VoicesAdmin

The Advice-Giver

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by Judith Meyerowitz

She appears in my life in only one place— the Y locker room and always standing in front of the mirror. She has been reflected in the background for many years.

A seventyish woman, she applies her makeup as if cast in a horror flick. Her eyes outlined in fuchsia between purple and pink. She continues to apply more makeup and smacks her lips vampira bloody red. I keep the bench between her and me.

Like a Stephen King clown, something is disturbing about exaggeration, even grotesque. Face potion-maker… Conjurer… Character. Cara Bella! The Addams Family! The missing aunt—bizarre in looks but good natured?

She is always speaking to someone. She is known— to all, even to me who doesn’t speak to her.

I overhear her movie and book recommendations. And repeatedly— her mantra “I swim so I can eat ice cream”. I picture her in the pool with one arm in mid-stroke and the other holding an ice cream cone.

Or does she have a secret stash in her locker? or in the overhead light fixture?

Why did I talk to her today?

I was up— excited to be back at the pool after two covid years and the locker room was empty. She was available for consultation.

I shared: “This is my first time back.”

She said: “I have been here for months.”
You fool- where have u been? Scaredy-cat.
“I have to have ice cream.”
You fool, you can have ice cream without swimming, although I’m having trouble fitting into my suit.

To be fair she is a disciplined, regular swimmer. I have seen her in the pool. Annoyingly, she is not too fat, not too thin— just right.

She is standing at the mirror putting on makeup. I wonder which she needs, more makeup or ice cream? I fantasize her smearing ice cream on her face.

“I swim so I can eat ice cream”
A Descartian declaration. A statement of her raison d’etre. But even more frightening, I was beginning to fit together these pieces of her life.

I have overheard her stories of being a school guidance counselor–advice giver. This concerns me but she is retired now. And the kids either made it— or not. I imagine the advice she gave the girls:

“You have a cute figure but you need to keep it to attract the boys.”
“Enjoy your ice cream but it has a cost.”
“You can never have enough makeup.”

Is she all about appearances? Is it because we are in a women’s locker room— runway before transition to the world?

And then it all started coming back— The one other time we spoke, she had told me about having lived in Florida and how she had successfully matched a couple. Of course, storyteller of the locker room, guidance counselor, Florida matchmaker.

Unlike many of us, this woman’s life and her ideas had an internal integrity. We are rapt by her stories in the locker room like in the old village. She was the advice giver of the shetl more than a century earlier.

She laughs, “I’m putting on all this makeup that I am wearing under the mask. It is like women who need plastic surgery. “

You could see her doing a YouTube video with the Y locker room in the background, standing in front of the mirror giving her followers instructions on how to put on makeup under a mask and advising: “Remember! It is important to look good even if you can’t be seen.”

Judith Meyerowitz: Judith has written prose through her participation in the LP² Writing Workshop and is pleased to share it in Voices.

Memoirs of a Brighton Beach Childhood

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by Judith Meyerowitz

I grew up around the corner from the beach in Brooklyn, that magical borough of saltwater and Dukedom.* And for two sweet months I was free from school—clothing, immovable desks, performance anxiety. I sat in the beach chair recliner with top shade surveying my land while reading an adventure book. I was above— the people on blankets, the hot sand, the wrappers and gulls, raised up to wave height.

And it was all about the waves. The magnet that pulled me beyond fear, beyond my non-swimming mother. Then, I belly surfed with abandon not worrying about knees; I tanned without hives. After the delicious waves, I waited for the Good Humor man in pith helmet, freezer strapped to the body. He seemed never to get closer, trudging through sandy desert mountains, distorted by sun rays— lost in heat waves. Finally! And my parents’ choice- huckleberry? I must be adopted! There was only one flavor in my genes—chocolate. Now to collect bottles under the boardwalk. Was it for two cents? The sun slated through creating patterns in the sand but also fears of the darkness and what dangers lurked under the boards, the people who never came out. And teenagers— what did they do under there? And then there was night on the boardwalk…

Ah, Brooklyn in the fifties and the Dodgers affectionately the Bums. I not only had sightings of the now extinct Ebbetts Field, but I sat in its belly—the bleachers. The two of us, my father and I would take the subway— the Franklin Avenue shuttle. I remember being startled going from the dark, to the sudden sunlight and the green expanse. And I remember the crowds moving with us, the noise— people cheering and jeering in the rising stands behind us.

There were all sorts of customs in Dodger territory. We got hot dogs and peanuts by signaling and your row passed money to the hawkers in the aisles who sometimes threw the food to you- played catch. We bought a program, and I learned the secret codes to record the history of outs. But when the seventh inning stretch came we were all hushed with expectancy. Then the sacred music and the pipe organ began and we community of Brooklyn Bums stood joined together and yelled “for the home team” and paused after one… then two… and finally “three strikes you are out”. They never sang it more than once and the words eventually echoed hollow of a relationship and closeness that belonged to that time and place and became as extinct as the stadium.

*Duke Snider, Brooklyn Dodgers

Judith Meyerowitz: Judith has written prose through her participation in the LP² Writing Workshop and is pleased to share it in Voices.

On Aggression

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by Mary Padilla

To be dynamic, a snowball must share several characteristics. Having no intrinsic mobility, it needs to roll downhill if it is to roll at all. In so doing, assuming an appropriate degree of friction, it will inevitably pick up speed. Depending on ambient conditions, it will generally gain mass. All this change will drive the process, making it still larger, heavier, faster, and more difficult to stop. As it feeds on itself, acquiring increasing momentum, ultimately we have an avalanche.

But sooner or later it has to hit bottom. Having consumed everything in its path, it will lose motive force. Now its bulk will paradoxically restrict its progression. All that is left to it is to change its state, or, more correctly, to be changed in state, as this is the problem:

It has no mutability on its own, no capacity to become other than what it is, or, rather, than a reduced version of what it was – a random accretion of elements in the surround, stuck together without uniting. Incapable of changing or growing on its own, it must inevitably cede what it has acquired by rolling over things that it incorporated by crushing and compressing them, but that were destined to return to themselves in the eventual and inexorable thaw that will consume even the initial nucleus from which it began.

Mary Padilla: I am interested in exploring ideas by translating them into words.

As Seen Through the Leaves

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by Mary Padilla

There’s a cloud on the pond. You used to see them overhead, looking up from a blanket at the beach or lying in a field. But there the grasses and wildflowers could get in the way of your line of sight. Now it’s the leaves. They roof over everything. You only feel the occasional drop from a gentle rain when it makes it through their overlapping panes. They spread themselves out like that to catch all the sun and stay alive. But this isn’t a dense rainforest. It’s oak and hickory, second growth. So enough light gets through that you can tell where it’s coming from as it shifts through the day.

But you can’t feel its heat anymore. It’s filtered out now. And it’s getting cooler, as the season changes.

Things have slowed down, and you have the chance to notice such things and to see and hear the squirrels, and the birds, and the bugs. And you have nowhere to go, which focuses your attention.

At night in the summer there are fireflies. But last night there were fireworks too, in the sky over the town. You used to go to see them. Last night they were partly visible through the trees from the top of this little hill. Some scattered points of brilliant colored light flickered up in an arc and then down, tracing a parabola on the distant sky beyond the trees. Succeeding waves of them kept coming, seen and not seen, as they rose and fell in volleys behind the leaves.

The booms trailed slightly behind, slowed by the distance, which muffled their loudness. It matched the intense insect sound of the night, and made a fitting counterpoint. The scene reminded you of a forest fire once seen through the trees at night in the Australian Outback.

Part way through, your attention was distracted by a beam of light coming down the road at the bottom of the hill, too slow for a car, too fast for on foot. When it got to some breaks between the trees you saw it was a cart drawn by a dark horse – or pony – going the wrong way for that side of the road, soundlessly. A shadowy figure within was shining a searchlight straight ahead. You couldn’t hear the wheels – rubber? – or the hoofbeats – unshod?

Between these glimpses through the leaves in the dark, so incomplete and intermittent, you kept asking yourself if that were what you were really seeing. But it lasted long enough that you could tell that yes, it was, although it seemed like a dream image, rather surreal.

No matter, you were beyond that now. The fireworks were over. The little interrupted points of life had stopped rising and falling.

Mary Padilla: I am interested in exploring ideas by translating them into words.

A Chinese Scholar’s Garden

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by Judith Meyerowitz

Out of the mist, a clearing slowly comes into view.
A secret scholar’s garden inked into a mountain.

Amid the craggy rocks, green splotches, hints of evergreen, smell of pine.
Around the trees light bends
Is it all illusion?

In the gazebos student scholars gather
They unwrap the silk cocoon of ancient writings
Silently let the narrative landscape materialize
Scrolls unfurl, rolling, rolling, unrolling. Calligraphs spill into the skies.
The thickly inked brushstrokes crash into boxes of red seals.
Colophons cascade like waterfalls down the steep ravines.
Poems tell the story of a
secluded scholar artist
relaxing at his back gate in bare feet
His robe unfurls like the leaves of the scrolls.
His Buddha belly soft in contrast to the hardness of the mountains.
He looks at veins of green foliage between the thighs of fleshy prominences
Lines of art and poetry in intimate harmony

Judith Meyerowitz has published both poetry and prose in Voices. She began to write poetry after participating in LP2 groups.

Napoli

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by Charles Troob

Look darling a lava pizza
bubbling and overflowing
a change from pepperoni
and heartburn

Nero’s bad press was earned
but we all do regrettable things
and Nero smelled nice
when he wanted to

though maybe I’m thinking of Marcus Aurelius
or Nebuchadnezzar
I’m not good with names

the pizza is ready
peel away the magma
and plunge in with me

Pizza and a volcano crater–once you associate them in your mind, it’s hard to unsee.  I have fond memories of a study group on Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, but the real inspiration is probably “That’s amore.”

Reclaimed

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by Mireya Perez Bustillo

Under the portals where scribes personalized
model letters to hearts and dutiful ones to mothers
near the entrance of the fortress within thickness of walled city
when presidents were poets el Bodegón gathered
el tuerto Luis, el cojo Manuel and abuelo to flail
in rhyming matches at Castilian sentimentality
writing odes to old shoes, sending shirts to la República
joining Neruda to cry at shelled Madrid.
Downing dark tintos dampness staining white linen,
smudging cuffs and manuscripts, wiring nerves, bulging eyes,
feverish, he wrote sleeplessness forfeiting judgeship,
piling curling onionskins in rented room in Plaza de los Coches
leaving abuela, niños, casa in the foothill of the monastery
Where some liberated Kongos once worshipped a golden she goat.
To take the cure, no one ever talked about, he left her
alone except for the hands that could turn string to lace
and patio fruit to cocadas and tamarind balls
turning garage to a tienda, abuela stopped tongues
showing a señora could work.
Sixty years later in this square near the arch
I know she would delight in a cherry cheesecake
attentive to the display and the conduct of the business,
while abuelo blooming from the rest
would nurse a cappuccino as he constructed
an ode to a recycling bin.

Mireya Perez-Bustillo writes poetry and fiction in Spanish and English. Her poetry appears in MOM’s EGG; Caribbean Review; Americas Review; Dinner with the Muse, IRP Voices, among others. Her novel, Back to El Dorado (Floricanto Press, 2020), a Latina coming-of-age story, is available on Barnes and Noble and Amazon sites.

Cordillera Oriental

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by Mireya Perez Bustillo

 

Verdigris      lianas       spruce

 

moss       olive      emerald

 

lime      pine    grass    clovers    palms

 

helechos       peacock       mint

 

parrot     lettuce    cabbage    capers

xxxxxxnot

vermillion    ochre    terracotta    sienna

xxxxmy   xxxAndes

 

Mireya Perez-Bustillo writes poetry and fiction in Spanish and English. Her poetry appears in MOM’s EGG; Caribbean Review; Americas Review; Dinner with the Muse, IRP Voices, among others. Her novel, Back to El Dorado (Floricanto Press,2020), a Latina coming-of-age story, is available on Barnes and Noble and Amazon sites.

Bed

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by Mireya Perez Bustillo

A woman filled with the gladness of living
Places clean fragrant sheets
Lavender sacheted
On the bed
Which hold the orange blossoms of her wedding
The rose petals he places there
After she returns
Covered with jasmine oil
Ready to please him
Putting there softness caresses
Sighs of pleasure
Next to the timelessness
Of her beauty

Mireya Perez-Bustillo writes poetry and fiction in Spanish and English. Her poetry appears in MOM’s EGG; Caribbean Review; Americas Review; Dinner with the Muse, IRP Voices, among others. Her novel, Back to El Dorado (Floricanto Press,2020), a Latina coming-of-age story, is available on Barnes and Noble and Amazon sites.

A Cow Jumped Over the Moon

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by Mireya Perez Bustillo

To see what she could see
To know her name beyond the number
xxxxxdangling from her ears
Rumors she’d heard of cows resting in Swiss pastures
xxxxxand others nearer feasting in grassy fields
xxxxxwith mountain views at “The Farm of Happy Cows”
There was talk of Tartine, a brown and white Holstein
xxxxxwho relished in her daily head rubs
xxxxxand her sister heifers mooing at massages
xxxxxfrom large round hanging brushes
xxxxxwhile they marveled at their clean hooves,
xxxxxthe fresh straw, the milking twice a day
Some say she was moved by a yearning for a cowbell
xxxxxor that she longed for Govinda, the divine cowherd
Others heard her wish for the eternal return
xxxxxto her original Maasi herd
xxxxxor maybe it was the stench of the chopping block
We only know that on Wednesday
xxxxxshe hoofed it out of the Musa Halal Slaughterhouse
xxxxxhooves darting down 109th Avenue
xxxxxdodging cars, cops, butchers
xxxxxcutting through the Drake’s driveway
xxxxxbusting the Farley’s fence
xxxxxcornered, lassoed, tranquilized
xxxxxshe learned the rumors were true
xxxxxNow she eats, sleeps, ruminates all day
xxxxxat ease from horns to tail
xxxxxdeep in the countryside
xxxxxfull in her cowness
xxxxxshe moos at the whiff of lilacs

Mireya Perez-Bustillo writes poetry and fiction in Spanish and English. Her poetry appears in MOM’s EGG; Caribbean Review; Americas Review; Dinner with the Muse, IRP Voices, among others. Her novel, Back to El Dorado (Floricanto Press, 2020), a Latina coming-of-age story, is available on Barnes and Noble and Amazon sites.