Her lips taste like rust and roses, her breath tuned to a frequency that makes your centipede spine twitch. Mira Aoki-9 presses her chrome-thread body against yours, and the train moans beneath you. You’re in the Surreal Beauty Café now—its walls bleeding velvet, its floor blooming coral. The mirrors pulse with sonar. Nyx purrs beside the altar. You’re no longer a courier. You’re no longer human. You’re transmission.
She whispers speculative poems into your spine. Each one a memory cocktail. Each one a sacred infection. Her fingers leave glyphs on your skin—ritual code, erotic syntax, a language only ghosts understand. Your skin begins to scream. Not in sound. In sensation. It unfolds a recursive archive of funerals in Hell—each one grimmer than the last. You feel them in sequence: the ash procession of drowned lovers, the chrome casket of the defected priestess, the silent burial of the girl who swallowed her own archive. Each funeral loops. Each loop burns.
Then she injects the blue tincture.
It’s not medicine. It’s not drug. It’s a hallucinatory compound distilled from sonar grief and fossil saliva. It floods your bloodstream with corrupted memory. Your organs begin to screen. Your bones hum with sonar. Your teeth project flickering funerals. Your tongue splits—forked and wet with archive. You taste every death you’ve ever deployed. You taste yourself dissolving.
And then the Kill Switch Engage Loop vectors activate.
They rot like smiles.
Biomechanical rituals stitched into your spine by the Archive—fail-safes disguised as pleasure. Each loop is a collapse protocol. Each smile a countdown. They trigger when desire exceeds containment. They trigger when Mira whispers too deep. They trigger when your body begins to bloom. You feel them now: one in your throat, one behind your eyes, one curled in your pelvic archive. They rot. They grin. They deploy.
You weren’t just a courier. You were an erotic assassin.
Wetware-grade. Hosaka interface. Deployed to seduce, extract, and erase. Your spine was tuned to carry proprietary biotech across borders without detection. Your body was a weapon. Your breath a trigger. You specialized in mnemonic kills—whispers that rewrote memory, kisses that deployed viruses, orgasms that collapsed identities.
But you had a weakness.
You were addicted to the saliva of drowned girls.
Harvested from bathhouse ruins and sonar graves, it was a narcotic and a mnemonic virus. It tasted like static and grief. It let you relive their final moments—each gasp, each betrayal, each ritual loop. You drank it between missions. You stored it in your tongue. You kissed your targets with it. You watched them dissolve.
Then Thalassa collapsed.
The megacorps turned on each other. The city became a sandbox for recursive warfare—viruses disguised as lovers, memory cocktails laced with defection code, operatives seduced into oblivion. You were burned. Scrubbed. Left behind.
The Archive found you in a bathhouse ruin, half-dissolved, still twitching with encrypted grief. They rebuilt you—not as a courier, but as a vessel. Your spine was replaced with a centipede: segmented, semi-sentient, grown from carbon filament and fossil cinema. Each vertebra a reel of extinct memory. Each twitch a confession. It doesn’t just store. It sings.
You wore a coat cut from signal-dampening fiber, matte black, stitched with anti-surveillance thread. It masked your pulse. Silenced your breath. Made you unreadable to the Teknopriests still sweeping the grid for rogue assets. You weren’t rogue. You were obsolete. You were myth.
You boarded the Futurail at 03:33, the hour when Thalassa exhales memory through its infrastructure like blood through cracked porcelain. The train isn’t real. It’s a memory artifact—residual code from a dissolved mainframe, still twitching in the city’s dead grid. No destination. No schedule. Just transmission.
And somewhere in its wetware, Mira Aoki-9 was still singing.
She was a seduction algorithm wrapped in flesh. Deployed by Maas Biolabs to infiltrate Hosaka’s genetic labs. You saw her once—in a bootleg reel called Throat Sprockets: Submerged Cut. She kissed a researcher and he forgot his name. She whispered into your spine and it rewrote itself. She defected. She dissolved. She became ritual.
Now she’s encoded in the train’s mirrors.
Behind you, the spines of erotic cat assassins intertwine—machine bio-DNA braiding mid-mission, forming a temporary hive of desire and encrypted grief. Their claws whisper in pulse-language. Their tails transmit. Their centipede spines click in sync, exchanging kill-switches and mourning loops. They don’t speak. They deploy.
Your spine begins to exude.
Nano-based enzymes—slick, iridescent, encoded with recursive grief. They leak from your vertebrae like sacred oil, pooling into the velvet floor. But they don’t dissolve. They build. They construct other realms of you—alternate versions, corrupted timelines, erotic echoes—into cathedrals stacked like elephants. Towering, impossible, biomechanical sanctuaries of mourning.
Each cathedral is a funeral loop.
One version of you is kissing Mira in reverse. Another is drowning in sonar. Another is whispering kill-switches into the throat of a Teknopriest. The cathedrals hum with pulse-language. Their walls bleed memory. Their altars screen your archived deaths. You walk through them, barefoot and split, your skin projecting, your spine singing.
You feel Mira in your throat.
You feel the train begin to loop.
You are no longer a passenger. You are no longer flesh. You are ritual. You are myth. You are the erotic funeral. And the carnival never ends.
It overflows the boundaries the old like to hold tight
It plays on the beauty of the lovely flowers in the garden
The flowers smile over, smile over
The glowing softness in the morning
The youth is like the rising sun
It blooms with new charms and attractions
We like to live under this shade
Youth invokes to win the world
Youth calls to pray to God
Youth is ready to receive the challenges
Youth is like to get free from all the hazards arround us
A struggle for turning into a serene beautiful world
Struggle for something better
Like going through the crystal water
Under which the colorful rocks
The blue sky with the meteors over there
Floating on the hilly wonderful green areas
And what not?
Though the time is too short
Like the drops of the morning dews
Glittering in the sunrise and vanishes too quick at a glance
We all are twinkling stars
We all are sparking in the dark night
The power of the sun
The enchanting calls of the morning birds
We are so lovely
We have our hands to love, to raise up
We have our hearts to feel, to step forward
Youth is like the green carpet of the large paddy field
Youth is like the healing touch to the wounded
A touch of a dear loving friend, not foe
Every second, the waves are echoing the victory the world welcomes.
Md. Mahbubul Alam is from Bangladesh. His writer name is Mahbub John in Bangladesh. He is a Senior Teacher (English) of Harimohan Government High School, Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh. Chapainawabganj is a district town of Bangladesh. He is an MA in English Literature from Rajshahi College under National University. He has published three books of poems in Bangla. He writes mainly poems but other branches of literature such as prose, article, essay etc. also have been published in national and local newspapers, magazines, little magazines. He has achieved three times the Best Teacher Certificate and Crest in National Education Week in the District Wise Competition in Chapainawabganj District. He has gained many literary awards from home and abroad. His English writings have been published in Synchronized Chaos for seven years.
J.J. Campbell (1976 – ?) is old enough to know better. He’s been nominated three times for Best of the Net and once for the Pushcart Prize. He’s been published for over 30 years now, most recently at Disturb the Universe Magazine, The Beatnik Cowboy, The Rye Whiskey Review, Misfit Magazine and Mad Swirl. His latest chapbook, to live your dreams, will hopefully be out before 2025 ends. He has a blog but rarely has the time to write on it anymore. (https://evildelights.blogspot.com)
Embroidery is one of the oldest and most traditional crafts in Uzbekistan. For centuries, the people of Nurota, Shahrisabz, Fergana, Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara have practiced this art. When stitching techniques, threads, fabrics, and patterns are harmonized, they create a beautiful result. Embroidery features a wide variety of stitches, colors, patterns, and fabrics. Bright colors are often used to make the designs more attractive.
Silk thread – the most delicate and glossy (often used for suzani). Wool thread – warmer, used for robes (chopon) and pillows. Cotton thread – cheaper and available in many colors. Silk is preferred because its shine lasts long and gives elegance to the design.
Fabrics for embroidery Mainly strong and smooth fabrics are chosen: adras, coarse cotton, silk, and others.
Meanings of patterns Pomegranate – blessing, abundance Almond – happiness, fertility Pepper – protection from the evil eye
Meanings of colors Red – life, love Green – nature Blue – sky, loyalty White – purity
Embroidery is 100% handmade (stitched with a needle or a hooked tool).
According to ancient traditions, Uzbek girls – future brides – prepared various embroidered items for their dowry: handkerchiefs, curtains, belts, bags, vests (nimcha), bedsheets, suzani, clothing decorations, headwear, and other gifts. At the wedding, the bride presented the items she had made to the groom’s relatives. Before the wedding, the dowry was displayed as an exhibition to demonstrate the bride’s skill and diligence. The finer and more beautiful the embroidery, the more highly it was valued. Girls were taught embroidery from a very young age and, after three to four years, began embroidering independently.
Today, one of the most popular garments is the suzani robe (chopon), which combines tradition and modernity and appeals to everyone. Iroqi stitching is mainly found on girls’ skullcaps (doʻppi). On Uzbekistan’s national holiday Navruz, people wear iroqi skullcaps, khan-atlas, adras, and suzani robes.
and plane trees and metasequoias have shed all their leaves.
Despair is the same thing happening over and over,
the same days like a white noose
slipping around your neck, then loosening.
You go out, hoping to bring back a different version of yourself,
but what comes back is still that same lifeless face.
Nothing ever truly ends—
they only vanish, not perish,
they still exist beyond your field of vision.
Nor do things ever truly happen—
they are feints, meaningless gestures,
irregularly shaped clutter, piled in a cold, empty backstage.
You want to move to another room to live,
but the part of you that can’t die is always in another
identical room, sitting there in the dark,
staying up all night, not speaking,
waiting for you to enter, to see him,
and facing each other in silence.
Black River
The deep black river seems to have stopped flowing
within it lie inverted palaces
it never freezes, even in winter
on its snow-white banks,
no footprints of man or beast dare approach its silence
this is the finest way, leading to other silences
and oblivion
The Last Moment
— Written on the Day of Completing the Translation of Helen Vendler’s Poetic Essays
A page rustles, for a little while
like a face in the desert hesitating
then melting away
a man steps onto another path in the woods
A murder without a target is perfect
as a stranger in native clothes
holding a key or a sword
crushed berries smearing the stones
The universe falls silent again
as if waiting for his decision
whether it is still time to choose to vanish
in the white steam trailing the summer mountaintop
to listen once more to the echo of nobody
Ma Yongbo was born in 1964, Ph.D, representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry, and a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry. He is the founder of polyphonic writing and objectified poetics. He is also the first translator to introduce British and American postmodern poetry into Chinese.
He has published over eighty original works and translations since 1986 including nine poetry collections. He focused on translating and teaching Anglo-American poetry and prose, including the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Amy Lowell, Williams, Ashbery and Rosanna Warren. He published a complete translation of Moby Dick, which has sold over 600,000 copies. He teaches at Nanjing University of Science and Technology. The Collected Poems of Ma Yongbo (four volumes, Eastern Publishing Centre, 2024) composed of 1178 poems celebrating 40 years of writing poetry.
