1. BEER FLOOD
On October 17, 1814 in the parish of St. Giles, London, England, at the Meux and Company Breweryon Tottenham Court Road, a huge vat containing over 135,000 imperial gallons (610,000 L of beer ruptured, causing other vats in the same building to succumb in a domino effect. As a result, more than 323,000 imperial gallons (1,470,000 L) of beer burst out and gushed into the streets. The wave of beer destroyed two homes and crumbled the wall of the Tavistock Arms Pub…Eight people drowned in the flood or died from injuries.
Courtesy of Wikipedia, 8 September 2012
After so many years, you
have to decide what to be
afraid of. Things, people, change
guises and colors. You will
no longer see them like dust
motes in sunlight. You can choose,
find what your trepidation
hungers for. Does it want be-
ginnings? Rash acts to save the
world? The torrents of despair?
After so many years, the
nearly-bare branches of Lost
call out for your attention.
So do the wet streets, turned to
obsidian in the dark.
Another choice. How tender
and sweet the way terror’s road
buckles and ends at the cul de sac
where you queue up your bantam
bottles of life—waiting and waiting.
2. RAPUNZEL TALKS TO ANNIE ASKEW
At some point, you must stop your weeping
and learn to love your captors.
At some point the complexities are
too overwhelming and you
must stop your damned weeping and eat the
bread they give you, stop your mad
weeping. Whatever is going to
happen will happen, you can
count on that. You’re in a high tower
now, nothing to do but look
out across some alien landscape.
You can eat, bleed, sweat if you
want to, but the weeping is useless.
Your sweet, sexual soul is
tied up behind you. You may speak, but
only in a whisper. Your
heart may throb like a wounded thumb, but
it doesn’t matter. Like it
or not, the world is your house and you
live in its highest tower.
At night the stars come in to see you
and lay like glass pieces on the floor.
You have no words for them, they
have none for you. The moon brings fever
and dreams of wars, dead children
in wars. There are no words; your bitter
weeping must stop. The plan is
to fold yourself up like a Chinese
fan. Why won’t you just do that?
The idea is to stop trying
to kick the underworld in
the teeth. You are veyniker
un veyniker, your fault entirely.
You must turn the other cheek
now. You must face the everlasting
night without tears as if it
were no more than a huge animal
lumbering past. The wind out
there will stop and you must stop weeping.
Learn to love your captors. When
this is over, you will be famous,
unrecognizable to all but
yourself. O lucky woman.
Lucky, lucky hightower woman.
3. דיסציפלינה (Discipline)
Lot’s wife recalled the angel’s warning.
For the love of God! All she should not see…
For love of Men! She should see nothing.
All she did was turn her head just a little to let
the fiery wind pass, to keep hot flying ashes
from singeing her eyebrows and hair.
She believed God’s love (and Lot’s) would tether her.
She was wrong. The ropes did not hold. They slipped,
came loose, unraveled, flapped useless in the air.
And THAT, they said was her fault, was disobedience.
Her evanescent flinch from pain, the involuntary twitch
to avoid hell’s heat, the sun’s descent.
She turned her face just a little aside, just enough
to let the spark and ash detour, and, in that instant,
the god of men blinked and she, now salt, was left to die.
Martina Reisz Newberry’s most recent book is LEARNING BY ROTE. She is also the author of WHAT WE CAN’T FORGIVE. LATE NIGHT RADIO, PERHAPS YOU COULD BREATHE FOR ME. HUNGER, AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE: POEMS 1996-2006, NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND and RUNNING LIKE A WOMAN WITH HER HAIR ON FIRE: Collected Poems.
Ms. Newberry is the winner of i.e. magazine’s Editor’s Choice Poetry Chapbook Prize for 1998: AN APPARENT, APPROACHABLE LIGHT.
She is the also the author of LIMA BEANS AND CITY CHICKEN: MEMORIES OF THE OPEN HEARTH—a memoir of her father—published by E.P. Dutton and Co. in 1989.
Newberry has been included in Ascent Aspirations first hard-copy Anthology, Blessed Are These Hands, also in the anthology In The Company Of Women and has been widely published in numerous literary journals in the U.S. and abroad.
Martina lives in Hollywood, California with her husband Brian and their best 4-legged pal, Charlie the Cat.
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