Women's History Month: Lise Quintana's "La Bombachadora"

La Bombachadora

(an opera treatment)

ACT ONE:

Scene one: a house where a couple are to be married
In one room, a group of girls are gathered around the bride admiring her trousseau, especially the fine undergarments. The bride says that she's invited Gala, the maker of the fine underthings, to the wedding. All the ladies praise her handiwork. In the meantime, in another room, a group of men surround the groom. One of the men, Don Comadreja de Pantalones, is particularly loud in his sympathy for the groom. He toasts the end of the groom's happiness, expresses sorrow for the ball and chain the man is about to adopt, and then expresses his own happiness because this means more ladies for him!

Scene two: the wedding ball
Don de Pantalones spies Gala and is immediately taken with her. He assumes that since she is at the wedding of a very important gentleman, she must be a noble lady. He dances with her, telling her that she is beautiful and charming and that he would like to meet her family and ask for her hand. She finds him handsome and gallant, but is worried that if he finds out that she's a simple seamstress, he won't love her anymore. She puts him off, but he tells her that he will woo her until the end of his days.

Scene three: a street in Madrid with a high wall
Don de Pantalones is walking along the street on his way to his club for lunch. On the other side of the wall there is a marketplace with many stalls and sellers. There is a lady selling oranges, one selling flowers, and Gala, calling to the passersby to come and see the fruits of her handiwork — her underpants. Don de Pantalones hears the woman exhorting passersby to see her underpants and is enticed. He decides that while Gala may be the woman of his future, this mysterious underpants exhibitionist is the woman of his present. He rushes into the market but the rushing throng of people serve to hide Gala from him. By the time he comes to the place where she had been, she's sold out of her finery and gone home. He becomes obsessed with this woman who will show people her underpants and vows to find her.

ACT TWO:

Scene one: Gala's house/Don de Pantalones’ house
Gala opens another of many letters from Don de Pantalones declaring his love for her. She is deeply touched and wonders when she ought to tell him that she's only a seamstress. There is to be a large costume party in a week's time, and she will tell him on the night of the party that although he is a rich and powerful man and she is only a seamstress, still her heart is pure and she loves him truly. She believes that the magic of the evening (and a particularly ravishing Bo Peep costume) will win his heart. Meanwhile, Don de Pantalones employs his friend Ricardo to find the underpants exhibitionist. He tells Ricardo only that there is a woman offering herself to passersby in Calle Colchones near the marketplace. He exhorts Ricardo to find this woman and bring her to him.

Scene two: Gala's house
Unbeknownst to Don de Pantalones, Ricardo is a cousin of Gala and goes to the girl, telling her of the Don's wishes. Gala is distraught. She is humiliated and angry and decides to expose Don de Pantalones for the philandering wolf that he is. She plots with Ricardo to expose the Don at the costume party. Ricardo is to find the wanton woman and bring her to the party, and tell the Don that she is there. When the Don meets up with her, Gala will expose him to all their friends.

Scene three: the costume ball
Gala looks ravishing as Bo Peep in a costume with a huge hoop skirt. Don de Pantalones has come separately as a sheep with a little bell around his neck. Ricardo corners Gala and tells her there is a problem - he hasn't been able to find the woman. Gala decides that the next best thing to do is to trick him into thinking that she is the mystery woman. She whispers her plan to Ricardo who goes off to find Don de Pantalones.

The group is gathered to play sardines. The host briefly explains the rules - one person hides and everyone looks for them. When the hider is found, the finder must squeeze into the hiding place as well. The last person to find the hider is the first to hide for the next game. And Gala is chosen as the hider! She hides herself in a potting shed while Ricardo tells Don de Pantalones that he has found the woman, who has dressed as Bo Peep. He leads the Don to the potting shed, then goes off to tell the rest of the company what a rat the Don is, and how he's promised marriage to one woman while chasing another. Meanwhile, in the dark of the shed, the Don asks the lady if he might see her underpants. Gala thinks that the Don has found out her secret and breaks down weeping, confessing all. The Don realizes that the underpants woman is his Gala and swears to love her all the more. When Ricardo throws open the potting shed for all to see, the two are embracing and kissing and swearing eternal love. As the curtain falls, Gala intimates that if he's lucky, he just might get to see her underpants later.

(c) 2019 Lise Quintana

Lise Quintana’s work can be found in SLAB, Red Fez, Drunk Monkeys, Instant Magazine, The Rambler, and Role Reboot, among others. She currently heads Zoetic Press, which produces the journal NonBinary Review and the Viable chapbook series. She is the former editor in chief of Lunch Ticket, the literary journal of Antioch University Los Angeles’s MFA program. She is active with the Bay Area Book Festival, Litquake, and National Novel Writing Month and dreams of one day taking live chickens on public transportation.

Quintana’s blog: https://junglemonkey.com/

The Zoetic Press site: http://www.zoeticpress.com

Women's History Month: Jan Steckel's "Tortilla Jesus"

Tortilla Jesus*

I see Jesus in a Cheeto,
a pierogi, a frying pan, an ashtray,
shower mold, a grease stain,
a paper towel like the Shroud of Turin.

I see the Virgin Mary
in agate, marble, glass and sheet metal,
in a rotting grape, a redwood burl,
a grilled cheese sandwich, a lava lamp.

I see Buddha in a beehive,
Mother Teresa in a cinnamon bun.
Satan in a potato chip.
I see love in your eyes.


*After reading Look! It’s Jesus: Amazing Holy Visions in Everyday Life, (Chronicle Books, 2010) by Harry and Sandra Choron


Jan Steckel is a former pediatrician who stopped practicing medicine because of chronic pain. Her latest poetry book is Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist Press, December 2018). Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, New Verse News, November 3 Club, Assaracus and elsewhere. Her work was nominated three times each for the Pushcart and Sundress Best of the Net anthologies, won the Goodreads Poetry Contest three times, and won various other awards. She lives in Oakland, California.

Women's History Month: BC Petrakos' "My Generation, Today"

I have seen the best women of my generation

used, bruised and tossed to the side

leaving them

crying, trying and whining 

like they have no power

I have seen them stand in the streets

in the face of "The Man"

waiting for nothing

wanting for nothing

sorry and ungrateful for 

the times that they live in

blind to the power they have in their hands

power their mothers could not imagine

they stride and they scream

becoming worse bullies

the same bullies

the exact same bullies

they always hid behind lipstick

I have seen it in all its all 

I hoped we were better than this

but we are not

False accusations fly

drinking the news

as if it were wine at a meal

being used to take apart 

the things that ARE GOOD

and things ARE Good

better than generations before

I have seen the best women of my generation

sick with identity politics

instead of well 

with the options available

instead of clear minded wisdom

that by nature is ours

Like fish in a barrel

like rats off a cliff

like a chorus of haters they hate 

oh so much

being deceived that the louder

the fury 

the more righteous

the theme

I have seen the beauty that was ours

degraded by our own rage

twisted faces shouting in constant 

drone..

its just the beginning

I have seen this before

This is how populations are manipulated

We are being used like puppets

 used like paper towels

to absorb the poison

and then

and then

at the end of the day

they 

the BILLION DOLLAR 1%

WILL toss us away

© 2019 BC Petrakos

BC Petrakos (Bren Petrakos), has written tons of stuff, been lucky to have had a few stories, plays, poems published; she has done shows in lots of fine places including London, Berlin, Edinburgh, Stockholm, and many beatific places in California. She has been nominated for Pushcart Prize, Best of The Web, won a few prizes for writing plays, and publishes poets and writers as an editor at International Word Bank.

Women's History Month: Cynthia Linville's "The Library, Albuquerque", "Evangeline's, Sacramento", and "Rim Rock Ranch"

"The Library, Albuquerque", © 2019 Cynthia Linville

  "Evangeline's, Sacramento, © 2019 Cynthia Linville

 "Rim Rock Ranch", © 2019 Cynthia Linville

Cynthia Linville’s photographs have appeared in The People's Tribune, The Sacramento News & Review, Capital Public Radio's website, Cracker (band) Official Facebook page, WTF, and Medusa's Kitchen, and her two books of collected poems, The Lost Thing and Out of Reach, are available from Cold River Press. Linville’s photography and poetry cross-pollinate, creating some strong poem-picture pairings she hopes to publish in a collection. Visit her website at CynthiaLinville.com.

Women's History Month: Diana Rosen's "Blueprint for Beauty"

BLUEPRINT FOR BEAUTY

She is twenty, 

has two babies, and a divorce from a man

she loves but cannot live with his "mental

un-health." Translation: fists, frightening

the girls, forbidding her to accept a full

scholarship for a chemistry degree. 

The good news:

her mom agrees to take care of the kids 

when she finds work at a doctor’s office 

where he (it was always a he back then)

takes her under his wing and under

the desk for his daily satisfaction. 

He instructs her to be blond, chisel

the Roman nose, risk it sniffing white

powder. Recognizing her manual dexterity,

he teaches her his skills to freshen faces 

for the screen, brighten hope for the newly-

discarded with too much money and too little to do.  

Now she is forty, 

submits to his needles even when it

does not sustain his desire. Her girls, 

bitter about their perceived abandonment, 

appreciate her home-made tiramisu,

the occasional, only occasional, check.

They’re in awe of her continued faith 

in The Church, that she’s avoided laws

governing her un-certified (though well-

trained) skills for those “little somethings”

supervised by cosmetic surgeons for patients

not yet ready for their full menu of services.

Now she is sixty, 

off to the Zumba class, her five-inch-high

red-soled Louboutins click on the sidewalk; 

her colorful tights shape her size two frame; 

her still mostly blond hair frames her wrinkle-less 

face, prick marks painted over with creamy

(imported) make-up.  The doctor? He died,

leaving the wife everything but her pride,

leaving our heroine as deep in denial 

as she was forty years ago. No, there never

was anyone else.  I had to keep my job, for the girls,

for our livelihood. I didn’t know what else to do.

© 2019 Diana Rosen

Previously published, in print and online, by Voice of Eve

DIANA ROSEN is a nonfiction book author, essayist, poet, and flash fiction writer with credits in print and online in journals and anthologies including two upcoming books: “Far Villages,” from Black Lawrence Press which includes her essay on the poet and the process,  and “Love & Irony, tiny stories in poetry and prose” from Redbird Chapbooks. Among her journal credits are poeticdiversity, RATTLE, Tiferet Journal, and Dime Show Review. She lives and writes in Los Angeles where she is a veteran docent for the city’s Central Library. To contact her, write dianalrosen@gmail.com 

Sheila E. Murphy's "Reporting Live From You Know Where"

My introduction to political poetry came with the Poets Against the War movement, back in 2001, within weeks of 911.

Since then, political poetry has been part of the mainstream, wth many anthologies and collections published every year. Reporting Live From You Know Where, by author and poet, Sheila E. Murphy, is a chapbook length hay(na)ku sequence of poems written after 45 was elected president. Winner of 2018 Hay(nu)ka Book Prize, it spans 65+ pages in a seamless and imagist narrative, but it also goes beyond the polemics required for political poetry.  

Reporting Live is written in the hay(na)ku style (a 21st century poetic form invented by Eileen R. Tabios. It is a six-word tercet with the first line being one word, the second line being two words, and the third line being three words - www.eileenrtabios.com). Murphy’s distilled the vast gulf of rage and chaos that currently divides the United States into a series of powerful, raw micro-moments the reader can immediately relate to, even beyond the political context:

    

look at what

You have

destroyed

forgiveness

was never

the right reflex

Within Reporting Live, Murphy brings to light those issues 45’s base patently ignores: sexual harassment and accountability (you claim inevitability/I should/know, sides/of her/face suspiciously unmatched); 45’s constant assertion of lies as truth (those/ declarations of/what he thinks, spare little old/us from/this, ongoing/figurative aggravated/assault on sensate); the fake news epidemic (loss glossed over/decibels functioning/as, smoothness/for perps/seeking confirmation everywhere); and GOP’s dismantling of democracy (why/are you/here to explain, these inquiring others/seeking just/relief, from/you, your/spontaneous theft swiping, what we have/worked years/for). Murphy’s vision and lyricism are laser focused through the hay(na)ku sequence, which makes Reporting Live a quick read, at first. A second, and then, third reading of Reporting Live will give the reader a deeper appreciation of Murphy’s skill with rousing the reader to empathize with the frustration that she, and the reader, as citizens, experience under 45’s regime.
Beyond the concern and rage expressed, is a clear warning in Reporting Live: to be vigilant against the “new normal, and to hold onto the real real truth of who each of us is, in an era where everyone else is too beaten down to care. This is why, in my opinion, Murphy’s words need to be memorized, as a mantra against the dark:

here i am

aged and

desirous

of

incessant earth

tones deliciously intoned

the only one

I can

hear

said

the conductor

is Sheila Murphy

an epic misunderstanding

my musical

weltanschauung

Reporting Live From You Know Where, Sheila E. Murphy, © 2018 Meritage Press/i.e. press and xPress(ed), 70 pages,  ISBN 978-1-934299-12-8, $12.00 US.

© 2019 marie c lecrivain

(previously published in Issue 40 of Clockwise Cat)

Interview with Judith Skillman, author of "Kafka's Shadow", by Carol Smallwood

      One of the many awards that noted American poet, Judith Skillman has received is from the Academy of American Poets for Storm while Red Town, and Prisoner of the Swifts were Washington State Book Award finalists. Her poems have been included in such journals as Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, FIELD and her collaborative translations in various journals; she’s in Best Indie Verse of New England. Her latest full poetry collection is Kafka’s Shadow. Deerbrook Editions, Cumberland, Maine; 77 pages; $16.95; paperback; 2017. ISBN 978-0-9975051-4-6

https://www.amazon.com/Kafkas-Shadow-Judith-Skillman/dp/0997505141

      

      CS: How did you decide on Franz Kafka for your new poetry collection?

      JS: I read “Metamorphosis” again, and was very taken with it. After a span of thirty years since the last reading, the story took on new dimensions. Then I read “The Stoker,” “The Judgment,” and “Letter to His Father,” as these have been reissued in a new edition titled The Sons (Schocken Books, Inc., 1989). After a visit to San Francisco, I wrote “Kafka’s Wound” and continued to find myself thinking and writing about Kafka. It took awhile before I realized the series might become a collection.

      CS: What are some of the most interesting things about him you discovered?

       JS: I learned that his relationship with his father was extremely complicated, and that helped my understanding of his work. In addition, he suffered greatly from intense sensitivities as well as, of course, the chronic illness of consumption/tuberculosis. His passion to write, his insomnia, and the hours he kept made me feel some identification with him, and I continued to read more of his letters. In this regard the book Franz Kafka: Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors was invaluable (transl. Richard and Clara Winston, Schocken Books, NY, 1977).

      I was surprised to find that Kafka felt such self contempt that he viewed himself as a son who should be sacrificed, as in the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. At the point I learned this I’d written a couple poems on that very subject, and experienced the sense of an encounter with the author, apart from space-time.

      CS: The Notes section in the back of Kafka’s Shadow (3 pages) share some of the scholarship necessary for such an ambitious collection. How long did it take to write the book?

      JS: Kafka’s Shadow took about three years to complete. As mentioned earlier, the book Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors provided inspiration when coupled with his stories and, especially, “Letter to His Father.” The interest and support of my writing groups and colleagues, in particular Christianne Balk, provided impetus to continue.

      CS: When and how did you begin your interest in translations? What classes did you take in languages?

      JS: My interest in translation began when I went to the University of Washington in 1994-95, ostensibly to get a PhD in Comparative Literature. That journey didn’t work out, but in the process I fell in love with the theory and art of translation. I have taken French and lived in Paris for three months—just long enough to become a Francophile.

      CS: You have been nominated for the Pushcart, Best of the Web. Please share how you came to be a poet? What other kinds of writing do you do?

      JS: I began writing in a journal in high school, but even before that, I had an elementary school teacher who taught poetry. And while my parents were both scientific (PhD’s in physics and math), they were also avid readers and lovers of music and all the arts. They took us to plays and concerts. I think the years of voracious reading likely determined my interest in literature.

      I have written fiction and non-fiction as well. A ‘how to’: Broken Lines—The Art & Craft of Poetry is the most serious effort I’ve made so far in non-fiction. There are many projects I would like to pursue, but the reality is one has to pick and choose.

      CS: What poets have influenced you the most?

      JS: There are so many! In particular I like the associative poets, among them Celan, Vallejo, Transtromer, René Char, and Franz Wright. I taught a “Great American Poets” course for several quarters and fell again for Williams, Bishop, Dickinson, Plath, Stevens, Eliot, Pound, et al. I also feel a great affinity for Jack Gilbert’s work.

     Roethke, Beth Bentley, Nelson Bentley, Stafford, Wagoner—all the Northwest poets. Milosz, Levine, Edith Sodergran, Adrienne Rich, Cavafy, Lucille Clifton. Wakoski, and all the beat poets. The thing is to continue reading, knowing one will never plumb the extant canon of virtuoso poetry.

     CS: How do you decide the number of stanzas, length of lines in your poems: what is your progression, steps, in composing?

      JS: Generally a poem begins as a fragment and then gathers steam. There are times when the form pours out with the poem, (a poem pours out fully formed) but those are rare and far between. I like to follow David Wagoner’s advice—take of your censorial hat when you write, let it sit, and then go back to the piece with your editorial hat.

      To write anything at all one must be in a receptive frame of mind, and not add judgments as to whether the would be poem is ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ The formal arrangement can come later. Exceptions abound, however. If you want to write a sonnet, villanelle or other set form, then you have to be intentional: count beats and employ rhyme and/or half rhymes.

      CS: What is your usual writing schedule for the day?

      JS: I don’t adhere to a strict schedule. There are days when I revise, and days when I explore other forms of art, such as painting. Writing requires wide reading as well—it all takes time—so flexibility is key.

      Simply maintaining the body, house, and extended family takes longer as I get older, so there are periods when writing happens only in the mind, with ideas. If that kind of ‘air creativity’ becomes more serious it might take the form of note-taking, marginalia, and/or soft research. When I feel the need to stop what I’m doing and write, I take that seriously.

      CS: Have you begun working on another collection?

      JS: Yes! I have a collection seeking a publisher. It has been a finalist at a few contests. Time will tell. Writing poems includes so many aspects; publishing so many facets. I feel lucky and blessed to be have been given the chance to write.

      Fans can visit her on www.judithskillman.com

© 2017 Carol Smallwood