Where the Silence Lives I smiled beneath the falling rain, While hiding every trace of pain. The world saw strength within my eyes, But never heard my quiet cries. I walked through nights without a star, Wondering where you truly are. Some memories refuse to fade, Some promises were never made. And if one day you think of me, Remember who I used to be— A heart that loved without a sound, A soul that searched but never found. So let the wind carry my name, Let time erase the olden flame. I’ll learn to bloom beneath the skies, Even with tears behind my eyes
In the shrines of knowledge that you once designed,
Enlightenment dies while the shallow arise.
Modest, bright girls are now pushed far behind,
As the crowd chases shadows, deceit, and disguise.
They look for disaster in lands far and wide,
Yet blind are the eyes in their very own head!
Mocking great Cholpon, forgetting their pride,
And erasing the roots where their ancestors bled.
Lives torn away under chains of despair,
Frozen in Siberia’s bitter, cold gleam…
Did you face the gallows for a future so bare?
Is this the tomorrow you wept for in dreams?
“The future belongs to the youth,” we proclaim,
Yet where are they marching, and what is their goal?
Awake from your slumber, look past the false game:
A book in the corner, a phone takes the soul.
Drunk on illusions, they shout “Real and Barca,”
Lost in the dramas that cloud and deceive.
Chasing K-pop stars, ignoring Qodiriy,
What hollow idols they’ve learned to believe!
Yet judge not too quickly, nor cast them aside,
Every dark era holds shadow and light…
Even amidst this commercialized tide,
There are youth who still keep their inner fire bright.
Do not ask me why I must lecture you so,
This is a reminder, no speech from a stage.
To witness this silence and let the truth go…
My aching, torn pen could not stand on the page.
When will we awaken? When will we return?
A true revolution begins at the door!
Tomorrow, before God, when lifetimes shall burn,
How will we answer for days that are no more?
{July 29, 2026 — 00:37}
—
### (UZBEK)
Yoshlarga murojaat…
Tarix sahifasin varaqlagan on,
Siz jon bergan millat “zombi” bo‘ldimi?
Siz kutgan oydinlar… siz orzu qilgan,
E’tiqod, hayolar bugun o‘ldimi?
Siz ochgan maktabda ma’rifat qolib,
Shaklu qiyofatga yopishdi hamma.
Iffatli qizlarni chetga surishib,
Asli yo‘q narsadan yasashdi muammo.
Ular fojiani boshqa yerda der,
Asli ko‘r bo‘lgani o‘z ko‘zlari-ku!
Cho‘lponni tanimay, masxara qilar,
Millatin unutgan shu oʻzlari-ku!
Zanjirlar ostida uzilgan umr,
Sibir sovug‘ida muzlagan vujud…
Axir shu kun uchun otildingizmi,
Siz qon yig‘lab kutgan kelajak shumi?
Kelajak yoshlarning qoʻlida deymiz…
Ammo, ular hozir ketur qay tomon.
Tan oling, uxlamang koʻrib turibsiz:
Kitob bir chekkada, qoʻlda telefon.
“Real – Barsa” deydi, xayol ila mast,
Dorama botqogʻidan chiqolmay qolgan.
K-pop guruhlarin, Qodiriy emas —
Oʻziga tengsiz bir oʻrnak deb olgan!
Xulosa chiqarmang oʻylanmay netmay,
Har zamonda bo‘lur doim oq-qora…
Shunday paytlarda ham oqim-la ketmay,
Aslin yoʻqotmagan yoshlar ham bor-a.
Demangki, nasihat qilur bu nega?
Nasihat emasdur, eslatma soʻzim.
Koʻrib koʻrmaslikka olib yashashga…
Chidolmadi shoʻrlik qalamim oʻzi.
Qachon ko‘zni ochib, qaytamiz dinga?
Ostonadan boshlar asl inqilob!
Ertaga Mahsharda, Haqning oldida —
Zoe bo‘lgan umrga ne beramiz javob?!
{29.07.2026 — 00:37}
Sabrina Ravshanova is an emerging 16-year-old poet from the Kashkadarya region, Kokdala district, Uzbekistan. She is currently a 10th-grade student at School No. 91. She is the co-author of several young writers’ collections. Her goal is to study Uzbek Philology at the university level and promote Uzbek national literature worldwide.
which is apparently how a city tells you now that one of its organs has failed.
No bell.
No man running up Yonge yelling fire.
Just somebody’s phone held sideways and black smoke climbing through the frame behind the gold woman who has been stepping out over the sidewalk for longer than most of the condos around her have been alive.
Zanzibar is burning down.
And the first thing Toronto will do is call it a building.
359 Yonge Street.
Commercial property.
Three alarm.
Road closure.
Structural damage.
Cause unknown.
All those little clean words we invented because things are easier when nothing has a body.
But this place has always had a body.
That’s practically the problem.
They built it in 1895 for undertakers.
Young & Millard.
Caskets upstairs.
Morgue downstairs.
Imagine that.
Before the tits there were corpses.
Before the pole there was the table.
Before somebody slipped a twenty into somebody’s garter somebody else was paying to put their mother in a box.
Same building.
That isn’t symbolism.
That’s Toronto.
We don’t tear the old purpose out.
We drywall over it.
Put another licence on the door.
Eventually there was food.
Then liquor.
Jazz.
R&B.
Rock and roll.
Girls dancing beside the band.
Then girls without the band.
At one point the liquor laws required food so there was apparently a ham sandwich that went around the room from table to table,
uneaten,
performing compliance.
I love that fucking sandwich.
I hope somebody saved it.
Patron saint of Toronto.
One piece of bread passing through everybody’s hands so the government could say desire had been served with lunch.
Then the city got taller.
Cleaner.
More expensive.
Every square foot learned how much it was worth.
Sam the Record Man went dark.
The signs came down.
Honest Ed’s went into memory.
Yonge Street started wearing glass like it had somewhere better to be.
And Zanzibar—
stupid, gold, horny Zanzibar—
stayed.
Ten-karat glazed tile.
Stars.
Neon.
A giant woman over the entrance with one leg extended like she owned the fucking street.
Which she did.
You could hate it.
You could laugh at it.
You could spend forty years pretending you had never looked up.
But you knew where you were when you saw her.
That matters.
Cities need things that cannot be mistaken for anywhere else.
And Zanzibar was never anywhere else.
It was exactly there.
Yonge Street.
Toronto.
Women going in for work.
Men going in pretending they weren’t lonely.
Tourists taking pictures.
Bay Street boys.
Students.
Regulars.
Bartenders.
Bouncers.
Cleaners.
Dancers counting money under fluorescent light after the fantasy was finished.
That’s the part I don’t want anybody cleaning up now.
Those women worked.
Their bodies were not the building’s mythology.
Their bodies paid bills.
Rent.
Food.
Phone.
Child care.
Debt.
Shoes.
A cab home at four in the morning because sometimes getting home alive costs more than the TTC.
Do not turn them into neon.
Do not turn them into the colourful history of Yonge Street.
They were working.
There were men downstairs once too.
Bodies everywhere.
Bodies looking.
Bodies being looked at.
Bodies converting loneliness into currency.
Bodies surviving another week.
A whole economy with its clothes off.
And underneath them,
the old morgue.
Of course.
The dead beneath the living while the living danced to stay living.
Tell me Toronto has ever written a better sentence.
Someone once danced there as the Queen of the Fire.
She ate flame.
I don’t know what to do with that now.
So I won’t do anything with it.
I’ll leave it where it is.
Queen of the Fire.
Zanzibar.
The roof burning.
Sometimes history doesn’t need a metaphor.
Sometimes the metaphor gets there first and waits eighty years for the fire department.
This morning smoke came through the roof.
The windows opened wrong.
Water went where liquor went.
Ash settled on the gold.
And somewhere behind all of that the old building remembered every version of what we asked it to hold.
The dead.
The drunk.
The band.
The dancer.
The lonely.
The horny.
The broke.
The beautiful.
The ridiculous.
The man with a twenty.
The woman earning it.
The sandwich nobody wanted.
The corpse somebody loved.
The stripper somebody loved.
The stripper somebody was.
Maybe that’s what I’m angry about.
Not that something old is burning.
Old things burn.
Old things fall down.
Toronto is excellent at helping.
I’m angry because we keep acting surprised when memory turns out to have an address.
We think history is Queen’s Park.
Casa Loma.
A plaque screwed into brick.
A black-and-white photograph of important men wearing hats.
No.
Sometimes history has tits.
Sometimes history smells like perfume and beer and bleach at four in the morning.
Sometimes history has a dressing room.
Sometimes history walks out the employee entrance with sore feet and cash folded somewhere safe.
Sometimes history is tacky as hell.
Sometimes history is gold tile on Yonge Street.
Sometimes history is a woman forty feet over your head who has been taking the same impossible step for decades
and never once put her foot down.
Until today.
Zanzibar is burning down.
Not metaphorically.
Not eventually.
Not in the careful language we’ll use after.
It is burning down while Toronto is still standing around it.
And tomorrow somebody will ask what should replace it.
They always do.
As if absence is a development opportunity.
As if every wound is really just available frontage.
As if the city cannot bear one square metre that isn’t becoming something else.
But tonight I don’t want the rendering.
I don’t want the proposal.
I don’t want the heritage strategy.
I don’t want some fucking condominium called
THE ZANZIBAR
with brushed brass lettering and a cocktail lounge in the lobby selling a seventeen-dollar drink named after a woman who used to work there.
Leave it.
For one night,
leave the hole open.
Let Yonge Street look directly into itself.
Let the glass towers see what they replaced.
Let the morgue and the stage and the dressing room and the bar and the gold woman occupy the same ruined air.
Let the city smell like itself.
Let everybody who ever looked up admit they looked.
Let everybody who ever worked there remain larger than the story we are about to tell about them.
And if she comes down—
the gold woman—
do not say she finally fell.
She didn’t.
Toronto burned the place beneath her.
There is a difference.
Joshua W.J. Brown is a Toronto-based writer and filmmaker. His recent work has appeared in Canadian Dimension, and his poetry has been accepted for publication by The Wise Owl.
Red Plastic Dust
My childhood began
with a metal spring
curled on the carpet.
I opened it.
A hand closed my mouth.
The light went out.
I stood
on a narrow shelf,
facing the wall,
learning fear
as a location—
in muscle,
in breath.
Even now, decades later,
when I wake in the dark,
my body still asks:
Is there ground beneath me?
My uncle brought me a gift.
1976.
I was five.
She was beautiful—
the doll with painted eyes,
dark braids,
and nails—
bright red,
glossy, perfect.
I held her like treasure.
“Bad girls wear nail polish.
Take it off.”
Water. Soap.
My small fingernails
scratching at the color.
“Use the scissors.”
Clip. Clip. Clip.
Ten tiny nails
falling to the floor—
red plastic dust.
They raised us
to fear soft things.
Color.
Touch.
Wanting.
I learned early:
desire is something
you bury.
But the body keeps records.
Even now,
when something good arrives—
a hand extended,
a voice that says stay—
something in me
still reaches
for the scissors.
On the floor,
a red dust
only I can see.
