@ Literary Mama

Read the most recent pieces at Literary Mama…

COLUMNS

The Pause Button by Ona Gritz from Doing it Differently

Just the week before, Ethan and I toured Fordham University, he was hired for his first real job as a waiter at a local pancake house, and he attained his driver’s permit. College. Earning power. The ability to drive away.

CREATIVE NONFICTION

His Beautiful Face by Lania Knight

Karl was four years old when I first met him. He wore thick coke-bottle glasses, and his oversized eyes stared owlishly out through the lenses. His speech was slurred. He couldn’t walk without holding his parents’ hands, without scraping the metal braces that held his ankles rigid.

The Evergreens by Jody Keisner

“We have the evergreens,” I said. They weren’t our trees, but they afforded us privacy. Piles of unused landscaping rocks, stacks of bricks, and four-foot high mounds of dirt encircled the evergreens.
“Hemlock roots can’t get oxygen with all of that stuff around them. They’re suffocating,” Jon said.

FICTION

It’s a Pleasure by Tiah Marie Beautement

Gordon Rivers had a rather awkward problem. He was stuck on the toilet. He blamed his children, as most parents should.

Trash/Treasure by Amber Cook

It was a hand-me-down house. In another century, it had been the work of a great-great uncle twice removed or some long forgotten grandfather that had never known she existed.

LITERARY REFLECTIONS

Essential Reading: Work by Libby Maxey

Even those in the beach house, having planned for weeks and made a six-page packing list and placated children through a 9-hour car trip in order to get there, know as well as ever that work is always with us.

POETRY

Exchanges by Tria Wood

santan flower by Regina Bowler

Exodus by Bethany Tyler Lee

How to Spackle and Sand by Alison Jaenicke

Respect for Life by Pamela Austin Bourgeois

Play Nice by Dayna Patterson

REVIEWS

Review of What My Mother Gave Me by Jenn Mckee

The essay anthology, What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-one Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most, edited by Elizabeth Benedict, got me thinking about the royal blue business suit my mother gave me as a college graduation gift.