This month's Moon Prize, the 89th, goes to Melanie Choukas-Bradley's poem "How to Silence a Woman."

How to Silence a Woman

by Melanie Choukas-Bradley


Hold open only actual doors
Admire her dress
Revere fake breasts, sequester nursing ones
Start wars
Threaten wars
Invent male gods and creation myths
Close the priesthood
Deny the feminine divine
Display public statues of men
Disdain the round belly
Tell her she’s good
Tell her she’s bad
Overwhelm her with aggressive conversation
Question her competence
Remove her reproductive rights
Fill the world with loud noises
Drown her power
Burn her power
Ignore her power
Be her protector in a world in which she needs one


* * * * *

Melanie Choukas-Bradley grew up wandering the woods of Vermont. She is the award-winning author of seven nature books. Melanie lives near Washington, DC where she leads nature and forest bathing walks for Smithsonian Associates and many other organizations. She is author of City of Trees, A Year in Rock Creek Park, The Joy of Forest Bathing and, most recently, Finding Solace at Theodore Roosevelt Island and Resilience: Connecting with Nature in a Time of Crisis. Melanie has been a longtime contributor to The Washington Post and frequent guest on NPR and its affiliates. She began writing poetry during the pandemic.

 Writing In A Woman's Voice will resume on Friday, February 18, 2022 with this month's slightly delayed Moon Prize. 

 

Eidolon

by Karen Jones


Worship not this Mary,
her alabaster pose,
hard skin, veil,
robes of stone.

She’s graven, trapped
as a golden calf,
sacrificed according to
an image in our minds. 
She’s perfect, she’s dead,
no thoughts of her own,
no flesh and blood,
no living womb.

Is this God’s vision? 
He has broken
his own Command,
and she stands cold
upon her pedestal. 

Once she was alive.
Blemished, but so wise,
warm, and whole.


* * * * *

Karen Jones is a teacher, poet, and life-long learner from Corvallis, Oregon. Her poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, Circle of Seasons, Cirque Press, and other publications. Her chapbook Seasons of Earth and Sky (Finishing Line Press) was released in 2020.

 

“We Are All Hopper Paintings Now”

—Jonathan Jones
The Guardian, UK (27 March 2020)

by Alexis Rhone Fancher

That’s me, solo table at The Automat, staring into a cold cup of tea; me, just out of frame, driving up to the lonely pump jockey in Gas. My sister says I have a “bad picker,” that my type (well-hung and irresponsible) is very very bad for me, and she’s right. I wouldn’t know a good guy if he snatched me up off the street in broad daylight, I tell her. My point, exactly, my sister chides.

I decide not to tell her about the stranger I’m chatting with online. He wants to send me on a train trip, meet him in Detroit, all expenses paid, and I admit, the thought makes me wet. That’s me, the woman reading in Compartment C Car, hurtling cross county toward a brand new life. I text him that I love Detroit, that I’m a fool for muscle cars. He says he’s a poet and an artist and a Buddhist. That he hasn’t owned a car in years.    

I confess, romance never ends well for me. Sometimes the loneliness screams so loud I want to drown myself in a tawdry romance novel with a sappy ending, or a bottomless glass of rye. Sometimes I want to hitch a ride with a comely vagabond, a poet from Michigan, drive off into the sunset. I lived 15 years with a Lakota Sioux medicine man on Pine Ridge Indian reservation in SD, he texts. Lived on a deserted tropical island off the coast of Thailand, in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Kathmandu, traveled Europe, lived amongst Bedouin Arabs in the Negev desert. I text back a smiley face and wait. I want to hitchhike to Tierra del Fuego, he responds. Wanna go?   

If only he knew! I’m the woman staring out the bay window in Cape Cod Morning, desperate for my latest true love to reappear. He said he was going to the store for bread, gas up the Chevy. Be right back, he said. The cloudy sky mirrors my mood. I wait. And wait.    

You should know better, my sister says. There are no rescuers anymore. I know that. I’m the usherette leaning against the wall in New York Movie. I’ve seen that film a dozen times; I’m lost in reverie. Dressed in a thoughtful blue uniform, rebellion looks like the strappy-assed shoes, half-hidden on my feet.

* * * * *

"We Are All Hopper Paintings Now" was first published in NYQ Magazine, Spring issue 2021.

Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle, Hobart, Verse Daily, Plume, Cleaver, Diode, Duende, Pirene’s Fountain, Poetry East, Pedestal Magazine and elsewhere. She’s authored five poetry collections, most recently, Junkie Wife (Moon Tide Press, 2018), The Dead Kid Poems (KYSO Flash Press, 2019), and EROTIC: New & Selected (New York Quarterly Books, 2021). Another, full-length collection (in Italian) by Edizioni Ensemble, Italia, was published in 2021. A multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Alexis is poetry editor of Cultural Daily. www.alexisrhonefancher.com

 

 

A Day at the Beach

by Jane Druzhinina


Standing at the seashore, gazing ahead...
Seagulls floating on the waves, caught in their everyday game with the unsuspecting fish,
the survival of the fittest.
Young couples walking on the beach hand in hand,
to be young, in love and oblivious to the notion of time. 
Time...
the uncountable grains of sand,
the dust of time.
The power of the emerald blue,
the weakness of man...in the end, the weakness of man.
The nature’s perfect design,
the failing body.
The eternity of this scene,
the air infused with the bitterness of ageing.
The bronze sunset,
the dying wish.


* * * * *

Jane Druzhinina lives with her family in Sandy, Utah. Her poems have appeared in The Cynic Online Magazine and Because We Write Magazine.

 

WILD GEESE

by Frances Browner


We all used to gather in the Wild Geese,
our home away from home.
Had we grown wings and flown?
Or were some of us forced to take flight?

Many were rooted to the bar, on the same seat
every night, looking out onto Broadway.
There were no theatres here, no neon lights,
only a wide road and a park on the opposite side,
red brick apartment blocks to the left and right.

We were a family of sorts, our homeland binding us
together - laughter, craic, banter. There was despair
too in some eyes, little spoken of, unless at four o’clock
in the morning, when the bar was quiet, one or two left.

That’s when the stories came spinning,
when loneliness set in
and relationships slung together, with hope.

We got married young, an older Irish lady
told me, because we wanted to make a home,
away from home.

* * * * *

Frances Browner, creative writing tutor, lives in Greystones, County Wicklow, where she curated Poets Wall 2020 and Poetry Trail 2021. Her fiction and memoirs have appeared in magazines and were broadcast on Irish radio. Poems have been published in Ogham Stone, Boyne Berries, Bray Arts Journal, Skylight 47, Ink Sweat & Tears, Tales from the Forest, Ulster Voice, Cold Coffee Stand, Poems on the Edge, Poetry24, East Hampton Star, Montauk Sun, South Wales Evening Post, and Live Encounters. A haiku won Local Voices, 2020, and collection, Roots & Wings, was launched by Revival Press, 2019.

 

 

Finding Calm
             Inspiration from What We Walk Towards by Kevin Brophy

by Julia Vaughan


Leads, chains, hats, flip-flops and sunnies
Poo-bags and lots and lots of training-treats
Are they lures or just plain bribery?
Plenty of sunscreen.

Two dogs exuberant and joyful, in their own wonderland
Dashing through the water’s edge
Pelting across the sand
Exploding away like released elastic bands
Seagulls escaping the excitement

Firm, hard sand underfoot. 
Striding boldly
Underground stream turns it soft and sludgy
Calf muscles ache, sand clings in-between toes
A slower walk.
Soon it’s firm, hard sand underfoot again.
Repeat the bold and striding walk.

Walk to “The Pole” and back
Embracing total bliss
Skies above pure blue, with very few clouds of fairy floss,
The sea ripples in sapphire, grey, azure, some topped with white caps,
Waves splooshing onto the sand, not a big swell, some little rips criss-cross.

Seagulls and magpies float in the air, zeppelins with wings and sharp eyes,
Gawking at the prancing dogs, hoping for a prize,
A missed treat, an easy dinner to gulp down. Very wise.
Life on the beach and on the ocean has no compromise.

Stepping over sea weed
Striding over the sand
Avoiding rocks
Watching the dogs
Watching my feet
Looking far away
Clearing mental blocks
Mindful, peaceful, calming and energising
Oblivious to any clocks
And yet also vaguely wondering, when is the next equinox?

High tides. Waters lapping the dunes. Low tides. Vast sandy beach expanse.
Up and down, like life’s rollercoaster
Near and far
A weird romance
The Black Dog chasing
But I’m choosing to walk towards joyful exuberance
Walking dogs on the beach


* * * * *

Julia Vaughan moved to Australia with her husband in 1989.  Having had 2 poems published, she dreams of more, and becoming an accomplished poet after attending inspiring U3A “I just don’t get poetry” classes, on the Victorian Surf Coast.  When not dreaming, she can be found gardening, and walking on the beach with her two Vizsla dogs.  (Woman in Red published by Otoliths 01Nov2021 and Words are Flowers published by Melbourne Culture Corner 01Nov2021)