Afterlife by Cassandra Lane
“Afterlife” by Cassandra Lane The Lynched Man’s Widow Mary feels the baby curling inside her, tighter and tighter, unbearable pain. She closes her eyes and prays for the coiled mass of limbs to dissolve. She and Burt had promised to raise this man-child together. Now, that Burt has been lynched, murdered, buried, his promises of a better future ring hollow. Mary wishes the fetus would stop feeding off her;...
Mother’s Wishbones, No Doubt by Ruth Sabath Rosenthal
“Mother’s Wishbones, No Doubt” by Ruth Sabath Rosenthal furculae with not a fragment of dried-up flesh or sinew to despoil their luster — the slew of them ranging in size from Cornish hen to turkey. Funny, I’d never noticed Mother extricate any, let alone strip them clean, secrete them somewhere long-forgotten. I stumbled across those old bones — took possession of the best of them, pried loose some of my own...
Vision by Jill Boyles
“Vision” by Jill Boyles She saw her mother at a garage sale on a spring blue morning chatting with a woman behind a card table. She closed her eyes and saw her mother’s eyes: translucid gray irises and lids bordered by brown eyeliner. The skin on her face soft and slightly fuzzy. She opened her eyes and saw her mother holding up a white blouse and imagined her saying to the woman, “Only a dollar for this?”...
Advice from Mother on Your One Less Day by Les Bernstein
“Advice from Mother on Your One Less Day” by Les Bernstein skip obligation’s inescapable sins wiggle out of pigeonholes enjoy happenstance and flux don’t forget to floss clog the clunky machinery of belief refuse templates of self ignore persistent memory elbows off the table airbrush your self portrait invite farcical pratfalls avoid hard labor’s invitation to bruise shoulders back stand up...
Autumn Melancholy with Birds by Margaret Chula
“Autumn Melancholy with Birds” by Margaret Chula Morning rain is tender, inviting me to slow down. How it taps the leaves before their final fall. Distant mountains obscured by fog are still there, even though I can’t see them. Will Mother die in autumn, hands nested in her lap, knuckles veined and buckled like the leaves of sugar maples? The bird feeder outside her window is empty. Once she told me she...
Does the sea remember everything? I wonder.
Does she absorb everything? Does she keep it safe?
Virginia Woolf
. . .
The Q: Can you fathom the spectacle that would be created if we moved together, arms outstretched, close enough to touch?
The Q: What echoes through you that longs to take form—a poem, an image, a mark, a whisper of becoming?
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fathoms Feb 28, 2026 -
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