POETS (Shoirlar)

Those who burn themselves for the world’s pain, 

The awakening of conscience, the soul’s cry. 

Slicing their own hearts with a blade, 

Dervishes of the word, beggars of the word.

They carve their very soul onto a simple paper, 

Burning like a candle at night, fading at dawn. 

While everyone laughs, they weep silently, 

Accepting grief as their destined crown.

They perceive the universe in a different light, 

In the autumn leaves, they see the grief of parting. 

They whisper a tale into the ear of the grass, 

The sorrow of the earth that you pass by, unknowing.

Sometimes burning in the fire like Mashrab, 

Sometimes awaiting the dawn like Cholpon. 

Those who could not speak the truth to the world, 

Passed through, swallowing their pain all along.

A poet’s only wealth is a single pen, 

One white sheet of paper is their everything. 

The agony of the heart transferred into lines, 

The lamp of faith, in the darkness, shimmering.

They are reborn only after they die, 

Their breath lives on within the pages of books. 

A poet is the chain that is called the Truth, 

The voice of freedom, no matter how it looks.

My pen trembles too, as I sit and write, 

Perhaps it is destiny, or perhaps a sting. 

When a poor poet passes from this world, 

Their words remain, a bright and glowing thing.

Ozodbek Narzullayev was born in the village of Boston, Koson district, Kashkadarya region. Several of his poems have been published in various anthologies and international journals. He has actively participated in numerous creative competitions, earning honorary titles and prestigious awards. He is the recipient of over 100 diplomas and certificates. 

Currently, he serves as the Koson district leader of the “Yuksak Parvozim” (My High Flight) project. He is also the author of the published poetry collection titled “Qalb Kechinmalari” (Experiences of the Soul).

Technology and Youth: Advantages and Disadvantages

Today, technology has become an essential part of our lives. Especially among young people, smartphones, the internet, and social media are widely used. This situation has both positive and negative sides.
First of all, technology expands opportunities for learning. It is now easy to find information on any topic, attend online classes, and develop new skills through the internet. For example, many young people learn foreign languages using mobile apps and videos. This increases their future opportunities.

At the same time, technology is very convenient for communication. People can easily stay in touch with friends and family, share ideas, and keep up with the latest news even from a distance.
However, technology also has its downsides. One of the biggest problems is wasting time. Many young people spend hours on social media instead of studying or doing useful activities. Moreover, excessive use of smartphones can harm health, causing problems such as eye strain and sleep disorders.

Another important issue is addiction. Some young people become too dependent on technology and lose interest in real-life communication. This can negatively affect their social development.
In conclusion, technology is a powerful tool. Using it wisely and in moderation can be beneficial, but overuse can be harmful. Every young person should learn how to use technology responsibly.

Feeling

The eyes of the daisies are looking for me, following me, and I feel so beautiful when the city counts my lost earrings…

The eyes of the green grass were two silver ones stuck in the circles of the mornings tired of musical notes…a longing…a re…a mi…

The moon’s eyes loved the tinkling of my heart when two grains of wheat rinsed their forgiveness…

They lifted me up, comma by comma, to the sentence with transparent temples that tasted of a corner of starfish…

I was a blue unicorn in a world of blue unicorns…

And where was spring?

Run barefoot through the soul of the sun…

Sometimes

Your hands weave time into a fan of cries and emotions…

A burning longing on a bench makes me more beautiful than going through wounds bleeding with love…

Now I know my name…it’s round and sticks colorful metaphors on its lips, to defeat youth…

I find you on my left shoulder and you smile blue, I will only give you one day, one century, the long-awaited hug…

A fairy gathers fragments of hope and teaches me how to fly with golden butterfly wings…

Bring me the breath of time when the sun will kneel in silence.

Thoughts

Thoughts forgotten at the table left a lilac flower on the hungry plate…

I counted two, three, bread crumbs and they ran away in a yellow hug…

I arrived at the seaside with a taste of myrrh through my funneled soul, towards the cries of sirens lost at the edge of the sky…

I roll my heart among ballerina steps and pains printed on angel wings, so I can convince you to share light with all the flowers left without lanterns…

Where are you?

Are you still begging for songs at the gate of the world’s questions so you can put the bat’s dreams to sleep?

Are you pouring more pieces of Heaven into my glasses so I can hear the laughter of the angels?

You bloom once more in every cell of the azure of the sky’s wisdom, and you will defeat spring…

Get home!…

金鱼

李心怡（10岁，小荷诗社）

金鱼，金鱼

金色的身体

快活的尾巴

美丽的眼睛

每天开开心心在一起

Goldfish

Li Xinyi (10, Xiaohe Poetry Society)

Goldfish, goldfish,

Golden body,

Cheerful tail,

Beautiful eyes.

Every day, happily together.

愉悦瞬间

赵雨桐（12岁，小荷诗社）

阳光跳进窗台，

笑声传透校园。

风抚过花朵摇摆，

快乐的愉悦感轻舞而来。

A Moment of Joy

Zhao Yutong (12, Xiaohe Poetry Society)

Sunlight leaps onto the windowsill,

Laughter echoes through the campus.

The wind strokes the swaying flowers,

And a happy sense of joy dances in.

夏日趣事

黄震宇（10岁，小荷诗社）

夏日趣事

就是一卷凉席

一根冰棒

一部电视剧

一个美好的心情

Summer Fun

Huang Zhenyu (10, Xiaohe Poetry Society)

Summer fun

Is a roll of cool mat,

A popsicle,

A TV drama,

And a beautiful mood.

黄昏

张海童（11岁，小荷诗社）

太阳顺着地平线下落

路上车来人往

我背着书包回家

买一根冰棍

很甜 很满足

鸟飞回巢穴

世界缓缓入眠

Dusk

Zhang Haitong (11, Xiaohe Poetry Society)

The sun sinks along the horizon,

Cars and people pass by on the road.

I walk home with my schoolbag,

Buy a popsicle,

Sweet and satisfying.

Birds fly back to their nests,

The world slowly drifts to sleep.

常足

刘良语（12岁，小荷诗社）

绿茵足踏尘沙，

一路攻向榜眼。

纵使未得金杯，

锋芒不减依然。

汗透征衣未歇脚，

拼来银榜不放松。

今朝暂作君下臣，

他日再登顶顶峰。

Ever Sufficient

Liu Liangyu (12, Xiaohe Poetry Society)

On the green field, feet tread the dust and sand,

Charging all the way toward the second place.

Even if the golden cup is not won,

The edge remains undiminished.

Sweat soaks the battle robe, yet no rest is taken,

Fighting for the silver list, never letting go.

Today, I temporarily stand as your subordinate,

Tomorrow, I will climb to the peak again.

家

宁静涵（9岁，毓秀小学）

树叶是露珠的摇篮

花朵是蜜蜂的眠床

小溪是鱼虾的乐园

家是孩子的避风港

Home

Ning Jinghan (9, Yuxiu Primary School)

Leaves are cradles for dewdrops,

Flowers are beds for bees,

Streams are paradise for fish and shrimp,

Home is a safe haven for children.

夏天是什么

王雨彤（9岁，毓秀小学）

夏天

是嘴里西瓜滴答的甜

是樱桃园里珍珠的红

是树上的蝉鸣一声声

是金色的麦浪一层层

夏天是什么

王雨彤（9岁，毓秀小学）

夏天

是嘴里西瓜滴答的甜

是樱桃园里珍珠的红

是树上的蝉鸣一声声

是金色的麦浪一层层

What Is Summer?

Wang Yutong (9, Yuxiu Primary School)

Summer

Is the sweet drip of watermelon on my tongue,

Is the pearl-red of cherries in the orchard,

Is the cicada’s song from the trees, one by one,

Is the golden waves of wheat, layer upon layer.

春天

王雨彤（9岁，毓秀小学）

春姑娘叫醒了

熟睡的柳树

柳树伸了个懒腰

照着镜子

梳着它的长辫子

Spring

Wang Yutong (9, Yuxiu Primary School)

Spring Maiden wakes up

The sleeping willow tree.

The willow stretches lazily,

Looks in the mirror,

And combs its long braids.

打翻了

任奕泓（9岁，毓秀小学）

天空打翻了颜料盘

把夕阳染成了五彩色

我把金黄色悄悄装进书包

撒在麦田里

农民伯伯露出了

幸福的笑容

Spilled Over

Ren Yihong (9, Yuxiu Primary School)

The sky spilled its paint palette,

Dyeing the sunset in five bright colors.

I quietly tuck the golden hue into my schoolbag,

And scatter it over the wheat fields.

Uncle Farmer shows

A happy smile.

长大

张羽瑄（9岁，毓秀小学）

蒲公英长大后

跟妈妈告别

坐着免费的大巴

去世界各地旅行

小水滴长大后

跟妈妈告别

和自己的小伙伴

一起去看那汹涌的大海

苍耳长大后

跟妈妈告别

跟着小动物

一起去探索新的世界

Growing Up

Zhang Yuxuan (9, Yuxiu Primary School)

When dandelions grow up,

They say goodbye to their mother,

Riding on free buses,

Traveling all over the world.

When little water drops grow up,

They say goodbye to their mother,

And with their little friends,

Go to see the surging sea.

When cockleburs grow up,

They say goodbye to their mother,

Following small animals,

To explore a new world together.

The story begins in the polished corridors of Vanderbilt University, where autism research is treated as both a scientific frontier and a moral mission. Within this environment, Dr. Blythe A. Corbett built a career studying autistic minors, focusing on their stress responses, emotional regulation, social behavior, and the delicate architecture of identity formation. Vanderbilt and its medical center provided her with everything a researcher could want: grant infrastructure, IRB pathways, participant recruitment channels, and a steady stream of graduate students eager to attach their futures to a well‑funded lab.

Among those students was Dr. Kimberly Lanni, who completed her doctoral training under Corbett’s supervision and co‑authored research with her. Their collaboration was not incidental; it was formative, a direct transmission of methods, frameworks, and institutional logic.

The relationship between advisor and student becomes especially significant when considering the lawsuit filed in June 2025: Wisniewski v. Vanderbilt University, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and Dr. Blythe A. Corbett. In this case, the parents of an eight‑year‑old autistic girl allege that their daughter, enrolled in a Corbett‑run research study, was subjected to identity‑related psychological assessments—including gender‑identity probes—without their informed consent. They describe a child who emerged from the study traumatized, confused, and in need of ongoing treatment, a child who experienced the research not as a neutral inquiry but as an intrusion into her sense of self. The lawsuit treats Corbett’s research as a form of clinical intervention, collapsing the boundary between experiment and care and revealing how easily a vulnerable minor can be swept into procedures she cannot fully understand or resist.

Years earlier, before the lawsuit and before the public controversies surrounding Corbett’s research practices, I encountered the other half of this lineage in a very different setting. In 2019, I underwent neuropsychological testing at Kaiser Permanente under the care of Dr. Kimberly Lanni. At the time, she was not a researcher but a clinician embedded in one of the largest healthcare systems in the country, a system where a single clinician’s documentation can shape a patient’s life for years. What unfolded during and after that evaluation would later echo, in structure if not in content, the concerns raised in the Corbett lawsuit.

I reported contradictory diagnostic narratives, chart entries I did not consent to, and the application of a “dangerousness” designation that followed me through the system like a shadow. Attempts to correct or challenge these entries were met with institutional inertia, as if the documentation itself carried more authority than the person living inside the body being described. The experience revealed how easily a patient’s identity can be rewritten within a clinical bureaucracy, and how difficult it can be to reclaim one’s own narrative once it has been overwritten by institutional text.

The parallels between the two situations are not a matter of speculation; they are structural. Corbett and Lanni worked side by side on autism research involving minors. Corbett shaped the frameworks that defined what counted as appropriate behavior, risk, impairment, or identity development. Lanni carried those frameworks into a massive clinical system where documentation becomes institutional truth. The same conceptual language that once guided research protocols in a university lab now informs clinical interpretations in an HMO, where a single note can determine how a patient is treated, believed, or dismissed.

The controversies surrounding Corbett and Lanni reveal a shared architecture of power. Vanderbilt and Kaiser, though different in mission and structure, both operate on the assumption that their professionals are reliable narrators of reality. Both systems tend to protect their own, to treat written interpretations as authoritative, and to minimize or reinterpret the distress of autistic and neurodivergent individuals. In both settings, the person being studied or treated can find themselves overshadowed by the institutional narrative, their own account of events struggling to gain traction against the weight of documentation.

The apparatus that emerges from these intertwined stories is not driven by malice but by structure. It is a system in which research ambition, clinical authority, and institutional self‑protection converge, often at the expense of the very people the system claims to serve. Autistic minors in research settings and autistic or neurodivergent adults in clinical settings face similar vulnerabilities: their voices are discounted, their distress reframed, their identities interpreted through frameworks they did not choose. The line between research and care, already blurred in the Corbett lawsuit, becomes even more porous when research‑born frameworks migrate into clinical environments through the careers of those trained within them.

Understanding this apparatus—its lineage, its incentives, its blind spots—is essential for imagining a more transparent and humane system. The stories of Corbett’s research participant and of my own experience as Lanni’s would-be patient are not isolated incidents. They are connected by a shared institutional logic, one that must be examined if it is ever to be changed.

Biographical Notes

Alex S. Johnson

Alex S. Johnson is an author, editor, and cultural critic whose work spans fiction, poetry, journalism, and investigative nonfiction. He is the author of The Kandy Fontaine Chronicles, Brides of Doom, Bizarrely Departed, The Vivids, The Doom Hippies, Drag Cola & Other Stories, and For Iris: The Los Angeles Poems. Johnson serves as editor‑in‑chief of Black Diadem magazine and as publisher and curator at A Collective Paw. His work has appeared alongside Patrick Califia, Carol Queen, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Michelle Tea, Jan Steckel, and Poppy Z. Brite. Known for his incisive cultural mapping and high‑intensity prose, Johnson brings a unique blend of literary craft and investigative clarity to his nonfiction writing.

Dr. Blythe A. Corbett

Dr. Blythe A. Corbett is a professor and researcher at Vanderbilt University and Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where she directs the SENSE Lab. Her work focuses on autism in children and adolescents, with an emphasis on social behavior, stress responsivity, emotional regulation, and identity development. Corbett has published widely and secured significant research funding throughout her career. She is a named defendant in a 2025 healthcare liability lawsuit alleging that an autistic minor was subjected to identity‑related assessments without proper parental consent during participation in a research study.

Dr. Kimberly Lanni

Dr. Kimberly Lanni is a neuropsychologist trained at Vanderbilt University, where she completed her doctoral work under the supervision of Dr. Blythe Corbett and co‑authored autism research involving minors. She later joined Kaiser Permanente, working within its integrated clinical system. In 2019, she conducted neuropsychological testing on author Alex S. Johnson, who later reported disputed diagnostic narratives and contested chart entries associated with her clinical practice. Lanni’s career reflects the movement of research‑based frameworks into large‑scale healthcare environments, where clinical documentation carries significant institutional weight.

Protocol

The night is starry like heaven

A hibiscus flower upfront

The city is painted red

The crimson is tantalizing

My hands up on the mirror

It sends a signal off

To be in God’s arms with happiness

Pluralism over this city

Protest of feminists and prototype

My verge is on the Bloomsbury gate

The gaze is on the death

Of rebirthing  vocals of masquerade

Martyrdom of heavenly speech

They take your breaths away

Till you pass on the hellfire

To public transport and health issues

The protocol is current

It sends off the heavenly bodies.

Belated happiness

Black fate knocked on the door twice in one day: When Bayna Momo buried her two livers, it seemed to her that not only the day but also the sun of her life had gone out. The courtyard was deserted, the tandoor had cooled down, and the table in front of the door lay silent as if it had lost its owner. Previously, this courtyard had been filled with the sound of a man’s footsteps and the laughter of his son.

Bayna Momo was now condemned to live in memories and flickering devotion. People came and went, comforted her, and then everyone dispersed with their own worries. But Grandma Bayna was left alone. Sometimes she would sit by the hearth, staring into the distance, waiting for someone from the past to return.

The horseman Zamon was still wandering around the village. There was no sign of remorse in his eyes. But the people were already thinking about him, and all the old women in the village were secretly cursing the horseman Zamon. Soon, Zamon’s business was not going well: all his horses died in one day, his business was not the same, and his reputation was ruined. People turned their backs on him. It was as if an invisible curse was following him.

One day, Bayna Momo went to the market. There, she saw a young man driving a cart. There was a look of calm mixed with sadness on the young man’s face.
“Thank you, son,” the grandmother said reluctantly.
“Your voice… Your sweet voice and words reminded me of my mother…” he said with tears in his eyes.

From that day on, the courtyard came alive again. Tea would boil on the stove, the smell of bread would come from the oven, and in the evenings, the quiet conversation of two people would be heard in the courtyard. Grandma Bayna straightened up, and the light returned to her eyes. Then she began to think about the future, not the past.
The wind was blowing again. But this time it was not a destructive one, but a warm breeze that swept through the yard.

Bayna Momo realized: a person’s life is a test. Some fall against the wind, while others rise after the wind. Her life had meaning again – the happiness of being a mother!

Saparboyeva Laylo Hajiboy kizi (born in 2010) is a student of the Ogahiy School of Creativity and a young creative writer. She began her creative career by writing poetry in elementary school. After a certain break, she returned to literature and is currently working mainly in prose. Her dedication work “You live in my heart” was published in the newspaper “Khiva Tongi”.

Laylo has also participated in several foreign platforms with her work, and her stories have been published on sites such as The Seoul Times and Synchronized Chaos. She actively participates in scientific and practical conferences, expressing her thoughts and views on literature and creative thinking. She also writes short stories and fan fiction, which she shares on online platforms.

Her works are mainly devoted to human emotions, inner experiences, and life observations. In the future, she aims to further develop her creative potential and become an internationally recognized writer.