Martina Reisz Newberry
CHORUS
...because I have been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age the wrong skin...the
wrong need the wrong dream...
-- June Jordan, “Poem About My Rights, 1980"
My new cocktail of choice is Anisette and Anxiety on the rocks;
it constantly fuels and feeds me. While my moral fallibility
goes unpunished, I look for and look after any tender explosion
of thought. I am a calm woman, they say, given to long pauses
and quiet rages (if any at all. Women like me grow hoarse with
apologies. By my 90th birthday, I’ll not be able to vocalize
a single syllable. I want to please as much as I want to be pleased,
want to revere as much as I want to be revered. Sometimes I curse
like a sailor to show I am real; to show I can make my bones
with the best/least of them. Understand that all my apologies
don’t equal one bad deed, but I make them freely, often with very
little conscience to back them. I am bent by all my steam-rolled sins;
a flattened shadow, a cocker spaniel rather than the smart, sleek Doberman
I’ve always wanted to be. Come with me now, ladies of the evening,
ladies of the canyon, ladies of round-table knights. Lets sing together
our apologetic apostasies, allow our faces to supplant the landscape.
Martina Reisz Newberry’s newest collection, Blues For French Roast With Chicory is available from Deerbrook Editions. She is the author of six books. Her work has been widely published in literary magazines and journals in the U.S. and abroad. She lives in her much-beloved city, Los Angeles, with her husband.