Submission: Synchronized Chaos: Rengay By Marjorie Pezzoli, Christina Chin & Sarang Bhand _______________________________________________________ 1 Sanctuary curtains drawn fireplace crackles chrysanthemums drop petals Marjorie Pezzoli then a heron forewarns the birds of hurricane Christina Chin uprooted children from faraway land sleeping under sky Sarang Bhand mist settles in soft gray clouds blue skies soon Marjorie Pezzoli looking up to sky in hope bowing down to earth in faith Sarang Bhand in the air aroma of coffee and chai grandma's tea table Christina Chin 2 Mountain Top adjusting to long night new time zone Christina Chin the earth spins eucalyptus bark peels Marjorie Pezzoli changing sky at every mile long road trip Sarang Bhand unsolicited— passenger giving directions Christina Chin a scenic detour much needed break Sarang Bhand sky show brilliant production no tickets needed Marjorie Pezzoli 3 Windswept rising sun that you sent to my side Sarang Bhand mist rises evergreen branches Marjorie Pezzoli roadblock ahead fastening a neck collar pretending to sleep Christina Chin stuck in traffic together we catch figments of time Sarang Bhand a house on an island king tide Christina Chin steadfast evergreen branches waltz with wind she dreams about clouds Marjorie Pezzoli
Author Archives: Synchronized Chaos
Poetry from Jeff Tobin
Of Sonnets and Skyscrapers
I wear this sonnet like a borrowed coat,
Stiff in the shoulders, seams pulled tight,
But stitched with threads from centuries ago,
Where ink met quill under a candle’s light.
I try to walk its lines, the measured pace,
Yet find the iambs don’t quite match my stride—
We’ve outgrown gallant rhymes and studied grace,
In favor of the blunt truths we can’t hide.
Now cities hum with digital confessions,
Algorithms dance in place of stars.
We measure worth in data and impressions,
Our loves reduced to avatars and bars.
Still, I patch this form, frayed though it may be—
Let it hold the sum of what we see.
Roots and Wings
I was born with roots buried deep,
tangled in the soil of a place
I never chose.
They said, grow where you’re planted,
but the earth felt like chains,
pulling me down
when all I wanted
was to fly.
You see, no one tells you
that wings come at a cost,
that to lift off
means leaving something behind—
a house,
a name,
a past.
I’ve felt both—
the pull of ground
and the ache of sky.
Each promises something the other can’t give,
each holds a piece of me
that the other can’t understand.
And now, I sit between them,
torn like a tree split by lightning—
my roots reaching down
while my heart looks up,
waiting for the courage to choose.
Maybe that’s the lie
we tell ourselves:
that you must pick one,
that you can’t grow
and fly,
that to be grounded
means losing the air,
and to soar
means forgetting the dirt.
But I think
we are both—
roots in the earth,
wings in the sky—
always tugged between where we come from
and where we long to go,
never quite free,
never quite still,
yet whole
in the longing.
Storms, Oaks, Roots
The sky cracked like a bell on the last night of autumn,
cold biting through the marrow, every bone humming.
We live like this—between breakage and bloom,
roots deepened by storms, reaching, always reaching,
downward into soil heavy with rain.
Oaks stand because they must,
holding what the earth gives—grit, flood, wind,
gathering strength from what tries to tear them apart.
We, too, are carved by what we survive,
the lines on our faces tracing the years of drought and plenty.
Pain sets its teeth in us, but still we grow,
hope rising stubborn as new shoots through cracked stone.
There’s no music to it, just the slow rise,
a kind of weathering in silence,
until we learn the language of roots,
how to drink deep from what remains.
Bruised but upright, we live as oaks live,
accepting the storms, holding tight in the wind,
and somehow, finding growth even in the breaking.
No Longer Here in Body, But …
You left in the middle of the night,
the house sighing in your absence, the door ajar,
as if you might return to fill the space again.
But silence consumed your place,
and we’ve learned to live with that weight,
growing larger by the day.
Your boots still by the hearth, worn thin with the miles,
carry the imprint of where you’ve been—
fields turned to dust, rivers that swelled and sank.
I trace the scuffed leather, hoping for something left behind,
a sign you’re still walking somewhere,
beneath a sky we both knew.
Absence doesn’t stay quiet,
it grows loud in the smallest things:
the kettle that doesn’t boil,
the coat never worn again,
the tools untouched, rust creeping in like autumn frost.
You are no longer here in body, but—
you remain in the turning of the soil,
in the way the wind presses through the trees,
in the stones you laid by hand,
one by one, until the walls stood solid.
We keep moving through the days,
because that’s what you’d want—
but the earth knows what’s missing,
and so do we,
every footfall a memory of where yours used to be.
Walking Your Field
I walked your field today, the one you tended
with hands thick from years of toil,
where earth clung to you as if it knew your name.
The furrows are softer now, untended,
but still they hold the shape of your labor,
your will pressed into the soil.
The air held a quiet weight,
a heaviness that comes from things left undone,
the half-mended fence,
the stones you set aside for later.
I stood where you used to stand,
looking out over what remains—
and what’s lost beneath it all.
I remember your boots sinking into the mud,
each step deliberate, as if every grain of dirt
mattered. And it did,
to you, everything mattered—the smallest seed,
the rainfall, the lengthening days.
Now the field feels like a question,
asking how long we can hold what we’ve lost,
how much we can grow without you here
to shape the rows, to tell the seasons when to start.
I plant my feet where yours once stood,
but the earth feels foreign, unfamiliar.
Still, I walk, because that’s all I know,
wanting something to rise from this,
like the crops you coaxed from the barren land,
year after year, with only your hands and hope.
Jeffery Allen Tobin is a political scientist and researcher based in South Florida. His extensive body of work primarily explores U.S. foreign policy, democracy, national security, and migration. He has been writing poetry and prose for more than 30 years.
Poetry from Christopher Bernard
The Choice Not an easy one, to be sure: We call them “Republicans” and “Democrats”: self-righteousness, sometimes half blind, versus greed, often naked; entirely real fascists against sometimes dubious progressives. On one hand, possible dictatorship, oligarchy, democracy’s end here; on the other, cultural anarchy weaponized by pity, the cruelest of false virtues. Both sides flirt with visions of anarchy masking a hunger for power, to bully and frighten the rest of us, throwing us to confusion whether stirred by the 1619 Project or the latest billionaire. Both sides support mass slaughter of children and women “for the sake of security,” crowing for blood or weeping tears to disgrace a crocodile. How can anyone sane, decent, honest, caring, choose between them? And yet they are not equal. I ask myself: Has either side shown signs of bending toward decency, even honesty? Does either side admit its human fallibility? Has either side ever corrected before a truth it did not, exactly, welcome? Did it then change, even if reluctantly? Or does it drive relentlessly toward the farthest edge of its own lunacy, double down in hatred, threaten our destruction rather than admit error and never defeat? If a time comes when we must choose between two madnesses that cannot face a truth they do not wish to face; that live a fantasy of vengeance, lies, and hate, drunk on certainties that face any doubt with calls for silence, removal, blood; that will not turn the helm an inch to escape the ice before them and certain catastrophe for the rest of us— then there will be no choice. Nevertheless, there is the question: is it a necessary evil to choose between evils when it is simply an evil to refuse the choice? No, it is not an easy one. _____ Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist, and essayist. He recently helped to organize and host “Poets for Palestine: A Poetry Marathon to Benefit the Middle Eastern Children’s Alliance” in San Francisco.
Poetry from Ivan Pozzoni (one of two)
HOTEL ACAPULCO
Le mie mani, scarne, han continuato a batter testi,
trasformando in carta ogni voce di morto
che non abbia lasciato testamento,
dimenticando di curare
ciò che tutti definiscono il normale affare
d’ogni essere umano: ufficio, casa, famiglia,
l’ideale, insomma, di una vita regolare.
Abbandonata, nel lontano 2026, ogni difesa
d’un contratto a tempo indeterminato,
etichettato come squilibrato,
mi son rinchiuso nel centro di Milano,
Hotel Acapulco, albergo scalcinato,
chiamando a raccolta i sogni degli emarginati,
esaurendo i risparmi di una vita
nella pigione, in riviste e pasti risicati.
Quando i carabinieri faranno irruzione
nella stanza scrostata dell’Hotel Acapulco
e troveranno un altro morto senza testamento,
chi racconterà la storia, ordinaria,
d’un vecchio vissuto controvento?
HOTEL ACAPULCO
My emaciated hands continued to write,
turning each voice of death into paper,
That he lefts no will,
forgetting to look after
what everyone defines as the normal business
of every human being: office, home, family,
the ideal, at last, of a regular life.
Abandoned, back in 2026, any defense
of a permanent contract,
labelled as unbalanced,
i’m locked up in the centre of Milan,
Hotel Acapulco, a decrepit hotel,
calling upon the dreams of the marginalized,
exhausting a lifetime’s savings
in magazines and meagre meals.
When the Carabinieri burst
into the decrepit room of the Hotel Acapulco
and find yet another dead man without a will,
who will tell the ordinary story
of an old man who lived windbreak?
LA BALLATA DI PEGGY E PEDRO
La ballata di Peggy e Pedro è latrata dai punkabbestia
di Ponte Garibaldi, con un misto d’odio e disperazione,
insegnandoci, intimi nessi tra geometria ed amore,
ad amare come fossimo matematici circondati da cani randagi.
Peggy eri ubriaca, stato d’animo normale,
nelle baraccopoli lungo l’alveo del Tevere,
e l’alcool, nelle sere d’Agosto, non riscalda,
obnubilando ogni senso in sogni annichilenti,
trasformando ogni frase biascicata in fucilate nella schiena
contro corazze disciolte dalla calura estiva.
Sdraiata sui bordi del muraglione del ponte,
tra i drop out della Roma città aperta,
apristi il tuo cuore all’insulto gratuito di Pedro,
tuo amante, e, basculandoti, cadesti nel vuoto,
disegnando traiettorie gravitazionali dal cielo al cemento.
Pedro, non eri ubriaco, ad un giorno di distanza,
non eri ubriaco, stato d’animo anormale,
nelle baraccopoli lungo l’alveo del Tevere,
o nelle serate vuote della movida milanese,
essendo intento a spiegare a cani e barboni
una curiosa lezione di geometria non euclidea.
Salito sui bordi del muraglione del ponte,
nell’indifferenza abulica dei tuoi scolari distratti,
saltasti, in cerca della stessa traiettoria d’amore,
dello stesso tragitto fatale alla tua Peggy,
atterrando, sul cemento, nello stesso istante.
I punkabbestia di Ponte Garibaldi, sgomberati dall’autorità locale,
diffonderanno in ogni baraccopoli del mondo la lezione surreale
imperniata sulla sbalorditiva idea
che l’amore sia un affare di geometria non euclidea.
THE BALLAD OF PEGGY AND PEDRO
The ballad of Peggy and Pedro barked out by the punkbestials
of the Garibaldi Bridge, with a mixture of hatred and despair,
teaches us the intimate relationship between geometry and love,
to love as if we were maths surrounded by stray dogs.
Peggy you were drunk, normal mood,
in the slums along the bed of the Tiber
and alcohol, on August evenings, doesn’t warm you up,
clouding every sense in annihilating dreams,
transforming every chewed-up sentence into a gunfight in the back
on armour dissolved by the summer heat.
Lying on the edges of the bridge’s ledges,
among the drop-outs of the Rome open city,
you opened your heart to the gratuitous insult of Pedro,
your lover, and toppled over, falling into the void,
drawing gravitational trajectories from the sky to the cement.
Pedro wasn’t drunk, a day’s journey away,
you weren’t drunk, abnormal state of mind,
in the slums along the bed of the Tiber,
or in the empty parties of Milan’s movida,
with the intention of explaining to dogs and tramps
a curious lesson of non-Euclidean geometry.
Mounted on the edge of the bridge,
in the apathetic indifference of your distracted pupils,
you jumped, in the same trajectory of love,
along the same fatal path as your Peggy,
landing on the cement at the same instant.
The punkbestials of the Garibaldi Bridge, cleared by the local authority,
will spread a surreal lesson to every slum in the world
centred on the astonishing idea
that love is a matter of non-Euclidean geometry.
L’ANTI-«PROMESSA» D’AMARE
Da anti-«poeta», vittima della mia anti-«poesia»
non sarei in grado di dedicarti che un’anti-«promessa» d’amore,
la mia anti-«promessa» d’amore avrebbe i tratti d’una sinestesia,
la durezza staliniana dell’acciaio e la dolcezza del colore,
la finezza dell’amicizia e la consistenza dell’amore,
i tuoi occhi, candidi, mi tramutano in cinico malato d’idrofobia,
e contro la rabbia – monamour– non esiste dottore.
Anti-«promessa» d’amore da leggere davanti all’ufficiale di stato civile,
come riuscire a convincere un mondo tecno-triviale
che ti ho amata dal Giugno del 1976, forse, addirittura, da Aprile,
io ero un embrione e tu, ancora, eri immersa nell’aurora boreale,
saresti stata sei anni un angelo, un fantasma, l’inessenza di un frattale,
senza fare una piega a attenderti, sei anni, trentasei anni, senza niente da dire,
i contemporanei montoni di Panurgo mi condannerebbero al silenzio totale.
Sei la mia anti-«promessa» d’amore e, magari, il concetto ti suona insensibile
ti osservo dormire, serena, come una briciola adagiata in un tostapane,
il mio amore – mi spogli dal ruolo di «guastatore»- è abissale come un sommergibile,
condannato a disseminar siluri sotto (mentita) spoglia di pesci-cane.
THE ANTI-PROMISE TO LOVE
Anti-poet, victim of my anti-poetry,
all I could do is dedicate to you an antpromise of love,
my anti-promise of love would have the features of a synesthesia,
the Stalinist hardness of steel and the softness of colour,
the finesse of friendship and the consistency of love,
your white eyes turn me into a hydrophobic cynic,
and there’s no doctor for rage, my love.
An anti-promise of love to be read before a registrar,
as to convince a tecno-trivial world,
i’ve loved you since June 1976, perhaps, in truth, since April,
i was an embryo and you were still immersed in the aurora borealis,
for six years you would have been an angel, a ghost, the inessential of a fractal,
without batting an eyelid waiting for you, six years, thirty-six years, with nothing to say,
the sheep of Panurge’s contemporaries would condemn me to total silence.
You are my anti-promise of love, and the idea may seem imperceptible to you,
i observe you sleeping, serene, like a crumb abandoned in a toaster,
my love I am stripped of the role of ‘sapper’ – it is abyssal like a submarine,
condemned to scatter torpedoes under the (false) guise of a dogfish.
BALLATA DEGLI INESISTENTI
Potrei tentare di narrarvi
al suono della mia tastiera
come Baasima morì di lebbra
senza mai raggiunger la frontiera,
o come l’armeno Méroujan
sotto uno sventolio di mezzelune
sentì svanire l’aria dai suoi occhi
buttati via in una fossa comune;
Charlee, che travasata a Brisbane
in cerca di un mondo migliore,
concluse il viaggio
dentro le fauci di un alligatore,
o Aurélio, chiamato Bruna
che dopo otto mesi d’ospedale
morì di aidiesse contratto
a battere su una tangenziale.
Nessuno si ricorderà di Yehoudith,
delle sue labbra rosse carminio,
finite a bere veleni tossici
in un campo di sterminio,
o di Eerikki, dalla barba rossa, che,
sconfitto dalla smania di navigare,
dorme, raschiato dalle orche,
sui fondi d’un qualche mare;
la testa di Sandrine, duchessa
di Borgogna, udì rumor di festa
cadendo dalla lama d’una ghigliottina
in una cesta,
e Daisuke, moderno samurai,
del motore d’un aereo contava i giri
trasumanando un gesto da kamikaze
in harakiri.
Potrei starvi a raccontare
nell’afa d’una notte d’estate
come Iris ed Anthia, bimbe spartane
dacché deformi furono abbandonate,
o come Deendayal schiattò di stenti
imputabile dell’unico reato
di vivere una vita da intoccabile
senza mai essersi ribellato;
Ituha, ragazza indiana,
che, minacciata da un coltello,
finì a danzare con Manitou
nelle anticamere di un bordello,
e Luther, nato nel Lancashire,
che, liberato dal mestiere d’accattone,
fu messo a morire da sua maestà britannica
nelle miniere di carbone.
Chi si ricorderà di Itzayana,
e della sua famiglia massacrata
in un villaggio ai margini del Messico
dall’esercito di Carranza in ritirata,
e chi di Idris, africano ribelle,
tramortito dallo shock e dalle ustioni
mentre, indomito al dominio coloniale,
cercava di rubare un camion di munizioni;
Shahdi, volò alta nel cielo
sulle aste della verde rivoluzione,
atterrando a Teheran, le ali dilaniate
da un colpo di cannone,
e Tikhomir, muratore ceceno,
che rovinò tra i volti indifferenti
a terra dal tetto del Mausoleo
di Lenin, senza commenti.
Questi miei oggetti di racconto
fratti a frammenti di inesistenza
trasmettano suoni distanti
di resistenza.
BALLAD OF THE NON-EXISTENT
I could try to tell you
with the sound of my keyboard
how Baasima died of leprosy
without ever reaching the border,
or how the Armenian Meroujan
under a flutter of half-moons
felt the air in his eyes vanish
thrown into a mass grave;
Charlee, who moved to Brisbane
in search of a better world,
ends the journey
in the mouth of an alligator,
or Aurelio, named Bruna
who, after eight months in hospital
died of AIDS contracted
to hit a ring road.
Nobody will remember Yehoudith,
her lips carmine red,
erased by drinking toxic poisons
in an extermination camp,
or Eerikki, with his red beard,
defeated by the turbulence of the waves,
who sleeps, scoured by orcas,
on the bottom of some sea;
the head of Sandrine, Duchess
of Burgundy heard the rumour of the feast
as it fell from the blade of a guillotine
into a basket
and Daisuke, modern samurai,
counted the revolutions of a plane’s engine
transhumanizing a kamikaze gesture into harakiri.
I could go on and on
in the stifling heat of a summer night
how Iris and Anthia, deformed Spartan children
were abandoned,
or how Deendayal died of deprivation
attributable to the single crime
of living the life of an outcast
without ever having rebelled;
Ituha, an Indian girl,
threatened with a knife,
who ends up dancing with Manitou
in the anteroom of a brothel
and Luther, born in Lancashire
freed from the profession of beggar
and forced to die by His Britannic Majesty
in the coal mines.
Who will remember Itzayana
and her family massacred
in a village on the outskirts of Mexico
by Carranza’s retreating army,
and what of Idris, the African rebel,
stunned by shocks and burns
while untamed by colonial domination,
he tried to steal an ammunition truck;
Shahdi flew high into the sky
above the flagpoles of the Green Revolution,
landing in Tehran with his wings torn apart
by a cannon shot,
and Tikhomir, a Chechen bricklayer,
that fell among the indifferent faces
to the ground from the roof of Lenin’s Mausoleum,
without comment.
From objects of narrative
fractured into fragments of non-existence
transmits distant sounds
of resistance.
Ivan Pozzoni è nato a Monza nel 1976. Ha introdotto in Italia la materia della Law and Literature. Ha diffuso saggi su filosofi italiani e su etica e teoria del diritto del mondo antico; ha collaborato con con numerose riviste italiane e internazionali. Tra 2007 e 2018 sono uscite varie sue raccolte di versi: Underground e Riserva Indiana, con A&B Editrice, Versi Introversi, Mostri, Galata morente, Carmina non dant damen, Scarti di magazzino, Qui gli austriaci sono più severi dei Borboni, Cherchez la troika e La malattia invettiva con Limina Mentis, Lame da rasoi, con Joker, Il Guastatore, con Cleup, Patroclo non deve morire, con deComporre Edizioni. È stato fondatore e direttore della rivista letteraria Il Guastatore – Quaderni «neon»-avanguardisti; è stato fondatore e direttore della rivista letteraria L’Arrivista; è stato direttore esecutivo della rivista filosofica internazionale Información Filosófica; è, o è stato, direttore delle collane Esprit (Limina Mentis), Nidaba (Gilgamesh Edizioni) e Fuzzy (deComporre). Ha fondato una quindicina di case editrici socialiste autogestite. Ha scritto/curato 150 volumi, scritto 1000 saggi, fondato un movimento d’avanguardia (NeoN-avanguardismo, approvato da Zygmunt Bauman), con mille movimentisti, e steso un Anti-Manifesto NeoN-Avanguardista, È menzionato nei maggiori manuali universitari di storia della letteratura, storiografia filosofica e nei maggiori volumi di critica letteraria.Il suo volume La malattia invettiva vince Raduga, menzione della critica al Montano e allo Strega. Viene inserito nell’Atlante dei poeti italiani contemporanei dell’Università di Bologna ed è inserito molteplici volte nella maggiore rivista internazionale di letteratura, Gradiva.I suoi versi sono tradotti in francese, inglese e spagnolo. Nel 2024, dopo sei anni di ritiro totale allo studio accademico, rientra nel mondo artistico italiano e fonda il collettivo NSEAE (Nuova socio/etno/antropologia estetica).
Ivan Pozzoni was born in Monza in 1976. He introduced Law and Literature in Italy and the publication of essays on Italian philosophers and on the ethics and juridical theory of the ancient world; He collaborated with several Italian and international magazines. Between 2007 and 2018, different versions of the books were published: Underground and Riserva Indiana, with A&B Editrice, Versi Introversi, Mostri, Galata morente, Carmina non dant damen, Scarti di magazzino, Here the Austrians are more severe than the Bourbons, Cherchez the troika. et The Invective Disease with Limina Mentis,Lame da rasoi, with Joker, Il Guastatore, with Cleup, Patroclo non deve morire, with deComporre Edizioni. He was the founder and director of the literary magazine Il Guastatore – «neon»-avant-garde notebooks; he was the founder and director of the literary magazine L’Arrivista; he is the editor and chef of the international philosophical magazine Información Filosófica; he is, or has been, creator of the series Esprit (Limina Mentis), Nidaba (Gilgamesh Edizioni) and Fuzzy (deComporre). It contains a fortnight of autogérées socialistes edition houses. He wrote 150 volumes, wrote 1000 essays, founded an avant-garde movement (NéoN-avant-gardisme, approved by Zygmunt Bauman), with a millier of movements, and wrote an Anti-manifesto NéoN-Avant-gardiste. This is mentioned in the main university manuals of literature history, philosophical history and in the main volumes of literary criticism. His book La malattia invettiva wins Raduga, mention of the critique of Montano et Strega. He is included in the Atlas of contemporary Italian poets of the University of Bologne and figures à plusieurs reprized in the great international literature review of Gradiva. His verses are translated into French, English and Spanish. In 2024, after six years of total retrait of academic studies, he return to the Italian artistic world and melts the NSEAE Kolektivne (New socio/ethno/aesthetic anthropology).
Poetry from Patrick Sweeney
for Katie
by the glow of the cigarette she bummed, Madam Marie read her palm
overcoming the limitations of Etch-A-Sketch with a ball-peen hammer
I’ve given up on the idea of ever bending a spoon with my mind
the gray green Atlantic rollers on the way to my father’s first wave
Fuller’s Earth
her thumb print
next to mine
the staggering odds he was deifying depended on a simple utterance
foreman berating Snot-rocket at the work site
bird migration
Hitchcock rushes to board before the closing doors
of the bus in my consciousness
three fairy ‘glees’ for the soul of Jack Kerouac
he came out in the heat to pick a leaf up off the lawn
her dead son’s shoeshine box
the footrest
size 9
Governments of this overheated world, ashamed before astral travelers
Poetry from Giulia Mozzati-Zacco
In Which Mallory Learns Three Important Things
About Herself as She Pinwheels to Death, Among Other Things
p.1
Dear Mother,
I do not regret the time we never spent.
Dear Father,
I am you and you are me. Who came first? The chicken or the egg?
Dear Self,
You must accept the fact that your imminent death is not and will never be glorious.
p.2
The worst part of realizations,
is they are cruel because
they cannot be changed.
Mine is that I will die
in exactly 17.12 minutes,
(my suit calculates)
whirling between
green, blue, black
speckled with
pinpricks of distant
light from a
different age.
I do not scream.
I do not cry.
I accept.
I am streaking
through time and
the atmosphere is
so close, filling my polycarbonate
visor with wisps of white.
I am glad that the last
thing I will see before
I asphyxiate is the
pacific ocean. I wonder
if fish look up
and wonder what it
is like to breathe.
p.3
I do not envy anything.
I am here, staring at my
entire life defined to
four numbers ticking!
(I have moved past
all things in life. I have
moved past staring at
twin tombstones and
I shall move even when
my synapses shall not,
forever freefalling into
nothing.)
the third thought
that cartwheels across
me squealing heavenly
mercy cries⸺
who will remember you?
The birds twittering under the shingles
of my roof, the squirrels eating the acorns
left on my porch, my posters hanging in
my room are all bits of my
existence and remember me in of
themselves.
I am real; my pain is proof of this.
p.4
00.10
there
00.09
is
00.08
nothing
00.07
more
00.06
beautiful
00.05
than
00.04
earth.
00.03
I
00.02
am
00.01
happy.
Poetry from Abigail George
God, why are You, the Creator of the known universe, letting Palestine die
Virgil, please look at me
my sad face that was once full of
love for you is now empty, made up
of lonely nights, Palestinian-Israeli
conflict, the ball found in a refugee
camp. I wake, get out of bed. Barefoot,
I walk to the kitchen. I boil manifestos
in the kettle. I eat leftover egg mayonnaise
on bread. I map out pain but I don’t have
to do that now, not yet. The silence is waiting
for me. My bathwater is getting cold. The
horse impatient, but, instead, I then map out
pain with these hands. My pain. This
pain that tastes bittersweet. It tastes like
dark chocolate and rain and sweet like a
banana. I drink in this pain like I drink in
Palestine. I get lost in the clouds above
the refugee camp. The clouds made of
a fallen empire, cities of night. The clouds
made of children’s faces. I see the man’s
face again. I am holding it in my hands. The
leaf falls and it’s buried in the ocean. The
ocean that I am swimming in is filled with
orphans. Look at me! I am swimming in
ketchup and grease, fish fingers, hot chips,
blue wrists, lifeless wildflowers. I’m writing
a letter to God. Look at the sadness in my eyes.
Let the sun and grass grow in every soldier’s
heart. Let every soldier on both sides hear a
child’s laughter in the barrel of the gun. Let
them remember their mothers’ eyes and
childhood for Palestine’s sake.
And let them remember the words of this poem.
So Now What
(for Charles Bukowski)
During war,
milk is the colour of blood, honey
the colour of bone
The skulls here are bored
They want a new life, not this tragedy
I’m listing all your war crimes
I remember being happy
But I don’t want to remember
I don’t want to remember the man
I remember bombs and Gaza instead
Amputated limbs like branches
Here, everything tastes like seawater
I hope I’ll wake up from this dream soon
And that the man will return to me
in the morning and to numb the pain
I take the pills one by one
and a fog descends upon me
I wish you had decided to stay
so that we could make things work
but you never did and the truth is
I must accept that as fact and choose to live
For some time I breathed easier
in this world because of you
Because you had become all my reasons
I have questions and they trouble me
Do I still live inside your heart and
inside your life as a passing thought?
I write a letter to God and put it inside a poem.
At night I pray for Israel too, because in war nobody wins.
I pray for soldiers on both sides.
That their blood will turn into flowers.
Antigone, there are no more trees in Palestine, or, salt found in earth (in Palestine)
I found a child’s body lying in
the dust of what was once a mosque
I told the child I would write a letter
That I would write a letter to my
Christian God who abhors brutality of this
kind. Maybe my God could do
something about this kind of pain
and suffering. I’ll put it in a poem,
I said to the child’s soul
I buried the child’s body in that street
where the mosque used to exist,
have its own universe. There are
no more trees in Gaza. There are
only refugees in Palestine and dead
children lying in unmarked graves
but there are unmarked graves everywhere.
Africa, for one, Europe, for another (because
of wars), and Israel, reason being
because of genocide.
Dear God,
Thank you for suffering
I’ve been through so much myself this year
Thank you for pain
my heart is a survivor
Thank you for the wildflowers
they provide happiness, a sense of self
Thank you for this rain
it offers me tranquility and comfort
Thank you for the fog
that hides my tears
Thank you for the children of Palestine
They give me hope
Thank for the man
who was briefly in my life
He loved me and made me
feel beautiful for a short while
Thank you for this year, however,
it was sad, long and exhausting
and I am glad it’s nearly over.
Refaat Alareer
There is hope born in death and death born in hope
These are not empty words, you said
I looked at the exhaustion on your face
I thought of the flowers in Gaza, the orange
and lemon trees, the last olive you ate,
the last shower you took, the last prayer
you said, the last time you boiled a
manifesto in the kettle, stirred coffee
and sugar into a mug, the last time you watched
an American film, the last newspaper you
read, the last dead body you saw, the
last book you opened, the last time you
saw your family, your wife and children.
I have stopped watching the updates of
the Palestinian genocide. They use to
call it the Palestinian-Israeli conflict but now
it is a genocide. It’s become to much
for me to take. My tears can fill an ocean
and carry the orphans in an ark until
this war is over but there’s no end to a war
like this. Perhaps when we reach the end
of the world the war will end. Perhaps. Perhaps.
Where are all the wildflowers, what happened to the books
You walk like the trees, you will
always walk like the trees from the
river to the sea, Palestine. I offer
you gifts. Oranges, tea, flowers, life.
You do not beg, you do not steal,
you do not say anything at all when
they say they have to amputate
I listen to two poems by Ali Sobh
I make spaghetti and watch the fine
sticks that I can so easily snap into
two with my fingers turn into noodles
Noodles not dead bodies. Not heads
I have something to eat and I’m grateful
for that but Palestine is hungry. How
she longs for the sweetness of milk, the
kindness of honey, the protein that
chicken provides. By now, the river
has turned to blood and the children into
angels and the mosques and hospitals
into dust. I cry me a river. My eyes are red.
My tears, the memory of blood.
I know what it feels like to be broken,
heart shattered, body in pieces
So do you, Palestine. So do you.
Flowers for Palestine, forgiveness in this time of war
It’s late. I should be asleep but I’m not.
Instead, I’m watching a 60 minute interview
with Colson Whitehead, he won the Pulitzer
back-to-back, John Updike being the only
other writer to win consecutively. I sleep-
walk walk-slouch to the kitchen and make a hot
cup of tea. I listen to a reading of
Yevtushenko’s Babi Yar. It is read in Russian
and I cannot understand a word. Then it is
read in English and I understand every word
but not everything. I know I will forget these
poems by the time I wake up in the morning.
I will forget writing this poem in response
to Yevtushenko’s Babi Yar poem. No tears
fall but something creeps into my heart and
my heart drops. There is something I cannot
escape in this life. Having bipolar. Bipolar
comes with rejection from family, isolation,
the label of the outsider and the writing of
these poems. Very soon, I will take a pill to
fall asleep. I will wake up with a brain fog. In
war, as in psychosis, there is a price to pay
for both sides. The poet lives with truth, and his
poetry contains life just as much life as that
which seeps out of a dead body in the snow.
The rain falls and washes the blood away
purely to keep the streets pure and clean.
In the hospital, the sick body recovers.
Lux
The skin, thunder, her skin is perfect. It is milk, it is
pale, it is privileged. I talk about this in
romantic undertones. I write a novella about
it. I mask my envy, live in my house, and live.
My skin is the colour of a green sea. It is
orange peel and stretchmarks. It is a tapestry. Stars are to
be found there, the universe, a tribe of singing
angels. No woman is proud of cellulite, of the scarring on her
heart that she has carried into middle-age.
She bathes in light and this privilege I want
so badly. This author bathes with bath salts and Pears
soap, lavender Vinolia bath oil. Fenjal is on the
bathroom windowsill. The blood washes over me.
I taste blood in my mouth. The bullet. I can’t
get the stain out. I turn the bullet into a rose.
It’s futile. You can’t turn bullets into roses.
My mute paternal grandfather taught me that.
I expose Palestine’s smoke to the light. The
light turns the air strikes on Gaza into a pilot.
The bombs are sent to a storage holder on the moon.
The war is abandoned and peace reigns but
then I woke up and I realised I was dreaming
and that today was Palestine’s funeral.