Glyphs

Also by Martina Reisz Newberry from Deerbrook Editions

Learning by Rote Where It Goes

Never Completely Awake

Blues for French Roast with Chociry

published by

Deerbrook Editions

P.O. Box 542

Cumberland, ME 04021

www.deerbrookeditions.com

digital catalogue: www.issuu.com/deerbrookeditions

first edition

© 2022 by Martina Reisz Newberry

ISBN: 978-1-7368477-6-3

Book design by Jeffrey Haste

As always and in all ways for Brian and for Jeffrey Haste and for Pat Bywater, and for Larry Kramer, and for Madikwe Game Reserve, South Africa

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.

—Edith Wharton

. . . 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 rages 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. Let’s sing together our apologetic apostasies, allow our faces to supplant the landscape.

Chorus

Watch for the tint of rain-weathered skies, blue/gray clouds. Doubtless, they’ll watch for you. Make yourself ready for the rush when both will meet and hand your observation to you in wanton sheets of wet.

Dig your toes into the damp earth,

wait to be kissed by gray weather, wind that whistles, whips your hair, forbids you to rest or sing or count your coins.

Tired… same questions, their answers, worn and dragged under foot. Rain voice says straighten up and you will—you do as it says.

You know that rain with its discomforts and untimely absurdities and such, is all that’s left that will not lie

Meaning Of Magic

I ought to learn more about omens and portents. There are those who live by them, in the center of them, every decision designed in the light of dire actions.

There is so much to memorize if I desire immortality: Never toast anyone with water unless you want them to die; never stick your chopsticks straight up which looks like incense sticks at a funeral; never whistle indoors which summons death and demonic spirits; never put your shoes on a table— it symbolizes the death of a loved one; never cut your nails at night— it causes premature death as does seeing a crow, sleeping in a room with a fan running, walking under a ladder, or inviting an owl into your home (well, an owl being there with or without an invitation).

We demand life, see it as our right and, still, some wrap their existence in the sorcery of signs and superstitions.

In the mysteries of flesh, the magic that is the body, we entertain a terrible, insatiable hunger to control and direct every envelopment, every emanation.

In the end, we claim to love and respect divine superintendence, that very omnipresence which makes magic meaningless, gift-wraps us, presents us to the unknown.

Orphanage

The cold links of these chains you wear constrain your memories from freely airing their complaints.

Origins: Who is that woman pushing poppyseed through the hand grinder?

Sad she is, incapable of sharing such a sensuous experience. Who is that man, sold early into slavery, but sweetly surrendering

to it all his life? That orphanage from which you emerged—after World War II, and after Korea, and “I Love Lucy,” and Soupy Sales,* and long after childhood’s life span—where is it now, who lives there now? You need someone new in the rawness of this naked life. A mother, a sister, maybe a lover, to show you that all that is good on this earth can be had. Come here. I’ll hold you in this wilderness.

*Soupy Sales hosted a children’s show out of Cleveland, Ohio in 1951

The Glyphs In The Canyons

I’ve forgotten those times between wakefulness and dozing and sleep. I know something happened, but I can’t recall what it was. It’s like trying to recall where I was just before I was born.

My friend tells me that this is the reason I should never fear death. She says, “You don’t know where you were before you were born, so why fret about where you’ll be after you die?” This is wisdom I can

acknowledge, but from which I glean no comfort and it is comfort

I want more than nearly any thing. I want the great eyes of god to turn my tears to opals and the great tongue of god to tell me that

life and death are the same--that I will keep loving and making love, and walking and humming, and wanting and holding, and will never lose my appetite for joy or for potato chips and onion dip and ice cream.

Between wakefulness and dozing and sleeping, what is there to know?

Who do I serve awake/asleep?

Who do I honor when I doze?

And why is wakefulness the stain on all this embalmed paradise?

A well-known someone once wrote a poem for me. To my delight, it showed up in a literary journal of some repute and then in an actual book.

My initials were there, right under the title and following the word for. I was delighted that this fine poet had discovered words meant especially for me

and I hadn’t even slept with him or chatted him up flirtatiously. My friends, I ask you to imagine it: a poem for me who ground away at her own poems—hustling

the hell out of every line, always afraid that my lack of credentials would become oh-so-apparent in my ignorance of literary intricacies. I must tell you:

that poem didn’t care one bit about my lack of formal education. It mentioned beauty and had an understanding inside it that claimed the right to know what beauty is

and what it is worth. “It doesn’t matter that you aren’t beautiful,” my father said. “It matters whether or not you are smart.” He, too, had discovered words just for me.

This all happened years ago. The poem with my initials happened 35 years ago. When I remember or dream, I forget which, it is those initials I see: for _______. Those initials are what I believe.

Home Town

There is a town too far from here, (too far from there), that I can’t even pass through it. Sadness and trepidation hangs over it like a century-old quilt. It is always late afternoon there and the atmosphere is the color of vanilla custard, carries the taste of tin. That town was my bewildering beginning, the village of my young wifehood— steel mills and strikes, dreamed-up romances, dateless weekend evenings, eulogies over the telephone wires talking of this one or that one who ran away or died. I swear to you, there were days in that town when I didn’t want to open my eyes—when waking up was an act of supreme optimism and warrior courage. The sagging porches of our best-kept secrets were at the front of too many houses, disenchantment reigned. I look straight ahead at the highway when we speed past that town. I will not look at that town until we get to its Hallowfield Cemetery where I turn my head to see the gisants* nodding their granite heads.

*Gisants: sculpted figures on a tomb, usually with arms crossed over their chests.

Into The Skid for Alexis Rhone Fancher

The year I lost my virginity, Marilyn Monroe took her own life.

She’d had it. She didn’t want it anymore.

She didn’t care about John Glenn orbiting the earth. She’d orbited

the earth lots of times with champagne and Nembutal

waltzing elegantly in her magical body. I cared about orbiting the earth

and figured losing my virginity would be about the same thing.

We’d been to see “West Side Story” and our shared grief at Tony’s demise

and Maria’s devastation took us to the Los Cochinos Motel (Hourly, Daily, Monthly Rates–Free T.V!).

There, in the aluminum light of Gunsmoke’s dusty tribulations, I unbuttoned my blouse, he unbuttoned his jeans, I unzipped my skirt, he took off his socks, I dug in my purse for a mint, he dug in his pocket for a condom.

Stripping, I thought, surely doesn’t take long.

The Beatles were on the radio, sang “Love Me Do,” and that’s

what I was thinking as he tried to figure out where to touch me

to unleash my passion. My passion seemed to want to stay leashed.

The progression from there is everyone’s story:

the French Kiss, the hard, close embrace, the tweaking and the tracing–

that unskilled first dance that everyone knows.

It took 12 minutes; I counted them, peering somewhat unsteadily

at my Timex watch–a graduation gift from my parents. It kept good time.

I must confess, I was unimpressed. He said, You’ll get to like it the more we do it.

When I told my roommate about it, she said the whole sex thing was an orchestrated hoax, laid on women to keep them encumbered and enslaved.

She said that, during our lifetimes, there might be a few encounters that would

produce momentary ecstasy, but, to stay sane, I shouldn’t depend on that

The night we went to see “Dr. No,” he started to drive in to Los Cochinos again.

I protested. I said, not this time. He said, The more we do it, the better you’ll like it.

“We?” I thought, “Meaning you and me? “We?” I thought, and dropped him like a hot rock.

Life is contorted and busy, busier than eddies or winged insects, busier than congested sidewalks at noon.

The Word, they say, is father to the body.

Then, who fathered the Word(s)

which lay like hand-sewn quilts of snow

(and other fragments of the sky) over earth and ruins of earth?

Suspicious of everything, my fears stay between me, Jesus, and the jelly jar which makes them no less alive and breathing than if I screamed them into the atmosphere.

I park those fears in deserted parking lots, old newspapers blowing up against them, ticket stubs scattered evenly over the entire expanse, dry grass poking through cracks in the asphalt.

I learned fear at Mother’s bedside— no, not her bedside—the last block coming home from school, the silence of the house, then her bedside.

Afraid that she would never get up; afraid that I would have to be more than daughter, a caretaker for a woman whose sadness would never let her out of bed;

afraid that she would stay in bed through a fire or a flood or even through the nuclear blast that was coming; afraid that my father was too weak to take care of me or maybe just didn’t want to.

Now, I am suspicious of everything but keep that to myself,

although I have just told you and the attendant at the little shack in the parking lot.

Aria (Basso Profundo)

The groundsman meditates and works on mathematical formulas in his shed when he isn’t raking leaves or cutting the academic grasses of the university from which he graduated with honors and with a Masters Degree in Physics. His radio is on a station that plays

classical music, operas. His face is stoic, almost angry, and, on breaks from his damp, green duties, he takes off his shirt and exercises or lounges in the sun (wearing only his camouflage dungarees and work boots), where students and secretaries and department heads can see and wonder at him.

I think he appreciates—invites— wonder, but not women; he doesn’t return their smiles and appreciative glances.

I imagine that, in his own home, the groundsman does his calculations by candle or lantern light, has soup every night for dinner, and sleeps on a cot with a scratchy blanket from the Army/Navy surplus store. I have wondered if he could lift heavy objects with his mind.

Once, in a thunderstorm, lightning struck his pruning shears and he was knocked flat. When the ambulance got there, he was already on his feet, retrieving the shears, walking with great determination to his shed. From then on, his lip had a curl to it that was almost a smile. We like to say that gratitude for being alive gave him that smile, but everyone knows it was just the lightning, nothing else.

The Most Beautiful Suicide

Evelyn McHale, May 1, 1947

86 floors up, the view from the Empire State Building Observation Deck shows a Legoland city. Brick atop brick. Brick atop brick, concrete blocks wedged and plastered together–miles of it–and there you have the city,

the cold, hard city, where Evelyn McHale breathed her last. Clouds are not much cushion for meteors or for determined jumpers.

A determined jumper, she dismissed her fiance’s proposal, wracked her brain for reasons, came to the dark conclusion that she was not,

(a dark conclusion indeed), good wife material. Evelyn left a short note saying no one should see her body. (Women! said one cop,

after seeing her body. Always worrying about their looks.) Of course she was, we always are; never wishing our realness,

the realness of our naked faces, on anyone. Evelyn left her small brown makeup kit at the site of her jump, ever mindful that the site of her jump was windy, mindful of what stiff breezes and tears can do to mascara and lipstick. Her own mother,

her own sad, quirky mother, had left them all–father, brothers and sisters, and her.

“Mental illness,” is what they said was the reason

and, after hearing “mental illness, she kept

close watch on her own thoughts. Women often suspected, were treated (were secluded and treated) as if they were crazy: shyness, worry, anger, fear, menopause, Empty Nest Syndrome, insomnia,

and insomnia-driven exhaustion–all of it went under the umbrella of female hysteria, the weak mindedness of women.

Perhaps, Evelyn thought, she was weak-minded. That was too sad to think about, but maybe… Evelyn might have been unclear about some things, unclear about many things, but she knew what was said about her mother and sure as hell didn’t want it said about her,

didn’t want it said about what she was about to do. She wrote that she had too many of [her] mother’s tendencies. To avoid that, she jumped.

Jumped, first folded her good gray coat over the railing next to her makeup bag–then landed on a parked limousine, makeup and clothes intact.

*American bookkeeper who took her own life by jumping from the 86th floor Observation Deck of the Empire State Building on May 1,1947.

See: http://www.atchuup.com/the-most-beautiful-suicide-picture-of-evelynmchale/

Cartography 101

When I turned the lined page in my notebook, I realized that this blank paper is for you, for me to call attention to your maps and models and musings so vital to me

that, without them, without you, this spinning sphere would slow, falter, stop completely,

and I would fall off it to become part of a bits-and-pieces universe.

Dark Feast

A banquet: hot dishes of disappointment, cold desserts of rage and revenge.

Where shall we eat this dark feast? Forked lightning, small flat stones, shards from broken mirrors— these are utensils.

We can only feed ourselves, you know. There are no “take home” receptacles to refrigerate, to pack up later in brown bags to feed the hungry and homeless.

Sunset shows us bruised clouds and a bleeding atmosphere, untrustworthy signs that there will be a tomorrow.

Acknowledgements

“Small Spring On The Property,” Beautiful Losers 9/2017

“For Sandro Nocentini’s ‘Women Waiting’,” “Street Scene,”

“Toward the End,” “Bar Room Kiss,” Long Exposure Magazine, 2018

“Starlings,” “Reading the Los Angeles Times With Sadie,” Everything,” and “Magdalene’s Villanelle,” Shrew Magazine, 2018

“Ghazal,” Inverted Syntax, 2018

“Morning on the Ugly Pond,” “Sadie Sings to Her City,” Cenacle 108, 2019

“Green Things,” Sisyphus 2019

“Birthday,” “Getting Ready,” Poesis Magazine 2019

“The Meaning of Magic,” Red Fez, March 2019

“Aria,” Courtship of Winds 2019

“Secrets,” Open Art Forum, 2019

“We’re Not Going To Talk About the Wind,” Sincerely Magazine, Vol. 8, 2019

“That Hour, Seeing,” Seattle Star, 1/27/19, 4/4/2019

“Orphanage” and “Home Town,” The Cenacle, #107, June 2019

“Air Travel,” “Residency,” Courtship of Winds, 12/2020

“Initialed,” The Big Windows Review, #16, July 2019 (nominated for a Pushcart Prize)

“Cartography 101,” Futures Trading, September, 2019

“Recedes Into Failed Light,” Roanoak Review, 2020

“Dark Feast,” Words for the Wild, May 2020

“Chorus,” The Wax Paper, February 2020

“Into the Skid,” South Broadway Ghost Society, March 2020

“Sadie and the Sea,” and “Phases of the Moon,”Redshift Magazine, May 2020

“The Most Beautiful Suicide,” The Cenacle, June 2020

“Gibbous Moon,” Carcinogenic Poetry, 8/4/202

“Deference,” Pioneertown, 8/2020

“Air Travel,” “Residency,” Courtship of Winds, 12/202

“Weekend,” Woolgathering Review, Issue II, 20219

“On the Anniversary of Marianne’s Death,” Abramelin, 2021

About the Author

Martina Reisz Newberry is the author of five previous collections of poems. She has been widely published in literary magazines and anthologies in the U.S. and abroad and has been awarded residencies at Yaddo Colony for the Arts in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., Djerassi Colony for the Arts in Woodside, CA, and Anderson Center for Disciplinary Arts at Red Wing, MN.

Passionately devoted to her city, Los Angeles, she currently lives there with her husband, Brian Newberry, a Media Creative.