At My Table

The silent dead sit at my table on Christmas night.
They have been buried a half century of stony time.
Under thick carpets of weeds and grass they sleep now—
Old voices that once were heard within these white walls—
Old faces now departed but still mingling with the vapors.
I can see my dead mother at the end of this long table.
Pauline is young again as she gazes upon her old friends.

My mother died in 2003, but there she is with a red apron,
Haunting me still with culinary aromas from her green kitchen—
Her feast of salt and sugar still on display from distant 1967–
Her dead relatives smiling now for the Polaroid picture.
She says life is a bowl of green beans laced with bacon grease.
The whisper of dry voices say grace under a dim chandelier.
Now I can hear the clanging of forks and knives at my table.


Anti-Poem I Without A Soul

Luscious creamsicles cascading as glacier pedestals
Transfiguring all the remarkable inclinations with pizazz
Luminescent monte carlo dream rhapsodies of tuna silk
Spin and spiral like rabid frosting rockets of glorious goo
Translucent moth girls collide into the shy fires of night
Licking now the smooth verdigris of old copper mornings
Turning and extending their silver lullaby preponderances
To the sipping uncles seated on hungry sofas of leering pleats
Fingering now the electric diamonds of a comatose creamsicle


The Coming Andantes

you are flying on a hazy dream carpet —
floating up there, above these old streets, 
these ancient genuflecting pines and cedars,
rising above the sleeping dead on Broadway, 
soaring now through the white tombstones—
the low walnut branches that flail like hungry cats.
now the sudden rush out of death’s hand we fly,
whirring by faster than blood flow in a silver sieve,
in and out of the shadowed majesties far inside,
these soul itchers that foretell the coming andantes, 
here in this perfumed dreamland with only you, 
as we seep through the spinning pines and cedars,
the long extending blood rivers naked with stones,
of venison death and fish spasms in the final sun.


Nightmare Again

Another loose grind from bedtime to flickering bedtime
The white pills on my bureau sit there like lactose bugs
Lurking silently as sad dogs would, waiting for the door to close
Life is the uneaten fish inside the garbage can out back
The maggots there drink champagne cocktails with their dim wives.
Another nightmare now with hordes of death nurses sucking on syringes 
Their black marble eyes enlarging like stoned puffer fish

Happiness is the Only Mask I'm Wearing

despite all the pain that lay beneath my skin
i've pushed happiness into my body
like a baby mother wearing proud joy 
in the labor room, post-birth, in agony.

love has given me so many reasons to be broken
it has sailed my heart in the wilderness of anguish
& had clayed the surface of my heart into a valley of wound 
like a solved puzzle.

when i say, i'm happy 
it means: my body has befriended freedom like my forefathers of Liberia

my heart wears the joy they wore 
when they were freed from the jaws of slavery.

every morning,
depression wraps its breath around me
& sit at the edges of lips
hoping it'd be the first thing i taste,

but, when i drag my body into reality,

happiness flips through the pages of my skin & mind 
& brush away anything saddened or depressing

truth be told, 
when i was birthed,
my grandmother named me "Muna"
which means: happiness

because that's what i am.

Elbov Kulmonov was born on 29 May, 1992 in Koson district in the Kashkadarya region of Uzbekistan. His poems and stories were published in local and national newspapers. 

His poems were published in a collection of "Ezgulik yolqini" and his poems were published in Uzbek Writer's Anthology in India in 2013 and '*Katla-lntercontinental magazine in 2013.Now he is a correspondent of "Tarovat" newspaper. He is a member of the "Astonishment" creative writing club.

Uzbekistan 

My body made by from your soil. 
I know some day I will die. 
Some day my soul will get across my body, 
So my soul is a temporal. 
I will take you away with me, 
until dead your memory. 
I will live in your land till this event, 
I will remain in your soil. 


Dreams

Dreams, dreams white dreams, 
You are a ray lighted my soul palace. 
You appeal me to live, 
You are an Antelope in my heart. 
I am trying to reach the dream's mount, 
Everyday, cry an hour with hope. 
I admire my feelings to reach you and I will gain a victory some day.

O human life, I pay homage to you

O human life, I pay homage to you
in teary wet eyes
in birth and death
in mosques-temples-synagogues-pagodas and churches.

O human life, I honor you,
in atheism and skepticism
in hunger and starvation, in food and luxury
everywhere, O great life, your very existence.

O human life, I thank you,
you showed me
a dew on the grass
Water hyacinth flower, Flame of the forest and Red silk cotton trees.

And whatever is sacred
baby’s smile mother’s caress and father’s affection
books, pens and ink
generosity-love and forgiveness.

O human life, I thank you
everywhere, O great life, you exist.


At Morges and an afternoon at the bank of Geneva lake

Walking can be a lovely experience
when you are in a new land.
the pictorial landscape
the silence, the raindrops.
The seagulls, the boats and the fisherman
at the port of Morges
at the bank of Geneva lake.
Being alone and loneliness not always crush
when you have water, lakes, mountains and the giant Sequoias
And they whisper! you are not alone
you are among us, you are with us
and we are too.


Tareq Samin is a Bangladeshi Secular Humanist Author. He is the Editor of the bilingual literary journal Sahitto. He is the author of eight books, including five poetry collections, two Short Stories collections and a Novel. Also he has translated into Bengali, two books of Anthology of International poetry of 22 poets from 20 countries. In total he has ten books published. His poems are translated in more than 20 languages including English, Spanish, Chinese, German, French, , Italian etc. Also his poems, short stories and articles are published in more than 25 countries.

Tareq Samin received the ‘International Best Poets Award-2020’ from The International Poetry Translation And Research Centre (IPTRC), China and the Greek Academy of Arts and Writing. Also he has been awarded ‘Honorable Mention’ in Foreign Language Authors category for his poem ‘Another Try’ in ‘The prize il Meleto di Guido Gozzano Agliè’ poetry competition held on 12 September 2020 in Turin, Italy. In July 2021 he won Naji Naaman Literary Prize 2021.

Tareq Samin is a Martin-Roth-Initiative Scholarship Alumni. The Martin Roth-Initiative is a joint program of ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) and the Goethe-Institut, funded by the German Federal Foreign Office. The Martin Roth-Initiative protects artists who are dedicated to the freedom of the arts, democracy and human rights in their home country. As a Martin-Roth-Initiative Scholarship holder, he was a guest writer in Goethe-Institut, Kolkata, India. And Kathmandu, Nepal. 

In 2021, he was also an International guest writer in Château de Lavigny International writers-in-residence,  Switzerland. 

Listening to The Moonlight Sonata During
	a Mohs Procedure

Thinking the last time
I saw this piece performed
was at Saratoga with Andre Watts
backed by the Philadelphia Orchestra,
an outdoor performance one humid
August night sitting on the hard packed
hill, all the grass scuffed away during
rock show crowds of twenty thousand
plus, all of them amped or strung out 
after scoring big on drug alley, the place
we think of as the promenade, outside
of the Hall of the Springs; the moon
low in the sky, the pianist caressing
the keys, the surgeon not even born yet.
 
All those Virgin

Island nights
I couldn’t sleep
listening to mother
play Chinese Checkers
with her selves
in the dark

Six voices arguing
false moves
phantom jumps
quantum leaps
over clogged
northwest passages
to nowhere

Her cat’s eyed
marbles polished
until they gleamed
in the darkness
as they played

The unnaturally
colored ones
pale blue greens
like death
or red irises burning

in a nightmare
that stays with
you when awake

 
I was stuck in a single take

tracking shot like a Russian Ark 
movie but instead of The Hermitage
I was on a set designed by interior
decorators of the Red Room on
Twin Peaks, then twenty-five years
later where all the carpet mazes
interlock and transport the unsuspecting
to an Inland Empire then the ballroom
of an Overlook Hotel and I’m following
Danny, the hot wheel kid, on the impossible
mobius strip carpets that lead so far into
the past even the dead people dancing
haven’t been born yet and I’m stuck
dumb, made immobile by whatever
Laura Palmer is whispering into my
severed ear, all her words dissembling
into tinnitus white noise static like
nine inch nails in between stations 
chanting, “She’s Gone, She’s Gone…”
and I’m back at the Road House drinking
skunk beer ignoring Mr. Booth exhorting
me, “Heineken, fuck that shit. Pabst Blue 
Ribbon!” and the scene shifts to the back
seat of Frank’s speeding car and I’m
squeezed between Frank’s under-dressed
droogies from a clockworkorangebluevelvet
in a noir nightmare neither Roy Orbison
nor Ludwig con can save me with a chorus
of crack whore angels singing and dancing to
Little Eva and Alle Menschen are waving
their hymnal and speaking in a language
that hasn’t been invented yet like space
age revenants from a futurama fourth reich
I can’t be rescued from until Billy Pilgrim
makes the scene in a Slaughterhouse Five
of the mind in a Twin Peaks diner where
nothing is as it seems. Not even the coffee.
Not even the pie.
 

 
Work Anxiety Dream with Lydia Davis in it.

I’m back in the tavern again
and its wall-to-wall humans
though it could be worse as previous
night terrors have shown.
Everyone is smoking clove cigarettes
to cover the smell of hashish hookahs
emanating from the blind corner
to the left of the bar that I can’t see
in my back bar mirrors. 
We’re all in the midnight witching 
hour, stuck in jukebox hell, listening to 
The Best of Patsy Cline,

” Worry, why do I let myself worry?
Wondering what in the world did I do?”

Then the new general manager is
behind the bar introducing herself as
Lydia Davis and I’m thinking what
the hell is she doing here? She doesn’t 
even look like the 70’s version of Lydia
despite not knowing her then, I’ve seen
photos of what she looked like.

And she assures me she is the same
Lydia Davis so I just go with it and try 
to find out when she changed jobs 
and why but she’s not interested in 
anything I have to say. “Read this.”
She says and turns to walk away and 
I say, “Watch your step.” But she still 
isn’t listening so I’m not surprised 
when she steps in the place where the wooden
slats we walk on are broken, turns her ankle 
and would have fallen flat on her face
if I didn’t catch her.  
“I knew you were trouble from word one.” 
She says, pretending
she can walk on a broken ankle.  
“You’ll pay for this.” Lydia says.
And I say, “You can’t fire me. No one else
can run this place.”
 ” Watch me.” She says.
And Patsy is crooning,
“Dreams I know can’t come true
Why can’t I forget the past”

And I wait for Patsy’s plane to crash. 
Planes have crashed here before 
as I saw first-hand outside the tavern.
Patsy may be gone and I may be fired
but I’ll be back. That’s why they call
it jukebox hell.

 
Her cousin saw

mother in the City
a week before she died.
“You’d never know
She was that close
to passing on. Of course,
she was thin but
then she always was.
Seemed happy and
talked like there
was no tomorrow.
How did she die?”
I told him that
when they opened
her up, after finding 
the stomach cancer they 
didn’t look any further.
Was enough cancer there
to kill two people.
“Stomach cancer.
That’s supposed to be
painful, isn’t it?
She showed absolutely
no signs of pain.
We went McDonalds’
and she ate like a horse.”
“I expect her dissociative
personality gave the pain
to someone else
What did you do
when she started
talking crazy?
I mean how did you
handle it?”
“I just laughed and
laughed and eventually 
the subject changed.”
He was the kind of
guy who made the best
of things. He just dealt
with stuff. He identified 
the body for me too.
He was a better man
than I am.

A Prickly Pair
by Pesach Rotem


The world is cruel and harsh and cold
And we yearn for warmth—my love and I—
A pair of porcupines
We approach and embrace
And she jabs me
And I prick her
And we flee, bleeding, back into the safety
of the pain-free cold.



Carey, Get Out Your Cane
by Pesach Rotem



When I was fifteen years old,
Joni Mitchell came out with a new album called “Blue” 
that had a song called “Carey” 
that went “Oh, you’re a mean old daddy but I like you”
and when I heard that song I resolved, right then and there,
that someday I would have a girlfriend—
I’m talking now about a real girlfriend, not an imaginary girlfriend—
that someday I would have a real girlfriend and
that someday I would be a mean old daddy.

I had my first real girlfriend 
the summer after my junior year of high school.
We were counselors in a camp.
She said, “I think you’re cute”
and I said, “Thank you very much,
“my grandmother also thinks I’m cute”
but she never said, “Oh, you’re a mean old daddy but I like you.”

Time went on
and I went to university
and I graduated
and I went out into the world.
I thought about becoming a professional motorcycle racer
but then I decided, for various reasons,
to become a marketing content writer instead.

Later, as the twentieth century transitioned into the twenty-first,
I myself transitioned from regular marketing content writer 
into online marketing content writer 
and I must say, at risk of immodesty, that I am a damn good one, 
but, alas, online marketing content does not a mean old daddy make.

I am now sixty-six years old.
I will never read The Odyssey in the original Greek.
I will never pole vault fifteen feet.
I will never argue a case before the United States Supreme Court.
I will never see Machu Picchu.
And I will never be a mean old daddy.



Why an Apple?

Hello, everybody.
I am Pri Etz haDaat Tov v’Ra.
You English speakers may call me The Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
I’m cool with that.
I am a major character in Chapters Two and Three of your Book of Genesis
along with my sidekick, the Tree of Life,
who actually has a much smaller part but nevertheless became more famous
just because he makes such a handy metaphor:
the Torah is a Tree of Life, the Sefirot are a Tree of Life, et cetera,
but I don’t care, I’m not jealous, I don’t even know why I brought it up.
What I came here to talk about is: Why an apple?

I never claimed to be an apple,
that rosy-cheeked symbol of good health and good cheer,
and yet Albrecht Dürer painted me as an apple.
Hendrick Goltzius painted me as an apple.
Titian painted me as an apple.
Lucas Cranach the Elder painted me as an apple.
And the folksingers are as bad as the painters.
Just listen to Patrick Sky sing “Separation Blues” and you’ll know what I mean
and why I keep on wondering: Why an apple?

At first, I suspected that John Milton might be behind it
but my investigation revealed that 
John Milton wasn’t even born until 1608
while Titian and them had already been painting apples back in the 1500s,
so that’s an airtight alibi 
that lets John Milton off the hook
but it leaves me wallowing in puzzlement
as I continue to ponder that eternal question:
Why an apple?
 



“Paint It Black” Revisited
by Pesach Rotem



“Use the active voice.”
William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, The Elements of Style


Last night I watched a movie called “Devil’s Advocate” on Netflix
and at the end of the movie, as the credits rolled by,
they played the Rolling Stones song “Paint It Black”
and the subtitles on the screen said “I see a red door and I want it painted black”
and I said, “That’s a mistake, it should be ‘I see a red door and I want to paint it black’”
and my date said, “Are you sure?”
and I said, “Of course. ‘I want it painted black’ is passive and the Rolling Stones weren’t passive guys so why would they sing passive lyrics?”
and to prove my point I replayed the song
but to my surprise it did sort of sound like “I want it painted black”
and I said “uh-oh”
and we played it a few more times and we listened very closely
and we also looked at AZLyrics.com and a couple of other lyrics sites
and they all said “I want it painted black”
and I said, “Well, I guess I’ve been singing it wrong for 55 years”
and my date smirked.

I brooded for a while and then I became defiant.
“But my way is better,” I proclaimed.
“‘I want to paint it black’ means I feel a powerful urge to grab a bucket of paint in one hand and a paintbrush in the other and slosh my pain and my grief and my anguish all over that grotesquely cheerful red door and all over the whole cold cruel uncaring world
while your way—‘I want it painted black’—means . . . what? I’m going to send a requisition to the Maintenance Department to have someone take care of this matter? Where’s the catharsis in that?”

I was starting to feel angry at the Rolling Stones for failing to consult with me 
as they should have done before releasing the song in 1966.
I would have told them to read their Strunk & White and use the active voice
but No,
the Rolling Stones are too high and mighty to ask for my advice
so I decided to lodge a Statement of Protest
but I wasn’t sure whom to lodge it with
so I lodged it with the songwriters Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
and I also lodged it with Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts as collaborating members of the Rolling Stones
and with the Decca Record Company
and with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
and with Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain
and with the Upper Galilee Chapter of the Voices Israel Group of Poets in English
and I am well aware that you can’t always get what you want
but I did at least get some measure of satisfaction.

Pesach Rotem was born and raised in New York and now lives in Yodfat, Israel. He received his B.A. from Princeton University and his J.D. from St. John’s University. His poems have been published in more than two dozen literary journals including Chiron Review, Permafrost, Voices Israel, and Synchronized Chaos. His poem “Professor Hofstadter’s Brain” was nominated for a Best of the Net award. He is a member of the Israel Association of Writers in English.

Face to Face

"Oh my God ... is it really you?"
"... Yes ... I was hoping it was you in that shell."
"It's me, and I remember everything."
"So do I ..."
"So .... like all that nonsense they told us about reincarnation turned out to be true, didn't it?"
"It seems like it now."
"That's a lot to think over, especially when our brains are so small."
"I know, I know ... but what else are we here for?"
“Well, I have to crawl down ... I can't stay here all morning. It’s unbearable when the sun is too bright.”
“I'll meet you here tomorrow morning then. Will you come?”
“It will take me all night to climb up here, but I'll do it.
... because, like how long do we live, in these shapes?”
"I dunno ... a couple weeks for me maybe."
“I think I get a little more. I've grown around this shell a whole turn and a half since Spring.”
“You go, girl! ... you are like, still a girl aren't you? "
“In this form we're all kind of half-and-half. I know it sounds weird.”
"I won't kick you out of the flower bed ..."
* laughs ...
“I’ll see you tomorrow, I hope. You be careful. There's a toad under the third brick in the wall. You would NOT believe how long his tongue is. ”
“Yes I would. I've seen him absolutely shred a bumblebee that didn't know he was there. It was horrible, except that I hate bumblebees. And you might want to step it up and go ... there's a Possum that lives behind the tool shed. ”
“Yeah ... bad news ... I have to keep a low profile around that one. I hunker down and pretend to be a wad of old chewing gum.
But hey! Listen! Maybe you can scout this out for me! I was down by the pond yesterday morning and I saw this BIG Catalpa leaf right
at the water's edge. I think it would hold me like a boat. And if you came and perched on the stem, and fanned your wings a bit, we might sail out to that little Island in the pond. We'd be safe there wouldn't we? No possums or toads, or kitties ...”
"Oh babe ... you don't know about the Bullfrog."
"Oh my Gawd, is that what makes that noise ...?"
“I’m afraid so ... top of the food chain on that island anyway. There are also some
big Bass in that pond. I’ve seen them lurking.”
"Shit ... I was hoping ..."
“I know. But I'll wait for you tomorrow morning, right here.”
"Good ... I still love you, did you know?"
“Yes, it's written on your shell in letters only I can see. And when my wings get really going, they make the sound of your name as I remember it. I will always love you, no matter what.”
“Thanks for that. Wait for me ... It might take me a long time ...”
"Yes, it always did ..."

						Michael Hough short fiction / Christina Chin, art.