VoicesAdmin

Nobody Goes There

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by Mary Padilla

Nobody goes there
who plans on coming back,
because nobody who goes there
ever has,
and there’s no reason to suspect
that you would be the first,
or rather the last.
So better plan
as per usual
and know what it is
you’re risking,
– not even risking,
because this is a sure thing –
so what it is
you’re willing to give up
in exchange
for seeing for yourself
what no one
who’s been seen again
has seen,
or heard,
or experienced,
because
to know what it is,
it seems you need
to give up
what you know
in exchange,
without knowing
what it is
you will gain.
You could just lose
if it isn’t even
a zero sum game,
and the odds are
– well, you can’t know
what the odds are
until you play the game –
the chances are
– well, the house usually wins,
so it’s more of a wager
than an exchange,
a roll of the dice
in cosmic terrain.
You don’t know
until you try,
and chances are
you won’t get a chance
to try again.
But knowing
what you would know then,
what would be the chance
that you would?

Mary Padilla is interested in experimenting with using sound and sense to explore felt experience.

Letter to You

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by Mary Padilla

You are free to say anything
to anyone
– even to me –
about anything.

You have 15 minutes.

I didn’t make it up.
I got it from a book.
No, it wrote itself.
I’m not responsible.
I don’t know what I think
until I see what I write.
It’s all been said before.
There is nothing new.
What is there to say
when you have said before
what there is to say?
I get what I like.
I like what I get.
Are they the same?
Are they not?
And then, what?
Where do we go
when we must go?
Where is there to go?
Where else?
Is there any there?
Why did we think
there might be?
Might there still be?
There might not be.
How would it be
if that were so?
When I say
what I mean,
do I mean
what I say?
Why or why not?
You must choose.
Must you choose?
Why must you choose?
Why not, indeed?
Because that is how it is.
Isn’t it?
How so?
And all this time
how could I
have thought so?
Did I ever
really
know?
No.
Did you?

Mary Padilla is interested in experimenting with using sound and sense to explore felt experience.

Joy

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by Mary Padilla

Joy is what
sneaks in
through the cracks,
not something
we can plan.

It isn’t anything.
Actually that’s it –
it’s not a thing,
a concrete noun.

It’s more of a verb –
something that
just happens,
and exists only
in the moment.

It’s just a bubble
whose essence lies
in the immanence
of the “pop.”

Mary Padilla is interested in experimenting with using sound and sense to explore felt experience.

Improvising

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by Mary Padilla

If we’re too busy codifying,
we can’t also be improvising,
not making it up as we go along,
or being the only ones deciding.

We can’t know just what we think
until we write it down or say it.
We don’t know what it is we see
before we draw or sculpt or paint it.

We can’t know where our step will go
until we’re almost ready to take it.
We don’t know what our sound will be
before we actually begin to make it.

The only true way in for us
lies in our trying not to try,
because it represents the key
to the how that underlies the why.

Mary Padilla is interested in experimenting with using sound and sense to explore felt experience.

Ode to Sylvia

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by Judith Meyerowitz

(In Memory of Sylvia Brill)

Tall woman, classical smile
You sweep me into poetry
It is your voice that takes me
hushed, sultry.
I want you to read forever

You bring me into the poetry group
Via black holes and reminiscences of Chicago published in Voices

We walk to Thirteenth St.
I slow down to meet your cane
Soon we are chatting in that hole of a West Village restaurant
With the warmth of home cooking.
Blackened pots and pans lined up for our review.
You had soup.
You told me of the Vermont house with garden, now sold
Of your small apartment with renovated kitchen
Your love of Rome
You sound young
I imagine that we are undergraduates
It is still the sixties
We are excited by poets and writers
I wish I remembered more the films you liked, the study groups you led.
But the warmth remains

You say goodbye–not yet
Chat about poetry for a while.
The cane out of sight
I walk on
Your voice stays in the air
And carries me

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

Jump Up Children

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by Judith Meyerowitz

Twirled rope
coiled round black hands
Spin a crisscross story in
magical bands

Jump into the half-moon circle
Hip Hop between invisible lines
A blur of quick hands
Now u see it. Now u don’t.
Jump up heaven bound
Return before sound
Taps the ground

the chain gang
Carries you up
chant
Carries you up

Jump up children
Trouble the waters
May jubilee voices
and African rhymes
Set you free
from imposed ties

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

Is This One?

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by Judith Meyerowitz

How does it start?
An overheard conversation, an image, a question, a howl?
How do we capture it? How do we paper train it?

To rhyme?
One two, buckle my shoe
A line thin or wide
O for osmosis.
Sestinas for math majors

Does blank verse need words
Does punctuation save lives?

We sit in a Greenwich Village apartment, close by the spirits of Cedar Tavern.
Masks on the walls and spirit visions.
Do they watch over us or mock us
as we ponder who is Antinous and how do you say Bluet?

A congenial group draped on couch and easy chairs. A frieze. We are one with the classics.

But should we be in nature, sitting around a fire?
Glowing embers, sparks like Frost’s fireflies,
spirits in a jar.

We are well educated and intended
But can we find the incantation:
“More s’mores and pass the metaphors please”

Do we write the poem or does it write us?
If we wait, will it come?
What makes it a poem?
When does it stop being a poem?

And if you can’t understand it,
Is it no longer one?

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

Sonnet VII

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by Carmen Mason

Freely flowingxx ahxx her dark hair glowing
soft birds huddled upon a safe high ground
the candelabras glistened as she made
her way past gargoyles squatting all around.
Her lover served the red wine carefully ~
its color like the blood of love they shared
mushrooms and salmon poached on bubblingly
finger potatoes looked like piglets bared.
They laughed   told stories   batted round bon mots
until their talk led to its common theme:
coincidence and chance they’d shared a lot
(they probably met first inside a dream).
Why do some pause, then pass right out of mind
while others flyxx collide xxthen soar entwined?

Carmen Mason has written poetry and prose since she was six. She first got published in P.S. 106‘s Children’s Press. She has kept going, winning a few prizes along the way, but mainly just enjoying sharing and, while waiting for her muse to (hopefully) visit her again, telling her friends jokes by Steven Wright.

Raccoon

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by Carmen Mason

I walk each day
across the bridge
wondering if we really
need a god or
are we enough ~

still, xx there’s the splayed raccoon
hit a few nights ago
its snout intact
half gritting xxxhalf grinning

The next day it’s flipped over ~
perhaps a dog or fisherman’s son flipped it
belly up xxxjumping with flies
and I want
to call you and get
you to come see it :
six grey teeth in a
grimacing mouth
belly oozing a million
undulating white worms
up and down
up and down
as if on infinitesimal
conveyor belts
striped fur gone XXface gone
nails scattered XXpawless
a fringe of paper-thin carcass
marking its small life
Oh let’s lift the baby up
And kiss its berry lips
and later dance with her
under the stars
to tangos and merengues
listen to the scat singer
syncopating the night air in
the snapping jazz club
give all our change
to the impatient waiter
look
let’s dance ’til the last dervish
lookxxxx look xxxlook!
xxxxxthe sun’s
xxxxxxxxdipping down

Carmen Mason has written poetry and prose since she was six. She first got published in P.S. 106‘s Children’s Press. She has kept going, winning a few prizes along the way, but mainly just enjoying sharing and, while waiting for her muse to (hopefully) visit her again, telling her friends jokes by Steven Wright.

Poemless in Gaza

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by Carmen Mason

It is Monday again and none
have come to visit me and make me feel alive and well
none swift and dazzling, catapulting into song
none sarcastic or profound, crashing for drinks and schmoozing
startling and abusing, or dancing in the dining room
with dizziness abloom or smiting, searing
to make my senses flare, rail up

(Did Samson feel all was dead,
Delilahless, all done
unless gouged eyes could gaze again
on all he would hold up to day’s
new light, take from night’s dark knowing?)

So here I sit and wait as so much moves out there that must be
felt to tell, coax and mill, then welcomed in
The night is still so quiet   I wait   I pray so that
my hand may lift to tell
my arms press out
upon the walls that
swelling, break and fold
while something bursts the door
and greedily I’ll greet
the words
then send them out to you.

Carmen Mason has written poetry and prose since she was six. She first got published in P.S. 106‘s Children’s Press. She has kept going, winning a few prizes along the way, but mainly just enjoying sharing and, while waiting for her muse to (hopefully) visit her again, telling her friends jokes by Steven Wright.