Blog Archives - The Voices Project

My Breath~ By Mayra Garibo

8/31/2015

I looked back
I saw it all
As it passed
Like an eclipse
One that did last
A permanent reminder
Bridges were never meant to be burned
Simply walked across and explored
Never built to hate
But to live and love
With every breath we take

Author Bio:
I am young, but wise. My soul, a Buddha in form.

Rasha~ By Unyierie Angela Idem

8/27/2015

She knew little of the fate
That awaited her that day
As strong arms of rallying cries
And surging crowds beckoned
Her to the unknown.

She knew she had to be a
Part of it, in it, to make
Her voice heard among the
Many demanding justice
And a new era - that new era.

In victory she raised her hands.
From beyond the flash
Pierced her chest...........
Hope lay on the ground before
The eyes of the world to see
What justice perverted could do.

In the arms of those around,
She faded into Eternity
To become the corner stone,
The beacon light for the
New Resistance.

Now they say she was a
Mistake - the convenience
Of semantics has justified
A killing, but time will
Tell when raging waves
Gather in heaps to reveal
The foundation upon
Which shall be built
The altar of Freedom.

Author Bio:
Unyierie Angela Idem teaches English as a Second Language (ESL) at Holyoke Community College (HCC), Holyoke, Massachusetts, USA. In her free time, she reads and writes poetry that addresses a broad range of issues from personal to social and political. Her poems have appeared in Sentinel Literary Quarterly: The Magazine of World Literature (April 2011 issue) and aaduna (Fall/Winter 2011 and 2012 issues). She has participated in a number of poetry events, including HCC faculty readings and the aaduna Fundraiser in Harlem, New York. She has also been a guest reader at a public library in Massachusetts. She is currently working on a collection of poems.

Poppies All Day~ By Sid Orange

8/26/2015

She grips, like iron pliers, dried lunch.
Always discoloured yet smooth and glossy,
she shakes that limp food. He pulls her quickly

inside the tight cage of a golden love story.
Its moral shines as a polished sunlit mirror.
Perhaps the storyteller should have said sooner,

‘She is wild blackbird and he slow bluish cat.’
At the last page, she shares that shrunken worm
and jumps deeper into heavy, narcotic purr.

Author Bio:
Sid Orange was a drug addict. Always an autodidact he left school at 15. He has been published in The Voices Project, Clockwise Cat, The Vine Leaves Journal, Brickplight and Straight Forward Poetry.

this is how things end~ By Brandi Kary

8/25/2015

When Brenda lost her baby we were all in disbelief.
There in the cold morning of the child’s wake
we stole glances over soft shoulders
and stood in silence thinking the same thing:

Glad it wasn’t one of us.

After that we rarely saw her.
Susan said she stumble upon her
Standing in the cereal aisle,
Staring in to boxes and sobbing.

But how could we have helped her?
We were raising our families on heavy hips,
Maintaining the potluck inventory,
And pruning the tomatoes.

Until the day it happened, as we all knew it would.

Brenda told Jeb she was going for a walk.
She stopped by the coal pit to collect some rocks.
There on the bridge with the black stone she wrote:

The light has left me.

Jeb went whizzing through town, shouting her name.
We all followed, naturally.

When we came to the bridge--
It was as if the galaxy had
collapsed onto the water below.

There was Brenda’s milky nightgown,
Tangled in a tree branch,
A ghost in the wind.
And something else too.

Something we all never talked about again,
Maybe because none of us wanted to believe it.
Maybe because it just didn’t seem possible.
Maybe because we never found Brenda’s body.

But right there
In front of us all,
We all saw it:
The outline of Brenda,
The outline of Brenda.

It was illuminated by tiny fragments of light,
There on the shallow surface of the lake,
That icy afternoon,
Brenda gone,
With only the sundrenched silhouette of her being,
Bobbing up and down,
Up and down,
Up
and
down.

Author Bio:
Brandi Kary is a mother, educator, and writer who lives in Pacific Grove, California. She currently teaches English and Creative Writing at Monterey Peninsula College. Both she and her anthropolgist husband enjoy dragging their kids all over the world to gain inspiration. Her poetry has recently appeared in Flutter Poetry Journal and Homested Review.

Grandfather Mountain~ By Yailyn Garcia

8/24/2015

Creatures hiding in the distance caves,
trees wrapping their branches around me,
flowers dancing below me,
All elements of one thing,
sight

Birds slicing the wind in their groups,
leaves detaching from trees,
bursts of colors swaying;
All elements of one thing,
sight.

Author Bio:
Yailyn Garcia is a junior at Miami Arts Charter School. She has received an honorable mention for poetry in Scholastic, and has been published in two poetry books. She currently lives in Coconut Grove with her mother who struggles with Multiple Sclerosis, and father who struggles with Hypercoagulable.

Many Any Ones (Two a.m.)~ By Jennie Hope Meres

8/20/2015

How can it be that someone with so many any ones
can feel so isolated and abandoned
You know they can see you,
but more a ghost of you--
like something inside of you,
the essence of you,
is invisible to your many any ones
The deep down of you is misunderstood
or worse, simply unknown
and you’ve become nothing more than a phantom
of yourself and only exist as
what you’ve been deemed to be
by your many any ones

How can it be that someone with so many any ones
can feel like a ghost haunting their own life
An inanimate being drifting
in drafts
and between cracks of thoughts of how
you are seen through the eyes of your many any ones
And you wonder how it came to this,
how you became this ghost in the photograph
where you don’t recognize your own face
Yet it must be you because she wears your smile
and has your eyes but
somehow it is not you and you know it’s not
but they demand it is who you are
Yet your soul screams and your heart bleeds the truth

How can it be that someone with so many any ones
can feel so isolated, abandoned
with dusty dreams
that the many any ones don’t even know exist
And when you grow out of the ghost of
all you’re expected to be to become what you should
always have been--
how can it be the many any ones seem so shocked,
dismayed, that you’re not content within
your determined role in their life

And sometimes,
at two a.m.,
when you’re less alone then
when you’re surrounded by your many any ones
you have to wonder how you lost everything
you were. Where this hole in you came from
Sometimes at two a.m. you have to admit
you made yourself a ghost,
you thought it was best to shell yourself out
remove what may not be for the best of the many
any ones
And you have to question,
how you thought haunting your own life
could be best for any one

How can it be that I, with so many any ones
could isolate and abandon myself
and still claim I loved my many any ones
with everything I had,
gave everything I could
when the best parts were buried away
and a ghost took my place within
photographs and
memories

Author Bio:
Jennie Hope Meres is a poet and fiction writer currently residing with her husband and children in the New York area. She fell in love with the nuances of words as a young girl after being handed a book of poetry. She then began her foray into the world of writing by emulating her favorite childhood poets until she grew into her own voice.

Perseverance~ By Hassen Gara

8/19/2015

Life is abiding, an ever-lasting, eternal fight
Scratching along the day, feeling exhausted and tormented at night
I have resolved never to yield, to tailor for this battle
Rocky determination, tenacity is my only weapon to struggle

Inclined to survive the tides that wish to carry me away
Cheered by the sweetest things that hearten me to stay
A commitment not to let my life come to a standstill
Sticking to a hard of difficult tasks the whole way through, my sole skill

Great difficulties may be surmounted by patience
Resolution, unyielding holding on and persistence
Perseverance only can pave me the way to climb any steep hill
Cope with another day, aspire and faith my heart fill

Rewards come to those who endure, withstand and persevere
Who are decisive, steadfast, determined and show no fear
I shall never give up my goals too soon
Never be elated or over the moon

I will keep my feet on the ground
Certainly I will get around
If I can’t metamorphose my destiny
At least, I endeavor to live in dignity.

Author Bio:
Hassen Gara teaches English at the secondary level in Tunisia.

Nothing to Say~ By Shelley Nutting

8/18/2015

This silence.
White,
clinical
melamine
that squeaks
beneath my finger,
its surface
damp
with gathered breath.

I long to break it,

shatter its perfect curve
with my fists,
fracture the smooth
walls with nothing
more than a
carefully
pitched
…..whisper

No sound
is forthcoming,
it catches
upon the fabric
of my tongue
and sticks
painfully
in my gullet
as I swallow.

I have nothing to say.

Author Bio:
Shelley Nutting resides in England where she is a wife mother and community nurse. She has been writing poetry all her life but has only recently begun to share it. The strength of women at the heart of family is a recurring theme in her writing.

A Woman’s Heart~ By Chukwuma Okonkwo

8/17/2015

A woman’s heart;
An asset of inestimable worth
A woman’s heart;
The most precious gift desirable to man
A woman’s heart;
As sacred as the ancient bald eagle
A woman’s heart;
Always filled with passion, but tender
A woman’s heart;
A gateway to the precinct where happiness is born
A woman’s heart;
A man’s nursling, nurtured to undying glee
A woman’s heart;
A nature’s canvas of impeccable aura
A woman’s heart;
A sanctuary embroidered with virtues of good fortune
A woman’s heart;
A protective charm of priceless treasure
A woman’s heart;
A beautiful garden where God planted his first fruits
A woman’s heart;
Purest of hearts more beautiful than usual
A woman’s heart;
Brings more glamour than gloom in the perennial voyage of life
A woman’s heart is heart of gold!

Author Bio:
I am a trained economist at Sussex in the UK, and a development aficionado with keen interest in gender equality. As a prolific writer, my works on fiction, non-fiction and poetry have been published online on various websites. My essays have won various online publication contests. I maintain a personal blog at www.brutusgarley.blogspot.com, where I write on spectrum of issues.

Five Years Later~ By Alley Shubert

8/13/2015

I would love to say that this poem is about you.
That you were the one, 19-years-old, clenching your left side in nauseating pain.
That you were the one who placed your hand in between your legs
And watched as blood stained the ivory sheets a crimson red
At some shitty La Quinta hotel in Georgia, two hours outside of Atlanta.

I started to believe that is how the story went
Because one day, five years later, I pictured you dead.
I twisted the story around so it was you who had to lay naked on that bed.

For five years I have tried to write about it
And for five years I let it consume me from the inside out.
For five years I have been fascinated by sharp objects, like razor blades to my own flesh.
For five years I tried to avoid looking into mirrors, and even threw them in a fit of rage,
To only see my cracked reflection, telling me “I deserved it” anyway.

For five years I was planning ways to kill myself in an attempt to kill you.
It was an attempt to escape the way your skeletal hands felt gripping at my thighs.
I was thinner then, and when you aggressively grabbed me by the hair and bent me over,
My hipbones clanked against the sink of that god awful La Quinta bathroom.

As I saw my reflection in the mirror, I prayed to a God I never once believed in,
And through the window blinds, I could see your mother sunbathing in the pool.
Her red lipstick, polka-dot bikini, fake blonde hair glistening in the sunshine.

I begged you to stop, but my feet were lifted from the floor,
I felt the damp coolness of your dog tag press into the small bones of my neck.
You made the final thrust and I held onto the dripping faucet.
I watched as you put your pants back on and placed a cigarette between your chapped lips
And threw me coldheartedly onto the bed.

For five years I couldn’t bare the sight of a person in camo, the print on a hunting magazine.
Chills ran down my spine, even when I wore my favorite color, green.
I thought because I wasn’t a virgin that I knew all about sex,
But then I figured you joined the Army,
Because you’re too much of a pussy to be a Marine. I guessed.

You left the room to chain-smoke a pack of shitty Marlboro’s,
And talk to your shitty friends on your shitty flip phone.
Your mother even entered the room and asked what was wrong.
A direct quote – “It must have been something I ate.”
Still clenching at my side.

On the flight back to New Jersey, we barely said a word.
I even tried to hold your hand but you constantly pulled away from me.
You came into my job and acted like you never knew who I was.
And for five years I tried to figure out who I was.
I’m not the slut, the whore, or tramp you made me out to be.

I’m not ashamed. I’m not ashamed.
That for five years I blamed the actions on myself.
I’m not ashamed. I’m not ashamed.
That for five years I was begging to be someone else.

Some months later you called me from a number that I was unfamiliar with.
You said you were in Germany and that you wish you gave me one more kiss.
For five years I thought of Georgia,
But never the succulent peaches, luscious fields, or gorgeous sunsets.
No, I think of July, the amber moon and the way it cried with me that night.

I think for finally admitting it after five years ---
Hell, it feels alright.

Author Bio:
Alley Shubert is in the Professional Writing program with a specialization in Journalism at Champlain College in Burlington, VT.