There Will Be a Quiz: 1,200 coal bags suspended from the ceiling over a stove (1938)

Duchamp’s installation of empty canvas coal bags in a darkened exhibition space for the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme

Quick takes for slow pokes:

This is what art’s signature looks like hanging from a surrealist ceiling

                                                         & remember, most folks say surreal  

                                                         when they really mean unreal

Don’t stumble walk underneath these unstable terms…

But wait, instead of coal it’s just hot air hitting canvas

Did appropriation artist Elaine Sturtevant’s 1973 replica

                                                                  done from memory

include the full 1200 bags?

It’s a Proprioceptive Art: Sixteen Miles of String (1942)

For the NYC Surrealist exhibition, First Papers of Surrealism, Duchamp wound ordinary string tautly throughout the show’s space, floor to ceiling & wall to wall, where artworks were installed (making them tricky to approach). He thus “subverted the expectations of the exhibition viewer, this time with an intervention [approx. one to two miles of string, not actually sixteen] that interrupted the view across the space.”

More stumble walk, stutter stoop

or is it loop & hang yourself

tied up in threaded dread?

Marcel’s hosting a surrealist family intervention!

We’re flooding the zone, getting

in your face           obfuscating the retina

They’s having to side-step, shuck & jive

bow & scrape at the D’s proprioceptive art

Our bodies tied to our eyes, chez la vision d’ Marcel

String theory never felt so stringy

Bloodied & Out of Vogue: Genre Allegory (George Washington) 1943

Vogue fashion magazine invited Duchamp to do an “Americana” cover for its Feb.,1943, issue.“Duchamp produced Genre Allegory, an assemblage of cut paper, cotton, nails, and gauz stained with iodine in a wooden box with a glass top. The central form is a visual pun that reads both as the right profie in silhouette of George Washington… and as a map of the United States turned on its side… [with its] clear reference to the American flag [with gold stars and red and white stripes on a blue ground… [but further that] since the iodine-stained gauz suggests blood wounds… [Duchamp] seemingly gave vent to his longstanding antimilitarism and distaste for patriotism. Vogue returned the work as unsuitable.” And says one critic, “it’s a star-studded map of the United States turned sideways. Duchamp constructred the nation out of gauz, leaving it puckered and stained, as though it were a patch set atop a festering wound.”

Your bloodied & unsuitable Geo Wash flag

gone out of vogue in a flash

He’s Not My President! 

                               they chant at the current

malignant grifting version

Neither Excited States nor United Snakes 

                                        of A’murica here

for me or thee says Dee

And hey, more than just ‘turned’ on its 

up∙side (whoopsie) downer

Bent like a blue note kinda sub-genre?

Using a lit word to lite a fire?

Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet with 23 books and 6 chapbooks in print from Blazevox Books, Chax Press, Ekstasis Editions, Spuyten Duyvil, Thistledown Press, and several others. His work has also appeared as an Ebook (Argotist, UK) and in well over 200 literary journals in Canada, the U.S., England, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Croatia, Finland, and Turkey, as well as in eight anthologies, on radio, and on YouTube. His personal papers are archived for scholarly use at Simon Fraser University Library’s “Contemporary Literature Collection.” His website is StephenBett.com

The Department of Lost Minutes

ALI Hasnain

At 8:47 every morning, Mara lost eleven minutes.

Not misplaced, not wasted. Lost. She would be standing at the sink, or tying a shoe, or waiting for the kettle to click, and then the microwave clock would read 8:58. The missing interval left no dizziness, no memory, no sign that anything had happened. It was simply gone.

For six months she blamed sleep, then stress, then the microwave. She replaced the microwave. The new clock was equally accusatory.

One Tuesday, a cream envelope appeared beneath her apartment door. It contained a numbered ticket and an address three subway stops away. No letter. No logo. The ticket said: DEPARTMENT OF LOST MINUTES, WINDOW 4.

The address belonged to a narrow municipal building wedged between a dental office and a store that sold only lampshades. Inside, fluorescent lights flickered above rows of plastic chairs. A sign read: TAKE A NUMBER. Mara already had one.

Window 4 was staffed by an elderly man in a green cardigan. He examined her ticket, then her face.

“Eleven minutes,” he said.

“Every day.”

“Since February ninth.”

Mara gripped the counter. “You know about this?”

“We know where they go.”

He disappeared into a back room and returned with a gray file box. On the lid, in black marker, was her full name. Inside were hundreds of index cards, one for each missing interval.

He handed her the top card.

FEBRUARY 9. 8:47–8:58. SAT ON KITCHEN FLOOR. DID NOTHING.

The next card read:

FEBRUARY 10. WATCHED LIGHT MOVE ACROSS WALL.

Then:

FEBRUARY 11. REMEMBERED GRANDMOTHER’S LAUGH.

Mara looked up. “I don’t remember any of these.”

“That’s why they were removed.”

“Removed by who?”

The man adjusted his glasses. “You submitted the request.”

He found a form clipped to the bottom of the box. Her signature curved across the page. The date was February eighth. REQUEST FOR TEMPORARY RELIEF FROM NONPRODUCTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS.

Mara remembered February eighth. A performance review. A supervisor telling her she needed to optimize her mornings, protect her focus, eliminate dead time. She had gone home and searched for something—an app, a method, a planner. She did not remember this form.

“I thought it would make me more efficient,” she said.

“It did.”

“Can I have the minutes back?”

The clerk sighed and pointed toward a second sign: RESTORATIONS MAY CAUSE DELAY.

“How much delay?”

“For eleven minutes a day? Considerable.”

“Do it.”

He stamped three forms. Somewhere behind the wall, machinery started with the soft mechanical cough of an old elevator.

“Tomorrow morning,” he said, “stay somewhere safe.”

At 8:47 the next day, Mara sat at her kitchen table.

Nothing happened.

At first she panicked. Then she realized that nothing happening was the thing itself. The refrigerator hummed. A truck reversed outside. Sunlight touched the rim of her glass. She thought about her grandmother and could not remember the exact laugh, only the way everyone else had laughed after hearing it.

At 8:53 she looked at the clock. Six whole minutes remained.

They felt enormous.

She did not fill them.

THE SILENCE OF THE DESERT 

INTRODUCTION 

Alan Patrick Traynor is an Irish poet from Dublin whose work has been described as “the mystical galvanic paint that sets the fields of Provence on fire.” His poems shock the eyes and the soul at once; they are, in the words of one critic, “deep veridicous spears in a rachis sky of black feathers that will unlatch and unhinge you.” Traynor is the author of ‘Seven Days of Ashes’, a collection written on the spirit of the Holocaust and published by Albino Crow Press. He also has two other poetry collections published ‘Edit Not my Soul’ and ‘Until the Broken Clouds Answer’. His poetry has appeared in literary journals around the world, and he is held in high regard by his peers. Two of his own phrases—“Edit not my Soul” and “Edit not Blood”—capture the fierce integrity of his voice.

The Silence of the Desert is Alan Patrick Traynor’s first novella. It is a work of fiction and truth woven from the living fabric of his poems and life. The narrative follows Liam Bird, a solitary Irishman, and Elise Moreau, an Explorer and Swiss rider of motorcycles who loves mountains, as they travel from the light of Florence through the Atlas and the Sahara, across the Serengeti, into the Alps and the quiet of Vevey, through the rain-wet streets of Wicklow and Paris, the orange groves of Seville, the jazz sanctuaries of San Francisco, and finally into the long northern darkness of Norway under the aurora. At every stage the poems travel with them—read aloud under desert stars, mountain wind, and city lamps—while the music moves from Mozart’s elegant yearning to the searching, unfinished prayer of John Coltrane.

Traynor’s art is not confined to the page. He experiments with German Expressionist painting—its raw colour, its fractured vision, its insistence that emotion is a form of truth—and with jazz guitar, an instrument of listening as much as of sound. These dual fascinations shape the novella’s deepest current: the idea that love, like a poem or a Coltrane solo, is less a destination than a continuous act of attention and listening. The silence that follows every note, every line, every shared night under open sky, is itself a kind of music.

Readers familiar with Traynor’s poetry will recognise the landscapes, the birds, the winter roses, the broken branches that speak an Igniparous language, and the starling that sings in the soul. 

Those who come to him for the first time will find a journey that is both outward and inward—a road that begins in solitude and ends in a listening so complete that the boundary between one soul and another grows thin. This is a novella for those who still believe that poems can hold a winter at bay, that motorcycles can carry more than just lonely people, and that the sceptriferous wind moving through the trees above a quiet grave is worth hearing with someone, especially in Vevey.

This is a story you will never forget.

This a journey of Love & Verse…

.

A Novella by Alan Patrick Traynor

Wrath Into Peace

Wrath igniting.

Twigs snapping into sparks.

Quick as the dead

leaping and falling from life.

Flames from forests.

Fire upon cites.

Souls running into the streets

nowhere safe.

Power points

thinking they control land and sky.

Their wealth overblown

mere dots in the sand.

The seas churning

toasting

smoke to the stars.

Wrath easing

into songs of remorse.

Another lot of seeds coming forth.

So many swaying in the sun

flowering

and giving in love.

Green fields stretching

horizon to horizon.

Earth changing

back to the beginning.

The Emptiness That Never Goes Away

There is no mystery

just the crushing blow of living

never interfering with life.

Arrogance pleads for justification

but remorse is often the gift.

We ask questions,

they are unsettling,

unanswerable.

There are no reasons, just observations,

a seagull, the smell of a white peach,

a begging dog waiting to be adopted.

There is only the concrete of the street, 

of the sidewalk

of the knock to the head

to what once could have been

now just spilled milk on a dirty floor.

Most of us are cowards, not fools. 

Yet we dance to the same intentions and doubts

and fall from pantomime heights 

only to bounce from insignificance to indifference.

Then there is that laughter.

That laughter that never leaves the head.

The rotting but never dying words that paralyze 

because the gentleness on the landscape

is violated with either expectation or regret.

There is that gloomy, ragged carnival

that travels the mind where amusements are not amusing.

They are perilous, broken or still.

Gamblers with a fear of value

with a fear of shadows

ignore invitations and despise appeals 

and the rejection from the mirror’s reflection is agonizing.

But what is worse is the truth it exposes.

The wind hisses when moving up a mournful stream.

The smell of adaptation never generates into translation,

and what is sought lies in a casket cascading over a waterfall.

Revel in absurdity, 

the reality that holds existence a thought above quicksand.

Once I whirled on saffron and evening primrose 

not believing that self-destruction is outwitted by distance.

How absurd that the deadliest of all serpents claws within us.

It thickens from the wealth of realism consumed from absent encounters.

The rendering becomes not a warning but a persistent signal 

from a lighthouse on trial for the emptiness that never goes away. 

Life denies its oppressiveness,

while living lies open to misfortune.

There are roads,

paths can never discover.

The relentless insistence to possess comfort,

and the noose attached that scars with hooks. 

When venturing blindly, 

any misshapen key to heartbreak becomes heartbreak itself.

The faucet drips, another birth, summing up nothing. 

Nothing, without boundaries.

Modeled with proper etiquette and a maze of identical circumstances.

You see there is no mystery,

Yet,

yet

a mask is worn to unveil the self 

seeking what is fortunate, never believing in the curse of wide-eyed sadness.

Then what is identity? 

A third-rate character in a dimly lit discussion of future tragedies.

Remember there are no mysteries.

Only thoughts.

Only thoughts on why pure imagination through a sieve 

produces

something as incomplete

as life.

Philip received his Master of Arts in Psychology from Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. He has published six poetry books, with another forthcoming. Three novels and two plays. He has a column in the magazine Per Niente. He enjoys all things artistic.

Luke Howard, you were right!

Luke Howard, you were right! We’ve lost a big God- the Messiah, the one who led us along the way. He disappeared in front of us like an absurdity or our invention, like an illusion. Not daring to control us He left us, pure and free. Only a little God remained, the God of each of us. He’s simple and clear, but small and invisible, like the truth in your musical works, Luke. People want another God who will match their vanity and wealth. But they do not find Him. And the little god laughs at them and points to a simple essence of things. He is quiet and wise.

I got up in the morning and wished with all my heart not to lose the little god, who curled up in a fluffy lump under the heart of mine. I suddenly remembered that I had finally heard Him … After all, even stones can hear! It’s like hearing your small, limpid and clear motives, Luke. 

I blessed the sunrise and the new day to enter me with the truth. Then I made and hung up a new birdhouse, and put some grain into it. And right then the birds from all over the world came and sat down onto my arms. They sang their psalms for me until the lunchtime.

I melted the stove and saw my reflection and the mission of mine in a piece of simple birch bark. The fire rose up with thousands of sparks of desires and hopes. Yesterday’s newspaper burned well. The fire consumed it at once and did not leave any opportunity to it to go down in history as something eternal. So it is. Then I hit the road and met a wanderer who gave me a new sense when I handed him a piece of bread, that was better than building temples in which no one comes for praying.

I’ll be back at sunset. I left here to find the small meanings of little and joyful gods. You were right, Luke. I tell you that again and again. A little God … don’t scare him away! He does not need rending ideas and global upheavals. You know it is not necessary even the lilacs under your window and the birds that’s sitting on your hands, Luke, while you’re playing for them.

Every creation is looking for a little god now, Luke. For a simple god that’s nestled close to us and is so warm and kind, like a memory of Mom, her arms and hugs, and a woolen shawl of hers…

2023, 2024, 2025 — participant and speaker at the International Gorky Literary Festival. 2025 — speaker at the first conference of literary cities of Russia within the framework of the International exhibition‑forum of regional hospitality “Intourmarket” (Nizhny Novgorod). 2025 — recipient of honorary diplomas from Serbia and Indonesia for achievements in art and pedagogy and for work on the project “Third International Poetic Competition: V. M. Terekhov Memorial‑2024”. 2025 — Coordinator from Russia for the literary and pedagogical project “Balakavi Poets” (India. Kerala). 2025. Author of the scientific article “The V. M. Terekhov Memorial in India.” The academic supervisor was Jerneil Singh Anand, President of the International Academy of Ethics and Professor at the Institute of European Studies. 2025 – Member of the jury of the International Awards “Arina gold-2025” and “Arina silver- 2025” 2026 -Deputy Editor-in-Chief for External and internal Communications of the literary magazine “Arina –NN”.

2026 — Winner of the “Art Expo‑2026” competition (vocal), (creative project) — in Abu Dhabi.

2026 — Winner of the World Expo‑2026 within the framework of intercultural exchange and gaining knowledge in the field of education and creativity.

2026 — Received a certificate confirming the highest qualification of a teacher at the Congress of Progressive Sciences and Creative Initiatives (UAE) from the European Association of Culture.

2026 – Special Diploma “For Preserving Women’s Folk Wisdom” in the “Short Prose” category of the International Literary Competition “Slavic Word‑2026” (Bulgaria)

Bodies Not Out Our Own

Just like God came down and clad himself in flesh,

That is how storytellers wear bodies not their own,

That is how they shift their own pain to take up the pain of another person.

Sometimes storytelling can be painful,

Just like it was painful for the Almighty when he wore the flesh.

He cried.

He wept.

He was hated.

He was persecuted.

He was crucified.

Storytelling on the other hand, is a calling one cannot run from.

It is impossible.

At the time of maturity, the stories you are meant to tell start looking for you,

Whispering into your ears.

It gives you access into its mysteries,

Into its different realms.

It draws you into solitude,

To tell a story.

To reveal a secret.

You wear other people’s bodies to tell some of these stories,

And it’s not often an easy process,

But you do it.

You have to do it.

You have to take off the burden.

So when we write, we are not only writing about ourselves.

We are wearing the bodies of millions of other people, born and yet unborn.

We are conversing with the universe.

We are talking to the universe.

We are writing about different worlds.

We are restoring dignity to places.

We are giving voices to the voiceless.

We are treading upon the serpents and scorpions of this world.

Art And Pain

Pain is the bedrock on which an artist sits to work.

Art is the artist’s response to pain.

When he’s assailed by pain

He sits down to make something out of it.

He sits down to talk back to pain,

To hold a conversation with pain.

He sits down to give pain his own blows,

The blows do not have to come from pain alone.

The artist wants to fight back.

He wants to give out his own punches,

Blows…

He wants to pummel pain.

Give pain some slaps.

Give pain his own ‘I dare you’ responses.

He wants pain to know there’s still a long way to go.

He wants to shame pain.

Belittle pain.

You think you are going to harm me?

But you are actually exalting me

Dear pain,

Thou exalts me!

You think you will make me cry.

But I’m carving beauty out of my scars.

I’m carving beauty out of my bruises.

I’m carving beauty out of the lashes you gave me.

You gave me a ladder to climb into creativity.

What else could the artist have done?

How else could he have coped?

How else could he have understood what was happening to him?

What was happening around him?

How else could he navigate through the myriad of questions?

He simply turns to art

He starts to paint.

He starts to design.

He starts to write.

He starts to create.

He starts to carve.

He starts to raise the dead in him.

To heal the blind in him.

He starts to rise,

Like Maya Angelou.

He starts to sing.

He starts to dance.

Where is thy sting, O pain?

Where are the chains you brandished?

Because they didn’t get me.

Your chains did not see me.

Because I leaped

Dear pain,

I jumped.

I transcended thy limitations

I have flown into the skies

I have spoken to the world

Where is thy sting, O pain?

Because I will continue to sing and fly into the heavens.

Isaac Dominion Aju is a Nigerian Pushcart Prize nominee. He’s appeared on Poetry X Hunger, Flapper Press, Asemana Magazine, Cajun Mutt Press, All Your Poems Anthology and The Kalahari Review. He’s the editor at Words Not Yet Spoken literary publication.