Poetry by Louisa Muniz

              Robb North CC




To My Younger Self

Too much is said
about stars & sadness

& unspooling the night
with your teeth.

Girl withholding. Girl abandoned.
Girl in hues of bulleted doe

be who you need to be.
Go ahead, tell me how

once you were lovely
how shadows grew

thick under scars.
Girl, go ahead, be April

besotted till golden September
in ocher-turned fields of earth.

Be the heady perfume 
of jasmine in June.
 
I’ll sage the windows, riddle the air
& bundle the bands of shame.

Despair is the dress of regret.
The body smothers in emptiness.

Listen how it morphs in slow rain.
Girl, go ahead be broken. Broken-open.

Don’t you see? High in the apple of sky
in twisting clouds, in rousing wind

I carry you.





Under the Lemon Tree

I am from wood, warm & the soft 
wax of dawn. The ancient world 
calls to me, no te olivides de mi. 
Never forget thrums in my head.

I’ve come here to uncoil
from the mouth of stillness
mortgaged to summer shadows.

The body is the wind in lullaby.
The body is a skin of dreams.
I am from the body that never forgets.

Where I’m from rosary beads sing
Santa Maria, Madre de Dios.
Prayers are milk-fed to faith.

Abuela lost her nine-month gemelas.
She bled from a speechless heart
in the deepest lakebed of longing.

Her song is elegy under el arbol de limonero.
Below the tree the air is pungent lemon fruit.

I am the namesake of twins. I answer to
the ghost of endearment: mija, nena, mamita.

I am from the tapestry of The Last Supper 
hung on the living room wall. A symbol of church goers.
Si Dios quiere is a prayer for possibility.

I was born on the last quarter of a waning moon.
In a pixilated heart I am out-stretched & zoomed. 

Some days I try to recall what I signed up for.
I am stardust spent & spilled
a return to love in the marrow of bone.
​

​

Louisa Muniz lives in Sayreville, N.J. She holds a Master’s in Curriculum and Instruction from Kean University. Her work has appeared in Tinderbox Journal, Palette Poetry, Menacing Hedge, Poetry Quarterly, PANK Magazine, Jabberwock Review and elsewhere. She won the Sheila-Na-Gig 2019 Spring Contest for her poem Stone Turned Sand. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. Her debut chapbook, After Heavy Rains by Finishing Line Press was released in December, 2020.

---