WHEN THE DAY WAS DARK

My toes were my eyes till

sunrise. It’s then that the

dawn lit beyond where my

footprints knew. But the true

Isness remained hid like

it did when the day was

dark. There’s no Hark! and no

Eureka! I’ve no law

which can explicate how

my fate operates, or

why there is life, or when

time began, where it ends,

who I really am, what

is scam. That sun is a

blimp. It just limps through the

defined sky, lets me eye

the way of my tracks – all

in back, and none move to

head off sunset: Daylight-

and-shadow’s status quo.

MENAGERIE IN E MAJOR

The monk cast that day’s third I-Ching

and then he made his turkey sing

to entertain the drunk heathens.

And the Turk had his monkey dance

in his red sequined funky pants.

The monk’s turkey and Turk’s monkey

showed them both they were worth money,

so Monk and the Turk joined forces

and purchased two purloined horses

that they taught to play bass and drums.

They toured as The Amazing Ones,

led by a jazzy pachyderm

who blew triumphant saxophone.

FURNACE AND FREEZER

My world is hermaphrodite.

A dimension where moral

coexists with the evil.

It grasps equal opposites.

Down is just as good as up.

Yes, there’s gray, but black and white

occupy the selfsame sites.

Oceans are the desert’s cups.

A vacuum comprises all.

A freezer and a furnace

work to serve a like purpose.

A dwarf is considered tall.

And your wanton naked face

is expressive as your ass.

FRANCIS DRAKE

My hands are caked and yours are so fine,

but somehow they fir

trim together like ships of the line.

Marry me, oh carry me, sign your name mine:

I’ll be Francis Drake and you’ll be my Golden Hind.

I’ll fill up your hold with all of the gold

that I can find, all of the gold that I can find.

We’ll dance naked, if you’re so inclined —

just billow our charms,

wrap our sheets round yardarms entwined.

I’ll ride you of I’ll guide you, make your name shine.

I’ll be Francis Drake and you’ll be my Golden Hind.

I’ll fill up your hold with all of the gold that I can find.

I’ll fill up your hold with all of the gold,

with all of the gold,

with all of the gold

that I can find.

I’ll be Francis Drake and you’ll be my Golden Hind.

MY FINGERS

Visit me in my mushroom tower and I will come to you

down this deep dark ditch amid tinder black flowers

down to the buttercups and dew.

My fingers have ridden through the forests of your hair

and slept on belly-gold prairies.

Have explored your hidden valleys, climbed snowcapped breasts,

and on your beach hips have rested.

Tanned your naked stands, strata in the earth in layers of

dark

light

dark

light

dark:

while (miners in anticipation) my fingers tremble….

And then it is we who are the layers in the dark, quaking among bedrock,

hardness melting into darkness, joining in new formations,

stalactite buried and unearthed buried unearthed buried unearthed

through the long geologeons of night

till finally separated by a fault

…and our sky becomes snow on coal.

(This is an excerpt from Irene Koronas’ new work chiaroscuros, which is a hyper-minimalist écriture, melding its aporias with a mix of staccato posthumanism and the historiography of color.)

5°

The futurists timbres

clash with a curve

interlock the facets

that objectify

measures or capture optical

effects (electric prisma)

perception in synchrony

in a violent convex

The spiral brush

across straight lines

A discourse with fiction

in discrepant repeat

in hermeneutric circles

it engages a stopgap

a sheen ore and alloy

extracted by smelt

and leaves a stench

Silver whitewash foils

against mixed genres

it hallows out the satire

The analogy an opposite

chromo for luminaristes

separates and assures

an integral meme

in the blank bane

horizontal = kaio

ascend = joie

descend = melas

this night libretto

konnen

emphendung

phantasia

Lavinia’s ritratto

Artemisia’s necksword

Delacroix’s violenter

Bocklin’s chimera

Monet’s crosshatch

6°

Nannofossils in one cell

coccolithophores

chalk from marine pus

quarried in large blocks

the calcium carbonate

in skeleton algae.

Skeletons collect

the seafloor

lithify

scales fall off

mix with clay

the upper layer

found in pelagics

in hemiplegics

cement the refractive

index

crushed white

forms the scarp horse

a minimalist red Hergst

and the godling epona.

Denumistics stunt

a burial bucket

the scour

the grass manger

graze the foraminifer

the low magni

in aragonite the creta

in drill core.

Deneholes are ancaites

that daub tectonics.

Shatter the boreholes

the marble mass.

Accretion layers

in drifts and zig zag

blocky fossils

the a303

the totternhoe stone

faeces picked out

by brackish seeps

7°

Riffling through thick

brush with a fossil’s trowel

beige’s insidious vowel

settles its secretions

with neutral poison

a dilution at the core

the nenuphar covers

pale brown karki

as it falls back

on paste in blend

the bland uniform

the pale sandy fawn

tints the communis

with the empty

trouser trade

nihil’s cesspit

soils buff

soils skyvory

soils cosmic latte

dull against bleach

8°

Orpiment

works on a charred

rustic surface

rigorous in logic

and artifice

a double nihilistic

search for violent yellow

shatters the terra firma

Art is a cadaver

exhumed by all

done by none 

under gravedirt

the conservator 

guilds a borehole

in baroque frames

Irene Koronas is an extreme experimentalist. Her The Grammaton Series includes gnōstos, Volume VII (BlazeVOX, 2023), siphonic, Volume VI (BlazeVOX, 2022), lithic cornea, Volume V (BlazeVOX, 2021), holyrit, Volume IV(BlazeVOX, 2019), declivities, Volume III (BlazeVOX, 2018), ninth iota, Volume II (The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2018) and Codify, Volume I (Éditions du Cygne, 2017). She is the Publisher of Var(2x). Her website is irenekoronas.com.

Prayer

I beg You, God,
Help us:

We who are children just turned forty,

We who still don’t know how to shake the gooey skin from our pithy words.

We haven’t wandered aimlessly with a dog

Merely

Because our grandfathers’ bones have been filling the cemeteries that our streets demand.

We haven’t drunk coffee,

Because the noise of their artillery really didn’t allow us to sleep.

Please, God,

When you are nigh, we shouldn’t dream of sheltering under blankets;
We want to see no matter what You have in mind for us

I beg You!

Don’t make matters go from bad to worse!

We're still kids--
Forever.


Translated by William Hutchins

Faleeha Hassan is a poet, teacher, editor, writer, and playwright born in Najaf, Iraq, in 1967, who now lives in the United States. Faleeha was the first woman to write poetry for children in Iraq.

She received her master's degree in Arabic literature, and has now published 26 books, her poems have been translated into English, Turkmen, Bosnian, Indian, French, Italian, German, Kurdish, Spain, Korean, Greek, Serbia, Albanian, Pakistani, Romanian, Malayalam, Chinese, ODIA, Nepali and Macedonian. She is a Pulitzer Prize nominee for 2018 and a Pushcart Prize nominee for 2019.

She is a member of the International Writers and Artists Association and the winner of the 202 Women of Excellence Inspiration award from SJ magazine, the winner of the Grand Jury Award (the Sahitto International Award for Literature 2021), one of the Women of Excellence selection committees for 2023, the winner of Women In The Arts award for 2023 and a member of Who's’ Who in America for 2023.
SAHITTO AWARD, JUDGING PANEL 2023
Cultural Ambassador - Iraq, USA
Email : d.fh88@yahoo.com

Everything is not as it seems

When it rained, everywhere is wet, the air is clean, I am looking out of the window of my room with different dreams, then I left my questions for a moment and I saw two couples.

   The first couple was standing near the entrance to the student residence, about 50 meters away, and the second couple were talking to each other.

   By chance, the guy from the first couple raised his hand to the girl, she stood crying for a minute and went into the bedroom. Then I noticed the second couple, and now it’s the opposite, the girl raised her hand to the guy, but the girl was very upset, and when she tried to turn back, the guy wouldn’t let her go, the girl was crying a lot.

   From my imagination, I walked without forgetting the situation of the two girls in front of my eyes. I said that there was a big difference between the first girl and the second girl.

   (after about 4 or 5 hours of wear)

   I was going to the library with my friend and I accidentally passed two more girls and I asked my friend about the two girls…. my friend knew both girls and both of them were engaged to the guys I saw next to me. .

   The first couple I saw fell in love with each other and got engaged. Are you wondering why the guy hit the girl? I asked my friend the same thing…?

   My friend said that the girl was jealous when she saw her boyfriend shaking hands with his fellow students. If you are interested in the second couple, listen, this couple is also engaged, but both of them are children who grew up in a rich family, who have passed their words on to their family members, and they will say whatever they say. The girl found out that the guy cheated on his betrothed daughter due to his wealth and wealth and had relationships with other girls, and she got angry and attacked the guy.

   My friends, do you understand that everything will not be as easy and beautiful as it seems? When you hear my first words, you still feel bad for the first girl. You ask yourself why she hits you, what is her right? from yourself …….!

Biography of a Guitar

Smooth wooden sides,

Carefully and carelessly carved away

From his mother. Rounded, sharpened

A carved down, hollow memory of a tree

The pattern of which is roughly polished

Into dust. A new pattern, freshly painted

On with seemingly gross perfectionism

In which the wooden shell will only in

Later years, see the reflection of imperfection

And neglected love hidden away

In the weathered hand of the painter.

Factory coils wrapped tight and thin

Starved plastic strings on pieces and knobs

Hammered, delicately attached to the

Oak tree shell – Now he sees he is from oak,

Not a patchwork of wood –

Wire, string mazes form strict lines to be

Arranged with handles? Knobs?

As a painting gains new layers, the oak tree

Shell is now metal, now string, now taut, mean,

Soft, still wooden. And with a simple strum of the

Wires, the strings. Slight turn of the knob

Ears to listen and a strum again,

A song is made.

Time Walks Each to its Grave

Tell me a story, your mouth whispers

Finished, still your eyes plead let this

Not end yet.

You’ve seen the way autumn stalks

Your beloved monkshood’s life, and

Know that his life is not fading:

It has found a home in his wrinkles.

Let time walk me down your path,

And watch life herself

Dance from your eyes into the scars

Cleaning your hands. She is only resting,

Yet as the lines in your palm meander,

So will her dreams.

Red-Handed

Aimlessly typing

I know, I remember knowing

You’ve never

Cut out your tongue only to learn

A missile shot through it,

Writhing in taciturn soil.

Silence an air raid, serenity.

Slide back under a tar-black sky

Wrinkled at some distant

Stain, bleeding

Into these stars too.

It’s only your fault ethics

Are haggard things, and

You’re haunted by lives

You’ve never breathed.

It could’ve been anyone, couldn’t it?

ONE CHRISTMAS EVE

One Christmas Eve a young man shivered in the night
No extravagant meal, no presents or beautiful lights
No parents or friends to celebrate with on this special day
He felt like an orphan or a child that had been thrown away

As families gather with excitement and glee
He wonders every day what his future will be
Will someone with a heart save him from this lonely life?
Will one day he have any children or a wife? 

He looks out his window at all the smiling faces
People singing joyfully of love and heavenly places
Except the young man who stands staring at this unthinkable scene
Who will be the one to save him from this horrible dream?

Just then there came a soft knock at his creaky old door
There stood an unknow woman he'd never seen before
But she was the one who wrote to him every day and night
And who used to tell him stories of never giving into this fight

She had promised him long ago that one way or another
She would do everything in her power to become his new mother
She didn't have the money to pay to get him to the States
But told him in God's time they would both have to wait

For she knew that only in His timing would this come to pass
And she prayed faithfully every night that this miracle would come fast
They had lost touch at some point; He stood alone once again 
Never did he think he would ever hear from her and then...

When he opened the door from whom someone now knocks
It was the now older woman to whom he used to have long talks
With tears in their eyes and without speaking a word
They hugged each other tightly no sound being heard

Only the cries of emotion from years of waiting for this day
On one special Christmas Eve when God did make a way... ❤



***************


Said The Moon to The Sun 

O Sun
You have learned how to walk on the thin
threads of my Love
But you need not dance alone anymore
Because I have heard a new song and I have
learned the rhythm of your love

O Sun
Come swim in my river, for the current has calmed
and the pain of my love will no longer burn you.
The cool river has put out the hot flames and
washed away the sharp rocks that had hurt you
You no longer have to be afraid

O Sun
The roses in my garden have shed their thorns for you
You no longer will have to bleed for my love
Now you can wrap yourself around their stems
And enjoy the beautiful red petals of their kisses
As my wounds now will one day all heal

O Sun
When the Spring comes and I have shed my old leaves
Climb the tree and enjoy the beautiful new blooms
It is there you will witness the transformation
You can then build your nest in its beauty
And It is there where you will be able to enjoy my love.©





Kristy Raines was born  in Oakland California in The United States.
A Poet, Writer, Author and Humanitarian/Activist.
She has five books getting ready to publish soon, one with a prominent poet from India  which will launch hopefully soon called, "I Cross my Heart from East to West", two fantasy books of her own called, "Rings, Thins and Butterfly Wings" and "Princess and The Lion", and an anthology of poems in English," Walking Without You, one in French, "Little Rose Poetry", and one in Arabic called," Jasmine and Roses". She is taking a course in Arabic to write this book. Kristy has received many literary awards for her unique style of writing.

Stop Please, killing

Still, I hear the echoes of the words
That the dying baby of Syria or Palestine uttered.
He said in the next world he would complain to the Lord
Who has created us all.
He threatened the world that he would say everything
The cruelty and injustice that he suffered.
He would ask his Lord what was his crime
And why was he killed?
When the innocent was taking to the grave
The air was heavy with tears and sighs
The helpless mother how helplessly she cries.

Certainly, certainly our creator had heard
That heart rending complains the baby had made.
The Almighty God had punished the world
By sending Covid – 19 Corona Virus.
The world has then seen the rallies of death.

But the hardhearted killers would never stop
To violate the rules of the Almighty Lord.
Still are they killing countless a day
Destroying the houses, hospitals and tents.
Which religion allows you to kill innocents
And burn hospitals, churches and mosques as well?

Blood of Muslims, blood of Jewish
Blood of Christians , Buddhists and Hindus
All are red and look the same.
Then why such rivalry why such crimes,
Why the slaughtering of people
And deprivation of right?
Stop please, killing stop genocide.
Don’t drop your bombs don’t fire missiles.

(Manzar Alam from Bangladesh)