Portrait of Rosa Schapire

The woman sits unwilling and blue

Boxed into a corner by a chair and a red wall

Implicating you in her afflictions

Worn sharp and clean resting

In a pensive position: poised as if ready to leave

At a moments notice she is encircled with wrought waves

Gold curves just short of crossing

The sun past set on the water

She is the only bright moment left

Before you are engulfed

The only thing holding back darkness

She is dressed in bridal white

Suits adorned in a rose and strung beads

Everything that is hers emanates dark

She is your mother dressed up and dolled up

To be young again for a night that dwindles

Four red clouds watch you from behind

The sun is dripping away

And you are stuck painting a woman

That is not your mother

About Rosa Schapire:

Rosa Schapire used her ground-breaking career in art history to advocate for socialist, feminist, and anti-fascist ideals across Europe in the twentieth century. Her family and education in her hometown of Galicia, Poland, introduced her to such ideals, and her studies took her around Europe. Schapire’s contributions to the art world were many, ranging from reviews and critiques to translations to amassing an impressive collection of German Expressionist work. She edited several journals and, along with fellow art patron and suffragette Ida Dehmel, helped to form the Women’s Society for the Advancement of German Art. After the rise of the Nazis and the death of many family members, Schapire fled to England, where many pieces of her collection are still housed in museums. 

A New-year Creed:

Ain’t it laughter for laughter sake?

Ain’t it a wish dreamy star could make?

Hearken, that reindeer with melodious psalm,

With processional parade of HOHO Pope of calm,

That crowning touch of bygone dismay,

Sending signs of hope of ravishing Hurray.

Call it a finale to all going got tough,

That tough got going at the end with a breath-taking trough,

All balladeers forgot those backsies, and uphold bonfire,

Of incandescent infatuating lights in a widening gyre,

And, those threaded buds of children respectively back in shape,

With dolly wagging ducks and snow-man scape.

The strongholds of rallied throngs and spectators cheered with applause,

It was so, that merriment on the cusp of inspiring divine laws,

No more nightmare, no more plea, no more— a travesty, 

 At last but not least, I find my sun replete with bliss and felicity, 

Let alone a new year with a slogan of cherishing hegemonial fraternity. 

**********×************×*********

Written by the Egyptian Poet 

Ahmed Farooq Baidoon

Kingdom, as Our Shelter or Grave

Their kingdom, towering and tainted with avarice,

Was the first place I learned to run from.

I crawled on all fours through the dirt, through the bramble, across freshwater rivers that smelled of a time long before ours,

My lips cracked and dry and the fur between my paws caked with mud.

I ran because they taught me to run.

I sought out hope because all that was left for me in their land was despair.

The sharp glare of their cold metal blades and the stinging alloy of their hollow-point glares seemed to say, “You are not welcome here, beast.”

And after I fled I swore to myself that those words, unspoken yet ringing all too clearly,

Would be the only ones from their mouths to which I would ever listen.

The shaking in my legs and the shiver in my spine remind me of when they first arrived.

Loading their lethal weapons, yelling gruff commands we could not understand, tainting the ocean’s shore with the unwelcome filth of their footprints.

The land upon which they walked had been our domain since time immemorial,

Yet when they set foot upon it they clipped our wings, hoisted us up by our beautiful tails,

Told us our names and what we were to be as if it was our duty to bow down.

As if their soulless, self-centered minds could ever know or understand us, they bound us in black and white and stripped us of our dignity,

Calling us boy, girl, he, she, it, beast, reducing what time knew as precious creatures to a mere curiosity, a conglomerate order of inferior beings which they saw as nothing more than playthings to satisfy their greed and thirst for cruelty.

“Nine coin for a necklace made of rabbit bones.”

“Twelve coin for a pound of venison.”

“Twenty coin for the fur pelt of a fox.”

What was once precious and sacred, by their selfish greed and piercing bullets had become nothing but a target, forced to stagger with matted fur, broken wings, and slit paws into hiding to retain the final scrap of dignity left in our mere breath.

Might I remind you, dearest creature to whom I speak, that we did not choose what we are. We did not choose to belong to the forest – it was the forest that chose us. We will not let them hold us down, harvest our fur for “good luck,” display our formaldehyde-filled corpses as trophies and say it is truth. It is cruelty. If we are to be hunted by those who stormed our kingdom and called us monsters, then let the forest that birthed us be our moonlight, our shelter, our treasure, our true story, so that we may never forget the meaning of peace or harmony. Silent creature, shivering in the cold, never forget your heritage, your homeland, your true colors, or the spirit of the forest that dwells within.

Never, ever forget what it means to be alive.

Love Letter to Myself

Love letters don’t have to be happy.

And if I were to write one to you I know it would have to be sad

Just like it would be if I were writing to anyone else

So I would write to you as if you were someone other than myself

I would not write you a letter about how much I love you

I would write you a letter about my love.

I would write to you:

Dear whatever you would like to be called,

By name or by another thing that calls to you

I could call you stars

Because I do think you shine like them and you’re scattered like them

And you don’t shine half as bright as the other lights do but maybe that’s okay

Or I could call you tree

Because you seem to keep wanting to be or thinking you are

Being stepped on by rubber soles that will slip and fall and it’s all your fault

Or I could call you mine

A pickup line that would never really work unless you looked unlike you do

But in this case you are mine and I am yours we are each other and I could call you

Or I could call you nothing at all.

There’s so much I want to say to you and so little that I do.

Words are less than feelings, I think.

I don’t think I could describe everything I feel for you only in words

But I’ll try to paint a picture of you with your own fingertips:

You are in a tree,

And I know you say that a lot,

You are the tree or you are in the tree but I think it fits,

Because you feel safe in trees and you feel safe here in this letter

And you would sleep in a tree if you wouldn’t fall out

And you’d dream of falling up into the sky

In that beautiful blue that you love so much because it feels to you like a color that’s been lost

To the dull of the modern world but when you see the stars that have been for billions of years

You see the light again and you are happy.

I love how you can be happy.

How when you smile through your eye bags

I imagine I see little stars twinkling in the brown of your irises.

I love how you giggle when anything happens that you like

And I love how it sounds when you laugh.

I love that you laugh at everything even if it isn’t funny because to you it is

I love how you try to calm down when you’re excited but you never can

I love how your dimple on the left side of your face

Shows up when you smile

or when you frown

I love how you can be sad.

How when you cry through your eye bags

I imagine I see little stars shining in the tears in your eyes.

I love how you cry whenever you get upset

Because it shows you have real emotion, you are a sensitive person

I love that you cry at everything even if it isn’t upsetting because to you it is

I love how you listen to sad music and it only makes you sadder

I love how much you feel.

Love letters don’t have to be happy.

But I find that this one has strangely turned out to be.

Maybe I do love you, and so then you love me

Even though there’s a lot of things I still haven’t said

Like I hate how you hate yourself and your face, and your body

I hate how you look when you smile and I hate how you look when you cry

I hate how you’re not cool and everyone else is

But I know that you know about the things that I hate.

Because you hate them too.

Because you never stop and think about the things that you love about yourself,

Except for the occasional selfie that you delete the day after

Because what were you even gonna do with it anyway?

You’re just not all that, you think. But I think you are.

And I think you love yourself anyway.

You must love yourself because I know I love you.

I love you.

Love,

You

Peace

I step in a field full of little lives

Grassy stains on my fingers, green and oily

There is blood is on my hands but I can only see peace.

SNAP

I stop and sit in the green

I want the blood off my hands.

I want it off I want to cut it off

What would happen if you did,

If you cut them off?

What kind of person would you be?

If you cut your fingers off, the blood drains from the wound, 

down your hand, dripping to the ground

Are you still there? 

Are you still you?

Iron,

That’s what it would smell like,

The blood

Are those fingers you? 

Have you lost a part of who you are?

Have those fingers lost their humanity because they lost you?

If you cut off your hand; leave it with your fingers, 

the blood draining from your arm, falling on your severed hand, dripping to the ground,

Are you still there?

Are you still you?

Fire,

A burning sensation crawling down the limbs, That’s what it feels like?

That metallic liquid.

If you cut off your arm; leave it with its fallen parts, 

the blood draining down your body, through the arm, past the hand, dripping to the ground

Is the arm still you? 

Is the flesh still yours?

Rivers,

The blood carves rivulets of red down the arm,

That burning metallic liquid

How many of the parts have to be there for you to be you?

Is it your whole body,

Just your head?

If you cut off your head and it falls to the floor,

The blood draining down from your neck, down your chest and past your legs,

Is the head you?

Is the body you?

If you get spread so far that you are atoms, spread across lightyears.

Each atom helping form a blanket of particles covering parsecs

Are each of those atoms you?

Have you been spread too thin?

If you get squished back together, 

Your atoms re-congealing into a person again,

Is that person you? 

Are those atoms no longer yours?

If you die; let your body rot away to bones,

Your flesh becoming one with the earth, unable to bleed any longer

Are the bones still you? 

Or did “you” leave with your flesh?

Are you your parts?

Are you all of you?

Are you just a concept, just the sum of your thoughts and emotions? 

Is pain an ugly thing?

Is pain wrong?

Is pain bad?

I lie in a luscious field full of lives.

Each life cultivated through pain,

And it’s beautiful.

When will I accept that I feel alive, if that ever happens?

One consuming tenderness flickering between fear and warmth, feel alive.

Two who enrapture my time, my being, my heart, I feel alive.

Collecting words I consume as wisdom while

cycling back to old conversations helps me feel alive.

Voluntarily measuring variations of matching visions

verify the mass between my shoulders, making me feel alive.

On the isolated islands above, I interpret my wrongings

and believe the design lied about my tendency to feel alive.

I decided for the first ten years of my life

to drink my spit and hide so I wouldn’t feel alive.

Since the sunflowers started speaking towards the sun,

I’ve struggled to fully feel alive.

Seeing myself surrounded by bloomers saying similar statements

to each other, I don’t associate with them, those who feel alive.

Even if we may agree, I battle between the truth

or continuing to drink my spit, denying that I feel alive.

There is nothing wrong with others who do, not to mention

I do feel sorrow for those persecuted who feel alive.

Honestly, I don’t want to endure any more of the

exhausting longing that stems from the way I feel alive.

Kass is only an example of a field of sunflowers who wilt internally,

those who hate themselves the hardest, feel alive.

When November Won’t Whistle

When will November find the way back home?

Why won’t the withered waters

Evaporate leaving me to suffocate

In the widely arranged wrath of

Eleven months complete with wronging.

I place a droplet of stone cold

Designing a pure perfect painting

Pointing to the people of the compass

West stitching on skin, North drawing on tongue,

East missing, South poorly printed red.

Pouring out of my nose, feeding onto what is left

So I roll and I reek in remnants

Until it stops raining, though quickly,

Where I am left to wait through the months wail once again.

A dream in the forest

Lucia runs in the forest, without stopping, her legs simply run automatically, she does not know exactly what she is running from, or what she is afraid of, the only thing she knows is that she must run, run as fast as she can, her feet are bare, full of dirt, her clothes are a
semi-transparent white blanket covering her body, in the forest there is only darkness, but Lucia’s instincts are active.

At the end Lucia sees a pile of leaves and bushes in front of her, with thorns and roses, when she touched the bush with her finger, a thorn touched her, and a drop of blood fell to the ground, the thing that was chasing her gets even closer, and each time it seems to growl louder,
and each time it seems to get bigger. Then Lucia prefers not to know what is chasing her and, closing her eyes with faith, she passes the bushes full of thorns and roses, getting wounds all over her body, while the semi-transparent blanket that covered her body was torn.

Lucia stopped, and opened her eyes, when she was perplexed by the paradise before her. Around there were trees, not just any trees, large trees full of fresh, green leaves, not like the trees in the forest all withered with purple leaves, the grass that touched his feet was soft, like the mane of a well-groomed horse, in the center there was a lake, with water as crystal clear as the crystals themselves, along with lotus flowers floating on the water.

Lucia notices that she no longer hears the thing that was chasing her, so Lucia takes off her semi-transparent blanket along with her other clothes, and walks slowly to the lake, when she submerges herself in the lake, and the wounds on her body due to the thorns heal completely, except for the wound on her finger, then Lucia lets her wavy black hair float through the water, as much as Lucia lets herself be carried away by the peace and tranquility in her mind, closing her eyes.

But Lucia wakes up to the alarm on her phone. “In the end it was just a dream,” Lucia thinks, but she doubts, because she felt it very real, the fear, the adrenaline, the fatigue, the pain and the tranquility she felt. But Lucia stops thinking about that and gets ready to go to work.

Lucia looks at her finger and notices that it has a scar, one that she had never noticed or had. Lucia thinks if the dream was real but then she thinks it was something else. Passing the door of her house going to work. While a dark and malevolent shadow begins to chase her.