Martina Reisz Newberry

Martina Reisz Newberry Poems

Martina Reisz Newberry Biography

Martina Reisz Newberry has been writing for 50 years. A passionate lover of Los Angeles, she currently lives there with her husband, Brian Newberry, a Media Creative. Martina Reisz Newberry's most recent books are NEVER COMPLETELY AWAKE(Deerbrook Editions) and TAKE THE LONG WAY HOME (Unsolicited Press,9/2017) . She is also the author of WHERE IT GOES, LEARNING BY ROTE (Deerbrook Editions) and RUNNING LIKE A WOMAN WITH HER HAIR ON FIRE: Collected Poems (Red Hen Press) . Ms. Newberry is also the author of LIMA BEANS AND CITY CHICKEN: MEMORIES OF THE OPEN HEARTH—a memoir of her father, (one of the first men ever to be hired at Kaiser Steel in Fontana, CA in 1943) —published by E.P. Dutton and Co. in 1989. Newberry has been included in It Happened Under Cover, Ascent Aspirations’ first two hard-copy anthologies, also in the anthologies In The Company Of Women, Blessed Are These Hands and Veils, and Halos & Shackles: International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women. She has been widely published in literary magazines such as: The Amaranth Review, After Happy Hour Review, Ascent Aspiration, All Roads Will Lead You, Arabesque Review, Balkan Press, Bella, Connotation Press, The Cenacle, Commonline, Calyx Magazine, The Charles Carter Anthology, Eunoia Review, Into the Void, Journal of Applied Poetics, Literary Nest, Poets and Dreamers, Two Hawks Quarterly, Wilderness House Literary Review, and others in the U.S. and abroad. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo Colony for the Arts, Djerassi Colony for the Arts, and at Anderson Center for Disciplinary Arts.)

The Best Poem Of Martina Reisz Newberry

Mid-February Late At Night (From Where It Goes, Deerbrook Editions)

Intimidated by the glass,
I reach to touch a near-full moon
suspended on a near-black string.
It strays across tonight as I
have wandered across blank paper,
decorum over and done with.
The strange bones of my hands find their
own way (hasn't always been so) .
Outdoors, the moon lights up the dirt, MidFeb
hides behind clouds that start to spill
rain. The environment reeks of
failure and I, unmoved by its
intent, start to despise the rain.
I have stood in this place a long
time waiting for shame to produce
the wild, tender thoughts I've called up
in the past. Where is the book I've
not written? Where is the house and
the barn I saw when I slept then
wrote about when I woke? Where are
the lumbering animals that
will find their way back home and the
farm wife in her wrinkled jeans and
patterned apron? Maybe they've been
cast upward into God's shadows.
I reach to touch a sky that has
filled my life with false promises.
The old olive tree looks so cold.
Soon it will be Spring: warm, blameless.

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