Friday, May 30, 2025: Loretta Oleck's "Wonder Woman"

 

Wonder Woman

Teenager in NYC, 1977

I was Wonder Woman—Jordache jeans skin-tight like stockings

tucked into worn-out, stiletto boots.

 

Fifteen, but could easily work my way into Studio 54's VIP room

where Grace Slick and Lady Divine were snorting lines.

 

I was embraced as their mascot because I smudged thick ink black

under my blue eyes and was the spitting image of Wonder Woman,

 except, I didn’t have her powers.

 

It was the seventies, and I had read, cover to cover, Our Bodies, Our Selves.

Discos were mine—fields where asses were grabbed, shooting ranges

where sex was snagged, strange, deranged theme parks where mental looting

and body arson were formidably encouraged.

 

Einstein said—If you want your children to be intelligent read them fairy tales.

 

I don’t remember female heroines, but I guess they had to be princesses,

or at the very least look like Wonder Woman.

 

Steinham said—The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day;

a movement is only people moving.

 

And people sure did move, shaking their booties in shiny silver hot pants.

I boogied under pulsing strobe lights, having no idea my body had rights.

Why did I not hear the words of Steinham, Brownmiller, Millett?

After all, it was the seventies, and I had read, cover to cover, Our Bodies, Our Selves.

I wish someone had said—Take off the damn cape and crown, girl, the tiara and gown, girl.

I wish someone had told me—There is no happily-ever-after.

© 2025 Loretta Oleck

Loretta Oleck, is a Pushcart Poetry Prize nominee, Westchester County Poet Laureate finalist, and author of three poetry chapbooks. Her work has been published in reviews and journals worldwide. Her poetry has been performed at the Hudson Museum of Contemporary Art, The Hammond Museum, and others. She was a Finalist in the Poet’s Billow: Bermuda Triangle Prize, Mary Ballard Poetry Chapbook Prize finalist, First Honorable Mention in New Women’s Voices Series Chapbook Competition, runner up for the Los Angeles Poetry Society Poetry Contest, finalist in the Jack Grapes Poetry contest, among others.

Friday, May 16, 2025: Jennifer M. Phillips's "Venus At the Little Acropolis"

Venus At the Little Acropolis

Under the plastic acanthus and laurel

swagging in grandmotherly curves

from the acoustic tiles,

in the hypothermic mood lighting

bluing the corrugated columns

and marblesque tabletops,

the combo strikes up Nisiótika

and the expat Kikladic-islanders grow misty-eyed

over their wine, hummus, and oktopadi.

This is the just warm-up act

under the Parthenon prints from Roma,

and the Venus De Milo wistful

that she could never again maneuver

tsatsiki into that pouty mouth.

Most of those not Greek here would tell you

they are Lebanese, politic at the current

Middle Eastern fraught moment,

but the table in the corner are riotously Egyptian

fêting Teta's eightieth birthday,

the nephews perspiring and the uncles

reminiscing about Oum Kalthoum

though this is Joan Baez country,

Cambridge, Massachusetts, where imports from everywhere

wash up comfortably cosmopolitan.

And now the star attraction over the baklava:

Fatima the belly dancer who can shiver

the gemmed scimitar across her abs

hands-free (a trick Venus is watching closely).

She arches and shakes her mile of glossy mane back

and the men mop their foreheads with their hankies

as she shimmers across the floor in rubied sandals.

She bows and they sprint up to tuck big bills

into her bedleh just slowly enough for lust

and quickly enough for family propriety,

and then it is our turn to dance. The bouzouki

jangles. The bodies shimmy and swirl

until Jadd rises and clears his throat and the dancefloor,

makes a toast and friends and strangers cheer.

Then the rhythm shifts, the tune is Leylet Hob —

Night of Love — and Teta rises the way a volcano presses from the sea,

shakes out her black skirts of ancient loss and her own

hip-scarf wine-dark as the Aegean or the Nile

and begins an undulation from her core

as though the earth were rearranging herself

or the tide rolling up the estuary.

No one breathes. No one has moves like Teta,

who has fled across borders with babies on her hips,

made do, made love, mourned sons, built businesses,

and planted herself here in the city like a monument,

but step-turns like Isis fresh from the lotus-gardens,

and Jadd flushes and flashes his teeth like a bridegroom

and we are all fallen in love again at the wedding of the world.

© 2025 Jennifer M Phillips

Jennifer M Phillips came across borders early in life and is now a bi-national lifelong poet

living on Cape Cod, grateful for this Wampanoag ancestral territory. Phillips' work has appeared in over 100 journals and 2 chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (iblurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022), with a 3rd, Sailing To the Edges (forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.) Her collection is Wrestling with the Angel, (Wipf and Stock Pub., 2025) Phillips has had two poems nominated Pushcart Prize.