“Historical Memory is the Foundation of the Future”

​In our country, May 9th – Memory and Honor Day – is widely celebrated as a nationwide holiday. This date is one of the sacred traditions inherited from our ancestors and passed down from generation to generation over the years. In our independent Uzbekistan, this holiday continues to be celebrated with special respect and attention.

​As our First President Islam Karimov emphasized: “There is no future without historical memory. A nation that forgets its past has no future.” Indeed, every person must never forget their past.

​According to a parable, a man’s father was a simple farmer. He worked tirelessly day and night with honest labor to educate his children and settle them in their own homes. When his time came, the man passed away. His children buried him and returned home. After that, the division of the inheritance began: one took the field lands, another took the saved money and gold items, and another took the house.

​Then, one of the sons said: “I want my father’s boots that he wore while working in the field.” He took only that pair of boots and hung them at the entrance gate of his house. Everyone who entered or left would touch these boots with their head.

​One day, someone asked him: “Why have you hung these boots here?” He replied: “So that I never forget who I am, my identity, and where I came from.”

​In conclusion, a person should never forget their past, their ancestors, and their hard work. Memory is a sacred concept that serves to help a person understand their true identity. Valuing the heritage left by our ancestors and remembering them is the duty of each of us. As our honorable leader Sh. Mirziyoyev emphasized: “We must never forget the horrors of war and must appreciate the value of peace.”

Blurb and Review of  

DID YOU GET MARRIED TO HER WHEN I WAS IN THE MENTAL HOSPITAL?  

by Abigail George  

Published by ZamaShort 1^st April 2026  

Blurb 

In DID YOU GET MARRIED TO HER WHEN I WAS IN THE MENTAL HOSPITAL?  Abigail George takes the reader on the big dipper of her poetry, riding us through shocks and thrills  in the carriage of her life with mental illness, a stigma she was branded with at age 16. En route, we  become as Eve, but abandoned by Adam, teeth tearing apart the apple of knowledge, alone; we  become akin to Lady Macbeth, trying to wash the blood Netanyahu has spilled – nothing is  separable from anything else, and the language relentlessly stirs the pot of our inescapable oneness. This is a writing-witch’s brew, cooked to nourish and forever transform your understanding of  mental illness, womanhood and writing. 

* * * 

Review 

Dear Abigail 

Your story, DID YOU GET MARRIED TO HER WHEN I WAS IN THE MENTAL HOSPITAL? is not meant to be an easy read. I know it took it out of you to write it, and I am not surprised by  that. While I read it, I felt almost as if I were being confronted with the life that might have been  mine, had it not been for … what? The two facts of your childhood that distinguish your life and  mine most significantly, in my opinion, are, firstly, the fact that you were burdened with the stigma  of mental illness. As you write in the 24^th of a total of 25 passages, or prose stanzas, that make up  this work: “It was my destiny to call stigma a companion” (The Sea.) Oh, I empathise with you saying  how tired you are of the illness: 

I am tired of being mentally ill, this chronic sickness, this flame, the powers that be. I watch  it burn between my fingers. It tastes of Palestine. Cold stone turned into rubble. Make it go 

away but it doesn’t go away. (Longing, and on Reading that Sad Story ‘Flowers For Algernon’, Here  are Some Thoughts.) 

I was diagnosed with mental illness in my 30s, but I was compelled fiercely to refuse the stigma,  because my father told me in no uncertain terms to right myself, he did not want to, or could not, pay for more sessions with the psychiatrist. (I don’t have medical aid, you see.) And I had a three year-old child to look after. So, I weaned myself gradually off the meds I was told I’d need to take  for life, and focused instead, fully, on having to mother, and having to be a wife. You lament that  those age-old, anonymous roles weren’t for you – “I could never be wife material […] I could never  raise children. Oh, madwomen couldn’t do that” (Longing, and on Reading that Sad Story ‘Flowers For  Algernon’, Here are Some Thoughts.) These roles can indeed help, can ground us – as you, too, I think,  are finding, by having to look after, to mother, to care for, your two-year-old niece, and your elderly,  vulnerable father – ? 

But back to the illness with which you were loaded at such a young age, as we discover in your bio  that precedes your story. As I see it, this load was weirdly and unwillingly (or unwittingly?) linked  into the thing you state unequivocally saved you: language, poetry. I will say more to try to explain  what I mean by this, but before I do that, I want to name the second significant event that for me distinguishes your and my destinies in, I hope, mutually instructive ways: the fact that both your  parents supported and encouraged your writerly gift. We learn from your bio that your father  proofread your drafts when you were in your twenties and thirties, and that your mother “recognised  my talent for writing early on” and bought you a typewriter, first a manual and then an electric one,  wow! And this happened even though she “makes it a point never to read anything I have written”,  preferring Barbara Taylor Bradford and Danielle Steele novels. Well, as Richard Bach famously  observed: “Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.” Still, your brother,  though far from filled with joy over your life, as you describe him, nevertheless published your first  book. The bitter contradictions life forces us to accept! And so: Writing was a sign from God […] it gave me a reason to live, a purpose and I could heal myself, and others. (From your Bio)

Despite the hatred and the absence of peace around you, despite the sickness inherent in the social structures of school and the nuclear family, despite the fact that your family members, teachers and peers “had no time” for you and “severely bullied” you, “leaving [you] breathless, or half deranged with all the negativity in [your] environment”, you found “a sea of wildflowers” in poetry, “a bed on which [you] could rest the vessel of [your] body.” (From your Bio) That is beautiful. The same motif serves your experience of reading: Reading, you write in Eating Rice and Potatoes with some Steadfast Patience, “is for the wildflowers in our imagination to blossom”. 

You begin your story addressing your First Love. Later, in Don’t You Forget About Me, Pinky Swear  Promise Me, R., you address your toddler niece, then, in We Need to Discuss Crystal Meth, Struggle, the  Healer, and Forgiveness, it’s your brother you’re talking to. And in This is My Convent, you talk directly to  Anne Sexton. And then, in Poem for Gaza, Songs for Me, you revert to your First Love, O. Have I got  that right? Seeking a hearing, a connection, a conversation – just like any ordinary woman, like any  social creature. 

I like the way each of your passages, your prose stanzas, begins with a sentence full of capitals, there  is something stately and leonine about that. 

Years in Summer Days. 

Let Me Sleep Now in Peace, Please. 

I mean, it reminds me of the Lion in Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, the way you make the words  march in, heads held high, bringing that energy of the Unquestionable Arrival of the Sovereign. And  that allows, later, for the “vessel of [your] body” to claim her vulnerability in the ‘aquarium’ of your  suffering, to announce: 

I Don’t Know How to Start. 

Or: 

The Gap Between Symbol and Reality. (The final passage.) 

… where the capitals seem to submerge the reader, with equal grandeur, but no longer breathing  with lungs, there is almost a having to hold the breath as you write that:

The sea began screaming at me. 

And: 

I held the blueprint of my wound and stopped breathing. 

(Finding Machiavellian Turning Points in Having a Nervous Breakdown.) 

Henry Lombard calls your story “claustrophobic” in her comment, and remarks that you “prove” writing to be “a holy act of reclamation”. That is what I want to dwell on now, I mean the role of  literary language and its implicatedness, as I see it, in illness, and in “the brutality” which “was the  same”, whether you were at home reading a magazine “whose words hurt [your] eyes”, and “A refugee camp falls out”; or whether you were in Israel, which you discovered while your mother  watered the garden, in Finding Years in Summer Days, or whether Netanyahu speaks, in Gaza is not  Dead, and you squeeze blood out of stones in a refugee camp and wash soiled garments in the sea. The aroma of death, the rubbish, and decay, I need to get it off my hands. (Forgiven, but not Forgotten, it Doesn’t Matter you see.) 

Now you are Lady Macbeth, and all of humanity’s horrors are yours to cleanse. And the reader is  with you and it’s awful. 

So, what is happening here, the way I see it, is that language is dumping itself into you, into us, via  an unchecked flow of sounds and images. You write that “when it appears in the newspaper it has a  beating heart” (Finding Years in Summer Days) and there is this sense of the limitlessness, the  continuous increment, the boundarylessness, that dreadful slipperiness of the medium you use: 

I can’t throw out my feminine energies with the past, nor with the pasta water. (Octopus  Flowers in the Dark.) 

Or: 

Nothing grows inside this garden except the dead bodies of children, and snails who were  somehow not involved in the Palestinian struggle. (Silence.) 

And:

These pills fill me or are they peas? (For Gaza’s Flame Gatherers, Those on the Frontlines and the Ambulance Chasers.) 

The snails are actually comical in their non-involvement, a last, languid bastion of feet and feelers in  Eden. Even the pills and the peas bring in the curl of a question mark, or is it a shy smile, after their  shared p’s – ? But when you “fry the ham in the pan” (A New Love), I accidentally read “harm” for  “ham”; and in This is My Convent I see you eat “my friend egg”, and only afterwards realise it’s a  perfectly regular “fried egg”. I mean, what is happening is that the language is uncontained, or  should that be untamed? The verbal stew of torment is bewildering, the fine details are so awfully  human, again I gasp for breath, asking, where is reality, where is the realness of the animal I am, my  connection to the wind? I want to run away and breathe an air free of language. Maybe on the  mountain, who “have ears and a kind of feminine energy” (Finding Years in Summer Days)? I have to  admit that I don’t have the tenacity, I don’t have your ability to live this remarkable destiny of  showing the world that the word was NOT God, the word was far, far too HUMAN! 

The truth reveals itself. Unlike your mother, who eats an apple “in tiny bite-sized pieces” (Octopus  Flowers in the Dark), you “tear the apple apart with [your] teeth” and “deconstruct [dried fruit] on  [your] tongue” (A New Love), and “Gaza falls like the neck of a wildflower falls” (For Gaza’s Flame  Gatherers, Those on the Frontlines and the Ambulance Chasers.) 

So, you are Eve, abandoned by Adam to a fallen Eden, eating the whole apple by herself, teaching us  that we have not survived the Age of Permissiveness, where the sea is language and, as female  writers, we inhabit an ocean of suicidal female poets: “Ingrid Jonker’s sea” (Finding Machiavellian  Turning Points in Having a Nervous Breakdown). Who can deny this fact? Yet you crave for your mother  to SAY she loves you, her gifts of actions are NOT enough (Longing, and on Reading that Sad Story  ‘Flowers For Algernon’, Here are Some Thoughts). I was the same, exactly so, where I likewise craved to  hear words from my parents that I eventually learned to accept could not and still cannot be  articulated by the soft animal that is love. Is that why the following paragraph touches me so deeply? 

My spirit has evolved because I loved you. On lonely nights I gather this fact of life to  myself. […] What is this observation that challenges me to overcome my suffering? (I Don’t  Know How to Start.)

You write, “I don’t know how to end this on a positive note, so I will end here” (I Don’t Know How to Start) – words which must surely move even the most coolly detached of readers.  

And then!  

Then you ask. You ask with a directness that jumps beyond words, it’s the gentle curiosity of a wild animal. Cautious, but fearless. The Gentle Curiosity of Woman. You jump, no, you pounce straight to the heart of matter (not “the matter”, just “matter”): 

As a poet, as an individual, whose joy matters most to you? What is your response to loneliness? 

Oh, Abigail, thank you for those questions! I want to do nothing more than respond. I want you to  know, and I want myself to know that, As a Poet, As an Individual, it is The Voices of The Earth  that matter most to me. And my response to loneliness is To Move. To Walk. To Extend a  Kindness to Someone. To Make Something Using My Hands. Maybe then, after all, to write (By  Hand). For, to be a female who writes, I have learned, I may not prioritise the role of ‘being a  writer’. For a writer such as I am – and this is, despite everything I did not want and did not ask for, a destiny of choice – the act of writing must come last of all. For a woman, writing is a verb, not a  name, not an identity. Then it is easier done than said. 

I see your story as the beginning of The Dance Of Wildflowers In The Wind. Your wildflowers.  Your seeds and your planting. For, the way I see it, your hands are clean now. From All The Work – writing and otherwise – which you have done and still do, through the summertimes of your father’s  embrace, through the winters of your mother and sister and brother, through your wound’s blooms  every spring (Finding Years in Summer Days) through to “the silken smell of autumn” (Let Me Sleep  Now in Peace, Please) – a smell my nose is now hunting to harvest! 

Love from 

Silke 

– Silke Heiss, Sunrise-on-Sea, 6^th April 2026

Abigail George’s Did You Get Married To Her While I Was In the Mental Hospital? is available from publisher ZamaShort here.

Just keep quiet, dry your tears and eat the fishcake

I hear my mother’s voice from a happier time

Perhaps childhood

The tears started in childhood

I would cry over everything

My brother has used drugs 

Every single day for the past twenty years

Just keep quiet, Abigail

Keep the peace

Don’t start the Third World War

Just keep quiet

Your father has cancer

Your father is ill

Your father needs peace of mind too

Just keep quiet

As the world falls around you 

Into the quiet deep

Into the lake of darkness

Into the abyss

Into the frozen sea

The Dead Sea

The Strait of Hormuz

Just keep quiet

Please, keep quiet

You don’t have to battle your brother

And win

It is a fight you will never win

You can’t change a drug addict

You can’t force a gambling man to stop gambling

Only the police can interfere with 

A perpetrator of domestic violence

But what can they do about a woman

Sewn up in darkness

But what can they do about a man

Who shows no remorse

There is nothing you can do

You can’t change your brother

You can’t change the situation

You can’t fix him

Just keep the peace

You can’t argue, and you can’t reason

With a drug addict

They think that they are right 

They think that you are wrong

I won’t talk to you, brother,

Leave me alone

Please, don’t talk to me

Live your life

You’ve made your choice

I can’t live your life for you

Sometimes I talk to God

Sometimes I pray

God, can you hear me?

God, are you listening?

Mr Lodewyk says that God 

Is aware of everything

So, Mr Lodewyk, God must be aware of this

The situation that I am in

I ate the fishcake

And it turned into a whale 

Inside my belly

It tastes like paper

Even with sauce

It tastes like paper

Did you know 

That you could 

Swallow your tears?

I look at my mother

Is my mother

The lighthouse 

Or the sea?

Is she the darkness?

Is my father 

The shoreline

Or the rocks?

Is my father, perhaps, the light?

I fight with my brother every single day

I just want to stop fighting with him

Isn’t he tired of fighting

Sometimes I make him a cup of coffee

I pour love and forgiveness into the coffee

I spoon psalms into the coffee

When I place the cup in my brother’s hands

I wait patiently until it begins to sing a hymn

Sometimes I think he is darkness

Sometimes I think he is the light,

Or returning to the light

Sometimes I think he is the lighthouse

Sometimes I think he is the green waters

Of the sea turned into darkness 

Under the moonlight

Sometimes he is the shoreline

Sometimes he is the rocks

Please tell me, what else am I supposed to do?

Dear God, what else am I supposed to do?

Just keep quiet

And knit manifestos 

Into the scarf 

you are making

Knit poetry

Knit sad poems

And love poems

And political poems

For your niece

Pour love and forgiveness 

Into the scarf 

That you are knitting

Maybe if I can’t save my brother

Maybe I can save my niece

I got a telephone call from heaven

I look at the sky, at the clouds, at the coins of rain

Maybe, says my paternal grandmother’s voice

Who had to face addiction with her sons 

And her husband

Alcoholism and drug addiction

Her eldest son was a drug dealer

I keep swallowing my tears

And eating paper

I am so quiet

I am so quiet

I am so quiet

My brother hovers

I go to my room and lie on the bed

And my body turns into the Dead Sea.

——————————————————————–

in a never ending war

mercy, a currency this

world no longer accepts

yet still pushes salvation,

but at what cost

forced to believe in a god

that only listens to the rich

sell the poor that prayer is

hope, but hope has never

paid the rent, bought the

pills for a sick child or

pumped gas in a never

ending war

reality is never as bleak

as it seems

sadly, the fantasy never

is as brilliant either

this is the underbelly

of what happens when

you allow others to

live your dreams

but keep pumping

out the kids

let them try to survive

when artificial intelligence

is teaching them how to

speak english

no better here in the

margins of life

on more storm away

from a biblical flood

have to burn the cross

to keep warm

————————————————-

sipping on a bourbon

when i first heard the song

misguided angel by cowboy

junkies i always thought

that was going to be a song

some woman would dedicate

to me one day

i’m still waiting

sipping on a bourbon as

i wait for life to catch up

to my impending death

what am i going to do

with no soccer games

on everyday…

spain made some old guy

from argentina cry

it happens

hoping i can drink myself

to sleep tonight

only for a few hours

the rain will wake

me up, remind my

body that arthritis

runs the fucking

show now

———————————————————

starting to fade

it was one of those nights

i thought about the lesbian

and how she tasted on

my tongue

all these years later

memories starting

to fade

i’m sure her wife has

made sure i never

existed in the first

place

another round of

thunderstorms

coming tonight

i’ll put on prince just

for shits and giggles

i showed her one night

where her g spot was

two weeks later she

broke up with me

no longer needed me

i supposed

she could have at least

paid me back the two

grand she owed me

karma still dances

at the club

——————————————————-

what could go wrong

i never wanted to grow

old and still be single

i can hear my inner child

laughing, recalling the

failed suicide attempts

not sure if any of the old

girlfriends ever wanted

to marry me or even

wanted to ever see

me again

i have been tempted

to move to someplace

completely foreign

to me

what could go wrong

but part of me knows

this is the life of a

creative soul

we drive everyone

away with the scary

word of genius

why success never

feels real

and why so many of us

can only die when we

will allow it

one of those nights where

drinking yourself blind

is certainly an option

——————————————————–

when patience leaves

hurry up and wait

as technology takes

over our lives patience

is already running thin

and when patience leaves

listening becomes a fucking

chore

and we all know what

happens to fucking chores

we have a robot to vacuum

for us now

we were duped into believing

the future would be like the

jetsons

instead it feels like tron and

night of the living dead in a

late night feature at the local

drive in

the one where i made out

with a beautiful black woman

the same night i shit my pants

because i was never aware i

was now lactose intolerant

where was the robot to clean

up that fucking mess

J.J. Campbell (1976 – ?) is a 3 time Best of the Net nominee and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. He’s been widely published over the last 30 plus years, most recently at Drinkers Only, Mad Swirl, The Rye Whiskey Review, The Beatnik Cowboy and Yellow Mama. His most recent book, to live your dreams, published by Whiskey City Press, is available from Amazon by going here: https://a.co/d/06qUrWxm

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https://evildelights.blogspot.com

https://goodreads.com/jjthepoet

THE LUNAR DIET 

On late nights you’ve seen that Diana chick 

and you’ve heard her weightloss schtick. 

”In one month all your bulk will be gone,” 

But of course it’s all a con. 

Although her so-called Diet of the Moon 

with its traces of selenium and witchesbroom 

will indeed disappear your unwanted shape 

and you’ll vanish all your extra weight, 

but it will all come back again, 

your loss will become your gain 

and all too soon 

you’ll mushroom, you’ll boomerang, you’ll balloon. 

THE REALM OF THE GODS WHO CONTROL OTHERS’ CREATIONS 

While your muses canary you awake 

my parrot perches asleep in its cage. 

I burn in the absence of their flame 

but you tower up like a crane. 

And those birds do prophet our futures: 

your doves and my vultures, 

your peacocks and your hawks, 

my silent shell’s empty bells. 

Though we’re feathered alike, you and I, 

your plumes atlas the sky 

and mine mattress my sighs, my sighs. 

The eagle captured my pigeon 

and fed it to your nestlings. 

“LET’S PLAY HOUSE,”

I said, “Let’s get more personal.”

I didn’t know what would happen,

that you would act like a vacuum

and treat me like furniture.”

EYE JOB. NOSE JOB. AND RED CROSSES.

The steeples in Seoul:

Needles in the sky, sewing up all the stars.

They’re red

They’re red

from the stanch of old Korean faiths.

Red! Red!

clotted up after lost Korea’s face

As red

as the stars

on all those tanks

sent south

to patch over those scarlet steeples.

The new needles

hammer forged;

thread, sickle sliced.

THE MISSIONARY 

My pilgrimage was blessed! 

I counted off  

the beads she strung  

across her chest, her precious  

rosary. 

So  

I’d passed  

my first test, one step  

upon the way. To finalize  

my quest, incessantly  

I prayed. 

And when,  

at last,  

I pressed into  

her nunnery, my passion  

came to rest, enveloped  

in glory. 

Her cloister was a nest 

of sacred ecstasy.  

…

Question?

Will you come to see me again?

If you are willing to call on me
Meet me in such a way
That we won’t part again
In anticipation of your arrival
I have been staying awake
As though I won’t have to sleep back again

I am impatient to touch the gait of those feet
You are turning this way
Only for my sake

Will you plant some flowers for me
Before you take your way again?
Or at least, will you leave behind some flowers?
I will devote myself to them
So that they won’t wither ever again

Will you say something for me
From your pious lips?
I shall consider your words my prayer;
Will you kindly shed for me
A drop of tear?

I shall consider it my elixir
In the parching desert heat;
Will you light me a lamp before you part again?
I shall consider it the moon
To light my dark nights

In the past too
I always waited for you
As long as I had hopes
And had life

I still wait for you
When I have no life left
And no hope left, either

Will you really come
For my sake?

ABOUT MYSELF:
Rehaan Khan is a US-based Nepali poet. He started writing since his school days and made formal entry into the writing fraternity with the launch of his Nepali poetry collection Anautho Sapana (2013). His fame as a poet rose with the publication of Ujyaloka Maliharu (2020), a joint collection of poems by ten Nepali poets. The Festivity of Dilemmas (2026) is his third collection of poetry and the first one in the English Language.