Tan-Renga by Christina Chin & James Young late moonrise the blood moon bleeds an unsettling howl the clock says it is the time i think it is a sacrificial fowl at the crossroad incoherent chants the book falls title page up licking thin lips a raspy whisper lights her eyes drawing closer we are all there creating potions the new priestess casts spells the cat watching a spider drumming on the lintel beam a woodpecker across the cemetery no heads turn
Category Archives: CHAOS
Poetry from Babatimehin Asíwájú
Unbroken Self-Portrait of a broken boy my greatest fear is dying alone in a windowless apartment in the countryside. & having my dead mass submerged 6 ft in the tangible despair that is my aura. i'm still trying to figure out why all my stories taper into tragic endings. my therapist said i'm broken. she lied. my mouth is home to the most torturous sores that have been conceived by guilt. my body drowns in the ocean of my eyes when i'm alone. i'm always alone. I do not believe love is a craft to be learned. or i do not believe I am capable of learning it. I've been hurt too many times. I've fractured every bone in my heart. my body is a brick wall with no doors. I'm unable to let anyone in. I know it's hard to believe, but my smile is a drawing on my face that fades at night. I know it's hard to believe, but this poem was not meant to end this way. I know it's hard to believe but this poem was meant to have a happy ending.
Babatimehin Asíwájú is a student of Civil Engineering in the University of Ibadan. A Essayist, Poet and Dramatist, he writes on social issues as well as on his minority-tribe identity. He is currently a member of The Poetic Collective, TPC.
Writing apart, he is involved with activism and while he’s not doing either, he plays table tennis.
Poetry from Richard LeDue
What Would the Flowers Say? I don't want children fighting in another war, to argue about a livable wage among rain drops shaped like inflation, or to feel smart for predicting I'll eventually be censored for writing a poem- I just need to live, yet even that has moments terrifying as gunshots and reminding me how many umbrellas leak, leaving me with days, where I want to crawl in the dirt, bury myself, only to bloom as a person sized flower, but that would be crazy, wouldn't it? Life's Cooling Fire We're being used up, worse than a candle burning in the middle of the day, only to surrender night to the darkness, where dreams are forgotten, so alarm clocks can have their say, as we let pay stubs give us light, like hungry flames, refusing to learn the moths' names.
Poetry from Patricia Walsh
Watch the Quiet Ones There are things never said causing oblivion Access to information stalling ambition, Sameness in form a blinding difference Not ordinarily a problem, but still kissing death. Some public kiss eats my soul Enough to dissolve trust in a hare’s eye Burning over coffee a necessary trick Dispose with necessity, surviving letters. Tying up hair in a predictable spancel Rebuffing concern over a light lunch Theories of disposition not ringing true Packing sweetness is a hypocritical mass. Picking apart decorum to the last degree In no company do I raise my height Black serviettes furnish the belated sorrow A sly association dissolving the soul. Criminal cliques, deluding God, The road to perdition calling the shots The princess stripped of her entourage Deservedly alone for a minor crime. Infused with good deeds, compensate for demeanor Exclusion zones reign supreme across the board. Waiting for star turns singing a praise The quiet ones plot again for aggrandizement. Sing Before Sung An artist to regimentary love looms large Taking random lives in due course A poet’s sweat gone before bedtime The young king wishes for wisdom, A fitting climax for the stage hand. Not seeing that far is a curse to savor Sequins before substance tighten the screws Of satisfied failure, a hypocrisy burned, Loving the weather while you can Traveling the scorched earth dream. Stripped to the waist, a boy with principles With the exact change and a illicit prescription His discourse is brief, phoning the phonies No one getting hurt in the course of the day Sweet failures mourn the last song. Acrylic eaten quickly by unholy punters An artist unheard is calling the shots Acres of beauty for sale, anonymous wishes Burn with perdition, fighting for a soul Taking apart roles to expose the carcass. Justifying desolation before it is sought Asking for grief before consummation the roll calls for gridlock of another’s wits and what is unsaid, playing with fire and dancing on another’s head. Hypochoristic He twists his blade like a remembered kiss Being made up to a parody of likeness Attention deflected to a newish fad. Choosing a clachan over history, Grinded into heartbreak a savage conclusion Weeping in public is a hard option. Some white boy riot simplifies things. People changing to vicissitudes of embarrassment Avoidance strategy is a necessary string of events. Feasting on the street not a good thing Gathering dishes not an historic task Sarcasm where intended, a shame of light. Drawing on tradition edging two souls Wanting to be a best friend stalls acceptance Disbelief at parties in another block. Political solution is on his side Gathering an importance a done deal All getting hurt at the end of the present. Taking a live is the only possibility at hand Weeping with pain traveling upstream Watching over a dangerous cause. Knowing pain before it is etched Conceding defeat in a public stare Filtered through a facetious quip.
Patricia Walsh was born and raised in the parish of Mourneabbey, Co Cork, Ireland. To date, she has published one novel, titled The Quest for Lost Eire, in 2014, and has published one collection of poetry, titled Continuity Errors, with Lapwing Publications in 2010. She has since been published in a variety of print and online journals. She has also published another novel, In The Days of Ford Cortina, in August 2021.
Poetry from Jack Galmitz
Observations The pitcher of ice water is nearly full. The refrigerator is stuffed with containers. There are mice nesting somewhere in the room. I think behind the oven. I've laid traps and poison stations, hoping to end the intrusion. And I'm making a fish stew for my wife who'll return later. I'm not one to add to what I find here. It's enough for me that the spatula turns the potatoes, the corn, and the tomatoes with the pollock. There's satisfaction in the fact that the cumin has come from Mexico or the Indian subcontinent.
Poetry from Yahia Lababidi
Exile is like the Desert, a homeland for God. * The Desert’s nakedness is borrowed from the sky’s. * Freedom is like the Desert: we only dwell in it in order to transcend it. * The Desert’s enchantment is borrowed from that of eternity. * The Desert, homeland for the spirit, exile for the body. * We go to the Desert in order to quench our thirst for freedom. —Ibrahim al-Koni, A Sleepless Eye: Aphorisms from the Sahara
When I lived in Cairo, Egypt, over a decade and a half ago, I would head to the desert periodically: to empty myself of the city’s noise, overhear myself, and then lose myself. I approached these desert pilgrimages with the earnest intention and passionate belief that I was going to encounter that part of myself not entirely accessible in other circumstances. In the desert, there is nothing to hide behind, nowhere and no one to turn to. It is where all those mad hermits and mystics—my people!—had their visions. It’s an extreme environment, and I suppose I felt that if I flirted with that extremity, in a committed, honorable way, a breakthrough might be granted to me. (If you were somehow avoiding yourself, and you went to the desert, somehow you would meet.) The rumblings of Eternity were there, if you could just be still enough, quiet enough, and indifferent enough to your self, your many selves, your many frivolous selves. Walking, reading, musing, I felt outside space and time and came to realize the necessity of aloneness: Aloneness as a prerequisite for the sublime sensations or epiphanies I sought. Sure, you could be alone around people, alone in your living room, but if you reached toward this elemental aloneness—one with the sand, the rock, the water, the stars, and the sea—you could experience a deeper innocence and purity of perception and as a result become a better witness to the life inside you and around you. The desert doesn’t, really, care much for you. It may, perhaps, want you there, but it doesn’t need you there. It doesn’t seek to appease you in any way. It only wants to declare its harsh, bold truths, and if you can stand it, then you might stay. What you hold in your hands is a slender packet of yearning; poems inspired by my desert retreats over the years. I did not, fully, recognize at the time the nascent thirst in these poetic meditations, or how the profound spiritual longing in these reflections was to mystically point for me the way towards a spiritual and religious life—a path I am exploring with wonder, and humbly deepening, nearly two decades later. It means a great deal to me that this poetry collection is bilingual and that my words will return to the part of the world that inspired them in its native language. I’m, especially, grateful that the Arabic is rendered by Osama Esber, a respected Syrian poet, translator and publisher whom I’m fortunate to call a friend and who, previously, has translated poetry of mine for Jadaliyya. All of the remarkable photographs accompanying my poems are by a gifted young Moroccan photographer I admire, Zakaria Wakrim, a kindred spirit who knows well the mystery and magic of the desert. Thank you, Rowayat, for bringing my words back Home, to my beloved Egypt. Yahia Lababidi, 2021
Solitude and the Proximity to Infinite Things The Desert is a cemetery picking its teeth with bones littered with brittle stones marked by a grave air. Mourning its myriad souls it murmurs threnodies, while winds scatter desert lament. Guarded, hostile growths defensive and aggressive martyrs to their desert mother they all wear crowns of thorns. Tortured trees break desert skin protruding stiff, bloodless veins blades of grass, yellow and dry shuffle from side to side, rigidly. Wanderers travel to see and hear Death-in-Life and Life-in-Death To see Stillness, to hear Silence Nothingness-punctuated-by-Space. Pitting its stare against the Sun the Desert returns it, pitiless unblinking, exchanging secrets of terrible, Eternal matters. Indifferent, like Time, to time resigned, without heart proximity to infinite things sets apart, makes remote. Underfoot, twigs and rocks crumble crack with ill humor and dry wit taking perverse pleasure in pain like one past suffering, yet bitter. The desert has its dark jokes over which it smiles alone, Mirage is the word for desert humor.
Yahia Lababidi is an Egyptian author of ten books. His most recent work is: Learning to Pray, aphorisms and poems (Kelsay Books, 2021), and Desert Songs, a bilingual photographic account of his mystical experiences in the deserts of Egypt (Rowayat, 2022) You can learn more about his work, here: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/205852.Yahia_Lababidi
Readers can receive an aphorism of mine, daily, sent to their phone by signing up, here: https://dailywisdomtexts.com/yahia_lababidi
Poetry from Kimberly Kuchar and Christina Chin
the shrill wail of a siren skinny bodies the place fills with ghosts head bowed she lights a candle at the tomb footsteps in the mist a shadow crosses Mary's stone face mourning moon the bare trees spread skeletal arms two saucers of milk for mewling cats... the witch's eyes a corner spider you cannot see I try to reanimate his old stories bones in the ground his soul has left this body