where the moon moth spent the night




back to the house, the same germline in every brave smile




temporal shifts of fruit flies on a rotten banana




sun shower loosening the tongues of lavender




in a Faraday cage of his own making




a species that applauds and weeps for one another




old men and kids staring down into a rainy sinkhole




finding space for a star on the boy's torn and wrinkled paper




his second-wind dandelion wish




playing army, the dying heroes of S.Vogdes Street

Demand

They all boldly project

A responsibility they have

As if we don’t feel it either

They also possess it well.

The price that will be found

And will lead them

Remember it my friends

It will be their own west.

After they chose

Our children’s east

Let them erase it

From the sight of our eyes.

They left them helplessly

As if they were only

Their own people

And there they will look frozen.

A body that they wounded

A soul that they burned

And everything was destroyed

They made an altar of money.

 Without shame or hesitation

They blamed these

A supposed human error

And so they brought it down.

A responsibility that should have been theirs

Who should take it

After everyone learned

A mistake with the bow.

Their discordant sounds

All together they set up

An absurd theater

Innocent though they died.

But with the rhythms of the lyre

A tear of pain is shed

They shout from end to end.

2 .

They wanted me.

To sit faithfully and patiently listening

But my ears grew tired of the influences

Of irrelevant and heartless types to dictate

As if everything revolved around them.

My usual reward was patience

But my worst, as I realized

On my own authority, a simple

Simple and never ambiguous no, pure, clean.

They never wanted to see inside me

To see my sides and textures

As everything inside me, they tore

The garments of my soul and burned my entrails.

 Besides, who would be 

Right and always true

To see and cast even a glance

On my own dreams, I want to, but no.

I was to blame for all this 

My magnanimity was in a superlative degree

And it was not fitting for them, unsuitable for immoral and ungrateful people.

But I would always have a good reason, which they proclaimed within themselves as a given.

But the worst and most unjust thing was

Not for me simply and naturally

But for those who wanted to crawl

To accept and accept foreign inhospitable layers.

 Now I knew, I suffered, I learned and above all

For my own good, I would never be a giver

Where it was not worth it and more, where it caused them

Fear, terror, insecurity and imperative, removal.

No matter if they wanted me according to their own standards and measures

I chose my own bar 

Without regretting it at all 

And to finally face that view.

Which does not come from riches and palaces

Parents’ parchments and not only

Despite life’s narrow streets and its steep sides.

I deal with all types of poetry. My writing has been awarded and has participated in various anthologies. I have published four poetry collections and a short story and am a radio producer. 

Caroline

for a while 

every poem i wrote

was my way of imagining

that we were making love

in the grass 

or the alley 

by the candy store

or just about anywhere

i could remember 

ever holding your hand

i imagined the summer breeze

& an armful 

of red haired babies screaming

until we took turns 

rocking them to sleep

& you gently 

placed flowers

in their hair.

The Marrow of Blueberries

i dream you 

are the marrow

of blueberries

& the roman spike 

of aging rose bushes

& you say

i am living proof

that the sun

will make 

you bleed.

Poem for Katie Teagarden

all through high school

i don’t believe 

we ever exchanged 

more than a few words

you always looked nervous

standing by the swimming pool

waiting for the whistle

the sun always brought 

your freckles out

while the quiet 

kept you pure

on your the final morning

i think it rained.

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), Pocatello Wildflower, (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2023), 100 Mornings, (Sacred Parasite, 2025), and Trump Stamp, (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2026). 

Mubāhala *

To the one who shrinks his love

to “Blessed Friday.”

For you, I say:

Come — let our hearts weep as one.

My letters—bowing and prostrating long at the altar of your silence — and yours.

My excuses — stitched in secret just to glimpse you — and yours.

The ache of my days

and yours.

My fear, raised by your own hand 

and yours.

Then let us swear together,

and lay the soul’s burning

upon whoever betrays.

• Mubahala: “Mutual cursing; a ritual in which each opposing party says ‘the curse of Allah may be upon the ones of us who are wrongdoers.’”   

(Taken from: https://rekhtadictionary.com/meaning-of-mubaahala?utm_source=chatgpt.com)

The Ark

Maori warriors flattened the lands won through bloodshed

and named it the South Island.

When the giant bustard flapped its wings,

the roots of the grassland trembled even in the wind.

On New Zealand’s earthquake island, isolated at 00:02,

three white-faced cows.

This tiny island of earth, where everything collapsed leaving only just enough,

is it God’s planned ark?

Counting toward infinity, then snap, short by the number 3.

Into that very plan, God drags the three cows.

The crumbling and cracking vast land is no longer a pasture for the cattle.

Like those times, excluded from the game of hopscotch at dusk,

the abandoned herd of cows.

The cows, puzzled by the suddenly narrowed field, comfort one another.

The cows can no longer go up

nor go down; nibbling on grass, they are peaceful for now.

The cows do not know God,

yet calmly, they rub their flanks together and graze.

That silent endurance of the cows.

Every crack in the world is a tear shed by God.

Seventeen-Year-Old Miss Marco Polo Sheep

By Yeon Myung-ji

Miss Marco Polo Sheep of the Pamir Mountains loved almond blossoms

and was an aspiring singer

who sang along to K-POP.

An aspirant,

what a beautiful occupation.

Riding the rhythm on the breath of the wind,

an aspirant walking the grassland.

She loves the wild goat

that endured the winter, tightly chewing on festuca grass.

The beasts of winter

must be winter aspirants.

The ghost of the snow mountains, the snow leopard,

must be a snow aspirant.

When you lie face down on the grassland, the grass sways,

and when you flip over the back of a stone, fish swim—

the aspirants of nature.

Only when a river flows from the belly

does the voice break through, says Miss Marco Polo Sheep.

Even if bitten on the nape and blood flows,

the song of the idol goat cannot be given up.

The pop song, which claimed that when the snow melts,

the leopard would melt too,

was plagiarism anyway.

The moonlight darkens,

and the snow leopard of Pamir, a high and desolate land,

drags its long tail across the ridge—

the ghost of the alpine.

The aspirant of a fairy tale,

caught off guard by the seventeen-year-old Miss Marco Polo Sheep.

Profile
Poet Yeon Myung-ji began her literary career in 2013 with the poetry collection 『Gashibi』, published in the Minerva Poetry Series.

Her published works include the poetry collections 『Sitting Like an Apple』 and 『Where would the House of the Sorry’ be? 』 the e-poetry collection 『Seventeen Marco Polos,』 and the travel essay 『Step by Step, Walking the Camino.』She has received the Tolstoy Literary Award, the Homi Literary Award, the Cheongsong Gaekju Literary Award, and the Aviation Literary Award. In 2025, she was awarded the Bronze Prize in Poetry at the Literature Asia Awards, Grand Prize Winner,9th Kim Myung-bae Literary Award.

Her poems have been translated and published in local languages in India, Pakistan, Kosovo, Italy, Egypt, the United States, and Belgium, Greece, UK, and Germany.

The War Inside the Voice: Leila Abdul‑Rauf Between Calls from a Seething Edge and Andros Insidium

by Alex S Johnson

Leila Abdul‑Rauf has long occupied a singular position in the experimental music landscape, moving fluently through noise, ambient, metal, thrash‑adjacent hybrids, folk‑metal permutations, and avant‑garde vocal architecture. Her recent work unfolds across two closely linked records: Calls from a Seething Edge, released on Cyclic Law in 2024, and the newer Andros Insidium, whose title she describes as a partly invented Latin construction—“andros meaning… the masculine,” while “insidium… I don’t even know if that’s real… sometimes you just got to make something up just to keep it interesting.”

Calls from a Seething Edge is the record that contains “Crimes of the Soul,” a song whose emotional and visual architecture anchors much of the conversation.

Abdul‑Rauf explains that the video was shot by her partner, Gregory Hagen, who “does make an appearance on both that record… Calls from a seating edge, which came out on cyclic law in 2024, and then… he also does a vocal appearance on Andros Insidium.”

The video’s pastoral core was filmed at “a local rose garden here in Oakland… such a hidden gem… a great place to just go and relax… watch the water fountains and all the birds… whatever’s lurking around there.”

That serenity is violently interrupted by war footage edited in by their friend Dave Brenner, who “kind of gave it the grit that… was true to the song.”

Abdul‑Rauf isn’t certain of the exact source of the footage—“you’ll have to talk to him about that”—but suspects “probably Gaza or Lebanon or a combination, Syria… all the recent bombings and things like that.”

The backdrop for Calls from a Seething Edge is explicitly geopolitical. Abdul‑Rauf describes 2024 as “sort of, like, the D‑day for all the… genocides going on,” a time when she began to feel “really… angry and vulnerable in a way that I hadn’t felt quite to that point,” especially in “this… hyper‑surveillance world that we’re living in.”

She became “really anxious… very on edge,” and war moved “to the forefront” of her thinking. Her day job at a psychoanalytic institute—“I do administration, but I’m around psychoanalysts all the time”—inflected the record’s conceptual frame.

For over a decade she has been immersed in a culture that insists, “don’t take everything at face value… really distill it… don’t make these flipped judgments… explore… the most horrible parts of ourselves.”

War, she notes, is “one of the most despicable things about humanity,” yet “going back to early humans, there’s always been war and violence of some kind.”

The record asks, without pretending to answer, whether war is something humanity can ever transcend: “Is war even something that we… can ever be above?… I like to think yes… but…”

One of the songs on Calls from a Seething Edge, “Failure to Fire,” draws on research from the Vietnam War. Abdul‑Rauf recounts studies suggesting that soldiers “weren’t… killing each other… enough,” which led to the use of gas to “incite more violence.”

She connects this to the premise of the film Jacob’s Ladder: “That was the whole premise for the movie Jacob’s Ladder, too… people don’t really want to kill each other… so they had to drug them.”

The song becomes a meditation on the gap between human reluctance and systemic coercion.

Sonically, “Crimes of the Soul” is built from deceptively simple materials. “The structure’s pretty simple,” she says. “I did very simple drum programming… some… deep growly synths… and lots of these lofty kind of vocals.” The second half introduces what sound like “high stringy synths,” but they are in fact trumpet parts “really stretched out… and playing back at different speeds.”

She took a treated horn part from “Summon,” the first track on Calls from a Seething Edge—“there’s another treated horn part at the beginning… that’s drop‑pitched”—and “put it in ‘Crimes of the Soul’ and sped it up… probably 3 or 4 different speeds.”

The result is a harmonic mesh that feels electronic but is “honestly just… acoustic horn, just trumpet… through a microphone… some reverb and some pitch shifting.”

Her approach to gear is deliberately minimal. “You’re very self‑sufficient as far as your gear,” I say.

“Not at all,” she replies. “I feel like I’m the antithesis of techie.” She insists on keeping “the gear as minimal as possible,” explaining, “I can’t wrap my head around these complicated setups with all these pedals… wires everywhere, I get nauseous when I see… I’m impressed when other people do it, but if I had to do it, I would just… freeze.”

The simplicity is in service of performance: she wants to “really get into the vocal performance, the horn performance… interact with the crowd,” especially now that there is “a lot more… challenging singing and… a lot more growling in the sets… a lot more visceral and immediate” than her earlier, more “down tempo” work.

If Calls from a Seething Edge is the war‑haunted, psychoanalytic record, Andros Insidium is the newer, parallel project where Abdul‑Rauf continues to push her voice and compositional strategies.

She notes that many listeners think she “now is going solo,” but clarifies that these projects have been running in parallel for years: “I’ve been doing my solo projects since 2012… Vastum started right before I joined Hammers… and then I started my solo project not much longer after that.”

On Andros Insidium, tracks like “Eros Anima” and “Fractured Body” carry some of her most overtly metal‑inflected and Halford‑inspired vocal lines. “There are a couple moments on… ‘Eros Anima’… where I just get my inner Halford out,” she says. “No one’s gonna say that when they listen to it, but… there’s some vocal melodies where that’s straight up the case.”

“Fractured Body” on Andros Insidium is repurposed from a Vastum song, “Corpus Fractum.” “I just… translated into English ‘Fractured Body’,” she explains. “Instead of the… guitar lead as the vocal lead… the rhythm guitars is the synth… did different drum part… shortened it… took, like, the intro of the Vastum song and made it its own song.”

The ending, built from “sound bites of glass breaking,” is a direct homage to Einstürzende Neubauten’s “Haster Luger”: “At the end of ‘Haster Luger’… there’s just, like, this endless… stream of broken glass. I was like, well, that’s… gotta… give my love to them there as well.”

Her influences form a dense, unconscious archive: “There’s… all kinds. There’s… Einsturzende Neubauten… a little Dead Can Dance, little Skinny Puppy… it’s all there back in… deep in the unconscious.”

One of her most important inspirations is Rob Halford: “I’m a huge Rob Halford fan. Anyone who knows me… knows that.” She has read “both of Rob’s memoirs” and K.K. Downing’s, calling them “all fantastic,” and still describes Judas Priest as “the best heavy metal band in the world.”

Abdul‑Rauf’s personal history adds further layers to her work. She grew up between two religious traditions: an Egyptian Muslim father, an imam, and an Irish Roman Catholic mother from New York.

She spent childhood weekends in a Sufi mosque in Soho, sitting through sermons, listening to the call to prayer, participating in dhikr: “You repeat God’s name… whirling around… almost passing out from these recitations.”

She recalls “all the call to prayer… it just kind of works its way in,” and notes that these sounds later resurfaced in her solo work.

Her band history is equally rich. Amber Asylum, Hammers of Misfortune, Vastum, Saros—each marks a different phase.

She describes joining Hammers after playing with Sigrid in Amber Asylum: “We had had a couple of years already… touring together… and then she invited me to join Hammers… I said, oh, okay, well, it’s Sigrid, I love playing with Sigrid.”

Hammers, she notes, is “John’s… basically his solo project brought to life in a band,” and her role was to “support… his ideas… guitar‑wise and vocal‑wise.”

Vastum, formed with Dan and others, continues: “At this point, it’s just me and Dan… we’ve been writing another record.” Her long partnership with Sam Foster—“the drummer of… Saros… who used to be in Weakling”—extends across projects: “He’s all over my last two solo albums… hand percussion… he’s done videos… all the photography… that’s all… he did all of that… that’s like an almost 25‑year relationship… he’s been such a big part of my life creatively.”

Touring has become increasingly strategic. Abdul‑Rauf outlines an upcoming East Coast solo tour with dungeon‑synth artist Vela Straz, describing the genre’s cosplay, masks, swords, chainmail, and 1980s keyboards: “It’s a whole thing.” The aesthetic appeals to her, and the economics make sense: “Touring with a band now is a total racket… too expensive… solo is more worth your while.”

Her sets now feature “a lot more growling… a lot more visceral and immediate” energy, even as she maintains dynamic range.

Her perspective on heavy music’s evolution is grounded in experience. She notes shifts in production—“hyper‑compressed guitar tones,” “drum triggers,” “homogenized growls”—and the explosion of global diversity in metal scenes, from blackgaze and shoegaze‑metal hybrids to internationalized extreme music.

She also gestures toward the intellectual currents behind punk and metal, mentioning Marxism, socialism, and situationism, and referencing a friend who “wrote a whole book on situationism in punk rock.”

When asked about advice for women in extreme music, Abdul‑Rauf answers with warmth and pragmatism: “Play with good people… collaborate with true friends… diversify creatively… avoid burnout.” She emphasizes the importance of long‑term artistic relationships: “If you play with good people, they’re gonna be in your life for a long time.”

Across Calls from a Seething Edge and Andros Insidium, Abdul‑Rauf’s work reveals an artist who moves fluidly between genres, cultures, histories, and emotional registers, creating music that is as intellectually rigorous as it is sonically visceral.

Her records are not simply fusions of influence; they are the lived expression of a life shaped by war, ritual, rebellion, psychoanalytic inquiry, and relentless creative curiosity.

CONTEXTUAL PROPHECIES
I comb the air with tingling thoughts
Spilling dynamic shots
From archeology of many plots
 
I sit in streams of eloquent joy
With butterflies, birds, flowers dancing like a toy
Around and around in windy coil
 
I sometimes spit thrilling thunder
To tackle those that plunders
Our dreams of willing wonders
 
I crow in voices of the unheard
Whose holy ambitions are disallowed shed
By Pharaohs sending them to early bed
 
When you drink any air of anger
In the veins of my ‘penful’ wander
Something has harassed my pot of ponder
 
When I dance with psychedelic metaphors
In milky streams of amorous lores’
An Eve may be cooing at my shores.
 
We vomit verses according to dictates of any wind
Giving wings to anger or melody of the mind
Speaking in tongues in view of what we see or find
 
We bring
We ring
We sing…
————————–
(Written on 11 June 2010)
———————————

THE REASON FOR THE SEASON
(THE IMMORTAL KING)
Raise your voices to the four cardinal wings,
All who know His worth praise and sing,
As I do in this renaissance of the kindly king;
I will rather be under His wing
Than crave silver and gold,
I will however, marry the king
And frown at rusty riches untold,
For on Calvary cross, gushed His blood
Draining off my sins and sorrows flood;
He is the light of my salvation beam
In joy I will forever scream
“Oh my lovely lord
And gorgeous gracious God”
Whenever I shed my clay
To ever in paradise play
Where there is no exchange of baton between night and day
On your bosom oh Lord! Let me baby-like lay.
——————————– 
(Written on 18 November 2003)

—————————————-

Adjekpagbon Blessed Mudiaga, holds a B.Sc. in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos; an M.Sc. in the same discipline from the National Open University of Nigeria, Victoria Island, Lagos; and a PhD in view. He also bagged a Diploma in Theology from Emmaus Bible School, Dublin, Ireland. He is a multi-talented journalist, poet, playwright, novelist, songwriter, and the first Nigerian author in the history of Nigerian authors creative writers, whose book titled “Rhymes from the Nile” is the first that ever received a presidential award from Aso Rock, in 2007. He is an author of over 18 creative and academic books.

Some of his works have been read live by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Voice of America (VOA), China Radio International (CRI), Nigerian Television Authority (NTA 2 Channel 5), etc. He is a former member of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL), London; and former Publicity Secretary of Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), Lagos Chapter. 

He was a member of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), Lagos Council until he relocated to Adamawa State in 2024. He is also a member of Tesol International Association (TIA), Virginia, U.S.A., as a certified Teacher of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL).

Moreover, at present, he is the Chairman of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), Adamawa State Chapter. He belongs to other academic and creative minds’ associations such as Africa-ELTA (English Language Teachers Association). He is the current President of Creative Writers Association of Nigeria (CWAN).

He is an Instructor in the Communications and Multimedia Design (CMD) Department of the American University of Nigeria (AUN), Yola, Adamawa State, Nigeria.