Surveillance

They keep a constant surveillance on our lexicon,

processing every content pattern,

every sound and stimulus,

intending to detect any intimidating competence.

They monitor every word of our utterance,

targeting the sense inherent

in the radiating features of our crafted letters,

scanning every idiosyncratic figure of speech

with unremitting reconnaissance.

Clairvoyance II

He sees humanoids dating the human species,

Aliens sunbathing on terrestrial beaches,

newlyweds booking rooms

on the overpopulated Moon.

He hears the throes of a newborn era,

free of -isms and hybrid terrors,

the jubilation of deer and fowls

over the ban of hunting on every ground,

including the Crown’s.

Ephemeral

Ephemeral is this stillness of five at dawn,

when what would follow is sheer turmoil.

No wonder suspense has become a much-dreaded foe.

Illusive is the silence that aspires to lull discourse,

since a torrent of abuse

will be blighting our morns,

seducing with the semblance of a dialogue

our entire afternoons,

only to then burn the midnight oil.

Frail is this temporary cloak of warmth,

the coziness of lying snug

inside a breath-warmed home,

with curtains fortified against wind and storms,

but cowering before a psychological cyclone.

Milieu III

I see carcasses everywhere

of birds and abandoned pets,

of a pigeon lying supine,

hit in the middle of its breast,

of a cat, its mouth wide-open

with the last throes of death,

and each daily walk with my discerning dog

is more than any living soul can bear.

Littered with the hookah’s remnants,

these streets abound with burnt-out coal,

some scattered cones,

and the residue of incessant gossip

that sheathes pavements, street corners, 

and the auras of pedestrians,

whose breaths still linger, 

weaving webs of indelible distress

where the moon moth spent the night




back to the house, the same germline in every brave smile




temporal shifts of fruit flies on a rotten banana




sun shower loosening the tongues of lavender




in a Faraday cage of his own making




a species that applauds and weeps for one another




old men and kids staring down into a rainy sinkhole




finding space for a star on the boy's torn and wrinkled paper




his second-wind dandelion wish




playing army, the dying heroes of S.Vogdes Street

Demand

They all boldly project

A responsibility they have

As if we don’t feel it either

They also possess it well.

The price that will be found

And will lead them

Remember it my friends

It will be their own west.

After they chose

Our children’s east

Let them erase it

From the sight of our eyes.

They left them helplessly

As if they were only

Their own people

And there they will look frozen.

A body that they wounded

A soul that they burned

And everything was destroyed

They made an altar of money.

 Without shame or hesitation

They blamed these

A supposed human error

And so they brought it down.

A responsibility that should have been theirs

Who should take it

After everyone learned

A mistake with the bow.

Their discordant sounds

All together they set up

An absurd theater

Innocent though they died.

But with the rhythms of the lyre

A tear of pain is shed

They shout from end to end.

2 .

They wanted me.

To sit faithfully and patiently listening

But my ears grew tired of the influences

Of irrelevant and heartless types to dictate

As if everything revolved around them.

My usual reward was patience

But my worst, as I realized

On my own authority, a simple

Simple and never ambiguous no, pure, clean.

They never wanted to see inside me

To see my sides and textures

As everything inside me, they tore

The garments of my soul and burned my entrails.

 Besides, who would be 

Right and always true

To see and cast even a glance

On my own dreams, I want to, but no.

I was to blame for all this 

My magnanimity was in a superlative degree

And it was not fitting for them, unsuitable for immoral and ungrateful people.

But I would always have a good reason, which they proclaimed within themselves as a given.

But the worst and most unjust thing was

Not for me simply and naturally

But for those who wanted to crawl

To accept and accept foreign inhospitable layers.

 Now I knew, I suffered, I learned and above all

For my own good, I would never be a giver

Where it was not worth it and more, where it caused them

Fear, terror, insecurity and imperative, removal.

No matter if they wanted me according to their own standards and measures

I chose my own bar 

Without regretting it at all 

And to finally face that view.

Which does not come from riches and palaces

Parents’ parchments and not only

Despite life’s narrow streets and its steep sides.

I deal with all types of poetry. My writing has been awarded and has participated in various anthologies. I have published four poetry collections and a short story and am a radio producer. 

Caroline

for a while 

every poem i wrote

was my way of imagining

that we were making love

in the grass 

or the alley 

by the candy store

or just about anywhere

i could remember 

ever holding your hand

i imagined the summer breeze

& an armful 

of red haired babies screaming

until we took turns 

rocking them to sleep

& you gently 

placed flowers

in their hair.

The Marrow of Blueberries

i dream you 

are the marrow

of blueberries

& the roman spike 

of aging rose bushes

& you say

i am living proof

that the sun

will make 

you bleed.

Poem for Katie Teagarden

all through high school

i don’t believe 

we ever exchanged 

more than a few words

you always looked nervous

standing by the swimming pool

waiting for the whistle

the sun always brought 

your freckles out

while the quiet 

kept you pure

on your the final morning

i think it rained.

John Dorsey is the former Poet Laureate of Belle, MO. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Which Way to the River: Selected Poems: 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020), Pocatello Wildflower, (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2023), 100 Mornings, (Sacred Parasite, 2025), and Trump Stamp, (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2026). 

Love, Honour, and the Hand of Fate: Reading the Knight’s Tale

There are stories in which love brings two people together. In The Knight’s Tale, love first divides. Geoffrey Chaucer places two imprisoned knights, Palamon and Arcite, before the same vision: Emily walking in a garden below. Companionship quickly becomes rivalry, and both men are prepared to suffer—and eventually fight—for the woman they desire.

What draws me to the tale is the question beneath its armour, ceremony, and courtly language: When two men fight over a woman they scarcely know, are they fighting for love—or for the idea of winning her?

Beyond the Romance

Geoffrey Chaucer, one of the foundational figures of English literature, understood human contradiction. In The Canterbury Tales, different voices reveal different faces of love, morality, faith, desire, and weakness.

The Knight’s story reflects his world: honour, combat, order, and destiny. Yet beneath its noble surface, The Knight’s Tale is also a story about power.

Palamon and Arcite barely know Emily, yet each claims profound love for her. Their intensity is undeniable, but intensity is not necessarily intimacy. Emily becomes the centre of their world before either man has truly entered hers.

And Emily has a desire of her own: she would rather remain unmarried.

That changes the question. It is no longer simply which knight deserves her, but whether either man has truly considered what she wants.

Honour, Desire, and Fate

In Chaucer’s world, love and combat easily share a language. Men fight to prove devotion and risk death to defend honour. A tournament is created to settle the rivalry, turning Emily’s future into part of a public contest.

Yet Chaucer does not simply condemn chivalry. Honour, courage, and loyalty have genuine value in this world. The complication begins when ideals become entangled with jealousy and possession.

And above both knights stands a power neither can command: fate.

Arcite wins the tournament, but victory cannot secure his future. His death overturns the apparent conclusion, and Palamon ultimately receives what force could not win for him.

A man may win the battle and lose the future.

Another may lose the battle and inherit what remains.

Emily and the Modern Reader

For contemporary readers, Emily may be one of the tale’s most thought-provoking figures. She is admired before she is known, fought over before she has chosen, and surrounded by structures that largely determine her future.

Her prayer, however, reveals another story beneath the romance: a woman whose own desire does not correspond with the desires surrounding her.

Reading a medieval work today does not require us to judge it entirely by modern assumptions. But historical distance should not prevent us from asking questions.

Good classics survive those questions.

Great ones become more interesting because of them.

From the Knight to the Miller

Reading The Knight’s Tale beside The Miller’s Tale reveals Chaucer’s remarkable range.

The Knight gives us temples, honour, combat, ceremony, and elevated love. The Miller gives us bodies, deception, adultery, and laughter.

One raises love toward the heavens.

The other pulls it into the bedroom.

Yet both ultimately ask whether human beings truly understand what they call love.

Final Assessment

The Knight’s Tale endures because beneath its medieval world lies a conflict that remains familiar: love and possession, honour and jealousy, choice and destiny.

We still confuse intensity with intimacy.

We still sometimes call desire love.

We still imagine that winning something means we can keep it.

And we still discover that life does not always honour the victories we carefully arrange.

Palamon and Arcite believe they are fighting each other.

In the end, neither is powerful enough to fight fate.

Perhaps the greatest contest in Chaucer’s tale was never between two knights at all

A Book Review by Raida Jirjees

Book: The Canterbury Tales

Author: Geoffrey Chaucer

Translator: Nevill Coghill

Edition: Penguin Classics

Publisher: Penguin Classics

Publication Year: 2003

Pages: 528

ISBN: 9780140424386

Mubāhala *

To the one who shrinks his love

to “Blessed Friday.”

For you, I say:

Come — let our hearts weep as one.

My letters—bowing and prostrating long at the altar of your silence — and yours.

My excuses — stitched in secret just to glimpse you — and yours.

The ache of my days

and yours.

My fear, raised by your own hand 

and yours.

Then let us swear together,

and lay the soul’s burning

upon whoever betrays.

• Mubahala: “Mutual cursing; a ritual in which each opposing party says ‘the curse of Allah may be upon the ones of us who are wrongdoers.’”   

(Taken from: https://rekhtadictionary.com/meaning-of-mubaahala?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

The Ark

Maori warriors flattened the lands won through bloodshed

and named it the South Island.

When the giant bustard flapped its wings,

the roots of the grassland trembled even in the wind.

On New Zealand’s earthquake island, isolated at 00:02,

three white-faced cows.

This tiny island of earth, where everything collapsed leaving only just enough,

is it God’s planned ark?

Counting toward infinity, then snap, short by the number 3.

Into that very plan, God drags the three cows.

The crumbling and cracking vast land is no longer a pasture for the cattle.

Like those times, excluded from the game of hopscotch at dusk,

the abandoned herd of cows.

The cows, puzzled by the suddenly narrowed field, comfort one another.

The cows can no longer go up

nor go down; nibbling on grass, they are peaceful for now.

The cows do not know God,

yet calmly, they rub their flanks together and graze.

That silent endurance of the cows.

Every crack in the world is a tear shed by God.

Seventeen-Year-Old Miss Marco Polo Sheep

By Yeon Myung-ji

Miss Marco Polo Sheep of the Pamir Mountains loved almond blossoms

and was an aspiring singer

who sang along to K-POP.

An aspirant,

what a beautiful occupation.

Riding the rhythm on the breath of the wind,

an aspirant walking the grassland.

She loves the wild goat

that endured the winter, tightly chewing on festuca grass.

The beasts of winter

must be winter aspirants.

The ghost of the snow mountains, the snow leopard,

must be a snow aspirant.

When you lie face down on the grassland, the grass sways,

and when you flip over the back of a stone, fish swim—

the aspirants of nature.

Only when a river flows from the belly

does the voice break through, says Miss Marco Polo Sheep.

Even if bitten on the nape and blood flows,

the song of the idol goat cannot be given up.

The pop song, which claimed that when the snow melts,

the leopard would melt too,

was plagiarism anyway.

The moonlight darkens,

and the snow leopard of Pamir, a high and desolate land,

drags its long tail across the ridge—

the ghost of the alpine.

The aspirant of a fairy tale,

caught off guard by the seventeen-year-old Miss Marco Polo Sheep.

Profile
Poet Yeon Myung-ji began her literary career in 2013 with the poetry collection 『Gashibi』, published in the Minerva Poetry Series.

Her published works include the poetry collections 『Sitting Like an Apple』 and 『Where would the House of the Sorry’ be? 』 the e-poetry collection 『Seventeen Marco Polos,』 and the travel essay 『Step by Step, Walking the Camino.』She has received the Tolstoy Literary Award, the Homi Literary Award, the Cheongsong Gaekju Literary Award, and the Aviation Literary Award. In 2025, she was awarded the Bronze Prize in Poetry at the Literature Asia Awards, Grand Prize Winner,9th Kim Myung-bae Literary Award.

Her poems have been translated and published in local languages in India, Pakistan, Kosovo, Italy, Egypt, the United States, and Belgium, Greece, UK, and Germany.