Why? !!
Why?
Are you always on my mind?
Every second, every moment?
Are you in my soul?
You don't know ...
Why?
I can't go, you can't go either,
My pillows are wet with tears at night.
The stars are holding me in mourning.
You don't know.
Why?
Do you keep writing gazelles?
Is it a band or another beauty?
Shormikan peshonam yo azal, azal?
You don't know.
Why?
Did your love blind my eyes?
Do you have anything to do with me now?
Does it matter, spring or winter?
You don't know ...
Why?
My heart sank,
You have broken my broken tongue,
Oh, give back my poor heart.
Silent ....
Why?
Many questions, unclear answers,
It is clear that I will be separated,
Now love is abgor, feelings are broken,
No answer ...
Why?
Why?
Why ?????
You don't know ....
Sharipova Zuhro Sunnatovna (Zahro Shamsiyya) She was born on April 9, 1969 in the Nurata district of the Navoi region. Her first poem was published in 1985 in the Gulhan magazine. Uzbek publishing houses published works in the journal "Sharq Yulduzi", in the literature and art of Uzbekistan - "Ma'rifat", in various regional and district newspapers. World almanacs in Canada, -2017 in Dubai WBA 2018 "Turkish poets of the world" (Buta 3) 2019, "Muhammad Yusuf izdoshlari" 2017 almanac. She published her book "Ismsiz tuigular."
We continue to express sorrow over what’s happening in so many different parts of the world and encourage our readers to support people and the planet.
Also, we are hosting our Metamorphosis gathering again! This is a chance for people to share music, art, and writing and to dialogue across different generations (hence the name, the concept of ideas morphing and changing over the years). So far photographer Rebecca Kelly and English/Spanish bilingual poet Bridgett Rex are part of the lineup and more are welcome! This event is also a benefit for the grassroots Afghan women-led group RAWA, which is currently supporting educational and income generation and literacy projects in Afghanistan as well as assisting earthquake survivors. (We don’t charge or process the cash, you are free to donate online on your own and then attend!)
This will be Sunday, December 31st, 2-4 pm in the fellowship hall of Davis Lutheran Church at 317 East 8th Street in Davis, California. It’s a nonreligious event open to all, the church has graciously allowed us to use the meeting room.
This issue draws us into a full sensory experience, surrounding us with places and worlds larger and more vast than ourselves.
Vernon Frazer’s pieces rumble with a smorgasbord of rhythmic and clanging instruments and sounds while Joshua Martin sends up a plethora of sonic syllables. Mahbub Alam stares and contemplates the beauty of nature and the Taj Mahal. Christina Poythress highlights through tactile details the rich nightlife within the world’s soil. Kathleen Hulser draws on mathematical concepts as metaphors for how life changes affect and circumscribe our lives.
Jim Meirose illuminates the sensory experience of playing outside on the grass on a nice sunny day while Lorraine Caputo wanders off trail in South America: evenings, out-of-the-way streets, and less crowded areas.
Rafiul Islam speculates on inter-planetary relations in a society where multiple sentient species inhabit multiple planets.
Bekzod Quodirov outlines ways to make ammonium nitrate safer and more stable as a fertilizer and an industrial tool.
Even our own, more human-scale worlds contain more detail that we often grasp at first glance.
Sophia Fastaia remembers the joy, wonder, comfort and danger of childhood, all in one birthday party.
Chloe Schoenfeld’s piece probes opposites and finding and befriending one’s shadow self. Pascal Lockwood-Villa surveys a vacation in the tropics through the lens of photos that reflect different dimensions of human nature.
Susan Hodara details the common sensory experience of drying off after a shower while J.D. Nelson observes daily life and snacks within a homeless shelter.
Philip Butera describes with sensory details the underside of a circus after the show, referencing the work of repackaging the illusion.
Duane Vorhees’ work explores coupling and fertility from several big-picture spiritual and grounded, natural angles. Aklima Ankhi describes the search for an intense emotional connection with a lover that goes beyond the fleeting happiness of the everyday.
Slavica Pejovic ponders love, closeness, completeness, and connection. Aasma Tahir rhapsodizes about the subconscious worlds of nighttime, romance, and the imagination. Kristy Ann Raines describes the intense emotional experiences of love lost and regained.
While our universe can be glorious, it can also be tragic, with forces beyond our control.
Ari Nystrom-Rice reflects on the fragility of his knowledge and sense of place in his world through the metaphor of a child’s toy boat exposed to the elements.
Nilufar Ergasheva illustrates the dangers of the winter season in rural villages, with cold and wild animals on the prowl, while Christopher Bernard renders appendicitis and surgery into poetry.
Mykyta Ryzhykh probes where we can find meaning and tenderness in a war-ravaged world where death seems frequent and life seems meaningless. Atagulla Satbaev shares how we delude ourselves into thinking love is eternal: time and death separate everyone. Michael Lee Johnson reflects on his own mortality and attempts to find eternal love in living death, rather than in the capriciousness of life.
Graciela Noemi Villaverde’s piece renders grief into somnambulant surrealism, a panoply of dream images while Alden Joe evokes the pain of lost love with imagery of tigers and predation. Suleiman Gado Mansir sends up a surreal dream sequence illustrating how our minds attempt to process the world’s violence.
Sometimes, we wonder what place we have in such a large world. Will the universe overwhelm and consume us?
Alma Ryan explores the season of fall with a meditation on falling, death, and the ways we let ourselves go. J.J. Campbell’s work turns solemn this month as he ponders various kinds of death and forms of passing away.
Zahro Shamsiyya reflects on the brevity of life and the need to savor the experience. Jerry Langdon reflects on the changing of seasons and the passing of a friend.
Gabriel Flores Benard shows the tragic ways continued abuse can shape a still-forming personality.
Even apart from mortality and injustice, everyday human psychology can be a mysterious and unmapped landscape.
Zosia Mosur illustrates how we sculpt and train and also harm and punish our physical selves.
Taylor Dibbert’s speaker speculates on what his midlife decades will bring, while Noah Berlatsky highlights the common human experience of procrastination and Shirley Smothers relates her efforts to maintain inner peace.
Shamsiya Khudoynazarova Turumovna laments that real life can’t be like the novels she reads. Azemina Krehic compares herself to a linden tree and wishes she possessed its strength, but finds herself instead in the tree’s biological complexity.
Yet, we as humans do not have to be passive in the face of such a large and grand universe. There are roles we can play, even as individuals, that allow us selfhood and transcendence.
Diyora Abdujabborova’s reflects on the value of women’s leadership and nurturing roles in Uzbek society. Anila Bukhari speaks to the earnest desire of girls living in poverty to get an education.
Christina Chin and Uchechukwu Onyedikam collaborate on haikus that are translated into English, Taiwanese, and Igbo and highlight moments of people collaborating with nature. Nery Santos Gomez illustrates the joy she takes moving in unison while riding a beloved horse.
Daniel De Culla’s photography focuses on low-key ways we alter or adjust our environment: clothes, sketches, bushes we plant. Isabel Gomez de Diego illustrates moments where nature (small children and plants) integrates into our built environments.
Sayedur Rahman demonstrates the resilience and strength of refugees creating new lives in their new homelands. Jacques Fleury asserts his place in the world as a Black man, self confident even in spaces not created with him in mind.
Christina Chin and Paul Callus also collaborate on further haikus translated into English, Mandarin and Maltese that celebrate the mastery of crafts: cooking and painting.
Annie Johnson speaks to the transcendent immortality she finds through stepping out of herself to create art that will outlast her.
Mark Young reflects on the values and accomplishments of his Boomer generation in terms of shaping society while questioning the uses of similar government power today.
Z.I. Mahmud outlines Jane Eyre’s character growth and self-assertion in Charlotte Bronte’s novel while Shokirova Zarnigor Shuhratjanovna urges patience for people seeking the meaning of their lives.
Orzigul Sherova shares how she learned to draw on her fantasies as an inspiration rather than as a way to avoid achieving her real-world goals.
In Nahyean Bin Khalid’s take on a haunted mansion horror tale, his protagonist frees undead souls trapped in the home, but stays to become their caretaker rather than escaping, getting killed, or kicking the ghosts out.
Jaylan Salah reviews Daniel Radcliffe’s new HBO show The Boy who Lived, about David Holmes, his stunt double who became paralyzed after an injury on set and who worked with quiet courage and dignity to rebuild his life.
Even if our places in the universe are relatively small in the grand scheme of things, it matters how we fill our places because our behavior and choices affect those around us.
Rasheed Olayemi’s poem demonstrates how corruption at both individual and governmental levels weakens a country’s economy.
Daniel De Culla calls out the hypocrisy of people who focus more on looking good at charity balls rather than helping others, especially in wartime.
Mesfakus Salahin’s narrators are wise beyond their years in terms of their ability to love and respect and connect with other people. Salahin urges adult world leaders to hold to that level of maturity.
Elmaya Jabbarova urges the world to wake up and turn back towards life and justice.
Lilian Dipasupil Kunimasa fondly remembers her low-tech but fun childhood visits to her grandparents’ country town, and urges compassion for those with HIV/AIDS.
Family, culture, love, and heritage can be vital to grounding us and giving us the strength to withstand a rough universe.
Aziza Gayratova expresses respect for her parents and the strength family love gives her to endure life’s injustices.
Wazed Abdullah reminds us of how essential love and caring is to life while Faleeha Hassan speaks to a mother’s wish to protect her son during wartime in her poem, translated by William Hutchins.
Shahnoza Ochildiyeva offers up a colorful paean to her native Uzbekistan while Yahya Azeroglu pays tribute to Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.
Fahimrelates a story of courage and loyalty among Bangladeshi soldiers at the country’s founding.
Finally, to come back to nature and the vast universe outside of our own species, Brian Barbeito reflects on the wisdom of nature to outlast humanity. He also considers how mysterious the sea remains, even after millennia of sailing.
ANOTHER SPRING NIGHT IN FARMERSVILLE, OHIO
The sun is a gong hung low across the sky,
windswept.earthdirty.sunwhipped: farmers wait inside their bones
for the horizon to rise and beat the daylights out of the sun
and call them from their long dungrows for a night.
Your chastity's a song sung slow through long nights
on muffled virginals: muting babies wailing to be born:
golden arrows, a thong-strung bow the dream night.
The night is calling: strong, gung-ho -- black hawk in flight.
(Tonight? When one earthtired husbandman works me in his hands
& periods this dry chaste day, waters these furrows hungry from famine?
But no.
Just one more wrongtongued crow in flight.)
AH! NIGHTS
Ah! Nights you were a harem
and I the unmade Bedouin too long in the thirst.
Past the black eunuch of the night
I would steal to your tent,
unarmed save the single arrow in my quiver.
I'd draw sensuously back your damascene veil
and let fly my shaft
deep into your bulls eye arabesque--
Or: you were queen of the hive
and I a drone among the honeys
getting a buzz on and doing my job
plunging among the dusky clover
trying to pollinate the skies
to flower the night with stars.
To lose my only stinger would be to die--
Or else: you were madonna
awaiting your Jealous Commanding God,
The Spawner Of The Cosmos,
Beam Of Light Made Flesh To Hold You In Your Place
(while you shook in rapture for the coming of your Lord,
i a small choirboy would steal into your unguarded churchyard
and send a solitary firework into the cathedral's secret hole
and hope it explodes high up in those beribbèd vaults
and surprise celibate fathers from their sleep).
EITHER ALZHEIMER'S OR THE LIGHTNING BLAST
Whizzdizzyingly
cruising The Moment,
arrowing past all awareness:
highway,enginewhiine,steeringwheeltrafficWorldsmuginnnngg past
while we, preoccupied, reprise Creation,
absorb Eternity and Logos, Eden/Gethsemane, Genesis-Apocalypse
and the Night the Night,
the private bleeding into the general,
and Ouruniverse proxying for ego.
Glorious cosmic fusion in an infinite minute.
(or so it briefly eternally seems in our infini-tiny microverse)
The ends of love
are but two
:your V8 plunges from the surface
and, crucified like a butterfly in time,
helpless consciousness heightened,
you hover in slowmotion witness
to the juggernaut earth's decay
just as your metal-again grille
begins to embrace solidity
or: doomed foresight eludes
as you rearend that lightless
semi-tr
MY WIFE
My wife is the flag
placed on climbers' highest crags.
My wife is the mirror
who patrols my appearance
and makes sure all is fit
and I'm vetted to grace the public.
She's the armorer
who's forged our love and honor.
My wife is the ear
who grants the pre-clearance
for my poems' weight and wit
so they're ready to face the critics.
My wife is that fire
to kindle and quell desire.
WHAT I DID LEARN
My mansard roof -- its shingles
lost so very long ago.
In Lhasa at Your temple,
at that brave school in Lisbon,
I studied my imago.
My music group's hit singles
stopped so many songs ago.
I've learned my shakes and wrinkles
but still I wait for wisdom.
Crying is foreign to me because I refuse to be weak,
but you, for some reason can bring me to my knees.
And yes, I do try to hide it, but not very well.
Now that my smile is small, it hides nothing.
Everyone can tell that deep down I am drowning
along with you, and there is no glory in that.
No, love can’t be the same, but maybe it can be made stronger..
So, I put down my pride and say with all that is in me
as I stand before you with no shame and tell you,
“I am still in love with you!”. And in my vulnerable state say,
“I don’t want to hide anymore behind this fake smile.”
“Forgive my pride and stubbornness, but my heart has suffered
much in life and it is hard to show vulnerability.”
Before I turn and walk away, I will ask you once only and then no more…
“Shall we try again?”
Hope Restored
When we met, you were in a painful state
Someone before me had stolen the joy within you
You thought she was “the one”
But she crushed you, instead
You lost everything, including yourself
She never cherished your being
In your darkest hour, she left you
I found you broken; with a sobbing and painful soul
You were in need of a pure love
It took a long time for you to let down your walls
You began to trust me, then you smiled at me one day
I never pushed you or demanded anything from you
Our friendship grew and you became my best friend
I saw joy in your life again
I rejoiced with every smile
From friendship grew love..
A pure love that expects nothing in return but a smile;
The unconditional love and respect that you deserved
All I ever wanted was to see hope restored in your life
But I ended up with far more.
Autumn With You
Autumn has always been my favorite time of year
It’s relaxing sitting in the sun along with you, Dear
The days are now more quiet like a silent bereaving
The end of a scorching Summer is readily leaving
Taking walks hand in hand, watching our neighbors raking
as the aroma of cinnamon bring memories of baking
I welcome the deep colors that amaze my eyes
as we sit on our porch and take in the trees and blue skies
Limbs slightly blow in the breeze as a few leaves fare
creating a sense of peace within me like a whispering prayer
The sky is so clear, bright stars I can see
I lean back against you with your arms around me
As we watch another sunset from our porch swing tonight
I am thankful being with you in the Autumn Moonlight.
Biography
Kristy Ann Raines, born April 9, born in California, in the United States, is a poet/writer/author, who is very versatile in her writing and internationally acclaimed.
From fantasy and love, to serious subjects such as, domestic violence, and human rights. Her passion is writing children’s books, short stories and romantic poetry. Kristy has earned many awards and has five book that she is working on. One will be published soon.
The Love Castle
Life is so beautiful, you are mine
You laugh out, the morning sun smiles on
You touch me and I survive in the morning breeze
The waves of the ocean run through in the veins
I become forgetful
The building stands on before us
The world can see the beauty of The Taj Mahal at Agra
The love castle - the eternal love story.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
28 October, 2023
In the Autumn Morning
How sweet the morning breeze!
In this autumn morning
No firefighting, no dismal display
Over the natural sight
The birds chirping near me
The sweet scent of the roses
The grass flowers on the bushes
All smile on at my bare foot walk by the way
By the river side and lake
I walk on and the autumn beauty welcomes me
The soft blowing of the catkins waving on the heart
The colorful butterflies and
The open sky round circle birds over head
Celebrating the bright morning
In my turning home feeling nostalgic to be with the childhood age
How wonderful the lambs and ducks on the ground and lake!
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
31 October, 2023
Md. Mahbubul Alam is from Bangladesh. His writer name is Mahbub John in Bangladesh. He is a Senior Teacher (English) of Harimohan Government High School, Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh. Chapainawabganj is a district town of Bangladesh. He is an MA in English Literature from Rajshahi College under National University. He has published three books of poems in Bangla. He writes mainly poems but other branches of writings such as prose, article, essay etc. also have been published in national and local newspapers, magazines, little magazines. He has achieved three times Best Teacher Certificate and Crest in National Education Week in the District Wise Competition in Chapainawabganj District. He has gained many literary awards from home abroad. His English writings have been being published in an International Online Magazine - Synchronized Chaos from America for seven years. He is a father of two daughters. He is living with his family at Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
***
prison instead of help
coexistence instead of love
unnecessary reform
one coffee and hotel room per person
there are many ways to show your dislike
Reprint by Crank
***
mom sews a vagina for her daughter like a red rag for tears
mom wants soldiers to give flowers to her daughters
the cemetery is silent about flowers
daughter collects khaki and throws it into the toilet
daughter screams that she does not need such flowers
graves are silent about the dead
Reprint by Rat's Ass Review
***
this poem
will not be written
by anyone because the author
will go to the supermarket for vodka
and never come back
Reprint by Tipton poetry journal
***
the leaves don't resent it when you step on them
the bones barely crunch when you do
people barely crunch on such occasions.
death is like a land mine doesn't resent it when you step on it
Reprint by Tipton poetry journal
***
what does the right pike of a suicide exposed to the wind say?
what happens to the frostbitten left cheek?
mother's biblical face turns silky as son pulls out graveyard surprise box from under his bed
***
internet people live the longest
a dog that died ten years ago still puts
likes on social media
instead of its killed dog owner
***
while God is sleeping, the children press all sorts of buttons on his smartphone
and do not understand what this leads to
angels drink living water meanwhile and get drunk
what is the name of the little boy who will never become Jesus Christ?
***
Dynastic hands of the dead
No one will teach palms to cry
Money can't be earned аnd neither can respect
Money and respect can only be stolen from talent
***
What can poetry be talking
about in the 21st century besides blood?
The ruins warm the bodies
of the future dead
***
death allows itself to be late in the form of rain that washes away all the moles from the body
no one allows you to return to childhood with a cheek turned up for a blow
meanwhile the window is slammed shut wide open
meanwhile the birds sew up the sky tightly
time turns into sand from which we built a house
house is grass house is glass
religion trauma of cold speech
torn tongue crunching leaves underfoot
the breathless unborn god underfoot
and above the heads of the airy sky which is no more
***
the little wolf cub is looking for wolf jesus but can't find him
animals are too humane to crucify each other
animals are just physically hungry
***
Jesus received the resurrection
certificate from the hands of the centurion
the dove sat on the arm of the tree
and silently watched
***
there is no more home
ruins play the stones of a scream
There's no more peace because
someone skipped a history lesson
on Hiroshima at school
***
as soon as
і wake up from sleep
і frantically begin to suck
the dick
of my rifle
as if there was no war
EssayThe Ditch
Man is something thrown into the ditch of world history. One day some guy went to get some alcohol at some store and ended up in the hospital. Judging from the pics on instagram, I would have liked this guy, and he also has nice long finger nails. Only I still don't know for sure if he's gay or if he just dresses so provocatively that he gets attacked by scumbags on the streets.
Once a famous poet went to get alcohol in one of the few stores and disappeared. These were the days of Soviet terror. I never understood what wrong this poet had done.
One day a Jew was walking near the palace (probably looking for where to buy alcohol). The guards came up to him and grabbed him. And then, on Nero's orders, the unfortunate Jew was crucified. Why this happened is unclear to me. Perhaps after such an incident Christianity was born.
That's why I don't drink alcohol and use courier delivery as a rule. I also think it is important to note that I want to dye my hair ashy.
