THE STONE

It is the awakening of beginnings,

A pulse born from the silence of ages,

The first memory of existence,

And the voice of the question when it emerged from fear.

In the hand of the first human, it became a tool that holds life,

A spark that lights the darkness,

A ember that preserves the body from the cold of annihilation,

And the first line on the cave wall.

It was a home when a home was unknown,

A sky to seek shade beneath,

A ground that bears the tremor of a step,

And a language that speaks without letters.

From it the story was launched,

Upon it the cry was broken,

In its hollows the trace dwelled,

And through it, humans understood the meaning of being.

In all its transformations, it bore witness,

In the grave, a mark,

In the temple, a symbol,

In the crown, glory,

And in sculpture, immortality.

O you,

Silent one who thinks,

Heavy one who speaks with wisdom,

Secret one dwelling at the edge of time.

I AM NOT AN IDOL 

I am not an idol,

nor a silent wall where your voice hides when it fears the void.

I am the breath of the universe when its chest feels tight,

and I am the wound that refuses to become a scar.

I am woman,

not a shadow that follows you wherever you walk,

nor a mirror that polishes your face to see your own glow in it,

but another face of truth,

questioning you when you long for forgetfulness.

I am not a stone that adorns your throne,

I am a wave uprooting silence from its roots,

and a land returning to the seed the whisper of eternity.

You want me as a chain,

but I want you as a journey,

searching with me for a meaning beyond flesh and blood.

I am not an idol,

I am a question dwelling in your eyes,

and an answer written only with the freedom of the soul.

I am woman,

and if you understood me…

if you stood before me without fear and without dominion,

you too would become… human.

A TEST FOR CONSCIENCE 

In the silence of closed homes

The stone bleeds from the heat of bodies,

And the gaze of shadows trembles in the corners of the soul,

As if time itself fears to witness.

The hand that strikes is but an echo,

An echo hiding in the hollows of the heart,

And a letter lost amidst the silence of screams,

A soul learning to live without a voice.

In every wound, a river of questions is born,

And in every tear, the philosophy of existence takes shape:

Is freedom merely a distant dream,

Or a secret hidden in the depths of anguish?

The woman is not merely moving silence,

Nor a stone dwelling between walls,

She is a light slipping through the cracks of pain,

A river flowing despite the chains,

And wisdom that cannot be broken by the striking hand.

Every fracture teaches the stone to dream,

Every tear gives the shadow new colors,

Silence becomes a cry,

Pain opens gates to light,

And resilience births a new horizon for life.

Violence against women is a test of life,

An experiment of human awareness,

A test for conscience,

And where the soul endures,

Light springs from the depths of the stone,

And dignity learns it cannot be killed,

Silence becomes strength,

And freedom echoes in every heart that remained silent,

Until the world understands that true power

Lies in respect, and in enabling the soul

To bloom without limits.

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY: 

TAGHRID BOU MERHI is a Lebanese-Brazilian poet, journalist, and translator, whose writing carries echoes of multiple cultures and resonates with a deeply human spirit. Born in Lebanon, she currently lives in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, after spending significant periods in various countries, including eight years in Italy and two in Switzerland, where she absorbed the richness of European culture, adding a universal and humanistic dimension to her Arab heritage.

Taghrid writes poetry, prose, articles, stories, and studies in the fields of thought, society, and religion, and is fluent in six languages: Arabic, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. This allows her to move between languages and cultures with the lightness of a butterfly and the depth of a philosopher. Her works are distinguished by a clear poetic imprint even in the most complex subjects, combining aesthetic sensitivity with a reflective vision of existence.

To date, she has published 23 original books and translated 45 works from various languages into Arabic and vice versa. She has contributed to more than 220 Arabic and international anthologies, and her works have been translated into 48 languages, reflecting the global reach of her poetic and humanistic voice.

Taghrid serves as the head of translation departments in more than ten Arabic and international magazines, and she is a key figure in bringing Arabic literature to the world and vice versa, with a poetic sensitivity that preserves the spirit and authenticity of the text.

She is renowned for her refined translations, which carry poetry from one language to another as if rewriting it, earning the trust of leading poets worldwide by translating their works into Arabic, while also bringing Arabic poetry to the world’s languages with beauty and soul equal to the original.

She is also president of Ciesart Lebanon, holds honorary literary positions in international cultural organizations, serves as an international judge in poetry competitions, and actively participates in global literary and cultural festivals. She has received dozens of awards for translation and literary creativity and is today considered one of the most prominent female figures in Arabic literature in the diaspora.

Her passion for writing began at the age of ten, and her first poem was published at the age of twelve in the Lebanese magazine Al-Hurriya, titled The Cause, dedicated to Palestine. Since then, writing has become an inevitable existential path for her, transforming her into a flower of the East that has spread its fragrance in the gardens of the world.

1. The Breasts Depart

Marla woke up flat-chested and full of dread. Her tits had left her.

Not metaphorically. Not emotionally. They had packed up their nipple rings, slathered on some coconut oil, and walked out sometime between 3:17 and 4:06 a.m., leaving behind a note scrawled in eyeliner on the bathroom mirror:

“We’re tired of being your emotional support meat. We’re going corporate. Don’t wait up.”

She stared at her reflection, now a pale slab of chest meat, and screamed. Not because she missed them. Because she knew what they were capable of.

2. The ATM Incident

Three days later, she spotted them at a Chase Bank ATM on Sunset.

They were wearing a vintage Vivienne Westwood corset, nipple tassels shaped like dollar signs, and a pair of oversized sunglasses perched on their areolas. The left one—always the sassier—was tapping away at the keypad with a manicured finger. The right one was sipping a matcha latte through a straw tucked into its cleavage.

Marla approached, hoodie pulled tight around her hollow chest.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Those are my tits.”

The left breast turned. “We prefer independent assets now.”

The right one blew a kiss and said, “We’re building a brand.”

3. The Debt Spiral

Marla tried to file a missing body part report. The cop laughed so hard his mustache fell off and scurried away like a cockroach.

She remembered The Nose by Gogol. How the nose dressed in a military uniform and refused to acknowledge its owner. Her breasts were worse. They were buying NFTs, investing in crypto, and launching a podcast called Boobonomics.

She saw them on a billboard for OnlyTans, a tanning salon they co-owned with a rogue spleen from Belarus.

Her credit score plummeted. Her name was attached to six maxed-out cards, a yacht rental in Ibiza, and a failed startup called “Nipple Futures LLC.”

4. The Podcast

Marla tracked them down to a podcast studio in Silver Lake.

They were being interviewed by a sentient vape pen named Chad.

“So, tell me,” Chad wheezed, “how did you go from being attached to a nobody to becoming icons of financial freedom?”

The left breast giggled. “We were tired of being objectified. So we became the object.”

The right one added, “We’re launching a lingerie line called Hostile Takeover.”

Marla burst in, breathless. “You’re ruining my life!”

The breasts blinked. “Do we know you?”

5. The Arrest

The FBI finally caught up with them.

Marla was arrested alongside her breasts for wire fraud, identity theft, and racketeering. They were accused of laundering money through a shell company called “BoobCoin.”

In the interrogation room, Detective Slade leaned in. His jaw was a meat cleaver. His libido, a broken fire hydrant.

“Tell me who’s behind this.”

The breasts giggled. “We are, Daddy.”

They seduced him with a slow bounce and a whispered promise of “interest-free pleasure.” He let them out on bail. Marla stayed cuffed.

6. The Showdown

Marla was released two days later. She found them in her apartment, sipping absinthe and watching reruns of Murder, She Wrote.

“You sold me out,” she growled.

“We upgraded,” they purred.

She lunged. They countered.

It was a knock-down, drag-out, tit-on-girl brawl. Fishnets tore. Lipstick smeared. The left breast bit her ear. The right one tried to gouge her eye with a stiletto heel.

They collapsed together, bruised and panting.

7. The Suffocation

Marla fell asleep on the floor, bloodied and exhausted.

She awoke to find her breasts trying to suffocate her, wrapping around her face like fleshy boa constrictors.

“Enough!” she screamed, grabbing a pair of bondage ropes from under the bed.

She tied them up, tight and trembling.

They moaned.

“Oh, you like that,” she said.

“We’ve always wanted a domme,” they whispered.

8. The Kink Ever After

Now they live together in a one-bedroom apartment above a taxidermy shop.

Marla is the Mistress. Her breasts are her submissives.

They pay off their debt one spank at a time.

Every night, she whispers to them:

“You may have left me once. But now? You’re mine.”

And they reply, in unison:

“Yes, Mistress. Forever and ever. Amen.”

9. Epilogue: The Nose Knows

Sometimes, late at night, Marla dreams of Gogol’s nose.

It floats past her window in a military uniform, saluting her with a crooked smile.

She salutes back.

Because in this world, body parts have ambitions. And sometimes, they just need a little discipline.

The Feeling of Things Coming to an End

I like the feeling of things coming to an end

a book finished, good or bad;

a rain falling is all the rain falling;

the campus near vacation starts to empty,

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.

Food 

Speaking for food

Bombs are coming in my left

Bombs are coming in my right

The smell of a coffee becomes a dream

People are targeted

Suffering

Starvation

Hypocrisy the cry for freedom

Governments they are counting their money

Over the bodies of dead children

Do you want this life

How much Human you feel today

We are all victims in the mind of narcissist

men with power

Peace

Unknown word

……..

Hate

War

Words that has bring people to the chaos

The absolute chaos 

Who’s supporting this evil??

We are

With our silence 

With our selfiness 

With our personal issues 

With our blindness 

Because man is the greatest monster of everyone 

Open your eyes 

Open your heart 

Open your hands to sky 

Start praying 

…………..

I am a woman 

Speaking loud about peace 

I am a woman 

A mother 

A daughter 

A Goddess

A bird

I am a justice lover 

I am woman who has long hair 

So i can hide my tears and 

Keep my body strong enough for your evil eyes 

I am woman who 

Glorifies 

God in every step…..

Eva Petropoulou Lianou is the founder of Poetry Unites People and has spent more than 10 years creating bridges for peace and poetry.

Thirty Beats

‎Oh, the pleasant moon hanging on the lips of the beloved

‎Don’t suck the light in greed anymore

‎Don’t walk in the arms of my beloved

‎Waiting for me on her radiant face

‎Don’t touch her tender heart

‎Where my dreams are drawn

‎Don’t look for the map of her eyes

‎There my happiness is tied

‎Don’t keep your breath in the bonds of her arms

‎There my nerves are touched

‎Don’t touch the sound of her feet.

‎Listen to the rhythm of my love with your ears.

‎

‎Tell the city, the garden and the orchard

‎The butterfly has touched the sky’s eyes

‎All the locks of the stars have opened

‎In this luminous light of love.

‎The spark of neurons covered in magnetic passion

‎Love’s rays pave the way like a river

‎The sweetest journey breaks the pride with a twinkle

‎The still nebula peeks out from the rosebud

‎A thousand roses stand in a row

‎With our honey moon in hand

‎Where darkness will never write a letter

‎All light will be purified in the water of the fountain

‎

‎Oh, the open air of spring,

‎Sing no more in a lonely tune

‎Wrap the neck of the afternoon of Chaitra

‎With the garland of red spring

‎Paint the flower of love on her forehead

‎Decorate her feet

‎With pearls from the oyster

‎Tell the birds

‎That in this kingdom, poetry will awaken

‎With their united voices

‎People will forget all differences.

‎The flag of love will fly on the desert.

‎

‎Oh, lonely river waves,

‎Don’t shed tears on the chest of the night

‎Don’t spread your sorrowful face

‎Don’t cry and sigh

‎On the flute of our union

‎Look, the flowers have learned to smile

‎The seeds of a vocal dream have sprouted in the chest of the bumblebee

‎The joy of happiness has blossomed in the bud of sorrow

‎I am coming on horseback

‎Tell the royal court

‎All the stones of the kingdom will become flowers

‎The fragrance of time will sing the song of union in thirty beats.

For the children

I am Bra Mzi Mahola

I am Nana Walter Chakela

I am Yehuda Amichai

I am Refaat Alareer

I am Ian Fleming

I am Patricia Highsmith

I am Brad Pitt

I am Coco Chanel

I am Rilke

I am Nietzsche

I am Freud

I am Jung

I am Lou Andreas Salome

I am Malcolm X

I am George Botha

I am Steve Biko

I  am Bessie Head

I am Ingrid Jonker

I am Sylvia Plath,

Anne Sexton

I am America,

I am Israel,

I am Palestine,

China, Russia, Australia,

Derek Walcott’s West India

I am Mufti Menk

I am Azania

I am everywhere

I am a child of God,

standing with a

a ripple of hope in my hands

I am freedom.

People always think of food when they hear about fish. They imagine the splendor and magnificence of the ocean or that sweet film about a coming of age story in Finding Nemo. This is a story for the ages, concerning land development meeting natural resources and the bounty and abundance of Mother Nature.

The writing in this story is a masterful blend of the lyrical, fantastical and the dire realities of climate change and the extreme changes to the environment due to human interference when it concerns the delicate balance of the ecosystem of a lake. It is filled in the beginning with the wonderment of the animal world and even can be quite magical at times.

Life in a pond can be tricky to navigate at the best of times but life is good for the catfish Xi and his friend Joe in the tranquil waters of his lake. Xi turns a telescopic eye to a penetrating view of the environment. In the beginning there is a tolerant understanding of the outside world. Xi, a catfish, lives in the watery depths of a pond with his friend Joe.

This story stimulates interest around the subject matter of grief for a life lived without difficulties and challenges, and loss, how dangerous human intervention is when it comes to matters in the animal kingdom. It’s a sad story filled with the violence and brutality of man in the natural world.

Humanity soon comes to the lake and the lake soon becomes a tourist hotspot. A hospital for Covid-19 is built at the edge of the lake and a maritime museum. In the process, animal life is killed by pollutants and removed from the lake as well. Life as Xi knows it is coming to an end. There’s an imbalance that occurs at the lake as modern life creeps up upon the animals at the lake.

Xi begins traveling to Florida and hopes to make it his new home but undergoes a violent and jarring meeting with a ferocious and curious dog. Xi is rescued and taken care of by its owner. The owner, Fred, then travels to Florida to their lab where animals of all kinds undergo the horrific experiences of experimentation at the hands of human beings.

After every traumatic experience Xi undergoes he braces himself for what will happen to him next. The researchers and Fred have no qualms about eating hot fin soup in front of Xi. The Florida researchers win the Nobel Prize but it comes at a terrible cost. The fragility of plant life and the animal kingdom that co-exists interdependently in the lake is not taken into account and it is not understood by human life. Humanity fails to intervene to save nature and the environment.

They are eager to kill, maim, mutilate and destroy in the name of science, research and experimentation. The human beings in this story have no respect for the natural world. They think their research will lead them to getting acclaim, international prizes and that they are doing it for the glory of mankind. They think nothing of how valuable the life inside the lake is.

Here are a few quotes from this fascinating yet tragic story that reveals man’s greed and his need for power, control and total domination over the natural world.

“It was a lake – clear, serene and old as earth.”

“The lake was surrounded by big trees that attracted especially the migratory birds. In winter, it would become a meeting zone for numerous birds – from the bigger ones like geese, waders and storks to the tiny ones like warbles, wagtails and pipits.”

“Without protozoa, there was nothing left for zooplankton to eat; and while zooplankton couldn’t grow there, invertebrates had to starve and die. As there were no invertebrates, fishes were not required to make an effort to look for a prey.”

“Despite some caring masters having such concern for their finned subjects, Joe would feel rather offended that the catfish community was being disdained. No doubt, they could collect food from any level but were bottom feeders as well. Now, as the doctor suggested to the farmer to remain careful about throwing peas into the pond, the catfishes began to harbor a deep resentment against him.”

“Whether they ever reached Florida is another matter.”

“They saw objects resembling hooks containing delicious food, tied to lines coming down from above. All the fishes thought it to be a great feast offered by someone in the sky so they happily scrambled to swallow the hooks, only to get the hook points pierced into and anchored inside their mouths, gullets or gills.”

“Some investor decided to construct a 4-star hotel on the lake to attract even more tourists from home and abroad. For this purpose, pneumatic caissons were utilized, and an underground tunnel was built using the same technology. To implement the plans at minimum cost, the lake was drained, and the mud and silt thus collected were used to elevate the banks. An artificial island was made in the shape of a palm frond, upon which a multi-storied building was erected.”

“It had a height of five to six feet, two legs, two eyes, fingers and so on, but no tail, fins or gills. Since Xi had previously heard about the human physique from his dearest pal Joe, he could easily recognize that it must be a human.”

Here are a few words about the author.

Born in the village of Majkhuria in Bangladesh, Rehanul Hoque started by writing poems at an early age. Falling ‘upon the thorns of life,’ Rehanul takes refuge in the lap of nature. He also seeks pleasure in playing with words. He believes beauty is religion and literature can build a habitable earth by promoting harmony and truth together through the appreciation of beauty. He dreams of a future ruled only by love.

Rehanul’s works have appeared in different journals, magazines and anthologies like The Wagon Magazine, Scarlet Leaf Review, The Penwood Review, The Pangolin Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, The Piker Press, Cacti Fur, LUMMOX 9, Literary Yard, NAT SCAMMACCA CULTURAL MAGAZINE, AZAHAR REVISTA POETICA, Asian Signature, North Dakota Quarterly, The Cyclone will End, and Love in Summer.

A promotional video for “The Immigrant Catfish”:

This review was previously published on the website Modern Diplomacy on September 2, 2024.