A drop of water
By Anna Keiko (Shanghai, China)
A drop of water
Dripping day after day
The creek became the sea
A ray of light
Shines year after year
A small seedling becomes a big tree
An encounter
A white sheet alike meets a coloured pen
Drawing a spring full of love.
A Bad Bowl of Oatmeal in Ogden, Utah
for abraham smith
you hand me a coffee mug of grains
& weathered berries floating in water
instant black coffee
like my grandfather made
when he was laid off
by the mill in 1984
while you wait for your girlfriend
to leave her husband
after years of being knocked around
your hands shaking
we’re both left waiting
for the sun to come up
there’s nothing about this morning
that doesn’t feel cold.
Lake Erie Prayer
for ken mikolowski
the best poems
have no money
they white knuckle
the afternoon
balancing the weight
of an empty soup bowl
swimming
in dirty water
because like us
they just
don’t want
to die
in detroit.
David Lynch at Little Pete’s
you sat alone
dipping russian sweet bread
into split pea soup
at 3 in the morning
the waitresses warned everyone
not to approach you
the lights overhead
flickered like a dying firefly
half drunk
when they told me
you’d paid for my hamburger
i watched you walk out
& go around the corner
weirder than any frame of film
ever captured
of a fly drowning
in a bowl of soup.
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), Sundown at the Redneck Carnival, (Spartan Press, 2022, Pocatello Wildflower, (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2023) and Dead Photographs, (Stubborn Mule Press, 2024). He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.
In Eleanor Vincent’s latest memoir, she quotes a therapist who describes marriage as a joint project both partners need to look after, like a puppy. The “puppy” becomes a third character in Disconnected. Eleanor and Lars both have individual life stories, but as they interact, the partnership takes on a life of its own.
The story follows her late-in-life relationship: meeting, dating, breaking up with, reconciling with, marrying, and ultimately divorcing Lars. Bits of backstory or asides that inform the present but aren’t quite long or relevant enough for full chapters get combined into “Things I Left Out,” in each of the memoir’s three sections.
These asides, and short chapters, fill out Vincent’s story and reflect her willingness to do self-analysis and examine her background and her relationship in full. Vincent describes where she lives, a “wealth-adjacent” SF Bay Area suburb, near things she likes: trees, order, quiet. She acknowledges that her surroundings might represent the peace she craved growing up in a high-conflict family with an abusive father and parents married to each other to conceal being LGBTQ. On a smaller scale, we see how her psyche and childhood background give her a need for order inside the home. This helps us understand why staying tidy and organized is important to her, and how it becomes a conflict with Lars and his need to feel secure by holding onto things.
She also does some work to understand Lars by talking with him as much as he will allow and reading up and joining support groups for partners of autistic people. She shares information she has read about how many autistic people think and feel and applies that to her husband. Her efforts to understand his point of view and his preferences give the book depth and fill out the story so it’s the tale of a marriage “puppy” rather than a lonely wife’s monologue. Other societal issues, such as age discrimination, further weaken the fragile “puppy,” as they can no longer afford marriage counseling when Lars gets wrongly fired from work.
Vincent varies sentence length and starts chapters at points of dramatic tension, then fills in backstory to catch readers up to that point. The whole book isn’t overly long, but covers an entire relationship’s life cycle. It includes bits of humor amid tragedy, usually through witty after-the-fact observations. For example, Lars would go silent or discuss random scientific facts during moments of tension. Once, desperate to be heard, Vincent beat his chest, then brought them both inside her place so that “the neighbors would not see the spectacle of an old woman beating up Bill the Science Guy.”
Disconnected is one story of one marriage with one autistic person involved. Eleanor and Lars do not represent every mixed-neurotype marriage out there, and Lars is not like every autistic person. While Lars does share some traits with many autistic people, everyone’s experiences will vary. Vincent conveys this through focusing intently on her own life and relationship for the first two-thirds of the book and only bringing in information on autism near the end as part of her desperate journey to understand Lars. This highlights that this is a memoir, not a textbook illustrating the inevitable struggles within all intimate relationships with autistic people.
As Vincent mentions, many experts now say that we should think of autism as a different neurotype with strengths and weaknesses, like a different and equally valid culture, rather than as simply a less able version of the neurotypical brain. And Lars shows some solid strengths: in situations where social expectations are cut and dried, he can navigate a whole room with ease, he is excellent with travel logistics and phone repair, and a gifted zydeco dancer.
Still, while the neurodiversity model may make sense on a broader cultural basis, and a human rights basis, if a particular person is in a situation where they need to do things to function that are difficult for their neurotype, they (and those close to them) can experience autism as a disability. And Vincent underscores how it’s important to honor people’s personal experiences and struggles without judgment, which would apply to autistic people as well as their neurotypical relatives.
As Vincent painfully discovers, sometimes love and the desire to make a relationship work is not enough when varying neurotypes present clashing emotional needs. And sometimes there isn’t much one person can do when their partner has already given up and checked out of the relationship. Sometimes people are just better off apart, and it’s best to separate with dignity and let the “puppy” go to a good home elsewhere.
Eleanor Vincent’s Disconnected is available for order here.
Departures
losing CO2 in the Jet2 queue,
staining Carhartt with heartache,
barcodes beep & promises pall
between staff & sightseers
& parents cheering up children
& new lovers arriving
chinos & eyes empty
into a grey tray, passing
Saint Peter with an automatic
& cutting through pictureless clouds
to arrivals, you were waiting,
& you opened your arms, like wings
Villa Diodati
like a leaf, you were ambered,
acquiescent, ambling the grounds –
gravel crunched with Converse
& a tableaux daydream:
Byron sailing, or the Shelleys
in love – & then, the villa doors
unveiled untouched antiques
& portraits eyeing every word
like the porcelain it was spoken over –
& sobering outside, ringtones
revealed Omicron will part you,
for months or more, before
the sun left for another city,
& the stars began to emerge
with the shyness of spiders
Geneviève
there you were: star-crossed
& stark, nipping the neck
of Calvinus, flicking Winstons from windowsill,
scribbled MA sonnets
& scrunched love letters smothered
under feet & frown,
Twelve Carat Toothache
cutting the silence,
your rib cage crushing, lungs
heaving in the June heatwave
with undiagnosed pneumonia
& pleural effusion,
coughing blood
& wheezing cheater
Light Years
another spin around the sun, & since, I’ve learnt that every mirror needs light: if light is c = 1/(e0m0)1/2 = 2.998 X 108m/s (James Clerk Maxwell, circa. 1864), it’s the magnetism keeping us close – if light is electromagnetic radiation (Wikipedia), it’s the life of moths – if light is a wave, it's scattering most from our hearts of silvered sand & limestone – if light is The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), then it’s you refracting all my colours – & if light is a distance, it’s always between us, because I have realised there is not a greater love poem than a blank piece of paper, or the cursor, blinking for us to begin, reflecting me in the screen where you have been waiting for light years
Capetonian Dillon Israel’s dream: on starting out, the unproduced playwright and his city
Dillon Israel is a South African actor, creative, storyteller and an unproduced playwright. He lives in Ravensmead, a quiet suburb in Cape Town, near Tygerberg Hospital. He enjoys cooking, baking cakes, making desserts and he loves the outdoors. He reached out to me. He was looking for a mentor. He has a lot of energy. I can hear it in the sound of his voice as I listen to the voice messages he sends me. I came into contact with Dillon Israel in September of this year.
He is twenty-nine years old and wants to “make it”, like so many people in this country in their twenties, hungry to work in the film and television industry. He loves watching South African television, Chinese films and Turkish shows. He asks me to explain the meaning of his dreams. I tell him that there’s symbolism and meaning behind everything in a dream. We have become friends. He shares with me his hopes and his dreams. I tell him that he was born with a gift, but whether he believes me or not is another matter.
We talk about our struggles and depression, loneliness and hardships, the church, mindfulness, having an “attitude of gratitude” and prayer. We talk about our problems, the major issues in our lives that we have in common, we laugh, discuss the antics of our dogs. We tell each other that our mothers find it difficult to say they are proud of us but that we know they are proud of us anyway. We have brought happiness into each other’s lives.
By day he attends a college situated in Bellville in Cape Town. He loves his mother, his dog, Snowy, watching films on Netflix, his niece, writing, listening to Adele and gospel music, making malva pudding on a Sunday, going to the shops with his mother and, like the North American writer John Irving, being alone. Dillon Israel is a young man who prefers his own company to that of others. He lives faith and has a spiritual outlook on life. He prays, has taught me to remain prayerful in my own life and encourages me in my own faith.
This Capetonian storyteller is soft spoken, thoughtful, highly sensitive, an empath, what you would describe as a dreamer and he thinks before he speaks. Nobody has encouraged him to pursue this dream, writing for the stage. Not his family, not his teachers in high school and not the “drama people” he reached out to in the industry. Most certainly, no one has ever told him to become a poet. When I tell him that he can achieve this, he is nervous. He says that he doesn’t believe me. I hope his thinking will change his belief system.
This is why I text him on a daily basis and motivate him. I want to inspire him as much as he has inspired me. I can’t understand the world we live in where teachers do not encourage their students to read and to write. Both are difficult to master but can increase the learner’s self-confidence and help develop personal growth, improve self and lead to an individual having a fulfilling life. I want his dream to come true like mine did. I don’t want him to struggle as I did in youth in making my dream to become a full-time writer a reality. I tell him he has his entire life ahead of him. That he has enough time for the inner vision that he has for his life to manifest and become a reality. I ask Dillon Israel if he reads. He doesn’t like reading, he says. He prefers watching television and series on Netflix. I can’t relate.
I grew up in a house filled with books, rarely watching television. Books were my university, my school of life. It was Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast that inspired me to go back to writing after a period of illness and hospitalisation for manic depression. I found a message of hope in Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye, in the novels of Fitzgerald, the masculine power of Jay Gatsby, John Updike, and in the poetry of Rilke. These authors, Rilke, brought me back to life. We come from two different generations, Dillon Israel and I. We are as different as chalk and cheese, two polar opposites. I tell him that in this industry you can’t take rejection personally.
I tell him to always be humble and kind, like the country musician Tim McGraw’s song. I give him life advice. I give him writing advice. I tell him to write what he knows, that he should write from his own life experience, that he should make characters out of the people he knows, passersby. I tell him to do a poetry course with award-winning South African writer and poet Finuala Dowling. I tell him that doing an online course in creative writing will help him. Already his English is improving. I talk to him as if he was a younger sibling just about to start out in the world. I talk to him about looking for opportunities, I talk to him about responsibility and the writing life, seeking daily inspiration. He tells me I’m changing his life. When I think of Dillon Israel painstakingly writing in a notebook on his desk I think of the poetic genius of Ocean Vuong.
Today he is listening to Jimmy Swaggart. We don’t have much time to talk. I’m working on a novel with both a modern and historical context and perspective and he has a project that he’s working on for college. I send him links to poetry by Russian Anna Akhmatova (“Memory of Sun”, Austrian-German Rainer Maria Rilke (“You Who Never Arrived”) and the North American Charles Bukowski (“Bluebird” and “So Now”). He is excited about writing. So far, he is making a lot of progress. He has disciplined himself and I am impressed by his confidence, his style of writing and I’m just happy that he is happy, that he’s starting to believe in himself.
It’s such an honour and a privilege to help another person, suffering for their art, to help them achieve their dreams, to tell them that absolutely nothing stands in their way. He might not know who Athol Fugard is, the late Taliep Peterson and Dawid Kramer’s productions that made it to New York and the United Kingdom, but I can inspire him to reach those heights. Maybe one day he gets to “pay it forward” and mentor someone of his own.
I confide in him my love of Barbra Streisand films, Yentl and The Way We Were. He tells me his parents used to enjoy watching films like that. I feel my age. We forget about the lonely journeys that forge our poetic and literary forays. The childhood that we create in our imagination, the childhood from memory. I feel that mentorship is a calling. I fear that people think there is no more reading of books to be done. Now there is the reign of social media that has taken over our access to information. I believe in dreamers. I too was a dreamer once upon a time. I say good night to Dillon and his Snowy and finish watching a documentary on Anna Akhmatova. Afterwards I write a poem on aspects of the personality affected by loneliness.
The music in the poetry speaks to me, speaks to my soul. Tomorrow, Dillon Israel will set off for college, nurture the dream of being a playwright, and writing for the stage full-time in his heart. I’ll be at my desk working on my latest novel.
An Ecstasy
Whether beloved
Buddha or saint
Your breath quickens
Lips part pulse
Races your lids grow
Heavy so heavy
You aren’t bothered by
Your hair a bit disheveled
(I wonder if Saint
Teresa’s toes curled)
We cannot help ourselves
We ache for bliss
Mystical or corporal
Seek out an ecstasy
Seek to lose
Ourselves in the vast
Expanse of another
For a moment euphoria
Unburdening our identity
Setting aside agenda
Ownership power
The shame of suffering
Unleashing devotion in
Willingly relinquishing
Our bodies our souls.
How It Is
Here’s how it is
As I understand it
(Have I got this right?)
We go about our business
Scurrying about the planet
Clumsily clamoring for a spot
Spinning round the sun
Occasionally looking up
All crowded into a precious
Little space worshipping
Pondering upon the stars
And of course God who
Resides beyond those stars:
A lanky decrepit white man
Dementia setting in
At the very least quaintly
Absent-minded though still
Omnipotent and omniscient
Who merely surveils
Suffering from afar
Lazy old voyeur
And once in a great while
Sends someone special
When we get a bit untidy
On the seasonal precipice
Of self-destruction when
We slaughter one another
Over slight differences
In interpreting God’s
Incompetence God’s love
Another Silence
For those sages
Lao or Chuang Tzu
(Maybe even Siddhartha)
Silence came naturally
Nirvana turned slowly
Silence now requires
The unattainable –
Far too much patience
To be at all effective
To have any impact
Upon our lives
Our intricate elaborately
Constructed karma
The well-intentioned
Vows of silence
Of monks and nuns
In serene monasteries
Seem quaint but futile
Solutions to the clamor
Of a peevish throng
And I am thinking
Anymore silence
Is rather irresponsible
A reckless wu-wei
An obsequious inaction
All spins too swiftly
Suffering too pervasive
Comes hard and fast
Though priceless
We’ve run out of time
For mute circumspection
To adequately flourish
David Sapp, writer and artist, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and the visual arts. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior, chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha, a novel Flying Over Erie, and a book of poems and drawings titled Drawing Nirvana.
Essence of Love
Thee, heavenly eyes,
Astonishingly invites,
the butterflies to flight
and invades the engaging delight
Yet, When my heart strikes
Sensuously Thee, impression excites
Again, our memories reunite
And echoes the enjoyable night
Thee, the dazzling sensations!
Multiples the frenzy attractions
O’ Silk and soft redemptions
Unlash and splash the attention
Ah! Transparency reveals
When thee, heavenly heal
And yes, our generosity ever deals
As thee, enthrallingly appeal
Yes! The Love senses!
Thee, mysterious smile, unveil the mate
The essence of loveliness encapsulates
And altogether the imprints activate
Ah! Every instant trace my sight
Yet then, I am delicately alight
Cuddle with a pigeon often at night
Oh! make me live a thousand might
Thee, Beautifies the beauty
And slightly mesmerize the duty
Joy and jumble in a fragrance of fumes
Cup and cure the color of resumes
Smiles
Yes! Essence of emotions
Whispers every single night
Like an exciting notion in flight.
A Floral Fragrance
You are a Fragrance embedded in my mind
You are a Fragrance of an exceptional kind
Fragrance of beautiful red roses
Fragrance of cherry blossoms in poses
Intensifying to the heaven
Fragrance extended and embedded at eleven
That is always fresh, pleasant,
and cherished the fumes of his scent
Yet, a sensation, an affection
And musical memories of discussion
Still imprinted and implanted
Glint and softly granted
You are a Fragrance fused with zenith and Zeit
Wrap with loveliness and yet too quiet
Polishing an underdone art
Bringing a light to the sensitive sight
Pleasure, pain, struggle, and delight
O’ The lesson of all kinds
Just like the embedded fragrance forever in my mind
Invisibly color the uncolored
And fade away the veiling blurred
Sparkling eyes having visions inside
Innocence offers ravishing rides
O’ The fragrance of generosity and humble
Regards, Respect, and dignified dale make it a bubble
A feeling of expressing is now double
Fragrance of all styles
Fragrance that touches the unheard miles
Grooming the dimness into eager lights
O’ the Dazzlingly fragranced like a hearth
Dispersal at the end of your breath.
Tajalla Qureshi, a radiant literary gem from Pakistan, stands as a beacon of creative brilliance. A wordsmith par excellence, she masterfully blends introspection, devotion, and creativity into compelling narratives that transport readers to enchanting dimensions. Her art lies in weaving words into wonders.
Additionally, a true polymath in the literary world, Tajalla’s portfolio spans poetry, creative columns, essays, and flash fiction. Each piece is a testament to her unyielding passion and finesse, intricately designed to evoke profound emotions, spark vivid imagination, and inspire the human spirit.
On the flip, celebrated as an international interviewer, columnist, and editor, Tajalla’s voice resonates far and wide, captivating audiences around the globe. Her unique perspective, lyrical style, and profound insights have cemented her place as a leading figure in contemporary literature. Furthermore, her work exemplifies the transformative power of words. With every sentence, she crafts an intricate tapestry of emotions, ideas, and lived experiences, inviting readers to embark on a journey of introspection, growth, and boundless wonder.