Home Blog Page 11

Four Poems By Catherine Klein

MAR Editorial Assistant
-
0
Four Poems By Catherine Klein

These poems are published connected to a series of workshops produced in partnership between Day Eight and the East Rock Creek Senior Village supported by a Creative Spark grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

Housekeeping

I’m beginning the housekeeping; it’s time,
Time to clear out all the cobwebs and grime.
They only masked a truth that needed to be seen,
A reality waiting at my doorstep—unforeseen.
Lies and manipulation, hidden in the corners,
Offenses where you’d never suspect them.

Now, I see clearly—
It was always there,
Hiding in plain sight,
Waiting for reflection.

Those cobwebs clouded my mind,
My judgment skewed, leaving me blind.
Tyranny attacked my thoughts,
Discernment drained my energy, my time.
It’s time to sweep,
To brush away the crumbs of empty relationships,
And those who never fed my soul.
I won’t entertain you anymore.
You’re swept into the trash,
Buried for safekeeping.

Next, I’ll dust the surfaces
Where reckless decisions have settled,
Letting go of results that hold empty promises
And cloud my vision.
I’ll gladly discard those memories—
They held me hostage, left me in need.
Oh, and I won’t forget to dust the fans,
For if forgotten, they’ll spin self-doubt again,
Whipping up illusions,
Clouding my view of what’s real,
What I truly envision.

It’s time to let them go.
I’ll remember—but only as lessons.
No pity parties, no fear of reckoning.
It’s time to let go of regret,
To vacuum up the fear, the doubt,
Making sure I’ve caught every negative thought,
Every heartbreak and disappointment,
Sealing them away—permanently.
Yes, they’re bagged and gone,
Disposed from my midst.

I’m closing this chapter.
No need to revisit the past,
No need to worry about what could have been,
What should have been.
What’s for me shall be,
Even if it can’t be foreseen.
When it’s all said and done,
It’s time to move on.
On from the clutter that no longer serves,
My headspace is now clear
Of cobwebs, dust, and grime.

The circus of chaos has packed up,
Illusions gone,
Confusion stilled.
Peace is what I’m seeking,
And as I take a deep breath—
It’s peace that now fills my being.

Inhale, exhale—
I feel it settle in my bones,
Where confusion once thrived.
The dust has cleared,
And in its place, I find—me.

Yellow Brick Road

Making the most of every moment!

Eager to explore what the future holds

Not allowing my golden years to pass me by because there’s no time to let things run awry

I’m making my bucket list and checking it twice

Rather than thinking about it, I am rolling the dice

Taking a chance, I press on with strength
With great enthusiasm I explore and travel great lengths

In my golden years, I am grateful to God
at the blessings he has sent

For I have tried my best to be faithful

And while my bucket list may not seem ambitious to you these upcoming years are no time to be wasteful

Relocating to the realm of my dreams to explore all the places I’ve dreamt of

You see I really want to see what’s at the end of that rainbow

Folks have said that there, I just may find my King of Pentacles

So be happy for me as I would be for you

There’s no reason to be hating

Forgive me for breaking the barrier of these four walls and the stagnant mindset that’s stressful

As I start my trek down the magical yellow brick road it’s fine if no one accompanies me

Although, I wouldn’t mind a friend or two to share the memories and talk the tea

For I can carry my own load to the next space and time and bask in the light of the future of mankind

Because I’ve come to understand that there’s a vast contrast between being by oneself

Verses being lonely and stuck in self-pity within one’s self

Do Not Disturb

Do not disturb my peace
Walking through life not looking for strife
Do not disturb my peace
If I don’t respond back
Not looking for any flak
Do not disturb my peace
Staying in my lane
Not looking for folks to drive me insane
Nor point fingers or blame
Do not disturb my peace
The world is crazy right now
No leader can take a bow
Do not disturb my peace
A world full of the fake
Out for the take
Do not disturb my peace
We must unite
For there is so much at stake
Do not disturb my peace
The need for more discernment
To avoid disillusionment
Do not disturb my peace
Staying steadfast to my belief
That there will come some relief
Do not disturb my peace
I will have faith
It’s not up for debate
Do not disturb my peace
I pray that integrity will be sustained
God will be with me throughout
This change
“I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.”
So
Do not disturb my peace!

His Touch

From the moment,
He put his fingertips,
Upon the temple of my face.
I felt an unexpected feeling of connection. One of mixed emotions,
Of intimacy,
A tingle, yet serenity with each stroke.

His touch soothing, yet sensuous,
As he rolls his hands over each mound of my sacred space.
Forbidden to many, restrictive at best!
Access meant only for the Divine Masculine.
For only he,
May invade,
Only he may trespass,
This Empresse’s sacred space.

Will I allow this one?
Just this one?
To trespass my inner sanctuary.
Because secrets may be revealed.
His touch stirring up memories,
In me of a past connection.
One that was passion filled, with taboo.
Of forbidden love existing in a prior place and time.
Could it be he?
Did we cross paths before?

His touch ever so soothing.
I welcome it with each grasp.
I harbor no fear of him,
As he embraces each curve,
It ignites a fire within me!
Exuding warmth, and gentle care.
Such a pleasurable embrace.

Perfection in one human touch.
Mystical and magical sends chills up my spine!
Perhaps a glimmer of a simmering passion from another place and time.

With each touch, he shows compassion.
As he ever so gently, caresses each and every curve.
Sending healing energy throughout,
Every nerve.
I comply,
For I am jelly in his gentle hands.

Meant to be healing but, ever so titillating.
His touch sparks memories of,
A time not known, to man in the world of 3D.
As he delves into every crevice of my body.
Each caress reveals secrets at the very depth of my soul.

Does he sense this?
Or is it only my imagination?
I keep this feeling concealed.
For only you God, in heaven truly knows.

He stares into my eyes.
I turn away,
For fear, that my eyes will reveal,
The secret of what we both,
May or may not have shared long ago.
Unexplainable, to others
I wonder if he knows?

And if so,
Thou shalt ignite my Soul!
For the anticipation of blissful honey dust powder and pleasure balm delights!
Stirs my imagination of,
Passion filled nights.
Did destiny cross our paths for a karmic meeting?
Will we finally reunite?
Has destiny bestowed upon me this sightly man who could be kryptonite?

Catherine Klein was born in Brooklyn, New York, of West Indian descent. She moved to Washington, D.C. as a young child, completing primary through secondary school followed by an undergraduate degree at American University. Catherine worked as a professional writer and subsequently a Senior Project Control Specialist/Quality Manager. Later, she worked as a Senior Acquisition Specialist. Catherine adopted a little girl in 1993 and is now a grandmother of three. She spends much of her time visiting with her family, exploring new adventures for her bucket list, and using her decades of writing experience to fuel her newfound passion for poetry. In her recent retirement, Catherine has found joy and peace in both the written and spoken word.

Featured image in this post is, “Women Washing Clothes by a Stream” By Daniel Ridgway Knight, licensed creative commons via Wikimedia Commons.

Two Poems by Alyssa Gutierrez

Gregory Luce
-
0
Two Poems by Alyssa Gutierrez

Drive to Thinness

Did the sound of the clicking hooves cause you to starve yourself?

Like a poor scavenger,
you fed on scraps of sin and servitude,
injecting guilt and regret into your lifeless, demonic veins.
As you pierced your flesh;
depleting your body
of love,
of innocence,
of respect.

How are you not full?

Has your throat not expelled the harrowing sins
you’ve been so intimate with?

Purging Riches

I weep riches.

As I admire the
delicate
rubies
that gush–

tickling my forearm,
suffocating
the bathroom grout with their
vibrant
red hue.

The leftover rubies gurgle,
seeping back into the
slivers
of my wrist,
waiting to be tucked in
by a tender,
fresh layer
of skin.

70 pounds of purity.
Bones.
Vomit.
Starvation.

I have never felt so wealthy.

Alyssa Mariel Gutierrez is a first-year Psychology PhD student and poet. Her work uses raw, vivid imagery that explores themes of body image, eating disorders, depression, and anxiety.

Image: Pablo Picasso, “Crouching Woman” [Internet Archive]

Three Poems by Carlota Roby

Gregory Luce
-
0
Three Poems by Carlota Roby

Tyrant-Poem
I
We will shake our bodies like animals abandoned in the forest,
and the moon will sing lullabies for the
dead;
the dead who were mine and did not know how to die peaceful deaths;
and the hour will come,
and it will carry away in colorful shrouds
the faces of the barbarians;
we will stand tall
but at what cost?
at what cost
will we survive their cruelty?
If the poem with which I drive my hand into this land
does not serve to withstand their assaults
then it is not a poem.
If the poem with which you drive your hand into this land
does not withstand, rewrite it.
If the poem is there
between its jaws, the earth will rise again;
between its jaws, executioners and traitors will die.

II
We must seek the country that lies
between the ledges, even if what we find is not the same.

We are already in the final lines
and we have not even honored the poem
that roars behind the mountains.
Listen to me well:
Beware of the poem that emerges
from its hidden zone,
it will come like tyrants fall:
without warning
and eager
to kill.

Salvador de Bahia

Set out from any point.
They are all similar.
They all lead to a point of departure:
A window, a cliff, a
back to hold on to when the night gets rough,
your legs wide open in the middle of summer,
Salvador de Bahia,
The South so blue,
your long speeches
about justice, memory,
the terror, not yet overcome.
How could I not remember that
as the beginning of many other endings.
The silence
—that was so rare in that city—
resting quietly in your open fists.
You were tired of fighting the wars of your ancestors,
the same wars that your children would have to fight,
that’s why you chose not to have any.
That and the economy:
that’s a luxury only rich women can afford,
maybe they’ll rent my body for a few months,
and that’s the closest I’ll get to experience motherhood.
Then you’d laugh and pass some more dendê
correcting my Portuguese with your soft tongue.

I hated dendê but never said it
to avoid hurting your feelings.
Mas você parece saída duma revista de Nova York.
That’s what you said
when you saw me at the bar
wearing those leather boots,
nobody wears boots here, you said
showing me your flip flops;
you told me in Rio you called them “chinelos”
that’s the first word you taught me.
The second one was “sapatona”
which I understood to mean dyke.
You wore that label proudly,
you said it took many battles to wear it that way.
Our last day at the beach
you bought me coconut water,
when we said goodbye you cried a little,
took one last selfie
and said holding my hand:
good is to forgive evil,
remember,
there is no other good.

Not us
To Jeanette Vizguerra

If we cannot make poetry a cry
let us clench our fists
and search beneath the earth
for the mirror that shows us
the most fleeting truth;
we are all the same,
connected by tiny threads
that never break.
Politics is also
to amplify language
against the despot.
Language,
which does not speak for itself
but designates others.
Let us name
things as they are
so that the executioners
do not render us mute.
They expected us to bow down
before the oppressor,
but we poets
raised our hands
and gathered the daughters of others
in our arms.
We come with sharpened tongues,
carrying the truth and the word
in our pockets.
What do they carry
in their mouths of salt?
Others will tremble,
not us.
Others will fall,
not us:
We
who exist,
demand our own
possibility
to seek justice
not only for the dignity of life,
but also for its tears.

Carlota Roby is a human rights attorney, and the co-founder of the project Vocales Verticales. She is also a poet and a cat lover. Originally from Venezuela, she resides in Washington D.C.

Image: Paul R. Burley, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

One Poem by Erik Peters

Serena Agusto-Cox
-
0
One Poem by Erik Peters

Fox Cubs

It was a cold day,
the kind of cold only clear
weather brings.
that hardens the earth
and makes life scarce.

There was something ignoble
about the hunk of granite
we heaped over the little grave
to save the grey flesh beneath
from sustaining the fox cubs
whose gaunt mother
prowled the encampment.

Erik Peters is a father and avid mediaevalist from Vancouver, Canada. His writing is influenced by late antiquity, his family, and his students. Erik has been featured in Coffin Bell, Zoetic, Takahe, Beyond Literary Words, and Thirty West. You can check out all Erik’s work at erikpeters.ca.

Featured Image: Fox Cubs by Evo Flash under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Four Poems by Monica Perez-Nelson

Gregory Luce
-
0
Four Poems by Monica Perez-Nelson

The women in a family

I.
In softest cream cashmere, silk draping
wrists of verbena, vanilla, rose.
Bronze chargers under china, layers
of scent: rosemary roasting turkey, bread
baking. Today is a joyful day.
The embroidered table runner
and the periphery of memory: this girl
cupping the phone as she whispers
to the tinny voice of a dispatcher
or that girl watching her mother breathe
into the crumpled brown paper bag.

Can you sum the pain: the hot weight
of bully slaps across the face
to the side of the head
or hands on vacated bodies, wine-dank breath
Can you sum these lives and portion it
like slices of pie
served to mothers are daughters
nursed, are sisters are cousins
lifting the forks to their lips.
To call it strength but what is it
but to daily wake, walk, eat of it.
There is no Greek chorus here.

II.
Lips licked, decadent meal done
Cousins and daughters languid
on couch cushions. Couches
across therapists’ offices
a dozen fair haired young women
their constellations of disorder
closeness and cold retreat.
Row, row, row your boat
these dozen cousins singing in a round.
This leaning tower has stood
over six hundred years on its soft ground
its flawed foundation has withstood
four earthquakes.

The water will recede

The house was being carried downstream, I saw her
face in the window, stilled in grimace. I steeled myself
to face her dying and I stood. But fell
at each particular of death:
Bridges torn apart, downtown submerged in water then rubble
A drowned body that sinks then rises to the surface
torso floating higher than head and limbs.

Our flooded house is half-standing, a jagged bit of wall
buckled beams, like a roadside animal’s skeleton
clinging to a few patches of carcass.
My dead garden where a stray dog shit in my flowerbeds.
They tell me it never was: the wax-leaved magnolia tree and its burst
blossoms in my backyard. They say it was always an empty spot of lawn,
that it is impossible to trace Orion even though the stars remain.

I walk through the mud and step on the shit, I shed and lose
that softest skin and with this self who has lost—
On soaked, leveled ground, I rise with the songbirds.
I am beyond gutting and my rage distills.
I wash the always full sink of dishes, food still caked on
feel the crushed garlic on my fingers, spreading it over root
vegetables for roasting, steam from the pot of soup, its promise.
My children take this food I have made.
My children who herald decency and the real flesh of others.

Placing these dishes before my children

My children eat hamburgers.
Light brown wisps cover my infant’s soft skull
eyes: greenish, skin: pink. Then pale pale
like his father but the baby’s
pale skin won’t burn as mine doesn’t.
We’re of two countries. The first:
Islands sparkling in the sun, and bloody gnashing
of a colony. Then here where no one
in its old memory has a face
like mine, my family’s lines not tender-fed
in its soil.

But how to eat of the land where I was born
its trauma and revolution
the buoyancy, the making do
the Art of it.
Grit and pieties
that are old, ancestral

I want my children to feel this country
in their fight and the pits of their stomachs—
to know my great grandfather led guerilla fighters
in the jungle

Are they strangers to what is in their blood?

We’re restless but for this clockwork of tables
set by a hundred titas—the aunties—
Lumpia in tidy rows and glistening stews
the tangy adobo, grilled fish, bones still in
recall an afternoon eating by the sea.
Take and eat
each bite of rice and fish, soaked
in soy sauce mixed with garlic, vinegar
a bit of calamansi, perfection.
There are no banana leaves at this table
but it summons to dinnertime
in the barangay.
Dusk fallen, street vendors barbecue pork
mothers cook in the kitchens, windows
open, steaming food and
relief that another bone weary day
of work is through
under the too heavy tropical air.

Funeral homes and new fluencies

I am an encyclopedia of organ failure, prognosis, orifices.
Having walked miles in pea-green and peach tiled hospital corridors
to the low budget movie sets of funeral homes—reception ballroom
leads to chapel, living room, a counter for cremation orders.
My love is now actuarial and I count the wakes.
Bereaved father who forgot to clip the back seam of his new suit jacket,
someone pointing out  who first sold the boy heroin,
and mythology of a grandpa on both the Eastern and Western fronts,
or my father’s dead body less than a decade older than my body now.
I am too tired to do an accounting of the ways I failed them, various,
too tired to remember about Plato and immortality of the soul.
I’ve never touched food at a funeral home reception. All I want to eat
is to smoke a cigarette with my nineteen-year old body
that didn’t even know it had lungs because they didn’t hurt.

Monica Perez-Nelson is a Filipina-American poet who is working on her first collection.  She returned to writing after a long dormancy and is also a mother of two and a health policy lawyer who specializes in data and AI issues.  She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband, sons, and dog, Tulip.  She jots poetry notes on scraps of paper while at her kids’ soccer games, swim meets, and practices. 

Image: Jessartcam, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

1...101112...187Page 11 of 187