Poetry

A Day in the Life: Spring 2020

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by Jennifer Ross

7:00 a.m.
Joyful bird chorus
Bright bursts of blooms busting out
This heartbreaking spring

12:00 noon
On my daily walk
Masked figures pass, no smiles
Silent, empty streets

7:00 p.m.
Neighbors go outside
Clap, bang on our sounding bowl
Thanking our heroes

Coda, Spring 2021

Slowly we emerge
Drinking in smiling faces
Shoots of hope in hearts

Jenny Ross is from Cape Town, South Africa and taught English in high school and college.  She lived in Jerusalem, then Ann Arbor, Michigan, but has happily called New York City home since 1989 and although she loves traveling, doesn’t plan to move again. She is excited to see Voices.

Chapelle du Rosaire, Vence

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To Henri Matisse

by Mireya Perez Bustillo

Where a clarity favors
royal palms over wedding cake buildings
he meditated on light

Here he wanted to draw the light
of the sea, the space, the mimosa
with bits of glass he colored
ripples to dance on white marble
a water moving to the sun
not knowing he could make a solid liquid
wanting only the light

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.

Gallery View

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by Mary Padilla
 

A moment in time
and space
–  frozen  –
as in Zoom,
suspended.
–  Leave and Return  –
They have to let you in.
You are in the Waiting Room.
What is on the other side
of that door?
Doors are virtual these days,
and apocryphal.

But the link is still there for 30 days.
There is no end time.
What does Time mean now?
It should be what keeps everything
from happening at once.
But what about
the parallel universes
we inhabit,
where we click
from one reality
to the next
and back again –
or not.

Everything happens
at once there,
except that there is
no single there.
but rather,
three-ringed circuses,
the net of Indra,
the many-stringed
multiverse.

And where are we in all this?
Are we in this?
If outside, where?
Given a place to stand,
could we move it?
What if there is
no place to stand?
And what would it mean
to move?

If nothing is fixed,
what then is our perspective?
That of the omniscent narrator?
Of the fish eye immersed
in a medium it can’t fathom?
And of what significance this?
If we can sense only
what we are primed to experience,
then we cannot perceive
what we do not expect.

Sensations are feelings.
We will not feel
what we cannot know.
Oblivious to the rest,
we each live now
in a world
of our own creation,
socially distant
in a fundamental way,
and alone.
What would it mean
to connect?
 

Since coming to the LP2 several years ago, Mary has been trying new things, like applying the economy of the poetic form to expressing what can be more felt than understood.

Annunciation

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by Mary Padilla

Is that what it is, then?
Something that puts in motion
a sort of cascade?  Personal?
Write it down
before it slips away.
Such things don’t usually
need setting up.
They come into being
by themselves.  Impersonal.
Maybe the pieces aren’t ready
to be locked into place yet.
To need to do this thing,
but not necessarily
because it’s likely to succeed,
It’s an exchange with the part that
observes, integrates,and only manifests
when the synthesis is complete,
to wake up with it in mind,
and live with it always before you,
as a sort of waking dream –
like the cuckoo in the clock
that makes its presence known
only intermittently – rarely –
then quickly disappears again.
when the fit is on, you must do it.
And so you discharge it, this necessity,
It won’t be coaxed out again
until it has something else to say,
and that fully formulated.
deliver it in the doing.
Or don’t, but then it will persist.
This sort of thing doesn’t – can’t – happen
on demand, under contract, or by a deadline.
Not exactly taken over,
haunted, preoccupied, obsessed,
you simply must pursue it,
if you are possessed by it,
or it just might destroy you.
It just bubbles up
when it’s ready
and can no longer be contained.
Not its agent,
but rather reduced to it.
All that can be done is
to give it the time it needs,
as everything else is stripped away,
superfluous to what it in essence is,
this thing that can exist only through you.
and then record the result
What matters is the essential need
for this inessential thing,
meaningful perhaps only to you,
to be,
when it’s ready
and to continue being,
to be delivered.
even after you no longer are.
 

Since coming to the LP2 several years ago, Mary has been trying new things, like applying the economy of the poetic form to expressing what can be more felt than understood.

A Bio Genetic Uprising

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by Judith Meyerowitz

Shadows are marching between our hi riser twins
Eyes shut to the advancing lumps, the great lump in the other bed, snores
My “twin” is almost ten years older and always beats me to sleep
Deserted, I watch the little black puffballs roll stealthily through the night
I can smell them as they draw closer
Aliens have invaded Brighton Beach and I am the last line of defense
Between my bedroom and the homeland.
I stand my ground.
A warm squishiness attacks my toes
I dive under the covers of my dugout
Motionlessness my weapon.
Unseen, unheard, be gone
Morning lights the battlefield.
The great lump rises and screams:” Get your dirty socks out from under my bed!”

 

Judith has taken several writing and poetry study groups since joining and is a member of an ongoing poetry group. She thanks Voices and all those coordinators for their encouragement and support. 

 

 

Hack Back

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by Judith Meyerowitz

You open my email account
Oblivious to the years I’ve inhabited it.
When unexpectedly. It chimes: “You’ve got my mail”
Startled but yet in disbelief, you ignore the first visitation
And set loose your virus on an unsuspecting population.
“Can you do me a favor?” You write
My name and invade my world
Then unexpectedly. My family, friends, acquaintances, associates spill onto your computer
A tsunami of letters flood your keys

You spin your chair around
Only to see a wave of @s rise up.
You scream in terror and race against the rolling addresses

In red you tumble down the swirling vortex
In blue the waters of fantasia engulf you
And in yellow-
The @s spiral out of the cartoon frame and wrap you in the entrails of my emails.

Judith has taken several writing and poetry study groups since joining and is a member of an ongoing poetry group. She thanks Voices and all those coordinators for their encouragement and support. 

 

Urgent Request to My Dell Desktop Computer

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by Carmen Mason

I would rather anyone –
my old self-absorbed mother sitting
in the dark remembering Charlie Rose,
either of my darling daughters
stopped momentarily from wrestling
with the disappointing universe,
a friend of my youth still my loyal friend,
even my obstetrician neighbor with
caked and tarred nails from slip-
shod boat patching and roof repairs or
Tony-Deli while handing me
the lacy Swiss cheese on toasted rye
or the two year-old who’s
just learned how to talk,
twelve-year-old Mack in his autistic ecstasy;
even Scotty who sells the yard sale
giveaways at his nouveau antique store
or Antoinette in overalls with her two-foot
wooden crucifix and rosary suddenly ceasing
her chanting to inform me Jesus’ll definitely
be here today
or the deaf pony-tailed carpenter whose
hundred keys announce his coming,
Elliot, the sweet starving artist or
Sylvia while she files the brave and weeping
diaries of her COVID clients or
Jimmy, the raging cross-dresser  while waiting
for his bus to eleventh-grade Hell-
and yes, my love, after kissing my hammer toe
and letting me dance atop his socked feet
(though it might pain him)-
anyone but YOU
can break the news to me:

YOU HAVE NO MEMORY LEFT……….
YOU ARE OUT OF MEMORY……….
YOU HAVE NO MEMORY LEFT………

 

I’ve been writing prose and poetry since I was six. Won the Ist prize in Seventeen Magazine’s short story contest at 17 and several poetry prizes through the years. I write because I cannot help myself. I write to empty out the thoughts I cannot hold inside a day or hour more.

 

The Irish Writer Leaves Home

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by Carmen Mason

How does one explain the perfume steaming
from a timid wrist
the musky scent
the flash of a white instep
Not love    not perfect flesh
but the shame of needing
a giving up    a giving in
a consummation that transfigures
for the moment
that transcends
for the moment
How can I tell my sleeping son
his mother was as brief
and as amazing as a shooting star
on a still    clear    miraculous night
that my leaving like this
without goodbyes
after spitting those acid words
into her questionmark
of a ruined face
is a refusal of everything
that warns me to stay
persist    make do
I am no longer a son of Dublin
There is a world out there
that will now    soon
make me delirious
with its musky
midnight breathing    its
ejaculatory fires
I am in need my son
in demanding need to go

Here is a kiss goodbye
I’ve been writing prose and poetry since I was six. Won the Ist prize in Seventeen Magazine’s short story contest at 17 and several poetry prizes through the years. I write because I cannot help myself. I write to empty out the thoughts I cannot hold inside a day or hour more.

 

 

 

 

The Artist

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by Carmen Mason
When you start   everybody and everything
 
           is there with you    past   present   friends   family

critics   strangers    and all the greats

the empty brain-washed canvas

brushes    oily rags

paintswirls on the palette

waiting

or     the empty pages in  your head

words   flit  like

hummingbirds

           
then finally

all leave one by one

you’re  all alone

and   then

if you’re lucky

really lucky on this day

 you leave too


I’ve been writing prose and poetry since I was six. Won the Ist prize in Seventeen Magazine’s short story contest at 17 and several poetry prizes through the years. I write because I cannot help myself. I write to empty out the thoughts I cannot hold inside a day or hour more.

 

Surfing

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by Carmen Mason 

Pythagoras lived when kids
didn’t wield box cutters and guns
or stand on lines for free condoms
missing class
when fuck-you shirts weren’t even
dreamed of by
lovehaters and childhaters
When homework wasn’t necessary because
each moment was an assignment for life
He lived when the parts still equalled the whole
and the whole was a holy thing
He    then Empedocles and later
Euclid believed the
world and all its matter mattered
and Pythagoras suggested that if you don’t get it right
you can come back and try again
in Samos or some other place and
body-state     say a fish or a goat
or a flea or Shanghai

To be brief     Pythy
opposed the taking of life
the eating of flesh or anyone who killed
or prepared animals for diet

So I think all these drive-by shooters
babyburners     peoplerapers
mindmarauders    ethnictrashers
racelashers     fuckshirt peddlers
drug and craprap hustlers
should die     just die     then come back and try again

I’ve been writing prose and poetry since I was six. Won the Ist prize in Seventeen Magazine’s short story contest at 17 and several poetry prizes through the years. I write because I cannot help myself. I write to empty out the thoughts I cannot hold inside a day or hour more.