The Voices Project - POETRY LIBRARY

A Sadness to Lean On~ By Elijah Frounger

1/21/2021

My Dear friend Sadie,
a sadness to lean on.
She's always there for me when I need to talk,
my dear friend Sadie.
Never late, always on time
no matter the time, no matter the place.
My dear friend Sadie is always there,
my sadness to lean on.

Author Bio:
Elijah is from Oakland CA. His poetry is a reflection of his feelings and life experiences, which is what "Sadie" represents.

The River Otter~ By Holly Day

1/19/2021

The otter sleeps in the river, wrapped
in duckweed and watercress, tiny paws folded
over its chest. I resign myself to stretching out
in the sun-warmed shallows, hands spread out in the water
determined to catch vestiges of the river otter’s dreams.

In fairy tales, this would be the time when the river otter
would wake and swim out to me to speak
of wishes and promises and secret treasures and marriage
emerge a prince from the water, dripping jewels and starlight
instead, tiny, unbidden ripples
spread across the water from where I lay
to where the otter sleeps, don’t, won’t stop

until the animal wakes and swims away.

Author Bio:
Holly Day has been a writing instructor at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis since 2000. Her poetry has recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Grain, and Harvard Review, and her newest poetry collections are Into the Cracks (Golden Antelope Press), Cross Referencing a Book of Summer (Silver Bow Publishing), The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body (Anaphora Literary Press), and Book of Beasts (Weasel Press).

Our Deeds Shall Purpose Either Peace or Strife~ By Walid Boureghda

1/19/2021

A Clare Sonnet

Life’s a battlefield of guns and roses;
One can live or die where hope reposes.

Only love gives after death a rebirth
Like a magic kiss gives a moment of mirth.

Life is just an insignificant tale,
A sea across which we’re condemned to sail.

So many waves playing rash games with us
That we cannot ignore and be bruised thus.

A breezy wind may send us to the shore,
Helping us quiver our wings more and more.

We’re here as stupid actors of a play,
Who like jesting and praising through the bay.

Life lies in death, so does death lie in life;
Our deeds shall purpose either peace or strife.

Written by Walid Boureghda
© All Rights Reserved

Author Bio:
Walid Boureghda is a 41-year-old Algerian poet, working as an Administrative Executive at Sonatrach-ENI Group. He holds a B.A degree in the English Language and Literature from the University of BATNA in Algeria. He draws inspiration for his poetry from his unceasing love of his beloved wife. He also writes about spreading peace over the world and dispelling hatred and bigotry.

Thunderclap Night~ By Danielle Dayney

1/14/2021

Ethereal love races
through electric fingertips.
Satin sound
whispers to the deepest soul parts.
Iridescent lightning
brightens darkened hearts.
All in a single kiss.

Author Bio:
Born and raised in Ohio, Danielle Dayney got her start writing rock concert reviews for a Toledo-based music magazine, THE GLASS EYE. Today, her work has appeared in the FREDERICKSBURG LITERARY AND ART REVIEW, online at HUFFINGTON POST, DEAD HOUSEKEEPING and THE MINDFUL WORD, and in several anthologies. Other than her writing, you can mostly find her chasing her kids and furbabies somewhere in the rolling hills of Virginia, or occasionally online at https://danielledayney.com. Her book is forthcoming from Brandylane Publishers in 2021.

Winter in America~ By Dennis Reed

1/13/2021

My wife sleeping,
as the day opens

blue sky behind the
Venetian blinds

Alexa getting the songs wrong
while I dream

of a response
to books I have written,

but it is the time
of Covid19

everything is desolate
strange

streets are bald
as my neighbor

no one
is going

anywhere
we have points of

destination and departure,
yet no way of getting there

the air has no force,
and we twirl

in the air
unable to use

mouths to tell
child why

there are so many people
dying, in a country

with so many scientific brains,
led by a destructive

devil with bad hair
without a human bone

anywhere.

Author Bio:
Dennis Reed is a native New Yorker, proud father of two wonderful women and the super-grandad of two beautiful children. He is a National Endowment Winner; awards include Eminent Scholar from Norfolk University, Distinguished Teaching Award from Morehouse College, a UNCF Faculty Development Award and a travel study tour at the University of Ghana.

Dennis Reed's work has appeared in ESSENCE, STYLE, BLACK SCHOLAR, CLA, and many other journals.

I Am Old~ By Sharon Lopez Mooney

1/12/2021

I am an old woman
swaggering in the statement,
my meaning changing with each encounter
not by me, but you who stand in your own
notions and assumptions circling age
like dark clouds surrounding sunshine.

We are old
we who have grey, white, and purple hair,
who stoop or hold our bodies in rigid postures
moving along sidewalks and through doorways,
independent, weak, strong, formed, still
birthing new selves, opinionated, open
minded, educated, sheltered, ignorant and hip.

We are old, I tell you
you can never know the meaning years have down
in gut and memory banks, how pain becomes your familiar
because it’s there and tells you so still are you.
Magic of age is camouflaged by skin and bone
by reflex, speech and texture, the internal richness
unavailable to your sight.

I am old
it is easy to see me as a spunky exception
but I am still part of that decaying of age
and visage that fools you into your sense of what
it means to be limited by our body’s diminishment,
to need your help and patience, once given
still cannot hide the challenge we cause your pace
and movement through your life. We know this
in spite of how you turn back to us, kind or harsh.

We are old
some really sick or not able, some still running
races at 103 – she’s not really running, it is whispered.
A few need help and others refuse, we resist ripping
up our driver’s license, fight to stay in our nests against
the pull of emergencies and staying engaged. You can
never know the ravishment of losses like those, you
must get here yourself, my friend, and let go into being old.

Author Bio:
Sharon Lopez Mooney has written all her adult life. She was human communication specialist in her earlier career, and an Interfaith Minister in the death and dying field for the latter; now retired, she lives in Mexico and spends holidays with family in California.

Mooney is an old crone, writing poetry because words are where she comes from; telling stories, talking about death and aging, witnessing our misguided culture, sharing her gained wisdom and putting her shoulder to the wheel of change and hope with everything she writes.

She has received a California Arts Council Grant to establish a rural poetry series; co-published a small regional arts journal; was an owner of Straight Talk Distributing, an alternative literature service; produced poetry readings and performances. Her poems have been included in the journals: The MacGuffin, Fallow Deer, Medical Self Care, and the anthologies: Calyx: Women and Aging, an anthology by women; Songs to the Sun, a poetry anthology; Poetry is a Mountain, An Anthology; The Wide Open Sky, anthology; Smoke & Myrrors, poetry anthology (UK).

The Sparks There Are~ By Maria Pilar Lorenzo

1/8/2021

The sparks there are
Sizzling and somersaulting
Points, springboard and departure
The sibilance around us

The wealth that wells up within
It is not only a matter of style

The fireworks that dazzle
There are too many
Pleasing but fleeting
Don’t even bother

That is to say, it is not physical
Metaphysical, it may be

And the sparks showing off
That come to the fore
Point and find their boarding
They may be too many to count

But what is life
If it can be counted?

Author Bio:
Maria Pilar Lorenzo is a researcher who has published on governance and development issues. Recently, she has tried going back to her literary side. Apart from doing research, her interests include reading, writing, playing music, making art, fashion, nature trips, point-and-shoot photography, and conversations with different sorts of people.

ELEGY FOR SHUB’S PRIMITIVE BAPTIST CHILDHOOD CHURCHHOOD~ By Shelby Stephenson

1/7/2021

My thighs stuck to the varnished bench
to let my mind go free
and once I found a lively trench
I felt that I could see.

The women’s bonnets in the church
I veiled the tops with fruit
But ate the apples when they lurched
And thought my words to boot.

I squirmed in my short pants to keep
a chance that I might rise
in grace to hear my airhead beep
to save the boy I prize.

Author Bio:
Shelby Stephenson, poet laureate, North Carolina, 2015-18, his recent book, SLAVERY and FREEDOM on PAUL'S HILL.

Shelby Stephenson says Poetry is the music of the soul. Poetry's music salvaged his life. He cannot imagine waking up to silence: he raises Purple Martins whose churbling swurges and swoops and Bluebirds that eye him when he checks their nesting boxes.

Cherries Jubilee~ By Janet Joyner

1/6/2021

I relish the year’s first
cherries from California,
or the Midi of France,
wherever there are workers
well enough to pick, not
yet too sick to spoil
this jubilee of my own.
One that scoffs at Escoffier,
at the august Auguste,
if not Victoria herself.
No glace à la vanille.
Just a bowl to hold
the dark sweet
(washed) fruit itself,
and a tiny cup
wherein to spit,
afterwards,
the pit

breathing

in and out
in and out
while
sleeping
waking
drinking
aching
walking
talking
kissing
blissing
when
it stops
does it stop
on the in
or the out

Author Bio:
Janet Joyner was a professor of French Language and Literature at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts until her retirement in 1994. She is a winner of the Poetry Society of South Carolina’s Dubose and Dorothy Heyward Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published in numerous journals and have won distinctions in Bay Leaves of the Poetry Council of North Carolina, in Flying South ’14 and ’15, Second Spring ’16 and 17, as well as finalist and semi-finalist distinctions for the Poet’s Billow 2016 Prize, and the United Kingdom’s 2016 Bridport Prize. Her “Cicadas Thrumming” was anthologized in The Southern Poetry Anthology, volume vii, North Carolina. Her short stories have appeared in The Crescent Review and Flying South. She is the translator of Le Dieu désarmé by Luc-François Dumas. Waterborne, Joyner’s first collection of poems and winner of the 2016 Holland Prize, reflects the importance of her native, low-country South Carolina, its rivers and peoples. Place and name, the currency of belonging, are essential to the poet’s encounter with the world. She has three collections to date: Yellow, Finishing Line Press, 2018; Wahee Neck, Hermit Feathers Press, 2019, (with Now Come Hyacinths scheduled for release in 2020).

Stacks of Bricks~ By Rey Armenteros

1/5/2021

I don’t remember. Oh yeah. Here goes.  Don’t stop. Keep moving. They ask me how I do it. It’s easy. From the moment you wake up, don’t stop — not until exhaustion takes you, and you have to go back to sleep. Don’t stop to smell anything. The roses were buried a long time ago, when you first thought that sniffing them was something you must do, as per someone’s wise instructions. I know when it’s finally over, I’ll just stand there and look at the guy that’s waiting for me at the door handing tickets into the next life. I’ll smile. I won’t be able to help it. I’ll tell him, “It never did matter, did it?” It’s the commendable ability to understand something, approve of it, and then ignore it. That’s what I’ll show him.

But first, you cut your hair because they say you must, and you do it because you figure it’s only hair, a superficial thing, you know; and there’s more to you than that. Plus it’s the only way to get the damn job, and you need money. But years later, you start acting like the clean cut man that you now look like. It’s pathetic, I know. And when I step back, I think: “Poor me for not yet dropping the issue.”

Poor, poor me. A mangled umbrella against a pole. I think of the frustration that put it there. All is dark throughout the land. As far as the eye can see, stores and trees in greasy gray. I hear a voice saying, “Let’s go now man! Why do we have to wait till this lets up? This thick, drab shit ain’t ever going to be over.” We, the mob of commuters, nudge each other inside. And the interior is dripping with the sum of something subsiding. A sudden flash! You see it on their faces as they enter the train. The doors close, and the train continues its passage. A regulated landscape, like tire treads we texture with countless lights.

“We?” you ask. “What do you mean ‘We’?”— the memory of you just before the historic argument. I play it back as if it were a pleasure. Bright lights through the fog of windows tell us we’re almost there, but last night’s argument is still alive and waiting for me, like a viper in the rose bush. It’s like when the dying, desperate lover pleaded for her life in the most recent blockbuster. “Everything will be all right, won’t it?” And they told her “Yeah,” even though she was dying. It was terrible, but it taught me that when it really matters, you lie. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do ever since, because everything seems to matter. So I keep going. And I said, “Yes. That’s right. ‘We.’”

Poor me for not dropping the issue. So, so much, you lose everything. You forget who you are when lost in all this. All the figures moping around a night landscape, and there’s no you, befuddled with all the other figures, until the odor of fear rises from the plop of single steps, and you find yourself about to enter the soaked darkness. No one’s around. Never gave it a thought until it’s on top of you. You get out the whistling, the nice thoughts, but to no avail! Oh no. “Oh, my pastoral is the bright color of a toy before the paint scratches.” You say this over and over. You think of anything. Someone told me about the tragedy on TV, the latest development. The girl — you know. The one everyone was talking about for weeks: her and her big catastrophe. It was good news, and it made the ratings. But when I walk inside, I turn on the set, and then I see pictures as they were given to the court officials minding her case, the ones with her in them, that last motion before everything became irreversible, the paint scratching, the bright colors. [speechless]

Author Bio:
Rey Armenteros is a Los Angeles-based painter and writer who has had his essays and poetry appear in numerous literary journals and art magazines, including The Nasiona, Lunch Ticket, Umbrella Factory Magazine, and Still Point Arts Quarterly.