This selection, chosen by guest editor Amber Alexander, is from The Curator's Notes by Robin Rosen Chang, released by Terrapin Books in 2021.
My Mother Was Water
She used to say they didn’t know how she got pregnant with me because my father was married to his work. I think about them, how he and his work might have dined together— my father in his blue and white polka-dotted bowtie across from work, a mess demanding, Look at me! I need you to do this now!— and where they would’ve slept, the space work took up in bed. But really, I knew my mother, so turbulent. She was water—a river, torrid, and trying to flow uphill, and he, a dam at the bottom imploring gravity—Pull down her wild current! I think I was a pebble between them, too light to lodge myself in the silt. I decided to be a fish, brown and speckled, to camouflage myself in mud and rocks. Refusing to swim upstream or downstream, I wondered about land—how hospitable it might be.
Robin Rosen Chang is the author of the full-length poetry collection, The Curator’s Notes (Terrapin Books). Her poems appear in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Journal, Diode, North American Review, The Cortland Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the Oregon Poetry Association’s Fall 2018 Poets’ Choice Award, an honorable mention for Spoon River Poetry Review‘s 2019 Editors’ Prize, and a 2021 Pushcart nominee. She has an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Amber Alexander, who publishes creative work as e. holloway, is a poet based in Ohio. They currently work in higher education and as an Assistant Editor for Best Of The Net within Sundress Publications. Alexander is a former Editorial Intern for Sundress Publications, former Editorial Board Member for Cornfield Review, and was a Sundress Academy for The Arts Writing Resident in 2023. Their work has been published by Cornfield Review and earned multiple awards during undergrad at The Ohio State University.
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