OUR PLACE IN SPACE


Our egg and our girdle – from our toelines to stars’ beyonds,

edgeless sky occupies. Continents and constellations

indicate sky’s compass points in all directions.

Here, and there, it corrals our air. Sky’s only brake is our imagination:

We house our deities in this infinite bubble, map every manifestation

of this cosmic envelope. We extract our character and extort destinies

through constant observation, keen ingenuity, endless speculation

as we contemplate wonderingly at sky’s progress and creation.


AMERICSSON


Whores parade their hymens

and diplomats their swords.

Priests display their diamonds.


With confusion since birth

futures ignore their pasts.


Cowards hang their medals

and gluttons wear their fasts.


The sugar tastes bitter

from the sweat of the slaves.


All the stones and banners

can't cover all the graves.


The lame think they're dancers.

The blind behave like seers.

The deaf play musician.


Hiding behind paved mirrors,

the meek show ambition.


Our clear insight is blurred.



O NIGHT, THE DOMAIN OF OUR DREAMS


The full world by day

is a speckled shade,

but colors at night

all coordinate.


Our humanity

claims its sanity’s

enshrined in marble

but held together

by spirit and breath,

yet we live in dust

and we choose to starve

amidst much rich stock.


Only dark’s tattoo

clears checkered shadows.


THE SINS OF POETS AND PASTORS


When preachers and poets exercise

our metaphorical rhetoric

we much prefer the dramatic

--the pitchfork of lightning--

above the anticlimactic

--a blanket of sunshine.

The wrinkled and crippled shall arise

sooner than the smooth and the spry.

The salve is shadowed by the sting,

and Found, by Wandering.

The tornado and the torrent

and the volcano’s ring

are prized beyond plastic ornaments.

We tend to the tortured and the tried.


TELL ME. ARE YOU SURE?


I wonder if once half our limbs were wings, like a fowl,

or if they all had thumbs once. Or is that only now?

The asker wants to know.

Do we see us in mirrors, or need a fluoroscope?

Are lovers on the level or are they on a slope?

This doubter wants to know.

Was Tigris always Tigris or once was it Paradise?

Was Jesus a carpenter or always just a christ?

This skeptic wants to know.

Are the answers on the internet? Or in ourselves?

Or should I communicate with oracles and elves?

This searcher wants to know.

We learn through maturity? But ages are cages….

Or from these ancient books of fingered, faded pages?

Don’t we all want to know?



QUANDARY



Flatter me – Do I receive or repeat?

With contempt or reciprocity?


THE PROCESS


My appetite

is my engine.


I transubstantiate

the wine of night

to morning wind,

body to pulsed headache state.

And I might write

undisciplined

doggerel to celebrate.


I eat that shite.

I take it in

and digest it. I translate

rails into kites

and doubt to djinn;

vomit; and hope it pulsates.

SWEET ANXIETY OF MOTHERS

      A piece of children's heart always lives in the hearts of our mothers. So long as he is still a child. We children always make mothers think and worry. Although there is really no need to worry, you always care for us with motherly love. Your imagination is always busy wondering if my child is calm, has a full stomach, and is not covered. Mothers, your hearts are white, your love is a river, your wishes are abundant, and your prayers are endless.
    We children will reach your value only by becoming mothers, and even then we will remain children for you, your worries and sorrow for us will not end, on the contrary, your time and life will increase for you, now our children - your sweet grandchildren.
  My mother, be happy that you consider these sweet worries to be the meaning of life! May you be healthy for our happiness, even though your dreams are busy with sweet worries, never let your eyes cry for my child!!!

Gulsevar Khojamova
Student of Andijan State Pedagogical Institute

Snow drip
washes winter memories
archived on the sidewalk



Don’t analyze
crickets
cast a spell



No room for panic
across the lake
don’t let him drown



Regeneration

It takes time to know a place.
In a day we lose 330 billion cells.
The new ones born 
in this new place
smell these new smells
and recognize
they belong. 

Gummy Bears 

Val and I were in Amsterdam.  Queen Elizabeth had just died, and no one was wearing Covid masks anymore. It was cold for September; I wished I had brought warmer clothing.  I wore my hoodie and a thin leather jacket, which wasn’t enough.  

Walking in the Red Light District, Val put his arm around me. “Do you want to get high?” he whispered.  Val has a nice voice – deep and seductive – but he asked as if he were certain I would refuse.  We were on vacation, just the two of us, without our sons. When I said, “Okay,” he raised his perfectly arched eyebrows and smiled.  
He bought a brownie edible and some gummies from a “coffee house.”  With the goods in the chest pocket of his flannel, we rode our rented bikes back to the hotel and locked them in the front courtyard.  If we were going to do this, we shouldn’t be on two wheels. On the way to dinner, we each ate a gummy, so innocent seeming, a candy in the shape of a bear.

Walking in Amsterdam was treacherous.  Bicycle lanes appeared seemingly out of nowhere, crisscrossed streets, and reappeared where we least expected them.  It made us apprehensive and jittery, swinging our heads around and stopping short, catching our breath.  We decided to walk in a quieter neighborhood, along the canals and residential streets, as we searched for a restaurant.
A few minutes later, Val said, “Do you feel anything?”
“Nothing.”
“Me neither.”  
We each ate another bear while the canals twinkled in the night and the houseboats bobbed in the water.

Debi, my older sister, used to get high.  In the 1970s, when I was 6 and she was 16, we shared a room, a small space where I witnessed her teenage life.  When she was stoned, I hated her.  She laughed too much and was distant. I didn’t like the pungent odor of the smoke, different from cigarette smoke.  I needed her to be her usual caring self, someone who was responsible for me after school.  Instead, she and her friends spread out on our twin waterbeds, which were not more than two feet apart.  When I came home and smelled the pot, I folded my arms in front of my chest and asked her if she was high.  This made her laugh even more.  “I’m going to tell Mom,” I would threaten and march off to the living room to watch TV. She made being a teen seem like a disease I wanted to avoid.  When I was in high school, I experimented a little, but I never inhaled enough to feel any effects.  It had no appeal to me. When a joint was being passed around, more often than not, I just handed it along.  
Val and I peeked into restaurant windows, looked at the menus posted on the street, and didn’t find anything.  Some were too crowded; some didn’t have enough ambiance.  Some needed reservations.  We walked some more.  

“How about now?” he asked.
“Nothing.  You?”
“Not a thing.”
He broke off a piece of the brownie and gave it to me.  
“Yum,” I said.  It tasted sweet and cloying. “I love chocolate.” 

He took a bite, too, and put the rest back in his breast pocket.  
Val and I finally found a restaurant that was neither nice, cool looking, nor appetizing.  We were running out of options, and closing time was near.  We took seats and wiped down our table with a napkin.  
While we were eating, Val said something, I don’t remember what.  For some reason it made me laugh.  “What’s so funny?” he asked. “Nothing,” I said, and then we laughed so much that no sounds came out of our mouths, except for occasional gasps for air and a kind of whine from trying to suppress the laugh.  We were attracting attention. After we finished our food, Val paid the bill, and then I grabbed his arm across the table and said, “I don’t think I can walk.”  Either he didn’t hear me or he ignored me because he got up and left the restaurant.  I hauled myself up, willing my legs to function, knocked into the edge of the table, which didn’t even hurt, and followed him to the street.  

I hooked my arm into his and followed his lead.  I knew I was walking but was not sure how.  As if emerging from a blackout, I was standing someplace new.  Then there were shouts and screams.  I hugged Val and realized that I couldn’t really see.   A bicycle swerved around us and then another.  We were standing in the middle of a busy bike lane. I tried to open my pink umbrella.  I was confused.  Was it raining?  Why did I have an umbrella in my hand? Val brought my arm down. 
Time must have passed because again we were standing someplace new.  I felt afraid. I didn’t remember how we got there.  My mind was flashing on and off, like a slide projector with a missing slide.

Val was talking to someone on his phone.  It was our son in New Rochelle.  Aaron and Oliver were locked out of the house.  The key had jammed inside the lock of the front door and broken off.  Val was talking with them on the phone, trying to figure out what to do.  I said I could open the garage remotely from my phone, and I did.  

Five minutes later, the boys called again.  I asked why they were calling.  “Are they okay?”
“Yes,” he said. “They got in the house.”
“They were locked out?”
“Les, we just talked about this.”  He looked at me, incredulous.
“Are they okay?”  I felt panic mounting, almost a sense of hysteria.  “What happened to them?”
Val told me how I had already let them in with the remote garage code on my phone.  
“I can’t remember,” I said.

But then, like recalling an elusive dream, I did kind of see myself unlocking my phone and punching in a code.  “Did I do that?” 
I was in a fog that was dense, and I couldn’t see my way out.
Val said something to me.  His sentences seemed so long.  I couldn’t follow.  I could only absorb a few words at a time.  “Can you say the first part of the sentence again?”
Suddenly I was standing near the reception desk of our boutique hotel.  My mouth was so dry.  I felt like coughing. I saw Val grab a beer from the cooler.  I asked him for water.   Or I thought I did.

“Am I talking?” I said.  
“Huh?”
“Am I asking you for water out loud, or am I just thinking it?  Am I talking now?”
The slide projector brought me to blank slide. When I came to, a bottle of water was in my hand, and we were in the tiny glass elevator going up up up.  

“Don’t lose me,” I said. And I clutched his arm with both hands.
Then we were miraculously in our 129-square-foot room that didn’t have a closet.  Our clothes were strewn on a chair and a deep windowsill.  I contemplated undressing.  As I stood staring at our bed that took up most of the room, Val opened the beer and it sprayed all over my leather jacket that I loved so much.  I looked at my suede boots and said, “Oh shit.”  I kicked them off along with my socks, took off my gold hoop earrings, and fell into bed.

“Please let me wake up okay,” I said as I drifted into unconsciousness.  
The last thing I heard was Val saying, “Who knows how we will wake up.” His jokes weren’t funny anymore.  He wasn’t funny; he was mean.
The next day I opened my eyes.  The room smelled like beer. The floor was wet, and my boot was resting in a beery puddle. My foot was cold from not being under the covers.  
“Say something,” I commanded.  
“That was interesting,” he said.  


I showered, washed my hair, wiped down my jacket with a cloth, tried to clean my boots, brushed my teeth, and put my gold hoops back on.
We went to get breakfast. Val still had the rest of the brownie in his shirt pocket.  “Wanna bite with coffee?” he asked.  I shoved him.  
We sat on a bench overlooking the canal.  The buttery croissant melted in my mouth, and the warm coffee restored me. I zipped my leather jacket up to my neck and gave him a kiss. “Thanks for getting us back home in one piece.”
We got on our bikes and did not return to the Red Light District.  We went to the Van Gogh Museum instead.

Pricing Out 


cream detachment

heard a blast within

the many 

               and



          another antic



                                gone



         disaster commandeering



             reveals 

             a digital scribble racket



                       *



dark songs

measured loose bits

             as sacred



          deeper, prescient

          of swollen definition



more ale along the water bars



         flavor bursts

        replenish filched steel



Invigorating the spat



                                  unlike no



                 *



the bars crack shut 

their sea against marriage 







     roaming acclamations 

     across the surging gape 

          against 

                      the chronically nostalgic



                          as place 

                                      colors 

                                               drift



                                 no profit comes stainless 







Cognitive Flight in the Day Cart


ontological waters

 ear from a mattress sea



     bubbling rise singing 

          postulate shaft zero 

               in monochord plan



bookmark  prophecy cautious

of the weary regret 

                              her delay cold vibrations

     bleed

       the         scratched

     feats        precious militia culpas  

   parroting

                            the sound of wringer memories

    rotor

 torment                           supple slavering wings

                                        turn the commissioned jitney

                        his lost waters punctuating rubric



          plastered cigars

          numbing forklift patterns 

                   dark and strong





              every supposition doorway

              requires a widening alcove 



                                            the slump no victory 



                                     *



a speechless pent 

scripted percussive exchanging



     tidal ratcheting reflects

     mitosis beans with membranes 

     along the garbanzo torn   



                   with age laundering

                   the mashed clasp margins

                   stemming

                                    rank turn juices



          the cavernous claims clunk and scratch



                                         the discerning frenzy installation



desecrated scattered truths



                                            the roving self escaped pleasures




Christmas Spirited



vocalist workbench climb

bearded the somnolent hydrant

     its fin stain 

                       a wireless vacancy



          morbid curls 

          motoring the gray inscription



                              portable volume gone menu



a past among therm

fetal homecoming revenue

manipulated

                     breath pageants



          (the ravenous breathe frequency mustard)



                                *



              a stateroom glower 

       from past celebrant 

boiled the dreamer

                                                                              the

          delivering                                                  shaver

                                                                        curriculum

                           palette temples                          

                                to spite swallowers

                                     only one getaway fired



                 repentance scoreboard a facet achievement



                     the hinterlands 

                     a predicated nostrum



                                glimpsing 



                                      a roast metallurgist

                                      cackle before disparity 



                             a spectral typescript

                                                              dreamers ration







Current Events Downstream

cornered eyeballs 

lost their mimetic vibrations 



torn without swords

traffic vibrations transformed

atonal hamlets 



while masked 

the raisin hippies outlined 

galloping rejection



its repression invisibly dentist 



a pawned handbag

spilled their watercourse keep



iteration punctuating 

a dead period darkening ooze 



nitrous eyeballs 

burnt a lava memorial forward



old crease brickading

darkened the stalkers

dipping the bloodbath



a weary mist welled

scattered stapled trickles 



retrofit removed the newsman





A  Lost Season Coming Back




a sinking dock set flagons

steaming a leftward transit

lashed a nascent horsewhip        



a fresco malfunction churning 

fountains toward ruder color

turns the next night cautious



conjecture burns rumination

greatest hit payola memories



the jerk admonished to wait 

silent over a nominal milestone

stowed a disconsolate elastic



in the ebb vat last welled out

fruition spinning from stucco

in dribbles traces their tingle 



rudiments to fanlight colanders

spread through riot repression



an empty grip let bandwidth 

ripple equinox emerges angry
tips the ether bottles round



billiard asset cruises a sleek

atrium habitat infernal meter

glints a habit lost to vacuum



simulacra subsidy scatters

skin play’s tingling symbols



BIO



Vernon Frazer’s latest poetry collection is Memo from Alamut.

Eight Day Weeks


Between
sunny Sundays
and
blue Mondays,
laid a day
so dark
and full
of hate
that it shall
not be named.




Gray


There's no black,
there's no white.
There's no wrong,
there's no right.
There's no good,
there's no evil.
There's no dark,
there's no light;

because just before
the looming storm,

exists distant, infinite
shades of gray.




Thoughts and Prayers


When a national tragedy
becomes just another day
and the news is always
"BREAKING",

grab a letter sized
white envelope
and fill it with all of the

thoughts and prayers

from your big heart
and your little head,
then lick and seal it
shut before they escape
into the open air,
stick on a stamp,
and wait until the
next day's tragedy
for the address
to mail it to
your child's school.




Hello Sorrow


Hello Sorrow
my first friend,
will you allow
me to drown
in burning rivers
of fire water,
or float like
a hollow log
as you hover over
the ghostly souls
of all who you
have met before,
until you arrive
to make the
skies cry,
or will you keep
me afloat like
a log flowing
downstream,

and we meet again,
my last friend.




Even When You're Dead


Even when you're dead
the neurons keep firing

ping-zing-bing-ding
against the inside of the skull,

but tricking others into thinking
that figeting, flickering and flinching
doesn't mean that you're still living.

MOTHER

This time I got a pen, for you mom,
I was looking for words like your kindness.
Dare to go today
Just wanted to say I'm fond of you 
Actually you are my endless verse,
I have hidden in the bottom of my heart.
Mother, mother, I've said it a thousand times,
You are my sun, the light in my eyes.
Sometimes I couldn't speak my mind,
I couldn't stand and hug you!
Sorry, I couldn't kiss your hand.
I wish these days would come back, mother
I wish I could honor you, mother.
The education you gave me has blossomed today.
I took a place in the heart of teachers.
Your bitter words opened my eyes,
You, my friend, are full of advice!
You planted a seedling with hope,
You will be the best gardener.
With praise, applause, recognition,
You will be a perfect mother!


CONGRATULATIONS TO THE YOUNG PEOPLE

The Uzbek people are young people,
Lover of youth.
Respectfully,
An uplifter.
Young people are ours,
Owners of our tomorrow.
Our pride is our honor,
Trusts of our country.
Be wise, smart,
Intelligence is unique to you.
Smart kids like you
Suitable for great ancestors.
Today is a beautiful holiday,
Let it be forever.
Be happy, be happy, be happy
Congratulations from the bottom of my heart.
Dear President,
Attention is ours.
Today is a celebration,
All boys and girls!

Nozima Ulug’ova was born on October 13, 2001 in “Yosh gayrat” neighborhood, Shorchi district, Surkhandarya province. He graduated from the 37th general education school in the Shorchi district and at the same time, the Nukus branch of the State Institute of Arts and Culture of Uzbekistan “Art Studies” 3rd-level student of the department “Dramaturgy of Stage and Screen Art”. In 2022, his creative author collections “Mother for you” and “Salvation” were published and gained their readers. At the same time, his creative story is among the young artists of Uzbekistan. “Culture”, “Creative Flight”, “Women and Time”, “Surkhan Youth”, “Morning Star” are examples of creativity in our republic. It is  covered in newspapers, “Gulkhan” magazine and “Nurli Jol” newspaper of Kazakhstan. The young penman did not limit himself to creativity, but participated in conferences and scientific meetings in prestigious journals with a factor recognized by OAC with about 20 scientific articles, pamphlets and theses.”Samarkand Youth Forum 2021″ “Uzbekistan Development Forum 2021” Participant of several forums and conferences, festivals and seminars. Nozima Ulug’ova in Personal development & Step into the international sphere Course, because he was able to show his activity and interests in the fields of literature and art in this course .Creativity Forum for Culture, Arts and Peace International member, Active member, working Group of International writers “Jontous por las Letras” Iqra Foundation has received membership offers from several international organizations in its field.