Featured Poet: October 2011 Vol. 3 # 6
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Martina Reisz Newberry’s most recent book is What We Can't Forgive. She is also the author of Not Untrue and Not Unkind (Arabesques Press) and Running Like a Woman with Her Hair on Fire: Collected Poems (Red Hen Press). She has been included in Ascent Aspirations first anthology and has been widely published in literary magazines such as: Amelia, Bellingham Review, Blessed Are These Hands, Women's Work and others. Martina lives in Palm Springs, California with her husband Brian and their benevolent dictator/cat, Gato.
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1. PRAISE
Say prayers where it is dark, unfathomed, unworthy.
Whisper them in a quiet, desperate voice
as if—instead of God—you were talking to a scientifically-
tuned stranger.
Say the prayer of the gap-toothed man
who touched the stripper’s shoe, knowing—if caught—
the bouncer would have him shaking blood from his hair like
a dog emerging from a lake.
In any case, that would be the prayer to say. It will not,
cannot keep you from dying,
but may give you enough time
to stop cringing, perhaps change direction, change the color of your body,
learn to give off some kind of light the way animals do,
the way birds do when they check under each wing then
praise, full-voiced, their ability to fly through the great skies.
2. PAINTING OF HIGH TEA WITH ONGOING
MELANCHOLY
This is the day a woman wakes
with a stone for a heart. She awakes
in silence or to birdsong but her
chest houses a stone and she is
mystified by this. She drinks her tea,
she sniffs the air, turns on the TV.
Her stone sits so heavily inside her
that it makes her shoulders slump. Soon she
surrenders, weeps, bends double, begins
to taste gravel, to vomit sand.
3. PHILOSOPHY
The bald man at the reading told me
“You’re not particularly
Existential are you?”
I stuttered, I guess not.
But the truth is I am. I do
all the things the other Existentialists do:
I write, slip on icy sidewalks, get lost on
the freeway, watch porno movies,
spill mustard on my blouses,
sit in bird shit on park benches, bang my
head on cupboard doors, burn my tongue on hot
soup, weep into the space where wind blows through.
Maybe he couldn’t see it, but I’m as
Existential as the next guy.
4. OTOŇIO (AUTUMN)
A woman walks west on Hollywood Boulevard.
She wears flat shoes, baggy jeans. She is full of terror and longing.
She tries to remember her last good dream, but all she recalls
is her recurrent nightmare:
the one in which her belongings are lost and she can’t find
her clothes to put
on to go find it. In the nightmare, she ventures out anyway,
holding a small
hand towel in front of her naked body. The fear in this
nightmare is enough
to keep her honest.
This woman is a loner. She loves museums, hates travel.
Sometimes she stops for a coffee and when a siren wails past,
she wonders why her children cannot love her and why
her new skin
cream isn’t working and why a well-crafted, correctly
metered line will not save or even comfort
the belittlement of age
or the failure of mythos.
5. SLEEPING GODDESS
December 2008: Martha Crawford “Sunny” von Bulow died after 28
years in the coma her husband once was alleged to have caused with
insulin injections.
Who said lies are ugly? That’s bullshit.
I have embraced one thousand lovely lies.
The unlit rooms in my head keep them safe
so that, when I do turn a flashlight beam
on them, they are in pristine condition.
No cracked canvasses here, no soft mold.
The radio always on in this room—
music, news, midnight talk shows.
I live and will continue to live
In my lies—my buttered, beautiful lies:
What was done to me
What was done for me
What was not done at all
What was fractured
What was healed
What was offered
What was eaten
What was worn
What was taken off
What was said
What was left unsaid
What washed over me during lovemaking
What I washed off after fucking
What was discovered through the looking glass
What ascended
What fell
What splintered
What did I wish for
What did I vote for
What did I conceive
What grieved me
Which goddess have I served—Danu or
The Sleeping Lady of Malta
And in serving,
what have I forgiven
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