To Hestia: who was forgotten – by Gabriela Marie Milton included in Issue III (Hestia) of Free Verse Revolution #poem #literary magazine #free verse

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

To Hestia: who was forgotten – by Gabriela Marie Milton

it’s quiet now
inside the shapes of our burning hearts
tortured the endurance of surreal trees
a headkerchief full of blood dries on a bench
unknown the mark upon the sky to which you point
the windows of bookshops read “kill” and “f..k”

Hestia,
strangled, your virginity hangs on a rusty wire
inside the chimney a creaking creature with bat-eyes
streets filled with guns
mundane caricaturesque phalloi,
demonic blisters rub the hearts
there is no home for millions of us

come back
you, virgin goddess of the heart,
the murder and the sex will stone you in the boulevards
premonitions
there are back streets where you can walk
songs of nightingales and roses will hide you in their arms

you sacred fire,
give a home to hungry children with no clothes
to those who sleep under the bridges of cursed stars
in nights when linden trees in cemeteries bloom
flame the ebb and flow of skies that know no tides
you, goddess,
the very subject matter of which I write.

I am thrilled to be part of Issue III of Free Verse Revolution. You can download the publication for free here.

Update on the poetry contest Woman: Splendor and Sorrow

Thank you to everyone who enter the poetry contest Woman: Splendor and Sorrow. I am honored and touched by your submissions. Your entries are magnificent. Everyone’s writing is so dear to my heart that I will never be able to choose a winner. As a gentle reminder here is how the winners will be selected:

The selection method is similar to that of a double-blind peer review: the reviewer doesn’t know the identity of the author, and vice-versa.

To achieve that I will do the following:

Create a master document with all submissions. Remove the name of the authors and replace them with numbers.
Create a second document with the name of the authors and their assigned numbers.
I will not participate in the process of determining the winners. Winners will be determined by two of your peers.
However, I will disclose a piece of information and deviate a bit from the fully double-blind process: the editor of Vita Brevis Poetry Magazine, Brian Geiger, will be one of the reviewers.

The winners will be announced in late-October. I will update you periodically.

Prizes:
First Place: $300
Second Place: $150
Third Place: $75

Funding for the prizes comes from my royalties.

To the future winners: please remember to spread love in our community and buy some books written by your WP favorite authors.

Update on MasticadoresUSA

Please visit MasticadoresUSA. Support our community. There are several new and wonderful poems up. Do not forget to like, follow, and submit.

@Gabriela Marie Milton

Love Poem

Our sun ripped apart by the gallop of an Arabian horse.
Sand & blood.
Memories of our Sahara: the Sahara in which fate played games.
Spaces, times, light crawl upon each other like flapping fish in a net.
The enigma of to be.
The simplicity of me.
I #miss you. #vss365 #poem pic.twitter.com/XtPMANNis9
— Gabriela Marie Milton (@shortprose1) July 22, 2021

Poetry Contest

My Dear Readers,

To honor the community who have supported my writing journey and my work I plan to have a poetry contest in September. I will ask you to write one poem inspired by a piece from my #1 Amazon Best-Selling poetry collection Woman: Splendor and Sorrow and to list the name of the piece that inspired your submission. There will be prizes. More info about the contest coming up in September.

MasticadoresUSA update

Thanks to Juan, MasticadoresUSA has now a new beautiful theme. There are several new posts on the site. For me MasticadoresUSA is a labor of love. It is a way of giving back to the WP community. Thank you to everyone who supports this site.

You can read the work of your fellow poets and follow the site here.

Love to everyone.

#1 Amazon Best-Selling Poetry Collection (August 9&10) Woman: Splendor and Sorrow: Love Poems and Poetic Prose by Gabriela Marie Milton:

@Gabriela Marie Milton

My Dear Readers,
Several announcements:

Woman: Splendor and Sorrow: Love Poems and Poetic Prose by Gabriela Marie Milton #1 in Amazon Hot New Releases

Yesterday, August 9, 2021, my poetry collection Woman: Splendor and Sorrow was #1 in Amazon Hot New Releases, Poetry Subjects and Themes. Yesterday, I became a bestselling author.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I have no words to tell you how humbled I am by your support, and by that of my followers from other social media outlets. Special thanks to my WP friends who are going through challenging times, and yet they still find ways to support and encourage me.

Equally, special thanks to my family, and to that wonderful person in my life who is a renowned and accomplished academic and author in his own right, and who he is now the “wind beneath my wings.”

My Dear Readers,

Do not listen to any detractors. There will be people who will envy you. There will be people who will denigrate your work, and you personally. There will be people who will want to drag you down. Do not listen to them. Keep going. Keep shining. Keep writing. If I can do it you can do it too. I will support each one of you as much as I can.

Poetry Contest

To honor the community who have supported my writing journey and my work I plan to have a poetry contest in September. I will ask you to write one poem inspired by a piece from my book Woman: Splendor and Sorrow and to list the name of the piece that inspired your submission. There will be prizes. More info about the contest coming up in September.

MasticadoresUSA update

You can read the work of your fellow poets and follow the site here.

Love to everyone.

Woman: Splendor and Sorrow: Love Poems and Poetic Prose by Gabriela Marie Milton:

@Gabriela Marie Milton

My Dear Readers,

The purpose of this post is two-fold.

To share with you some thoughts on poetry.

To briefly give you more information about my upcoming poetry collection Woman: Splendor and Sorrow, Vita Brevis Press, release date July 31. 2021, and share with you one of my favorite poems included in this collection.

Random Thoughts on Poetry

In an interview with New York Glamor Magazine, I stated: “Poetry is the magnificence which reflects upon the landscape of our souls.” My intent was neither to offer an exhaustive definition of poetry, nor to dive into the more complex realm of conceptualization, and try to explain of what poetry is composed. How arrogant of me that would have been. For those who did not get the news yet, arrogance is not sexy. It is not a precondition for talent and/or high intelligence.

However, back to my tentative definition of poetry. It suffices to say that, if one pays close attention to my words, the most obvious conclusion is that poetry is “out there” waiting to be recognized, and to reflect itself upon the landscape of our souls. Once recognized, the reflection happens only in the measure to which our souls can create a mirror image, albeit highly distorted and with the degree of distortion predicated on our sensibility.

As Nigel McLoughlin wrote: “Recognition depends not on linguistic criteria or on conscious thought, but on what is physically felt. It does not demand structure or form. It is beyond that.” [McLoughlin, Nigel F ORCID: 0000-0002-0382-6831 (2013) Writing Poetry. In: A Companion to Creative Writing. Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 40-55]

Poetry is indeed beyond structure and form and, if I may, is “out there.” All of us are poets when that which we gather with our sense starts having an emotional and physical impact on us.

[draft – Thoughts on Poetry will continue in an interview with me conducted by Brian Geiger, the editor of Vita Brevis Poetry Magazine.]

On Woman: Splendor and Sorrow

Woman is a collection of 63 love poems and 25 pieces of poetic prose. I talked in another post about the feminist and philosophical trends in my poetic prose. However, the main theme of my book is love.

Therefore, in this post I would like to quickly turn to my love poems. Out of the 63 love poems included in Woman, “The Biblical Sense Of To Know” is my favorite. The poem was first published by Spillwords Press under one of my pen names: Gabriela M on March 10, 2020. Below is the original text of the poem as published by Spillwords. In Woman, the text was slightly modified.

The Biblical Sense Of To Know

the biblical sense of to know
born in a summer that never existed
nailed to the cross of your poems
I’m losing my mind inside the blue night
I reach you in dreams you do not understand
It hurts when I’m there
It hurts when I’m not
I ask for the help gravediggers can grant
I wrote I love you on a note that I locked
It wasn’t a snake, it was an iguana
the night the tango nuevo played its guitar
on fifteen decades I counted my prayers
my fingers were naked
my fingers were gloved

Why do I like this poem so much? Because in the moments I wrote it reality deeply reflected in the mirrors of my souls. I was hurting.

I do not believe poets know only that which comes “by observation of themselves.” The observation of ourselves is only one of the preconditions of poetry. The multiple faces of reality is perhaps another one.

my fingers were naked
my fingers were gloved

Those are simply two instances of the same thing.

I will talk to you more soon.

Thank you for reading.
Love to everyone.

@Gabriela Marie Milton

Dear Readers,

Here are some of my summer reading recommendations. I haven’t ranked-ordered them. They are all excellent choices.

Summer recommendations:

Midnight With Words: Late Night Conversations in Poetry.

An anthology in which you will find poetry of stunning refinement, of beauty, and subtle meanings. An exceptional recital of verses that enchants the mind and the senses. This is one of the most impressive anthologies I’ve ever read.

Author: Lisa Alletson, Joe Barca, Cynthia Capri, Delilah Doe, Mark H. Fitzpatrick, Ty Gardner, Jeffrey Haskey-Valerius, Rebecca Hooper, Andy MacGregor, Jared Mulhair, Antonia Wang, and Wanjiku Wanjiru.

A Ferryman and the Sea Witch by D. Wallace Peach

Enter a world of fantasy, and with that the mesmerizing writing style of D. Wallace Peach. The book has a fascinating plot, passages of powerful imagery, and emblematic characters; in short the real ingredients of a bestseller.

Visit Diana’s site here.

The Anthropocene Hymnal anthology is here.

Please do not forget that you can order now The Anthropocene Hymnal anthology. The Anthology is “a poetic response to the joint crises of climate change and biodiversity loss.” (Ingrid Wilson, ed.) Read more on Ingrid Wilson’s site.

Crossroads (Winds of Love) by Jude Itakaly

A dazzling collection of poetry written by a young author. Let’s listen to him:

“I wrote Crossroads for all who have not found romantic love and are on the threshold of giving up on it, for all who have love and may be about to give it up, and for all who have been wounded gravely by love and are scared of ever trying it again. It is a companion that stirs memory in reminiscent and also horrific ways only to finally awaken hope and new life in us, where the best love may come to us.”

Jude’s landing page

Update on my upcoming collection of poetry Woman: Splendor and Sorrow

For those of you who are interested in my upcoming collection of poetry Woman: Splendor and Sorrow my publisher and I decided we will not open it for pre-order. The book will be published on July 31. Both versions e-book and paperback will be available via Amazon. I will post the links on July 31.

MasticadoresUSA updates

There are several new posts up at MasticadoresUSA. For me MasticadoresUSA is a labor of love. Thank you to everyone who supports this site.

You can read the work of your fellow poets and follow the site here.

@Gabriela Marie Milton

Time to put yourself first? I don’t think so. It is time to put our planet first. If not there will be no you, I, us.

The Anthropocene Hymnal anthology is here.

Ingrid Wilson, who complied and edited The Anthropocene Hymnal, describes it as “a poetic response to the joint crises of climate change and biodiversity loss.” Ingrid worked hard to raise awareness of the dangers our planet faces. I am extremely grateful to her for her efforts and dedication.

The book will be published on 24 July 2021. The Kindle e-book is now available for pre-order from Amazon.

However, please keep in mind that Ingrid will sell her own version of the e-book on her site. Payment for downloads purchased in that way will be via donation to WWF. If you want to contribute to WWF [https://www.worldwildlife.org/] please consider buying from Ingrid’s site.

From my contribution

destiny of this earth
you are my destiny too
I burn in wildfires and spin in the eyewalls of hurricanes that should never be
I sit at the intersection of two bridges that lead nowhere
wonder how many days this earth and I have left
there is no more laughter in the eyes of the stars
there are no more shells on the shore
the waves leave behind the deformed plastic of heated summers
echoes of drunken voices
…
destiny of this earth
you are my destiny too
teach me what saviors do

A few reports on climate change

“Record-breaking temperatures hit the Pacific Northwest at the end of June, with an all-time high in British Columbia of 121 degrees.. An estimated 1 billion small sea creatures – including mussels, clams and snails – died during the heat wave in the Salish Sea, off more than 4,000 miles of linear shore…” [Amanda Coletta, and Sammy Westfall, The Seattle Times, July 8, 2021]. Internet available here.

“Officials in the Florida Keys announced what many coastal governments nationwide have long feared, but few have been willing to admit: As seas rise and flooding gets worse, not everyone can be saved.” [Christopher Flavelle and Patricia Mazzei, The New York Times, December 4, 2019]. Internet available here.

“2020 was one of the three warmest years on record. The past six years, including 2020, have been the six warmest years on record. Temperatures reached 38.0 °C at Verkhoyansk, Russian Federation on 20 June, the highest recorded temperature anywhere north of the Arctic Circle.” [State of the Global Climate 2020, WMO-No. 1264, 2021]. Internet available here.

To increase donations to WWF please consider supporting Ingrid’s efforts and buying The Anthropocene Hymnal from her site when available.

Thank you everyone.

@Gabriela Marie Milton

Cruel Sunsets by Gabriela Marie Milton

Summer sunsets with their cruel debaucheries of orange and purple. Concentrated scents of saffron and roses in the hallways. Dates filled with marzipan. I crave sweetness like I crave you.

Nightmares. A sailor drowned a cat at sea. Someone paid him to do it.

I cannot breathe anymore.

Last night in one of the upstairs bedrooms the child’s toys changed places. A candle lit by itself.

I do not wish you were here. I am beyond that. My blood flows in the opposite direction. I am the plenitude of my febrilities. I am incandescent.

Remember that scene from Jane Eyre? Bertha: beautiful, exotic, insane, locked in a room. Bertha whom Rochester married in Jamaica. Every time he tried to open the door she would rush to tear him apart. Why am I thinking Bertha?

I can see you walking in the streets of another continent. I can hear your murmurs by the sea.

I still cannot breathe.

My darling, “will you still be loving me when the summer is gone?”

MasticadoresUSA Update

There are several new poems up at MasticadoresUSA. Please visit the site here and support your fellow poets. Do not forget to follow the site.

Thank you.

Have a beautiful summer everyone.

@Gabriela Marie Milton

My poem I am the one translated into Italian by Daniela Cerrato is up at Gioielli Rubati 146.

Those of you who can read Italian please visit Gioielli Rubati 146 here.

My most sincere thanks to Daniela who translated my poem.
Grazie di core, Daniela [visit site].

Deep thanks to Flavio Almerighi [visit side] too, the founder of Gioielli Rubati, who featured me in previous editions, and who translated into Italian several pieces included in my book Passions: Love Poems and Other Writings [available on Amazon here].

I am the one

I am the voice of your past loves
resounding in your wildest fantasies
dressed in roses at the altar of your dreams
I am the one you’ve never had
my soul flows from the tears of the Nile
from the hands of children who still beg
through ruins, darkness, and deep pain
through wars which they will never understand
I am the last who will be saved
for I have sinned under the shadow of His cross
when Spanish fountains cry in the sunset
I am the Desdemona who you’ve never met
today Granada’s just the place
in which García Lorca once was killed
I am the feather of a gold macaw bird
and in the city where bells toll
I am the one whose cries you’ve never heard.

Io sono l’unica

Sono la voce dei tuoi amori passati
che si fa eco nelle tue fantasie più selvagge
vestita di rose all’altare dei tuoi sogni
Sono colei che non hai mai avuto,
la mia anima scorre dalle lacrime del Nilo
dalle mani dei bambini che ancora mendicano
attraverso rovine, oscurità e dolore profondo
attraverso guerre che non capiranno mai.
Sono l’ultima che si salverà
perché ho peccato all’ombra della Sua croce
quando le fontane spagnole piangono al tramonto
Sono la Desdemona che non hai mai incontrato,
oggi Granada è il luogo
in cui una volta fu ucciso García Lorca.
Sono la piuma dell’uccello ara dorato
e nella città dove suonano le campane
sono la sola di cui non hai mai udito i pianti.

MasticadoresUSA Update

A beautiful poem by Joni Caggiano is up at MasticadoresUSA. Please read it here and subscribe to MasticadoresUSA.

Do you want to submit? Please read the guidelines here.
Thank you
Gabriela

@Gabriela Marie Milton

Dear Readers,

It is with the outmost pleasure that I introduce you to a fabulous American poet: Ty Gardner. I discovered Ty on Twitter about a month ago. His talent captivated me. His poetry is life and it’s beauty. His poetry is all of us.

The rambling roads are calling home,
and the paper trails of prose-poemed passages
we vowed to roam echo visions of misted-morning veils
o’er mountain…

Please continue reading Ty’s poem Siren Songs of Rambling Roads at MasticadoresUSA.

Visit Ty’s Amazon site here. Pick one of his books. Read it and you will know what I am taking about. Visit him on Twitter.

Do not forget to follow MasticadoresUSA.

Do you want to submit? Read the editorial announcement here.
Thank you
Gabriela

@Gabriela Marie Milton