Lit at the Mic Anthology Update

We are making progress! We have two chapters sketched in. We are in awe of the submitted work, and we'll continue to chip away on building this beautiful book while we keep our other plates spinning. We are still months away from making announcements. With apology, we are unable to respond to individual queries; when we announce our selections, if you'd like to withdraw a piece then, we invite you to do so. If you decide to publish with us, we hope you'll feel it was worth the wait.

Many thanks to Adrianna Lamonge for submitting this wise and poignant poem, printed here with permission.

Postpartum Elegy

Is motherhood the thing with feathers?

Does it perch in the soul

And sing a tune without words that never stops?

Is it synonymous with hope,

Because who hopes more than mothers?

We look to the sky with folded hands

And rain prayers on our babies’ heads.

We compose songs rocking by the light of a pregnant moon,

Offerings to Guardian angels,

Newly awakened to worlds of pink and blue.

Pink, like the soles of our babies’ feet,

Crafted by Khnum from soft clay

Before they are tucked in for a nine month sleep.

Blue, like the feeling we get that first week,

Shedding the ectoplasm of our former selves,

Wilted butterflies emerging from torn cocoons.

In pain we pledge to that sacred sorority,

A camaraderie of sisters,

Bonded in blood, and amniotic fluid,

Sharing tears as bundles of joy suck our breasts

While we grieve for the death of girls we once knew.

Heads bent over the kitchen sink, we look one another in the eye

And in that moment we feel recognized,

Names we erased and replaced,

Exchanged between sips of wine.

We remember the sound of our babies’ first cries,

How they pierced through the hardest places in our souls

Softening them like frozen sticks of butter in the microwave.

This is the echo that comes back to us

In the frigid hospital room, limbs heavy from grasping the rails of the bed,

Cradling us in that primal sound we first heard on the ground amongst the trees

A sound that pulls at our deepest roots, like tiny hands tugging at wrinkled hems.

We connect like colorful paper dolls

Cut by chubby fingers, hanging on the walls of the fortresses we’ve built,

Next to our Grandmothers’ wedding photographs.

In them, our mothers grew,

And in our mothers, we did too.

Painted Matryoshkas snug and tight,

Peonies waiting for June.