This month's Moon Prize, the sixty-first, goes to Nancy Mercado's poem "Catcalls to My Brain." 

Catcalls to My Brain

by Nancy Mercado


No 1980’s tight young ass to pounce on anymore
No smooth skin to assault anymore
No frightened little girl to follow
Down cold shitty Lower East Side streets anymore

Now-a-days the boys catcall my intellect
Corner me in conference rooms
Universities
In restaurants

¡¿Oye mami cuántos libros has leído?!

¡No sabes na bruta!

Where did you graduate from mami?!

Your university degree means nada nena!

They attempt to inflict
Injuries with blank pages
To drown me out
Under piles of exclusions
To erase my existence
To whittle me down
To a stub

N o t h i n g

Silence.

These days my catcallers
Are the intelligentsia
Postmodern jeering elitists
Hyperbolic hipsters swooping in to take charge
Our modern-day land grabbers
The white settlers of the information age
Revolutionary revisionists

My cat-calling boys come with females in tow these days
Sold out dames of trendiness
Fast talking fools
Puking memorized conceptual hullabaloos
Living delusions

They are lost souls

Existing in their own holograms of fame
Convinced masses in the world
Know their name
Believe their immortality

Don’t my catcallers understand
They have yet to be born?


* * * * *

© 2020 Nancy Mercado

"Catcalls to My Brain" was first published in Gargoyle (2020).

Nancy Mercado is the recipient of the 2017 American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement presented by the Before Columbus Foundation. She was named one of 200 living individuals who best embody the work and spirit of Frederick Douglass on the occasion of his bicentennial by The Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives and the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. For more information go to nancy HYPHEN mercado DOT com.

 

You’re Gone

by Eliza Mimski

  

Two months ago you were here and now you’re not and the street that I walk down - the long line of telephone poles, the line of stucco houses, the menacing foxtails on family front yards - go on forever. I turn up the hill and face the sun. I pant-walk up the grade, sit on the top step and gaze out at the ocean, a massive blue plate of remembering.  

            The ocean is wise. It holds our memories - that day on the beach with you when I first met the world. You and I walked along that shore. Don’t think the ocean doesn't remember this.  

It’s hot out, which means I yearn for things.

 

* * * * *

Eliza Mimski lives and writes in San Francisco. She's a retired teacher and has been published in literary journals across the net. https://elizamimski.wordpress.com/

Mourning Doves Make the Best Music

by Karen Friedland


Can I tell you how happy I an
with this humble little life?

With the paths I walk every day
with my dogs,
and the trees I know like lovers,
that bend in the wind.

Having finally learned
to fight nothing—

to let the whole world wash right through me,
and simply be suspended
in the still blue sky
of an ordinary day.


* * * * *

A nonprofit grant writer by day, Karen’s poems have been published in Nixes Mate Review, Writing in a Women’s Voice, the Lily Poetry Review, Vox Populi and others. Her book of poems, Places That Are Gone, was published in 2019 by Nixes Mate Books, and she has a chapbook forthcoming in late 2020 from Červená Barva Press. She lives in Boston with her husband, two cats and two dogs.

 Having Built for Ourselves a House That Does Not Leak

                                                                                                by Karen Friedland


in the pouring rain is the main thing—

having cobbled together
a bittersweet, New England
kind of a life,

amidst leaning gravestones
and miniscule old houses
with teacup-sized yards.

Years pass,
and you learn to survive the seasons,
the bitter coldness.

But oh, the nearness of the ocean
and the blueness of northern skies.

* * * * *

A nonprofit grant writer by day, Karen’s poems have been published in Nixes Mate Review, Writing in a Women’s Voice, the Lily Poetry Review, Vox Populi and others. Her book of poems, Places That Are Gone, was published in 2019 by Nixes Mate Books, and she has a chapbook forthcoming in late 2020 from Cervena Barva Press. She lives in Boston with her husband, two cats and two dogs.

UNSUBSCRIBE

by Mary K O’Melveny


I spent time today
pushing and clicking
buttons and links.
All designed to
remove me
from commerce,
from conversations,
from cooking insights
and calico curtains.
From onslaughts,
opportunities
and outrages,
sordid tales
of dreams gone dim.

No one really
wanted me to leave.
Some begged me
to stick around.
Offered options.
Sought my opinion.
Were sorry to offend.
Wasn’t it a simple
misunderstanding?
Wouldn’t I consider
a brief reprieve?
There were causes
in need of rescue.
Consciences to be saved.

Suppose memory
worked this way.
We controlled what stayed
and what strayed away
from our grasp like unruly
children on a playground.
We were in charge of synapse,
neurotransmitters bent
to our will, molecules
waiting to bond with our
best moments, swim away
from mistakes and regrets.
We want veto power.
A second chance to get it right.


* * * * *

Mary K O’Melveny, a retired labor rights lawyer, lives with her wife in Washington DC and Woodstock, NY. Mary, a Pushcart Prize nominee, is author of A Woman of a Certain Age and MERGING STAR HYPOTHESES (Finishing Line Press 2018, 2020) and co-author of the anthology An Apple In Her Hand (Codhill Press 2019).

Writing In A Woman's Voice is on equinox sabbatical until September 27, 2020. Happy equinox, Everyone!

VISITORS

by Mary K O'Melveny


A bird’s nest perches on top of a drainpipe
that snakes down from our rooftop toward the deck.
Our arrival after months away has disturbed the peace
of newly hatched chicks who did not know sounds
of opening doors, windows or FM radio news.
Human voices add a heaviness to their air.

Mother Nature has not been idle in our absence.
Tulips and violets, pear and cherry blossoms,
pale green ferns uncoil like modern jazz dancers.
An electricity fills the atmosphere as if
a summer storm was on its way. Each point
of light a promise of survival.

Today, dear friends stop by to say hello.
Masked up, distanced. What a joyous two hours.
A Baltimore Oriole serenades us all
from the top of the apple tree. A blaze
of orange amidst newly leafed branches.
Like us, cautious, yet eager to be seen.


* * * * *

Mary K O’Melveny, a retired labor rights lawyer, lives with her wife in Washington DC and Woodstock, NY. Mary, a Pushcart Prize nominee, is author of A Woman of a Certain Age and MERGING STAR HYPOTHESES (Finishing Line Press 2018, 2020) and co-author of the anthology An Apple In Her Hand (Codhill Press 2019).