Two Poems by Louisa Muniz

Long-Held Forgiveness

When he slapped me for answering back I was halfway
through Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind:

the world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don’t mind
happiness not always being so very much fun.

At thirteen, born was a mute swan of unrest.

Years later, I’d dial his number, anxiously waiting
for him to answer, yet secretly hoping he wouldn’t

in order to avoid the awkward small talk
in the field of long silences between strangers.

If he did pick up, I’d affirm later to myself:
I am a good daughter, once the milkman’s daughter,

la hija del lechero, who rose daily before dawn
to deliver fresh eggs, butter & glass-bottled milk
to designated milk boxes on neighborhood porches.

At the end of it all, I visited him daily, in hospice.
Sat in the uneasy chair of a man orphaned at seven.

A man who never stayed around long enough
for a daughter holding absence in the hollow of her ribs.

Oh, how we ache for what is left whispering in us.
Oh, how we stumble through the mire, falter in the swale.

Slipping beneath the floating sheets before he passed,
he whispered, oigo musica Cubana.

I heard no Cuban music of danzon or rumba or son.
I heard no words of endearment, no words of regret
escape his slackened jaw in the slender hour.

What I heard was the weight of the rain.
How it pummeled the earth outside the window.

And how the earth embraced it.
Let it flow as runoff.
Let it go as long-held forgiveness.

*

Victory

Mother wasn’t a saint but she could’ve been sainted. Made holy. Exalted.
She was devoted to good in a way I never cared to be. Instead, I cared to be
saved by a blazing sunset while inhaling a Tango screwdriver. Father mistook
her heart for a secondhand rug, her hands for two empty jugs; a homemaker
in a housecoat. You could say I drank from the cup of resentment. You could say
it draped the house like a curtain of smoke. Through the cracked bedroom door
I watched Mother pray. Mouth salted in sorrow, she prayed to be seen in the moon’s
rosary of light, to be heard by the one who art in heaven. Ask me how I learned to
smokescreen sadness. Ask me how my body splintered, thin skinned, until every
muscle carried the weight of her name. When her mouth parched in enough,
she cut him loose. That was the year she discovered Elizabeth Taylor. Idolized her.
Framed Liz’s Life Magazine pictures on her bedroom and living room walls.
Painted a mole above her lip with an eyebrow pencil & cinched her waist to show-off
her curvaceous figure. Wore Victory Red lipstick as part of masking a brave face.
If she was looking for something glamorous in her ordinary life, I can’t say.

*

Louisa Muniz lives in Sayreville, N.J. She holds a Master’s in Curriculum and Instruction from Kean University. Her work has appeared in ONE ART, Tinderbox Journal, Palette Poetry, SWWIM, Jelly Bucket, PANK Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic and elsewhere. She won the Sheila-Na-Gig 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 was released in December, 2020. Her chapbook, The Body is More Than a Greening Thing will be published in the spring of 2025 by Finishing Line Press.