National Women's Month: Lynne Bronstein's poem "Enough"

Enough

If you feed a few crumbs to one bird

It is enough. If you feed

A can of cat food to one cat

It is enough. If you feed

A family with your leftovers

It is enough. If you feed

A room full of refugees

With collected canned goods

It is enough.

So many grievances,

So much injustice.

It’s like too many holes at once

Opening in the ceiling.

You run all over the place,

Trying to plug the leak.

You don’t have enough fingers.

But if you give someone on the street a quarter

It is enough.

If you make that phone call to a representative

It is enough.

If you write one editorial or poem

It is enough.

If you march and shout

It is enough.

If you live your life no matter what

And be true to yourself

It is enough.

Don’t let anyone tell you

You are not doing enough.

You alone will not be able to build the ark.

But your hammer will drive in one necessary nail.

It will be enough

If there are enough of you

To wield all the hammers.

© 2017 Lynne Bronstein

Lynne Bronstein came to LA in the era of album rock and wrote for the underground Los Angeles Free Press. For five decades she’s supported herself as a journalist while contributing to the literary community with four books, poems and short stories in numerous magazines, readings, and organizing poetry events. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net Awards and her short story “Why Me?” won a prize in the poeticdiversity Short Fiction Contest. She has poetry forthcoming in Lummox, Chiron Review, poeticdiversity, and Sparring With Beatnik Ghosts, among others.

National Women's Month: Mona Jean Cedar's poem "The Cup"

When the Cup is Full you can’t Pour in anymore.

Ya gotta empty (POUR) your cup

Before you Pour more.

Never Worry; Not Enough

Gotta get a Big-ger Cup

Don’t be Afraid to be Without

Heaven’s got Lots more to pour

this Pouring-out and Pouring-in

it is’ the Change that Must Begin

If Your Time-Cup is Full w/ a Crammed Schedule?

Inflexible, Immutable, impervious to Change

(Set, Impossible, Stay “Y” Same)

How do you Expect to Reform and Refine? (Become Improve)

Don’t even have a Goal in mind…

(Warn) & People are always Steal-ing your Time.

Can you? Yes. Can you? Yes. Can you? Yes, Yes, Yes Yes,

(put xxxx in schedule)

Time’s all gone; there’s nothing left

Gotta Eat, Sleep, (put in schedule)

Wanta Create & Meditate, or

Party (“y” & Drink) TV (Look TV Watch)

Study, Maybe be with Family (Mingle Family)

so Choose; it’s up to you. (Decide Self)

it’s Your Cup; fill it up (pour)

is Your Brain-Cup Full of Worries and Maybes

of Futures un-happened (Late)

and Pasts so long gone (Finish w/ hand slaps)

Guessing, Obsessing, Stressing

(R) Gotta; (L) Hafta; (R)Oughta; (L) Should

Who Says so? (Question Mark)

Mom & Daddy?

Teachers, Lovers always Adding

Their Beliefs into Your Cup…

You’re Old Enough to Know

Don’t be so Gullible xxx (Pour Glup xxxx)

be Responsible

Know what is there and Why

If your Heart-Cup is Full of Complaining & Anger,

of Blaming the Other; Comparing the un-Fair!

Jealousy does not behoove you (Benefit)

that Poison will Hard-en

it’ll Hurt Your own Heart (Block)

& Only You have the Power to Help/(Become) it to Heal

TIME HEART BRAIN

{1}

But They Need Me Insults & Injuries Thoughts From Them

2 3 1

{A}

Chase Compete Stone Cold Combat Stupid Dumb Imbecile

1 2 3

{3}

Strict Toxic Evil Stuck

1 3 2

That’s (Safe) Enough (cut throat) I Am (Hn) Full! (Overwhelmed)

(hands up)

(Pour, Relieve)

Breathe

right ( point here) Now

Perceive; behold the Beauty

Breathe;

right ( point here) Now,

Trust in your Safety

Know - you Need Nothing – just Be ( Mtn. Pose)

It – doesn’t – matter How it got there ( LPour into RCup)

Ya just Gotta get it out (R Pour out)

Might not (-) be Easy, Maybe need some Therapy

Dig deep (Analyse)& be ruthless (Strick)

Honest

Those Old Habits will not Help you;

they’re just holding you back. (noose)

let Loose the noose ; Pour & then Soar! (Leave Develop)

Know, Your Cup is so Precious

Allow in only Forgiveness

Thankfulness, Compassion,

Hope, Joy, and a whole lot of Love

This Is Your Cup, of Your Life’s making, (Pour L into R)

Cheers! Drink up!

© 2017 Mona Jean Cedar

Mona Jean Cedar composes and choreographs spoken word poetry with sign languages. She holds an AA in Dance, an AS in Sign Language Interpreting, a BS in Deaf Studies from CSUN, attended the Julliard School in New York City for Theatrical Interpreting and the National Theater of the Deaf.  For fun, she creates multi-communicative performances with her husband’s original music, has performed at many Burning Man festivals, slammed and interpreted in the National Poetry Slam Finals, interpreted for the Women of the World Slams, and represented the USA at an International Slam in Paris. France.  Ms. Cedar is “poetry in motion”.

National Women's Month: Carly Bryson's poem "Sides"

Sides My friends have all taken sides collective vs collective I sit with my nose pressed to the dirty glass Watching as they roam the streets Striking each other with well worn slurs Then crying into the social media equiv. Of a boob tube with test pattern eyes Lamenting about the unfairness of it all While I sort of want them all to understand What it really means to suffer

© 2017 Carly Bryson

Carly Bryson lives in Houston, Texas and writes poetry and prose about cracked dirt, the desert, lonesome highways, dirty rotten wars,nasty city air, pending dystopia and the frailty of the human condition.

National Women's Month: Cynthia Linville's poem "Pilgrimage to Duncan's Landing"

Pilgrimage to Duncan’s Landing

Lush pastures roll out
wildflower-patch quilts
as eye soothing sheep flow
past my window,
the eucalyptus and manure scented air
blows in,
and then
(I’m almost there)
misty brine,
and the guilt and loss I carry
tastes like sand in wine.

At the overlook
salt-laced wind slaps my face
as the tide’s thunderous rage
chews the cliff scape
inch by inch
into new shapes,
as the years have chewed
my inner landscape.
I climb down barefoot
to pace a gentler beach:
this briny repository of secrets

I’ve doled out slowly over the years –
a lover in jail
the death of a friend
the beginning of an affair
the end of an end –
these resilient waves never fail to soothe me
with their sibilant liturgy:
pardon
and peace
pardon
and peace.

At night the sharp stars
sting
like grit in my eye
and the surf’s soft caress
sounds like your absence –
breathing in
breathing out
breathing in –
while the cant of foghorn
absolves me
of every sin.

Poem Credit: First published Poetry Now Nov 2007; later included in The Lost Thing, one of my books of collected poems from Cold River Press, 2012.

© 2017 Cynthia Linville

Photo Credit: Rosario Romero

Cynthia Linville, a 2012 Pushcart nominee, has taught writing in the English Department at California State University, Sacramento since 2000 and has served as Managing Editor of Convergence: an online journal of poetry and art since 2008. Her work has appeared in many publications and several anthologies, and her two poetry collections, The Lost Thing (2012) and Out of Reach (2014), are available from Cold River Press. She invented a poetic form dubbed the Linvillanelle which is profiled here: http://medusaskitchen.blogspot.com/p/calliopes-closet.html.

National Women's Month: Alicia Winski's poem "untitled"

memory is vile and intrusive

I watched him get out of the car

something about the way he was moving…

for a moment, I loved him

until he stopped moving

we went inside

and I let him make love to me anyway

sometimes I feel suffocated

tucked under a New York deep freeze with you

choked out on ashes and frozen leaves of grass

but every once in a while

I like to get out and remember

what it feels like to breathe

© 2017 Alicia Winski

Bio: Editor for NightWing Publications and Author Alicia Winski, of Seattle, was born and raised in Southern CA.  Having lived many of her formative years in several beach areas such as Venice, Playa del Rey and Malibu, California, she developed an early affinity for water and often incorporates that affinity, along with her love of music and color, into much of her writing.

Her work has been featured in numerous publications,  including Twizted Tungz, Jan 2013, Vol 4 Marbella Marbella Adelante!, (Spain) Dec 2012, The Shwilby.com, Twizted Tungz, Vol. 3, Neon Highway Poetry Magazine, Issue 23, Requiem Magazine, Edition 6, The Right Eyed Deer, 5th Edition, Edgar Allan Poet, Real Change.org, Cliterature Journal, Rolling  Thunder Press, Ygdrasil, A Journal Of The Poetic Arts, RezFez and Poetic Diversity. Her first poetry collection, "Running On Fumes", was published in early 2010, with a second collection entitled "Dreaming In Color",  and a third collection, "of dreams & mortality", set for release sometime in 2017. 

National Women's Month Toti O'Brien's short story "Cassandra"

                                       
                                          "Cassandra" © 2017 Toti O'Brien


      You looked like anybody when you left the bus, aiming at the marble bench in a corner of the noisiest, most crowded square of our town… and still magical, spilling beauty from ancient ruins, arches, columns. Spilling out a beam of eternity: a blade, sharp, insinuating.
     The past glory didn’t impress you. You were born there, you had sipped it with milk. But the rest took its toll—the traffic, the rumpus, the chaos. And those buses, so loaded you didn’t miss room, you missed oxygen. So sticky you’d peel off your skin. Was it why you rushed to the door? You needed air, you would later say.
     You did not make it to the bench. You sat on a wall, reverberating white coolness and a promise of rest. An island peering out of your sudden vertigo. That was it, correct, Sandra? A whirlpool of pain sucking you from the inside, cutting your legs, choking you.
     Hurt, though, wasn’t in your muscles or viscera. Where? You couldn’t tell. You just starved for something firm to grab on—the bus wouldn’t do. You wanted a cube of air for you only—nothing big, a prison cell would suffice. But you couldn’t be squeezed among hips and elbows, not for the next hour.
     That’s the time you spent sitting, while the afternoon morphed into night, bringing a change in colors—darker shades, imperceptibly soothing. Then you stood up. You boarded the next bus. You went home.
     What happened in those sixty minutes? You guessed it but you couldn’t name it. Of course you recognized it. It wasn’t the first time. You knew it wasn't yours—by the intensity, so thick it almost detached itself. As when you paint over something in too many layers: there’s a point when the medium doesn’t adhere to the surface… it takes a life of its own. Or when you insist with crayons until you pierce the paper. Again, the surface gives in to the medium’s overwhelming presence.
     Now you were the surface and that thing imposed on you, pushed you like a hand against your throat, but it came lose somehow—alien, extraneous. “It’s not mine, take it away,” you murmured quietly. No one heard you. You looked like anybody, Cassandra: plain, neutral. And the thing passed, leaving no trace behind.
     That night at the dinner table you learned grandma had died. Thousands of miles away, while you sat on stone, unaware: those things require perfect ignorance or they can’t be. Slowly you let her agony leak through your cells, in a rated version of course. An echo, a reflection—that is normal.
     Still she reached you. She got you off the bus. She sat you as for a sacred function, a wake. You were named after her though you didn’t especially love her. You had seen little of her, didn’t have any particular bond.  
     None of it counts, Sandra, in this kind of geometry. You should have known by then. Your tastes aren’t the point. It’s not love traveling through the ether, scattering time and space, winning over gravity and matter. Not the love we believe we feel.
      You were her namesake, she chose you. She nailed you to the wall: white, like the grave she was about to rejoin. If you’d wish for me to tell you what for —what she had to pass down—I can. But there is no need, sweetie. You will find out.
      There will be other deaths, Cassandra. Always far away, at a distance. You will lose your mind and start turning in circles like a caged animal. You’ll pretend not to know what’s going on until you’ll be tired of pretending. You will learn how to stop your frenzy sooner than later, sit and breathe, whisper your mantra: “take it away, let it pass”.
       A bit later the phone will ring. A week later the mail will reach you and you’ll check the date, the hour, the minute, to discover the unfailing coincidence.
       You will wonder about what they’ll want, those random deceased of yours. Not the dearest, not the closest… love isn’t the deal, we said.
       You will find out, no worry.
       How you’ll miss it, when there’ll be no more virtual agonies left, no more calls from the trespassing zone. Then the real gloom will begin.

     Of course this isn’t all. There are words, written, spoken. There are objects: the scariest.
     Those earrings you stole, for example, then you never wore. You were traveling by bus (once again), on your own. You traversed the Black Forest, exploring the wild life, the rapacious birds you so liked. Falcons. Hawks. Eagles. Dark. Large. Larger. Tall trees, castles. Medieval towns. Mighty mountains.
     At one stop, an Alpine resort, you ambled through the gift shop while waiting for the bus to refuel. You saw those plastic trinkets among edelweiss and beer steins: a pair of cheap ear-clips, a small man and a woman, climbing. Smiling. Happy. You took them in your hand and started looking for a clerk who was nowhere in sight. Now the bus was boarding. Nervously you gazed around, then you closed your fist.
     But you never wore them. You didn’t know why you picked them in the first place. They fit neither your age nor your style. You just couldn’t let go. You stored them in the safest pocket of your wallet. You looked at them daily—they were company. They grounded you, so to speak, though they were gaily climbing, one foot in the air…
     One day you were climbing as well. His stairs. Some stairs, leading to one of the apartments where he nomadically abided. Where you went to meet him, nomadically following his path. Unhappy as unhappy can be. Younger than he was. Way more stupid, too. Forgive me, Cassandra.
     Unhappy for you were in love and couldn’t help it, while he wasn’t and never would—in your dumbness you understood that much. Still you climbed those and many other stairs, to join him when he so wished, to gather whatever crumbs he had spared you.
     And you called it love, so let me repeat: there’s a fundamental confusion you need to clarify. Yes, love is involved in what tripped you on those steps. But another quality of it, can’t you see?
     You were going up the wooden stairs—so typical of our capital town, the ancient matrix, playing lives on its grid—when your eyes caught them and you stopped, petrified. Your earrings! Another step and you’d trample them. You got mad at yourself: can’t you look after things you care for? Why don’t you keep them safe? You bring them along with no reason. Then you drop, lose, destroy them.
     Contrite, careful, you bent to rescue your toys. Too late, the girl’s foot was broken. The left one—strange, you had fractured yours many times. It was your Achilles’ tendon, your weakness.  You were dumbstruck for a second... then you opened your purse to hide your treasure, broken and all. And you stopped dead, again. Your earrings were in the pocket. These you found were doubles: a mock pair, an echo, a reflection.
     No, they weren’t sold in each supermarket of town, you were sure. You had seen a pair only, in a very remote tiny village. They had struck you because of their idiosyncrasy, their uniqueness.
     Now they had produced aliases, with a mutation—an injured foot, yours. They had come closer—kachinas, voodoo dolls. Your blood slowed down, staggering through your veins. You were suddenly afraid to climb and ring at his door, for the girl was injured while the boy... what could it possibly mean?
     You tell me, Cassandra.
     Other things will multiply, split, appear, disappear. You’ll get used to it. Let it pass. Do not talk about it, no need. For you look like anyone else: plain, neutral. Sometimes a bit lost.

© 2017 Toti O'Brien

Toti O'Brien is the Italian Accordionis­t with the Irish Last name. When she’s n­ot at the squeezebox she spins stories a­cross a language or two. She lives in th­e City of Angels, in a miniature house b­y an oversized grapefruit tree. You’ll f­ind some of her jam recipes at www.totihan.n­et/index.html

National Women's Month: Julia Stein's essay "Margaret Atwood is the Leading Novelist in North America"

      The more I read Margaret Atwood, the more I think she’s North America’s leading novelist. Her early novels of the 1960s and 1970s established a feminist voice critical of her contemporary society in Canada.  Her first novel The Edible Woman describes a heroine, getting engaged to a male who believes in traditional gender roles, loses her appetite and her identity. In her next novel Surfacing the heroine, unable to conform to traditional women’s roles, has a nervous breakdown similar to Sylvia Plath’s heroine’s breakdown in her novel The Bell Jar but Canadian.
     During the 1980s Atwood wrote her breakout novel The Handmaid’s Tale when in the U.S. the Reagan government and the rising Christian fundamentalist attacked abortion and women’s rights. The novel is set not in Canada but in the United States, where a Christian theocratic dictatorship has taken over the country and renamed it Gilead, while Canada is the place her oppressed characters hope to escape to. The Handmaid’s Tale’s heroine is Ofred, whose job is to be the breeder producing children for the Commander, a high political figure married to a woman who can’t get pregnant.  The characters take part in sexual intrigue and rebellion as Ofred starts an affair with the chauffeur who is in a rebel group Mayday. The Handmaid’s Tale was a double breakthrough for Atwood.  The novel was widely adapted in a film, an opera, radio plays in England and Canada, and stage plays in England and the U.S., and a ballet etc helping Atwood gain an international audience.
Also Atwood left the realism of her earlier novels for an alternative future in The Handmaid’s Tale, which won the Arthur C. Clark Award for Best Science Fiction. Atwood has argued that her non-realistic novels aren’t science fiction but speculative fiction. Whatever the label, in  the U.S. and Canada after World War II women in increasing numbers created science fiction including feminist science fiction of the 1960-1980s with such well-known writers as Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, and Octavia Butler. Many like Atwood also created novels with utopias of gender equality or dystopias that critiqued North American society.
     A second breakthrough book Atwood wrote is The Blind Assassin which won the prestigious British Man Booker Prize in 2000 where she looks historically at Canadian women, society, and pulp science fiction. In this novel Atwood intertwines three stories.  . Iris tells of her life as an eighty-year old as well as a second story realistic story of the rise and decline of her family’s button factory in Ontario early in the first half 20th century.  Iris and her sister Laura, who come of age during the 1930s when the factory loses more and more money, both fall in love with Alex Thomas, rebel organizer of the union at their father’s factory and a writer of pulp science fiction. Iris describes how she accepts being sold off in marriage to a wealthier manufacturer to save the failing factory and how Laura writes a novel and then kills herself when quite young.
     This realistic story of the family and its factory is frequently interrupted by a tale of two lovers where the man spins out to his woman lover a speculative fiction story “The Blind Assassin”—supposedly Laura’s novel.  At the end Iris confesses she’s lied about who the author of “The Blind Assassin” is, lied about her marriage, and lied in her family/historical tale. Atwood has written a postmodernist tale looking at who tells the story, who lies when telling the story, and what difference the lies make.
     Atwood’s trilogy MaddAddam continues speculative fictions having thriller or adventure plots with sexual in intrigue where a small rebel groups trying to overthrow the power structure. Starting in Oryx and Crake published in 2003 and continuing in the next two novels of the MaddAddam Trilogy, Atwood creates an alternate 21s century world where large corporations have compounds for their wealthy scientists/executive employees and their families to live in while most of the population live in the wild untamed slums called Plebelands.  Oryx’s and Crake’s main character Snowman tells two stories:  the first story is his struggle to survive after the epidemic that kills most humans in the world and his friendship with the Crackers, a humanoid species his corporate scientist friend Crake invented and Oryx, the woman he loved, taught..  Snowman describes his problems in inventing a scripture about Crack and Oryx for the curious Crackers.  The second story Snowman’s tale intertwines with the first is of his actual friendship with Crake from childhood growing up in a corporate compound to being with him in another compound while Crake concocts the epidemic and the Crakers. Though the tale might seem dark, it enchants with Snowman attacked by huge pigs, an unusual sex life the gentle Crakers, and Snowman’s comic problems of inventing new religious Scripture.
    In the MaddAddam trilogy Atwood’s scientists create inventions just to increase corporate profits though they play havoc on a patients’ health or those like Crake play God with human lives. Atwood, whose father was an entomologist, says many of the scientific inventions she describes in Oryx and Crake and the subsequent two novels could easily occur in our world. Her speculative fictions are a critique of 21st century post-industrial society.  In her novels corporate scientists do gene splicing to create new species such as crossing genes between humans and pigs to create pigoons:   big, super smart pigs. Scientists in 2017 just created the same kind of gene splicing between pigs and humans, but Atwood would ask, “Is this invention needed?”
    The 2nd volume and 3rd volumes of Atwood’s trilogy deal with rebel groups dedicated to protecting the environment and people from corporate mayhem.   In the 2nd volume The Year of the Flood the heroine Toby, who is raped by her boss in a fast food job, finds refugee in God’s Gardeners, a peaceful ecological group who live in the plebeland and cultivate gardens on rooftops. In the 3rd volume MaddAddam takes place after the epidemic where Toby has survived and joins up with her friends in MaddAddam, a militant group led by Zeb that split off from God’s Gardeners.
     In the third novel Toby seems to tell two stories:  first she tells of a small group of MaddAddams people struggling after the epidemic.  She interrupts this story to tell of her lover Zeb’s adventures during his decades of rebellion. MaddAddam has a great love story between Toby and Zeb as well as a plot with cross-species friendships.  The MaddAddam people befriend the Crackers with Toby teaching a Cracker child to read who at the end seems to be writing the story/history. This 3rd novel asks a question:   is this 3rd novel a human story told by Toby or a post-human story told by a Craker? The Crakers are friends with the pigoons, the huge pigs. At one point Zeb leads his troops—humans, Crackers, and pigoons-- into battle where Atwood bends the adventure plot to look at how humans, humanoids, and pigoons after catastrophe start anew. Three human women even participate in Craker group sex getting pregnant.  The creation of new lives and new scriptures is strangely cheerful and hopeful.
     Atwood’s later big novels are like major 19th century novelists Dickens or Tolstoy. She writes compelling characters caught up in exciting plots that also look critically at their society and their history. Like both Dickens and Tolstoy she looks at how the huge inequality in society as crucial to the characters’ lives. Many of her heroes or heroines are orphans like Dickens’ main characters who have to make their way in a cruel world. Not content at looking at the future, Margaret Atwood, who as a child grew up loving to read myths, has created two recent novels rewriting of myths from the past. Her novel Penelopiad rewrites Penelope story in the Odyssey where Penelope’s maids are the heroines and not Penelope.     Penelope helps the male aristocrats butcher the maids-- again Atwood stands up for the underdog in rewriting of Penelope. Her latest novel Hag Seed is a retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest but In Atwood’s rewriting her Prospero character, a Duke who was overthrown and thrown out his realm, needs to be set free of his rage and wish for vengeance as well as learn humility.  Whether creating alternative futures or helping us to rethink past myths, Atwood has been writing some of the most innovative and exciting novels in North America.


© 2017 copyright Julia Stein




Julia Stein’s has written five books of poems, edited two books of poetry, and is also co-author of the prose work Shooting Women:  Behind the Camera, Around the World (Intellect Press, 2015). she has been an arts journalist and literary critic for years.