CONSTANCY
Hey, the voice of a thousand sighs/
return your light to me
Turn your eyes, before it is left, all dark,
In blind fog/
I'm not just your work
Your masterful craft.
I am also your part, a thousandth of an effort
Something that flaunts in the trade.
My participation is in finiteness/
An irreversible dam, that tried to reverse,
The massive balance of the heavens.
I am your nostalgia, there is no doubt.
I am your way of having wanted to be time.
I am your total constancy.
Graciela Noemi Villaverde
Argentine poet writer based in Buenos Aires
She has a degree in letters, author of seven books in the poetry genre. She has been awarded several times worldwide. She works as the World Manager of Educational and Public Relations of the Hispano-Mundial Union of Writers UHE and World Honorary President of the same institution.
Brambles: All About You
I tried to draw you but forgot your face –
No, tore it cleanly from the picture frame
like a widowed man cleansing his home of your ghost.
I see you every morning, scanning your pupils for the person who
slid down cold metal banisters with me,
cackling at blackberry brambles, arms reaching
for each other’s pulses like symbiotic sea creatures –
I do not miss this. I try not to miss –
We left hope in our dirty school backpacks
tangled in the decaying bushes of glen canyon.
When I examine your regenerated face
I see only a boy who forgot the sound of friendship
and replaced it with the static rumble of popularity.
Time does not have gauze wraps
or ointment to sink itself into my wounds –
Time does not carry a first aid kid
overflowing with bandages, neosporin
Witch Hazel.
So when you tell me Time can heal
I will ask you to bring me her stitches,
and weave them patiently in and out
the gashes in my chest, my neck –
Heal me.
Or let me simmer like raw meat in a cauldron,
fizzing with the resentment
you gave me no choice but to chew on.
The image of you has faded
to a shadowed sepia, wrinkled by my fists –
We are no longer nocturnal creatures,
insects feasting on bone marrow under saturn’s glow –
I have formed callouses from touching your skin
and my tear ducts are swollen, a pale red –
do not let me fly through the moth holes in your mind,
for jasper and jade stones are my hollow sisters –
I teethe again like a baby,
orphaned by your hissing obsidian glare –
So now I know what love should taste like.
Bitter acidity on my tongue, fear –
that when we wake up your skin will be cold.
Friendship did not begin or end
with us –
We are the fossilized creations of evolutionary failure,
what the solar system spat out,
the dairy that grew sour in the milky way.
Drugs hidden by dinosaur bones –
you have made me realize I am not
an archeologist.
Sometimes I wish –
all the stars have fallen now and if we are what’s left
of humanity…I surrender myself
to the earthworms that spoil us
with their lustful consumption of our corpses.
Haze is a junior in creative writing at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts in San Francisco. They have work published in several literary publications, including Synchronized Chaos, Blue Marble, The Weight Journal, Teen Ink, and Parallax Journal, and have performed their poetry at the Youth Art Summit in San Francisco and 826 Valencia. When Haze is not writing, they can be spotted cuddling their three cats, holding their python, feeding their tarantula, or rescuing insects from being squashed.
YOU WHO CREATE UNREST!
You who are the servant of darkness,
hide behind wealth, power, and lies
but I'm immune to it.
You can't take away my right to freedom,
my life belongs to God,
you can't ruin my poem,
woven from prayerful thoughts
sung in praise of all poets
which breathe in the rhythm of peace for the whole planet.
We are poets like flowers,
we sprout from tiny seeds, carried by the wind, rooted in the ground.
Watered with water from rainy clouds sun-breastfeed.
Our common strength is
in the beauty of thought,
about equality
about satiety
in the absence of war.
We build heavenly gardens from letters
and send clear messages to everyone.
Do not be afraid people, let the peace of God reign!
You, who are hidden, will not stop causing people unrest
and various diseases, but I will not stop, I will defeat you with a poem.
Verses have the power to melt all hard hearts, to forget what evil is,
when in the prayer song for forgiveness, they find their peace.
LOVE
Insects are attracted to the street light at night, so the heart that is open to the love of this world, the closer to the source of the street light dies because of the desire to unite with something that is doomed to die.
Maja Milojković was born in 1975 in Zaječar, Serbia.
She is a person to whom from an early age, Leonardo da Vinci's statement, "Painting is poetry that can be seen, and poetry is painting that can be heard," is circulating through the blood.
That's why she started to use feathers and a brush and began to reveal the world and herself to them.
As a poet, she is represented in numerous domestic and foreign literary newspapers, anthologies, and electronic media, and some of her poems can be found on YouTube.
Many of her poems have been translated into English, Hungarian, Bengali, and Bulgarian due to the need of foreign readers.
She is the recipient of many international awards.
"Trees of Desire" is her second collection of poems in preparation, which is preceded by the book of poems "Moon Circle."
She is a member of the International Society of Writers and Artists "Mountain Views" in Montenegro,and she also is a member of the Poetry club "Area Felix" in Serbia.
The end of the world is nigh. So what? This doesn’t change things. All my life I’ve been wishing to do something important, go down in history and now I know that it’ll never happen. So let the apocalypse come, who cares. Finally something really democratic. Not even the greats of the past ages are safe, everything will disappear from the face of the earth. Pardon, that’s going to disappear too. The Big Crunch, the return to the singularity: few believed that it would really happen.
I was talking about that with a female friend just yesterday.
– I don’t see why we should get desperate. In any case, each one of us would have to die sooner or later.
– You’re insensitive as usual.
– At least we’ll die together – I said, although my love is unrequited.
– You creep me out – she replied, and started chatting with her friends on Facebook.
I remained at her disposal anyway. Shortly thereafter, she ordered me to go and rent all the disaster movies I could find because she would throw a party that night.
They want to overcome the fear of death, I said to myself, by mocking it, laughing at it. It was a good guess: on my return, I find her making out with two guys in skeleton costumes.
– The best is yet to come – she says.
– I’m partying too?
– There’s always the dog.
That was one of her friends. Soon after other people dressed up as the occasion demands – gravediggers, ravens, worms and whatnot – walk in with crates of beer and any kind of commercially available drug.
Moral: there was little interest for the movies and only I and the “dog”, wearing a tombstone costume, watched them, until she left me to participate in an orgy with two skeletons, a coffin and a mausoleum towards the end of the night.
At dawn they had all sunk into comatose sleep, as in one of those music videos that stage the typical post-party morning of the latest pop star. I walked out in the garden and watched the sun rise.
I’m still here now, contemplating the sky. It won’t be long until the end.
Komm, süßer Tod!
Really, that’s what life was? We could do without it, thanks. Adieu.
Maurizio Brancaleoni has been widely published in several journals and anthologies. He has a bilingual blog where he posts literary gems, interviews and translations. The original version of “Who Cares About The End of the World” was first published in 2012 in an anthology of apocalyptic short stories.
Borders
The mother leans against the sad wet strings
We last a long time-holding time in a transparent suitcase
For handles that pierce the skin, bones, blood flow and go away all at the same time
I am not good at this designing at all
I speak to the body I'm dragging along the blank paper
The body they call my mother
A quiet black dress filled with the burst of distant stars
I can't do anything in creative expression classes
As a representative figure of absolute human evil
I draw wires around my mother, around me, around the house
Around the tongue that can't help me anymore
To make something out of swallowed pain
I will never be able to bring back the dead, nor measure your graves
Where does your grave end and mine begin?
Behind the camp there is still an endless field of wires
Hands that outgrow it are just a myth
Souls are always in love with floating
How many times have you tried to teach her to speak?
They will ask the mother, and I will wait
Drawing line by line
Begging her to hug me
Begging her to go back home
All are welcome to attend this multi-venue literary event on Saturday April 22nd, starting at 2pm in Heritage Plaza across from the library. As it’s also Earth Day, we will begin with a group of poet laureates from the East Bay giving environmentally themed readings and then move to a selection of different downtown venues before re-congregating for the afterparty at the Sun Gallery. Several Synchronized Chaos contributors will read from their work.
This month, Synchronized Chaos’ contributing writers and artists map the inner journeys many of us embark on as creators or simply as human beings.
Christopher Bernard reviews William Kentridge’s Sibyl at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, a production evoking humanity’s continual search for answers we may never find. Jaylan Salah interviews Jim Frohna about Apple TV’s show Shrinking, which confronts mental illness in a unique way by showing a character’s search for truth and his life’s purpose. Maja Milojkovic renders internal journeys between people and within oneself through esoteric and painterly metaphors. Graciela Noemi Villaverde expresses the inner passion and turmoil of someone in the depths of romantic attraction through her dreamscape poetry.
Robiul Awal Esa celebrates his country of Bangladesh by reflecting on its founder’s creative work of statecraft. Wazed Abdullah also honors his Bangladeshi homeland by singing of its natural and human history.
Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal reflects on where our minds wander when we stare out our windows. Jerome Berglund observes everyday objects – scoreboards, prickly pear cacti, chia planters – in ways that are unique and uncanny. Noah Berlatsky finds enlightenment in a single moment: a computer chatting from an algorithm with no biological past, a tiny house with no room for hoarded objects from the past, a sailing ship, and a spiritual meditation on the present moment.
Barbara Gaiardoni superimposes words onto closeups of plants to encourage people to think and contemplate our place within nature.
Philip Butera writes of his creative process, search for inspiration, and the loneliness of art-making. Scott Thomas Outlar’s poems also explore psychological questing, artistic creation, and his soul’s evolution. Jerry Durick writes of individual identity from three different perspectives. Ivan Jenson alludes with humor to how intimately intertwined technology has become to the processes of finding and creating ourselves.
Stephen Jarrell Williams sends up a post-apocalyptic fantasy sequence about holding onto one’s truth and identity in hopes of recreating a better world. Roodly Laurore speaks to finding hope in the midst of desolation and violence in Haiti.
David Woodward evokes through surrealist poetry the history of broken treaties and legal stratagems used to remove Indigenous people from their lands. Clive Gresswell peers into the underbelly of modern British society, unearthing poverty and decay. Faroq Faisal laments human greed and environmental destruction. Michael Ceraolo satirizes power relations of all sorts, political and professional.
Chimezie Ihekuna’s song lyrics relate how he remains open to the possible need to question everything he’s been taught. Henry Bladon’s humor probes the meaning of life and death and explores the limits of nihilism.
Nilufar Ruxillayeva reflects on how the path to happiness can be different for each person.
Mehreen Ahmed reminds us that our bodies and psyches need recharging as much as our devices. Mahbub Alam finds renewal through peaceful retreats to nature, imagining himself loved and encouraged within his sacred space. Don Bormon wishes he could bring happiness to the world like the sun as it returns at the end of winter.
Some people’s work looks into how we grow as we pass through different stages of life and common experiences.
Richard Simac’s story of male self-discovery and bonding during puberty echoes with references to the garden of Eden and the maturation of humanity.
Shelby Stephenson reviews Stephen E. Smith’s poetry collection Beguiled by the Frailties of those Who Precede Us, a book of poems addressing family relationships and the pain caused by prejudice and racism. Z.I. Mahmud examines Alexander Pope’s famous poem that satirizes his society’s expectations for high-class women.
Duane Vorhees speaks of physical and cultural evolution, how we are all inevitably shaped by our pasts. J.J. Campbell shares how he relives memories for comfort and excitement amid the slow passage of present-day time. Norman J. Olson, in a letter to a friend of his on the occasion of the passing of poet Steven Richmond, reflects on what it means to have had a lifetime of literary success.
John Grochalski illustrates the world-weariness of a returning traveler and points out how many people share that feeling looking at today’s American society.
Linda Gunther captures place and time while recollecting a high school romance, tied to her past while tiptoeing into adulthood.
Abigail George’s essay probes the journey of heartbreak, compounded by the sense that her past partner viewed their whole relationship as a mistake. We see how grief elongates time and heightens perceptions as the narrator processes strong emotions and seeks to reclaim herself, drawing on literature and history as touchstones.
Chris Butler explores another type of heartbreak in a different way, through a horror tale of a mother and daughter’s doomed search for connection. Az Emina Krehic writes of the slow fade of memories of a departed person, another source of grief.
Other contributors illumine care, connection and compassion for others as a pathway towards spiritual growth, how relating to others changes us.
Taylor Dibbert’s speaker devotes himself to care for a sick dog, while Mesfakus Salahin illuminates the gentle renewing power of love, and John Culp finds peace in the natural rhythm of a long-term relationship.
Cheryl Snell crafts moments of tenderness between fragile, mortal humans, as Ann Christine Tabaka celebrates love shining through a dark wilderness of broken souls and bodies.
Finally, some art and writing turns outside the human psyche to explore the world.
Russell Streur chronicles haiku poetry’s 1950’s cultural moment in the United States while questioning whether anyone could truly create authentic haiku in languages other than the traditional Japanese.
Mark Young’s poems consist of sentences that make sense individually and fit together structurally, if not content-wise. Michael Barbeito’s photographs are lush, complex renderings of scenes with several layers of detail. Maurizio Brancaleoni’s drawings focus on line, shape, shading and color.
Channie Greenberg’s natural and artistic representations of birds illustrate how beauty can be found in both nature and in human-crafted artwork. In the same way, Daniel De Culla juxtaposes images of dogs and statues, clowns and Santa Claus, the real and the crafted.
This issue encompasses a variety of human thoughts, quests, and journeys, and we hope it inspires you to ask and seek answers to your own questions.
