Motherhood: A Visual Contract
By Essay Issue 102
Leni Dothan examines and critiques how motherhood has been presented in western art history.
Read MoreThe Stand-In
By Short Story Issue 95
1 C AROLINE WAS PADDING, distracted and shoeless, through the weekday stillness of the empty church when she came upon Desmond’s wife standing on the other side of the back entrance. Framed by the double glass doors, Kim looked uncharacteristically small in an out-of-season winter jacket. Caroline offered up pastoral smile no. 6: Ironic Appreciation…
Read MoreMary, Mother
By Poetry Issue 92
It is a fact that no one worries in the Bible. —Adam Phillips i. She worried. & she knew. Good enough makes a faint halo. Still she was good enough. She let the infant dream his unbroken body at her nipple. She suckled him & waited as lightning struck. Often. His eyes clouded— ultramarine, gray…
Read MoreRoman Charity
By Essay Issue 90
THE LAST TIME YOU SAW your mother alive, she helped you heal from your C-section. It wasn’t what you planned, with your careful study of the benefits of natural childbirth, your doula, your pelvic carriage the midwife called beautiful. Your own mother’s births had been natural, her milk abundant. She always said that being a mother…
Read MoreScale
By Poetry Issue 89
______I am soft sift ______In an hourglass _____________ —Hopkins Against the darkening winterplum sky, a lone contrail whitens—loose thread, untufted cotton. A perfect inverse of me: ____________________________Lenten moon of my belly taut, halved by a slurred gray line. Linea nigra, the doctor says, my belly button’s new ashen tail a ghostly likeness of the cut…
Read MoreWaiting
By Poetry Issue 62
On the hospital bed, a body: long, straight, and still breathing, though the eyes don’t open and the ears can’t hear. No sound escapes the body’s vocal cords to slip across its lips. Two women on straight-backed chairs watch and wait. The woman who is the mother naturally insists on hoping. Says she sees eyelashes…
Read MoreDay Lilies
By Short Story Issue 54
SHE KEPT WAKING up at 4:45 in the morning, and when she did she felt lonelier than death, like an iron globe was locking over her heart. A dull but definite click. She could almost feel it, a shudder in the bed. Sometimes she went back to sleep and she would oversleep, staying in bed…
Read MoreNear-Annunciation at Carroll’s Point
By Poetry Issue 87
First try, the bird dropped from the sky, belly-flopping the surface that separates our two worlds, and came up empty. He rose again and wung away in easy, languorous strokes, as if it was all part of the plan. Hunger returned him. But whose? What surprises us now, despite our dragnet…
Read MoreMy Mother’s Visit
By Poetry Issue 86
My mother was the first pianist I ever heard. All through childhood I was spellbound by her gift, her virtuosity. Now I welcome her to my house, show her the grand piano, and lift the lid to its full height and glory. I ask her to join me on the black bench. At ninety my…
Read MoreGarden of the Gods
By Short Story Issue 53
The following excerpt appears in Peery’s new novel, What the Thunder Said. Copyright 2007 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC. Available this spring wherever books are sold. YES, SHE KNEW THEM. They were her grown sons Sam and William and she loved them dearly but she wished…
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