Martina Newberry - Outlook

"If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?"
—Tyler Durdin, Fight Club

I’ve been ripe all my life; it is my
mother’s gift to me along with her
madness—but “ripe" doesn’t make it now.

I want to see my taut flesh pulled down
over my frame, no softness, no place
that gives. I want to be pared down to

the bone, no places left to pinch. I
want to find birds with beaks like straws to
suck the fat from my fat places and

fly away with it. I want to be
an abstraction, a wraith, a nymph. I
want to be unreachable, remote

as the eye of a needle. I want
to leave sweat out of the equation
that is my body and put sylph in

its place. I want my bones to be
remarkable, my face chiseled marble.
If I am to return to the same

darkness from which I rose, I want to
do it with fingers like twigs, ankles—
impossible, hummingbird ankles.

This is the way to perfection, this
longing to be going, going, gone—
pushing hard against the adversity

of silken chocolates, sweet plums, red wine,
roasted chicken, buttered bread—things that
stay and will not be replaced by ice

water and grape skins. All this will come
back to haunt me. At some point, I will
not remember the difference between

shadows and radiance. I will only
be aware that light will shine through me,
ignoring flesh, headed toward paradise.


Martina Newberry’s most recent books are Not Untrue & Not Unkind (Arabesques Press 2006) and Running Like a Woman with Her Hair on Fire (Red Hen Press 2005). She was the winner of i.e. magazine’s Editor’s Choice Poetry Chapbook Prize for 1998: An Apparent, Approachable Light. She is also the author of Lima Beans and City Chicken: Memories of the Open Hearth, a memoir of her father (E.P. Dutton and Company 1989). Her work was included in the Ascent Aspirations anthology and has been widely published in many literary magazines. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Brian, and their cat, Gato.

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