Parents are such people that no one in the world can take their place. The only people who always believe us and  always support us are our parents. If we hurt a little, they will hurt a lot and they long for our success. They are most necessary and sacred people in our lives. They take care of us and remove any obstacle in our way, saying ” My child should not be hurt.” They can’t bear it when we cry. They will be the heroes who are ready to give their lives for us. They always try to make us live well in this life.  If we have any problems, they solve them at first. Parents are the meaning of our life. Life will never be meaningful without them. They will be the only people who will love us until the end of the our lives.

         The most important, dearest and holiest people in this life are my parents. Dad ! Mom ! For me, they are the greatest blessings in my life. They are my greatest gift from God. They are the most wonderful parents in the world for me. My heroes, who are always by my side and always believe me are my parents. I always promise to be a worthy child and justify your trust! Thank you for everything dad and mom!

Mekhrangiz Kibriyeva.

MEKHRANGIZ KIBRIYEVA OLIMJONOVNA was born 1 January , 2006 year in Sariasia district Surkhandarya region in Uzbekistan.

Returning to Lidice 

Before I knew how to run, how to swim, how to dress and tell the good from the bad, I learned how to take care of the gardens. Most girls and their Nivea-nurtured palms had nothing on my dirt-christened hands. 
I was christened all right. First, by the Catholic Church at the Cathedral of Saint Patrick, ten miles south of Lidice, where I grew up. Then I was christened by my grandfather's unforgiving gardens.
"You need to learn the value of hard work," he used to say to me. Of course, he knew a lot about hard work. Helvance was a small town near the Nazi-obliterated village of Lidice. The land was stained with blood. And my grandfather never made a difference between who was manly enough, adult enough, or tough enough to hear what he had seen. He was progressive like that, you could say. No discrimination in the department of permanent trauma. 
"We have to pass the story down. Otherwise, history will repeat itself," he used to say to me. As soon as I learned how to walk, I took care of the blood-soaked soil that would spur all the treasures necessary for a family to survive winters and enjoy summers. 
“You work, you reap the benefits,” he used to say to me. I think I hated him my whole childhood. 
The lesson of misfortune that happened on this soil was carved into me and forever stained my innocence. 
"Why don't we leave?" I would often ask him. 
"Because we know how to withstand a storm. It doesn't matter whether it's a storm of bullets or a storm of nature. We endure." I learned how to harvest pear trees. 

I learned a lot working in his garden. I admired his silent strength and his loud beliefs. I hated his burdens and his ancient personifications of youth. 
The pear trees were his favorite. So incredibly unresponsive to so many habitats, yet they subdued to his will and let him mold them into whatever he pleased.
He molded me, too. I became firm. Ready to withstand a storm of the world. 
“What if I choose to leave?” 
I was eighteen and eager to see the world, to study. 
He shrugged. He never acknowledged it as betrayal, but he didn't want to imagine that someone would leave the grove and grow beyond its borders. My grandmother encouraged me. 
“Go. You can always come back to your roots.” 
Of course, she would say that. She loved her roots. Spent forty-five years fertilizing them. But I didn't blame her. She was abandoned, and the land saved her life. Listened to her pain and accepted her tears without ever letting the salt infiltrate the fruit and spoil it beyond repair.
"The worldly possessions don't matter," he used to say to me. "It's only a matter of time before we're reduced to the state of a catastrophe like we were seventy years ago. Nothing will matter. Except for family and Mother Nature.” 
Was it a promise? A prophetic challenge? 
"You go and enjoy your life. But don't lose sight of what's important," he used to say to me. He packed three pears in my backpack. Reminded me that France and Belgium cultivated them but could never really nail the taste. He reminded me that the colonists brought pears to the American east coast, but the unique agricultural conditions killed the harvest. The pear trees thrived in Oregon and in Washington – North Pacific East. 
“If you want to go, you should go there. Always stay close to the land that can adapt.” 
Even when I thought I was making conscious decisions, his opinion was more important to me than my happiness. Because I wouldn't have survived without his tutelage. Without the values, he installed in me. I settled in Oregon. Portland was as close to my garden as I could imagine. I dedicated my life to literature and a small garden. 
Then, the worst possible thing happened. 
We were reduced to nothing. An imitation of life we used to have. For the first time in a long time, we united to survive. 
I wanted to go see him. Five years was a long time to be away. But I couldn't. I didn't go when I could, and now they canceled all flights. 
I waited. And I waited. Consoled myself with pears that never tasted the way they did when he served them to me.
Finally. Restrictions were lifted at least to some extent.
When I was waiting for a connecting flight from Atlanta to London, masked and miserable, I saw a bowl of pears on the front line of an airport restaurant. Of course, no one was eating in that restaurant. No one was eating the pears. I wish I could pull down the mask and ask the staff if I could have one. What a strange wish to bite into fruit at the airport. 
Who would ever in their ever-loving thought ask a waiter if they could have one of their decorative pears to go? 
No one. But that was before. Now, with empty halls and empty hopes, I would give anything to be able to tear the mask apart and have a pear. 
I was terrified and invigorated the whole flight to London. Stayed in quarantine for fourteen days, according to their regulations. 
“You have to hurry,” my grandmother told me on the phone. “He doesn’t have much time.” 
If I could erase the pandemic to be able to travel fast and tell him how right he was and that I'm taking back everything I ever said about living in the middle of nowhere, I would.
Now everyone lived in the middle of nowhere. Their houses and apartments were their nowhere. The streets were empty. Nowhere was suddenly everywhere. Nowhere engulfed us and suffocated us. 
 And the people capable of growing their own edibles were the true winners.
I survived. I arrived in Prague. Another fourteen days of quarantine. By the time they let me out, I sprinted to the nearest grocery store at the Hlavna Stanice, the Main Train Station, and bought the freshest, French-imported pears I could pick from the bunch. 
I boarded the train to Helvance, admiring the harvest I was bringing him. 
The train stopped at Lidice monotonously going into the station as my cell vibrated in sync with the screeching brakes. A text message from my grandmother.
“The garden is yours, now." 
He will never be able to say anything to me again.

BRASS MIRROR

Behind the monastery, under a yew tree, in a lonely grave the worms have already worn out the hands of the one who made the mirror.
In front of the monastery, in the cemetery of discarded things; faded photographs, decapitated icons, saints pleading for salvation, and tarnished brass.
After midnight,
I am a silhouette that jumps into the depth of the mirror.
There’s nothing between us anymore.



Azemina Krehić was born on October 14, 1992 in Metković, Republic of Croatia.
Winner of several international awards for poetry, including:
Award of university professors in Trieste, 2019.,
„Mak Dizdar“ award, 2020.
Award of the Publishing Foundation of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2021.
„Fra Martin Nedić“ Award, 2022.

She is represented in several international anthologies of poetry.

+



Drink my water 

I borrowed your lake 
    just last week 

        fair is fair 

I came happy and I can 
           leave happy 

Still my lake,  would you, 
      I want the stillness 
to raise our Hearts 
      friends & children 
                  Art & Sky
      So walking away will not 
tear me away from Love itself 

I can see myself in
      Your reflections 

thinks    I'm gone 
           Knows the lonely heart 

   Find me in the overview 
where hilltops Grace the Land 
      ,as the wolf calls, 
            My World Lives!

A gust taunts Lake's mirror 
 to scatter the curious fish 
                   as one took Air. 

      Steal the moment 
          found content 
              Soothed 

One  cannot  Steal  a  Gift 
 Rested,  on dimension's rift

The world Begins 
  alive 

Forgive my Stars 
    the Space they take 
We'll share a Sun
     to Warm Our Lake 
                                                           
                                                          ...........


by  John Edward Culp 
    January 26, 2019
                 

FOREVER CRYSTALLINE

The happy sleep in another country,
while I read again my diary
of all the years we never had,
precious as a flower to a dying soldier;
when love is over, you should starve it, they say,
but I prefer my own futilities.
Our silences hid a snowy forest,
at its heart a walled garden with a dead fountain.
Lying at the bottom, a shining white stone:
dreamwater turned to salt, crystalline forever. 


SAFE HARBOUR
For Claudia

The world had dragged me behind it –
a stubborn dog in a lifeboat – 
while opportunities floated past
like unnamed islands on a map,
hidden in the blank spaces. 
One must have been what I hoped for:
a paradise behind a reef
with endless joys to discover
and fulfilment of my cooling dreams.
Eventually, while I floated
lost in that long dying evening,
the moon threw light on the dark places
and I knew I had found it long ago;
the island I searched for is you.


OXYGEN DICTATORSHIP

One eye watching the emptiness all around
and the faded sketch of hostility above,
sleeping whales are boundary markers
suspended vertically just below the surface,
cordoning off a hemispheric dream space:
half of each gigantic brain awake
while the other dives deep in the subconscious
pursuing unimaginable prey
hidden in the limitless expanse,
until the need to breathe calls them back once again.

DANCING IN THE DUST

Mr Bedford’s shop was a treasure house
of dusty old things on endless shelves.
I used to dream about the gramophone,
imagining people in 1920s clothes
climbing out of the horn to dance the Charleston
by the till to scratchy old records.
Many years later my brother bought the shop
to continue the dancing in the dust.

S.C. Flynn was born in a small town in Australia of Irish origin and now lives in Dublin. His poetry has been published in many magazines, and in March 2023 leading US magazine Rattle included him as one of seventeen contemporary Irish poets in a special edition. In May 2023 he was long-listed for the Erbacce Prize out of 13,000 entries. 

MY YOUTH

I can't forget my youth days,
My dream would fly in the sky,
There my vote, my sweet ages,
The sky would always fascinate me.
My dreams flapped wings and flew,
Even fate would be afraid of me and run,
As if the Sun was the only one shining,
Earth would make Heaven fall in love with her.
Watching the sun and turning on a tune,
I counted stars after the moon went down,
I would greet the Sun every morning,
This is how love would go on.
Being loved, a lucky age of loving,
A beautiful line up of my younger years,
Take the cabbage I put on my head,
Would be great, would amaze me.
Months, days, years, seasons,
It's a memory now, my youth and me.
It's a pity standing in between, a bit,
My youth is growing from afar!


Short creative biography:
Elmaya Jabbarova - was born in Azerbaijan. She is poet, writer, reciter, translator.
Her poems were published in the regional newspapers «Shargin sesi», «Ziya»,
«Hekari», literary collections «Turan», «Karabakh is Azerbaijan!», «Zafar»,
«Buta», foreign Anthologies «Silk Road Arabian Nights», «Nano poem for
Africa», «Juntos por las Letras 1;2», «Kafiye.net» in Turkey, in the African's CAJ
magazine, Bangladesh's Red Times magazine, «Prodigy Published» magazine. She
performed her poems live on Bangladesh Uddan TV, at the II Spain Book Fair 1ra
Feria Virtual del Libro Panama, Bolivia, Uruguay, France, Portugal, USA.