Senior Discount Day at the grocery store on the first Wednesday of every month. And loftiest of all: …
Tube or Not Tube? by Katherine J. Barrett
We have our share of mealtime battles, but yogurt-wise, we’d enjoyed a quiet innocence, a simplicity of pure, unadulterated yogurt. So why, why, did I pick that first box of yogurt tubes from the grocery store shelf?
CREATIVE NONFICTION
Kindergarten Pick-Up by Melanie Pappadis Faranello
You pant, climbing forward, up the endless hill, you heave and huff like a beast, like you are in labor, but you do not stop.
Bloom Where You’re Planted by Kristen Levithan
As I lowered my pregnant belly onto the alley of grass between the sidewalk and the town’s main avenue, an advertisement for our new life played out before us.
FICTION
All My Wrongs by Sara Weiss Zimmerman
I ran into my daughter Alice by the train station one afternoon. I was on my way to pick up my car. It had broken down on a back road, because I’d driven it for twelve years without getting an oil change.
Blood Stories by Lara Vesta
We begin to bleed in bedrooms, on subways, in soup kitchens and dentist office lines. We begin with secret exaltation, rereading sections of Our Bodies, Ourselves, checking out our budding breasts for exponential growth. We receive a day of long knowledge from our aunties or grandmothers, and each new moon we peek into our underwear, waiting for the sign that we are grown.
34 Minutes by Amanda Hart Miller
A firefly lit and dimmed beneath a fingernail moon. She moved the flashlight around the yard, its concentric circles spotlighting Eli’s wading pool, which was half-deflated now, with a shiny, black maple branch immersed in the collected rain water. The toys at the bottom lay stranded in their water world amidst the leaves.
POETRY
Firstborn by Maggie Smith
It’s as if the woman dropped a gold piece
into a jar every night since the night
the girl was born, only to find the jar
filled with small stones.
Fish-eye by Maggie Smith
I read this week that in Rome
the city council banned curved bowls
for goldfish. It’s considered cruelty…
Menagerie by Este Pope
Little bears with fish in their mouths
and sacred stuff bears that
keep comfort through the night
Forever by Deborah Bacharach
My son will be five forever. Every day,
he’ll shock me by saying please
PROFILES
A Conversation with Brooke Warner by Marianne Lonsdale
Brooke Warner is changing the way books get published. She’s a triple threat: a writing coach, a publisher, and an author.
LITERARY REFLECTIONS
Essential Reading: Books to Read Again by Libby Maxey
The books I revisit these days often remind me of particular people with whom I’ve shared them, or particular stages of my own life that I want to recall.