The Feel of Christmas
Every day is a celebration day
But on this day, it’s a Special Day;
the feel is just not ordinary
Every day is a merry-making day
But on this day, it’s in itself a Merry Day;
the feel is just not a ‘’normally’’
Every day is a reflection day
But on this day, it’s a Stand-out, Sober-Reflection day;
the feel is just not temporarily
Every day is a gift-exchange day
But on this day, it’s a memorable Boxing Day;
the feel is just not materially
Every day is a should-be ‘’Christmas’’ day
But on this day, it’s actually a Christmas Day!
the feel is just not a mere Christmas frenzy!
All Green Thumbs
You can trick a houseplant
into believing it is outside
by gently brushing your hand
softly against the leaves
bending the stems as if
they are out in the breeze
Strangers clustered
in a strong wind
at a stop
waiting
for the bus to come
____________________________
Battery Heaven
Hard to tell batteries apart
lying loose in a box in the back room
The bad eventually crust over
but there’s no way to determine the good
without popping one then another
into the remote
Try a different pole
Try rolling one then the other
around with your thumb
whatever it takes
desperate for signal
Get the angle right
Get close enough & there
is enough juice to get through
tonight
No negotiating with a spent cell
but power predictions are possible
& frequently wrong
The pizza place in town that takes
dead batteries has a slot
in a 5 gallon bucket lid for them
Who knows where they go from there
Battery heaven is filled
with cheapies that come with toys
very obviously of lower quality
than the ones bought at the store
Do it wrong & kill a car
The smoke detector cheeps
until the corpse is removed
Even the rechargeable don’t
last forever
____________________________
My advice
is to get out
of this town before you turn 20
Otherwise the broken store fronts
start to worry you
You might transmogrify
into a lamp post
become a fixture around here
Not like Gary who inherited
the hardware from his dad
George Bailey-ing his way
through his 50s as girls
softball coach & people love him
More like Sandy who will never
leave – there’s too much
out there she wants & feels
she doesn’t really deserve
but there is always just
a little less than what
she needs right here
It’s fine – it’ll be fine
The train doesn’t publish
it’s schedule so the terrorists
can’t formulate a plan
but it always seems to roll
through right when you think
maybe I shoulda left that one time
& then it’s gone & the crickets
return in the night certain
everything will be just fine
& it is, isn’t it?
____________________________
Our first date
1986
Took Mindy to see Platoon
We both liked war movies
Empty theatre perfect
for making out except
one angry vet
sobbing down front
in the horrible fog
They killed the good guy
is the only lesson learned
Too stunned even
to hold hands
we liked it
yeah – great film
Barber’s Adagio for Strings
swelling & enveloping
me later when
Mindy takes me
into her mouth
on a gravel road
next to some field
my hands clutching
air just like
Willem Dafoe
____________________________
Waiting for the future
to arrive as advertised
I hear a juvenile hawk
in the dense canopy
of the abandoned house
across the street
1000 years wheel
across the starry starry
until something different
happens & is it?
Every hill is always
the one we choose to die on
My car narc’d on me
now I’m too scared to drive
killing machines with fascists
Clock sounds digitized
making “simmer down” motions
with their useless hands
Everything is late late late
can’t happen soon enough
Even waiting is a waste
of time and energy
in the midst
of a long-haul dream
Let us then toast
to the ever-under-construction
freeway & pour one out
for all the dumb bugs
wending wayward into death
against the grills & shields
of inevitability
Waiting for the 20 years
implicit in the next advance
turn signal on too early
been on the last 100 years
I awake resembling something
extinct & pissed off about it
Not false Not spiritual Not grief
Anticipation & the wearing
down of might cliffs
to something manageable
A fun time on a wild ride
left with penetrating desire
to go go go
again
Tony Brewer is a poet and foley artist from Bloomington, Indiana. he has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and his latest book is Pity for Sale (Gasconade Press). He is executive director of the Spoken Word Stage at the 4th Street Arts Festival and co-producer of the Writers Guild Spoken Word Series. More at tonybrewer71.blogspot.com.
The Firing World
The world is firing
Firing for what?
The world is raging
The wildlife is burning
Burning for what?
Some try to escape the fire
Some can't but accept the world
It seems to ask the question
How are you, dear world?
The silence breaks out suddenly thundering in the sky
Blazing hundreds and thousands of lives
The cloudy sky without rain thunders and fires on the ocean and the earth
Firing for what?
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
28/07//2022
A Room for Love
Will you lend me your sky?
O my dear, will you?
I'll be there always twinkling in the night
Will you hold my hand?
I'm giving you my words
We must fly on
Make a room for love
My sleepless nights and restless days
The lively drakes and deer
O my dear, can't you see and hear
What I feel and what I face
Would you like to join the race?
Only for the 'yes' comment
I can drive for rest of the world
The sun rises -----
I know you are watching the beautiful sunny nature
I'm standing by you looking behind.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
28/07//2022
Load Shedding
The season is for - ongoing load shedding
Who knows when and how it happens
Appears without notice - shedding on life to lead
Time is on and good
Time is off and bad
Yet time is not to blame
What we say can't keep it in words and deeds
Say much more than it needs
The loaded head can't move forward anymore
Burdened as the seedlings dry out in the hot rainless rainy season
We like to see the glory that is not yet uttered
The untold love like the unseen strength of the ocean
Around the green beautiful hills protecting all
O my dear load shedding!
In this hot, gloomy, suffocating room
Can you hear me?
O my dear love ------
I like to live well in the enlightened green beautiful world
Can you give me the address of my loving care?
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
29/07//2022
Musings Of A Loner
By
Aeesha Abdullahi Alhaji
submersed into husky lines—hypnotised by nature exuberance,
a misfit—growing on parallel lines, ageless, awaiting a homecoming,
un[scathed], to the truth, my existence a bane of contention,
~ousted from a love quadraple~
made my reign obsolete—happiness was not meant for (me).
This month’s issue explores how we experience our world and how we process what we observe.
Aisha MLabo paints a portrait of a stylish, glamorous bride on her wedding day while Sushant Kumar describes the dedication and gentleness of true love.
Ian Copestick revels in the simple joys of listening to the rain and spending time with friends, while Muhammed Sinan remembers waking up early on a foggy morning.
Sayani Mukerjee crafts lovely memories of her home, family, flowers, beach and writing, while Mehreen Ahmed, in an excerpt from her upcoming title Incandescence, presents a character whose life and feelings are intertwined with her home and its flora. Jimmy Broccoli reflects on how we bond and learn from each other, whether fellow humans or other creatures.
Muhammed Sinan, in another piece, reminds us that elderly and immuno-compromised people are still dying alone of Covid, in a piece about a sick grandmother on oxygen.
Ridwanullah Solahudeen’s poem about safely navigating a sailboat becomes a meditation on losing his grandmother.
Paul Olayioye’s poems illustrate through metaphor how we process grief from different sorts of losses, while Hannah Aipoh’s complex pieces explore heritage, history, untimely death and sorrow repeating themselves over generations.
J.J. Campbell evokes thoughts of our slow slide into mortality, while J.K. Durick protests the frequency of American mass shooting tragedies by describing them as if they were ordinary events.
Adesiyan Oluwapelumi writes of thinly veiled repressed anger while John Edward Culp comments on the American Supreme Court and encourages us to temper justice with love.
John Grey contributes various poems commenting on how we perceive and where we find safety and freedom. Texas Fontanella processes modern life and financial uncertainty in a semi-stream of consciousness.
Visual artist Thomas Fink and poet Mark Young collaborate on ekphrastic work that explores the different ways we seek to understand: through empathy, definitions, and explanations. Shine Ballard pulls out another layer of understanding of humanity by repurposing biographies into non-representational art.
Faith is another lens through which we observe and interpret the universe. Michael Robinson describes the peace, healing and spiritual intimacy he has found with Christ. Chimezie Ihekuna, also from a Christian background, highlights the spiritual meaning of Christmas in the second of a set of poems from him we are publishing up until December.
In a thesis on Christopher Marlowe’s Faust, Z.I. Mahmud explores how Marlowe warned of the spiritual and moral dangers of overstepping our bounds to claim more power and privileges than are our natural rights as humans. He points out how we have natural limitations on our egos and behaviors and how we are ultimately not free agents but belong to each other.
Richard LeDue reminds us that practicing our faith should also involve contributing to the welfare of our fellow beings on the planet.
We hope that our issue inspires attention, thought, and care among our readers, and wish you well at this midpoint of the year.
Forgotten / twirl
- how easy to be a roving corolla; to be the left wing
of a butterfly, fluttering
through a garden of memories, infest by thistles,
infest by whatever the gun left behind.
last week, a chapel was invaded & all present
left a landmark of a crimson river.
in my calligraphy, every letter is a florid stain
of a body, rippling &
forming a col.
in this poem, everything is all about grief.
i heard memories are the biological
father of pain, often tearing into your mind.
& i don't know how to sift pain out of
this body / to sift myself from this lack
of wilting something calories.
but i do know that to sieve myself
will touch this little cornflower, hiding
behind the bars of my ribs.
so i hide myself, beside the grave
of a mother, whose chest form a
cladding for me during a gun battle.
& this is not the first time i reel
to this point. my aims were clear:
to see if a bluebell lush will sprout
from her grave. / to see if the requiem
of her portrait will revolve again.
but every night i revisit, night respond
with a rhetorical silence. & i thought
everything is gone. i thought the
refulgent of my hope has wreck into
this night. i thought that the myth
that proclaim spirits wear the moon
to see their love ones have effect,
& my mother, wreck into a black
indigo of nothingness.
this night, i filch out again. the tarmac roads
so attentive that they echo my footsteps
& i feel i was turning a knob of something, feral.
same - the moon went into extinction. & i
break my toe on a gravestone. i knew this
mother was warning me to stop obstructing
her sleep / to stop trucking back to
memories. so i left everything on a flower -
a rose flower - i drop on the top.
i left every memory there & walk out -
walk out of the repose; walk into a life
still shredding people like a deciduous
tree. one day - someday - i, too, will be
forgotten this way.
Springs - Heaven's Droplets
Every dawn, I revolve into a garden of
meadows. At this point, the grass have
recoil in warm bathe from heaven. To
walk there will enthrall one in a svelte, to
always refurbish after a bedevil life.
Once, I was a boy praying that the miry
of lack - poverty - sinking my family will
be dry. Heaven knows how much I
scrolls this prayer before their tablecloth.
Even before this poem was birth &
bath, I was on a rusty way to the brook chapel
to wash my family's curse, milk on garbs.
My foot, clashing against the pebbles.
That means, troubles. That means, the
way to cleanliness is a sanguinary &
needs something red to rewash itself.
That means, everything wants to wash
itself all the memories, sticking on a hairy
skin. Here, if you don't wash yourself, you are
a walking corpse, carrion. You are leprosy,
nobody will wish to clash. So I take my buta*
& refill it with the springs left in the well -
getting gabby. I know if I must blush like the
grass, I must wet this body; flux out everything
that makes me ooze rancid breath before God.
So I pray, my head on the mat, that: God, give me
this heavenly springs, before I wilt & twirl.
Buta: it means a little kettle, use by Muslim to do absolution.
Wrecking
After Chibueze Obunadike, how to eat a father's sin
anytime my father chap a tree, i carve the former
& the aftermath. how i will come to miss the tree
& the fruit it produce. how the leaves, forming a
debris on the floor, will etch grief on my brain.
to eat a father's sin is to take a kola from my father's
palm & chew: my teeth, browning like his. how i look
old from the way i munch. he do tell me how much
his grandfather love to break a lobe daily & offer him
one. after his dead, responsibility were shred to each
child to wash the debts his father left behind. & that
debilitates him, sweeps him into the stream of solitude.
where i come from, we are living in claustrophobic hamlet
& everyone fears, debts spread like flood & enclose
every home. my father once gargle a palm gourd of
about a future & i was the collateral. in another,
he induce an urchin & the street knows me for
trudging. & now my father chaps a tree, a fecund tree
which i will spent days, drudging to breath life to
the scion faggots.
Grievous monologue
I
& there was rain. A voice from heaven
telling me I must bath in its springs, if
I want to be clean. If I want to be free
from all grievous cobwebs, stitching
to my reins.
II
How easily to be swindle. I mean, find
a rhetorical & watch yourself sway with
the wind. I was woo by the wind, a breath
from grief & I inhale more than enough.
There's always a releasing whenever I
exhale & heaviness anytime I inhale.
III
In this part of the earth, I have watch people
live with grief as a cloth & call it a souvenir
from God. All their effort to erode the threads
is merely a daily routine - I mean: wash, dry
& rewear into the same agony.
& I have heard one asks: what is the use of
shaving when another hairs will regrow?
IV
I walk into a basilica one time in August.
The heavens were reseating all their tears
into clouds, & waiting for a moment to sieve
them out.
I met the pastor, whose teeth preach peace;
preach gnawing - meaning, come unto me &
I will chew your problems like cola. I biography
my life, in a way a screed will be needed.
But he mustify his mist, shook a loom at me.
He said my problem is a rock he can't chew.
Said my problem is a train, driving to its location,
of which a mere wedge can't clog.
I swallow them back, into a belly & wobble, my mind
hobbling.
V
What can I do to eradicate this grief
infusing into my biography like an
inevitable comma? There's more to
life that just procuring a solution.
What can I do to soften this grief
for my body bearing the burden?
Will you teach me, hummingbird?
How you carry a message without
thrumming a jeremiad? I want to be
the next eulogy in the mouth of wind,
to inhale & not feel heaviness.
So Lord, I am in Your sanctuary with
Hannah. My lips, rarely splitting. My
heart, sacred to Matthew 11:28.
Soften my yoke now before I break into
shards.
A Friday I Hold A Mist Of My Uncle
Friday is a of solemn prayer in my mouth.
Chibueze Obunadika
Still skinny as ever, my uncle stretch himself over
the mat that was soon to carry his back into a night
that will have no voice or light. My uncle said it's a
way of keeping the mat holy, that when it bedriddens
him, fire will not gush from inferno to carpet the mat;
but music from alujuna. On days when he laid himself
on the mat as though the walls were a god & he was
kissing his feet, I question him on why he must
murmur words into the air. He would say, to kiss the
air before the air kiss him goodbye. I swear, I saw this
obliging homesickness as schizophrenia carving out
of his mind, when insomnia seize sleep as hostage.
He said it this night & his voice was thin, as if tilting
on something that was soon to let it go. Night flood
down with a filming lunar, perforating our curtain. &
his voice was like an organ, about to complete a hymn.
He draws me, so close, our breaths - sultry & wintry,
entwining, on a mat. He said: when my breath freeze
to flux, let me dwell with my prayer mat, my holy mat.
A rendition to Abiku, when harmattan scarified our skins.
there's a cry inside: first joy; then death
morphing the green leaf to yellow & twirl. outside
there's breeze. outside, there's wheeze
of pain & ferric chloride agony.
dear Abiku, i see your star(dom)
how it trails with the mockingbirds to scorn
our last hope. how the owls
carrying your voice, saying: arise, there's no antidote
to the plague.
____________________
i wake up this morning & your face stride
past like a firefly in my eyes.
i know i have anew wedge to lift - pain,
something uneasy to bypass.
outside, the family sits again to decide
how the placenta will not regrow in the
woman's womb, to birth Abiku again.
& i know this method is mouth: once
the words windfall, they will dried like
spittle.
outside, the breeze is blowing again.
outside, the walls & skins are being
scarified from the breath of Abiku.
The Rainstorm
I sit here
11:40 p.m.
Listening to
a rainstorm.
There can't
be many
better feelings
than this.
Than being
safe inside,
and
hearing the
elements
outside.
The rain
hammering,
battering at
your window,
as you drink
your last drink.
Give your cat,
and dog a
goodnight
stroke,
turn off the
lights, and
just lay there
listening to
the rain.
Falling,
falling,
falling.
They Are There
I've really,
really enjoyed
tonight.
Catching up
with a friend.
Consuming
both red, and
white wines,
and whisky.
But that's
far from the
most enjoyable
part of the night.
That would be
the conversation,
the laughter, of
which there was
plenty.
Sometimes I feel
quite misanthropic,
but nights like tonight
show me just what a
fool I am.
Yes, some people
are monsters, but
there are also the
other type.
The genuinely good
ones, I'll admit that
you don't come across
them very often, but
they are there.
Buddhist-Curious
Once upon a time,
I was reading up on
Buddhism.
I was feeling very
depressed, and one
of the first things I
saw was that one of
the four Universal
Truths is that, " All
Life Is Suffering."
The way I was feeling
right then, I was very
impressed with that.
It really struck me as a
Universal Truth.
I read more about
Buddhism.
But, a year later,
I realised that,
it's not quite true.
Not in the slightest.
I'll agree that a Hell
of a lot of life is
suffering, but no
way is all of it.
There's sex,
although it's a
long time since
I last had it.
Music, poetry,
comedy, drinking.
A walk in the
sunshine.
A beautiful meadow,
my beautiful pets .
Yes .
There's a lot of
suffering, but
there are also
a lot of good
times.
A lot of fun.
