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Amazon wishlist for an organization led by Afghan women (nationals to the country who want to shape their own destiny free of warfare and imperialism and with equal educational opportunities and safety for all).
Beaupre Anthologies (seeking submissions of work related to indigeneity, neurodiversity, or horror, for separate anthologies).
This month’s issue attends to matters of the heart.
Abdulquadir Ibrahim Worubata’s work expresses sorrow at a deeply felt personal loss, while Ian Copestick renders the angry stage of grief, indignation at loved ones’ being taken. Aloysius S Harmon renders the extreme emotions of mourning in his grammatically understated piece.
The two protagonists in David A. Douglas’ short story dream their way into connection with deceased siblings, finding peace at last over their passing.
Sidnei Silva’s piece explores the varied and beautiful dimensions of rain and draws upon them as a backdrop for love between two people. Mahbub also turns to nature as a metaphor for romantic, familial and spiritual connection among people. and pleads for interpersonal peace and understanding.
Ahmad Al-Khatat’s work also cries out for an end to violence among nations and people groups, while also reflecting on love and insomnia. Steven Hill issues a lengthy literary clarion call for racial justice while Chimezie Ihekuna relates the story of an impoverished Nigerian boy determined to get an education. Pathik Mitra explores and advocates for gender justice in a creative short story while Kellie Scott-Reed probes the extent of our responsibilities to protect others in danger as well as our assumptions on the sources of the danger.
Allison Grayhurst’s poems speak of places where we find spiritual nourishment: through practicing faith, compassion, and mindful care of the land and its inhabitants through gardening. K.J. Hannah Greenberg contributes some gentle photos of animals and natural scenes.
Christopher Bernard pokes fun at the popularity-driven culture of social media to contrast with his low-tech, undying love.
Norman J. Olson describes his artistic creative process, most poignantly how his subjects become portraits of people he cares about, seemingly of their own accord.
Robert Fleming writes of love in an unusual way, in a piece where he juxtaposes romantic attraction and calculus. Another of his pieces links the earth’s rotation with that of a disco ball.
Jim Meirose contributes an intriguing tale that consists of internal dialogue and captures place, character, and time. J.J. Campbell presents a photograph in words of middle age and his speaker’s philosophical attitude towards his decline. George Economou reminisces about hazy past days of heavy substance use, old movies and ill-fated romances.
Steven Croft reviews William Walsh’s young male coming of age novel Lakewood and Federico Wardal offers up a preview of the historical film he’s creating about Cleopatra. Wardal’s intent is to portray the ancient queen as an authentic woman of her time with real human feelings and desires.
The Red Ribbon Braid
My hidden love lies in your red ribbon braid
The scented dewy morning wind flows from the fringe of your sari
The sun plays in my sky every moment
The rejuvenated, illuminated star I feel like twinkling in the dark
The light in hand I'm standing on your land -the alluring flute from far-reaching path
A piece of my dream lies in your red ribbon bun shinning in the bright morning sun.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
14/01//2021
A Floating Piece of Cloud
I'm a piece of cloud floating in the sun of rain
Wakeful on your eyes in time or out of time
In this play of rain and sun
No sooner had I closed my eyes the cloud went out of sight
Paying no heed I pray for staying some more time
Where does it take place and how it works?
Before my sleep I recollect the scene repeatedly
All I lost in the world of sleep
Possibly the cloud flies like that of egrets or doves
Setting me up to the play of light and love.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
15/01//2021
The Envoy of Peace
You are a drop of my eye's envoy of peace
Flying and flying around you sit on the green field
On the bank of the river, the lake, or the pond
All on a sudden to the branch of the tree
Eyes fixed at to the unknown far-reaching way
That aiming snatches me away from myself
Vibrates the imagination to the distant vatical path
O the migratory flock of birds
You are exposed to the winter light - a heavenly glory
Soothing my eyes all the way I come back with a light
In my hand at the evening or night.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
15/01//2021
Classification
Why is this acute classification in humanity?
Why is this different social status?
Why can't we flow like the waves of the ocean?
The sun rays can't reach the depth of the forest
Yet the heart or conscience shines in humanity
Darkness may be removed for every single hand
The blind eye can find the light
The hungry can have a lump of food
The sick can get treatment
Why people die before eyes in season or out of season?
And the others run through on the dead bodies
Though we all stand in the same line in all prayer houses
Then why is this condition outside?
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
16/01//2021
Turning Back
Whenever I take step out of the door
Come back again and my eyes fix to the deep well of yours
Hold your hands, cry so loud
You pull me up and I weighed down on your rosy wings
You keep me so tight in your breast
We can't go away so far leaving each other
In this sweetness of bond
A spring of love feathering from this sight to the limitless unknown
The joy shimmering in the eyes I come back again and again
Dive into the deep well of your eyes.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
16/01//2021
The Making of My Story
Paddling the canoe, I have always wanted to be a doctor. But I am faced with the difficulty of navigating the canoe to its bank where I could board a taxi to school. It has always been the first thing that comes to mind when I wake from sleep.
My parents are poor. My mother is a fish monger while my dad is a taxi driver whose lifestyle of incessant drinking and smoking would not permit him to discharge his fatherly responsibilities. By the way, I am the only child of my parents.
Going to school late has always been my hobby. Despite that, I have always had the mindset of being the person I have always wanted to be...A qualified medical doctor.
My mother has always been supportive. She works tooth and nail to see that all school fee and related expenses are met. Though she falls sick due to stress and burdens my father pose on her, she takes it as her duty to ensure I am hale and hearty.
On a Saturday afternoon, my mother calls my attention by engaging me in what I call The Motivation.
She begins: ' Be that person you have always wanted to be. You can't be limited by the circumstance I am facing. I am your mother, Jude. I will ensure within my powers and to my last breath that you get to study to the university. I won't fail you, as long as I live, God willing. Jude, you will reach the height of your dream and surpass it'
'Amen' I reply.' Jesus will make a way for us all'
I believe in you. Never give up! Amen to your declaration!'
'Yes mother. I won't give up. My passion has always been to be a medical doctor. And that I shall become'
'Yes, that's the spirit!' She encourages. I can feel that positive vibe rubbing off on me from her.
'Don't mind your father. He can do what he likes. It was my choice I married him. But that's not important, compared to what we are presently facing.'
'But why is father behaving this way?' I ask in interruption. She sees the ugly face of anger in me.
'Don't get me upset' She warns, looking at me sternly. 'I am all out for you, and nothing less. I put my life on the line to ensure you become a better you. What you just asked is none of your business, but mine!'
Noticing her countenance, I had to show remorse. 'I'm sorry'
'No problem. Can I continue uninterrupted?'
'Of course, mother'
'Good!' She continues: 'But I believe we will live this place and I will leave this business. You know it has not been any easier for me, even your father.'
With tears rolling down my eyes, I hugged her. 'Mother, you're always my sunshine and will never have that light dimmed, even for a split second! You've been my support and pillar. I promise you, I will get us out of this bad situation'
'Of course, my lovely son' She agrees. Unmoved by my tears, she encourage me to 'Be yourself no matter what they say'
She has to go back to her place of trading, a riverine location, not up to a nautical mile to our place.
'Jude, I have to attend to my fishes' She laughs, parting me on the back. 'See you later'
'OK' I smile. What they great time to be inspired.
Since then, as I paddle the canoe to as part of my side hustle, making some money to support the home and in some way, my education, I am always optimistic that my faith will make me paddle away the challenges I am facing as I climb through the rigors of life tests to become what my dream has always been... A qualified medical doctor.
That has been the making of my story...
The Long and Mischievous Life of Love, Hatred and Fear
By Steven Hill
(dedicated to the memory of George Floyd)“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."
― Immanuel Kant
Now the streets are quiet again, peaceably quiet,
but it is the pause of the reloading,
the stillness of a graveyard;
it is the morning after
for those without a future,
viewing the hulk of strip malls charred to steel frame,
shuffling through the shattered glass
of the fragile consensus,
and the melted smell of tear gas, weeping over broken dreams.
It is the same twisted today that looks like the yesterday of a
hundred or thousand years ago,
for those without a language whose hopes were turned to ash, and
swept by the aproned shopkeep into the ceaseless star-stream.
The damage is done when the prospect of progress vanishes
with the dust re-settling,
when we cease plumbing the depths of the human soul to
find that broad territory in common.
And as the clash of flesh exhausts its insanities,
as the Us vs Them smashes together like dialectic atoms,
the frantic synthesis arrives in time for the new tumult,
the pieces pick themselves up and recompose,
sneak past the debris to find a way forward again,
arresting the black hole collapse to the backward,
leading the escape of runaways in search of
a refuge from this most un-civil war.
But the silenced ones know, oh yes don’t they,
that the interregnum always ends
and the relentless assault on meaning begins again,
leading once more to another round of tweeted reprisals;
across the broken landscape, the tectonic plates crack and separate
kin from kin,
ethnic from ethnic,
accord from conversation,
we watch helplessly as words tap the algorithm and
sentences juice the emotion,
foreboding the passage of night swallowing the day.
History the bloody obituary written by
the last of the last survivors,
language a vehicle for unconditional surrender,
signed at the Court House adjacent to the ghastly battlefield,
bearded General to bearded General, victorious to vanquished,
chainreacting all over the weaponized volksgeist,
there are no winners here, only those who lose less.
But what if we re-launched the invention of the feeling?
What if we sought where the tenderness may lie?
What if we weren’t beset by something so sad that it paralyzed?
Or if we listened harder to those who
had to bite their own tongues until they bled,
to those who ended with the short end of the loaf of bread,
those buried beneath the missing tombstones of the mass graves.
What if the pure decision of the Good Samaritan
replaced the pursuit of the Master Race deal,
or if our human desires were not entwined,
like a crown of thorns,
inside the political economy of our times?
Here, at the apogee of our history,
the latest Great Leap Forward turns out to be
a backward fall into more backwardness.
The return to MAGA plantation greatness is exposed
as another fake story of
white bwanas sipping lemonade on the porch,
attended by obedient Dark Continent subservience,
such a human thing to do, to love fantasies that never were,
as they disappear in the rearview mirror.
But the past survivals never stay buried, do they?
They ooze from the muck of the weeping mass graves,
the Rosewood’s and Tulsa’s and Thibodaux’s and 1919 arise
from the cruel crypt of Hate’s harsh oblivion,
white-world memory tries to delete from the hard drive
the silenced evidence of ethno-cide, and
the un-banality of evil and the sin of looking away,
every soul guilty of all the good you did not do,
leaving us still groping toward a recognition of our real lives,
our real history,
the stipulated record of who really built this country,
planted its fields, erected its towns and schools and cities,
and laid the rail tracks to the future,
as the Four Horsemen howled their overwhelming questions:
Are we here?
Is this real?
Are we sure?
Am I real?
Does here connect to anywhere?
If E = mc2, then how am I still here?
How do I find a reason to put one foot in front of the other?
When will I uncover the words, consonants and vowels needed
to arrive at the source of Something true,
instead of circling the lonely perimeter with longing,
for what I cannot have,
for what I cannot taste and cannot kiss,
and cannot see except in fleeting glimpses of Beauty,
that elusive Something that vanishes into Nothing.
Yes, I see it in your eyes, my love,
all the disappeared lives that mattered,
reflected a thousand by thousand times,
the ones who looked after the system, previous and present,
blown like dead pollen across the centuries;
I see it in my eyes, reflected in your eyes, my love,
the present is everything and nothing,
utterly reusable in the Grand Mortar and Pestle,
nothing lives forever, nothing ever will,
not even you and I, my love,
pawing through the leftovers to hoard what we can,
to return and return as the dust of the double helix,
amidst the un-raveling of the un-civilization and—
You don’t believe me, you say?
You don’t believe this is slithering thru our DNA?
Then why, in the realization that we are everywhere and nowhere,
why have all roads led from the many pasts to here?
Why, for each History’s moment, does the crossroad
fork yet again, to anywhere but here?
How do we find it within ourselves to arise from the breakfast cereal
into the urgency of each tangled day?
And why then do we fall down, we millions and billions,
hearts beating fast like the Ninth in D minor,
contesting the birthright of where we were born,
as the Fear and Confusion plant their jeering flags
amidst a fireworks of scorn?
No, the streets are calm now, passably calm,
it’s dead quiet out there, beneath the noise;
despite the rumblings of marchings from those who demand a future,
despite the huddled masses barred at the border by the rusted Iron Lady,
despite the divided “e pluribus unum” of this violent mammal trajectory,
we thought if we plugged our ears it would leave,
we thought if we clutched our bellies without malice,
we thought if we arranged the words and paragraphs just so
that we could pacify our death-fear locked inside.
But what if the most feared thing is that which we refuse to confess:
that Love is the strangest notion of Civilization,
proven to regularly run amok,
kneeling at the altar of heartless entropy,
until one day we run out of luck;
Yet Love is also the molecular force that can bind,
and what’s bound gives the World its arrow-direction,
in broken search for that more perfect Union,
you and I, a chance for resurrection,
for in the end, in the very very end,
we are here,
within the limits of our language,
within the space between our opposable thumbs,
stumbling toward governance within the parliament of hysterics,
straining toward common ground,
resisting the Hate that tries to overrun all representation,
standing in defiance of the Trumped up charge and
the profanity of evil exposed.
And then, as the streets re-explode in their un-poetry of un-justice,
as we gasp over our brutal re-acquaintance
with the imperfection of it all,
we discover that something still lives above
that purple bruise behind the stars,
and below the crooked tree limbs, swinging heavy with that strangest of fruit,
our prayers re-locate the ACTG helix,
replicating with mercy and haloed in pearls,
until finally, we remember, just before we extinguish:
“Our kiss is for the whole world.”
[1] The Great Leap Forward of Chinese leader Mao Zedong was a disastrous economic policy from 1958 to 1962 to reconstruct China’s agrarian and industrial economies thru forced collectivization that led to mass starvation for tens of millions of Chinese.
[1] A 19th century colonial and racist term for the continent of Africa. Sigmund Freud also compared adult women’s sexual life to a “dark continent.”
[1] Racial massacres: in Rosewood, Florida, New Year’s Day, 1923, a white mob of 300 men murdered dozens of black men, women and children, and completely torched the town into oblivion, wiping it forever off the map; in Tulsa in June 1921, whites burned to the ground the prosperous black neighborhood of Greenwood, murdering hundreds and burying them in forgotten mass graves; and in Thibodaux, Louisiana , November 1887, white plantation owners, politicians and their paramilitaries murdered hundreds of black sugar cane workers and their families for going on strike, the most violent labor dispute in US history; in 1919, white massacres and lynchings of blacks took place in more than three dozen US cities, including Chicago, Washington DC, Baltimore and Omaha, after black military veterans returning from World War I asserted their labor rights, resulting in the murder of hundreds of black Americans.
[1] The four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Death, Famine, War, and Conquest, that arrive in the biblical Book of Revelations as harbingers of the Last Judgment and the end of the world. [1] Albert Einstein’s equation of special relativity. Energy (E) produced equals the mass (m) of a body destroyed times the speed of light (c) squared. That means mass and energy are the same physical entity, and can be changed into each other.
[1] Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125, popularly known as the 9th Symphony, or “Ode to Joy.”
[1] The Statue of Liberty is the figure of Libertas, robed Roman goddess of liberty, inscribed with the words “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” [1] “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…”, first words of the U.S. Constitution.
[1] Singer Billie Holiday, Strange Fruit. “Southern trees bear a strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” [1] ACGT is an acronym for the four fundamental units of the genetic code found in a DNA double-helix molecule: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T). They comprise the molecular foundation for all organic life.
But, Sadly It Never Will
The middle of the
night, and here I am
half drunk. Feeling
the urge to write,
but not knowing
quite what to do.
I'm not sure what
I want to say.
I feel like I'm halfway
on the way to somewhere.
I'm not totally depressed,
but I'm not O.K. either.
I'm not happy, though,
no way !
Far from it !
Earlier today, I met a woman,
an old friend of mine,
who's partner died a couple
of years ago.
I hadn't seen her for nearly a
year, or so.
So she didn't know that my wife
and father had died within
two months of each other.
When I told her, she got upset,
which made me feel guilty.
But, what can I do ?
If someone asks, " How is
your partner? ", I can't lie,
and say " Fine."
Can I ?
I wouldn't want to, anyway.
It's a very strange thing, but
I've noticed it before ;
When someone who you
love, really love dies,
for a month or two you
feel like grabbing by the
lapels everyone you pass
in the street, screaming
" Don't you fucking get it ?
My grandfather/ girlfriend/
wife/Dad has died ? "
You want it to mean as much to
the rest of the world, as it does
to you.
But, sadly, it never will.
Direction
Can this moment be a fruit,
a moist secret, picked and juiced?
Can I follow through with my leap of faith
and leap into the coal fires of survival’s uncertainty,
be selfish as the hunter who conserves nature
so he can have enough nature to kill
and make into wall trophies?
Am I a dead mouse on the porch who made it
as far as the first freeze, forgot
to build a nest and suffered the consequences?
Am I fortunate as the found street dog,
given kibble, a warm place to lay,
a pack to call her own?
Am I here maimed but alive,
like all things living,
crippled by the weight of time?
Why is everything half-formed?
Only young things leap and frolic,
free because of their dependency
on maternal sustenance and protection.
My endurance is threadbare.
If I wash and wear it one more time
it will disintegrate and not hold form.
I know nothing but
I do know Jesus -
the bridge and the tunnel below.
I know one way, one path
all else is
phantom blood, phantom fulfilment,
just renderings humming ‘yes yes -
take my false face as truth,
count my money, my grand accomplishments,
my soft seats, my high seats,
my triple thaw and my double freeze.’
The butcher is a psychopath. The liars are in charge.
Steady now, the hand, the moon dangling on a string,
say your necessary farewells.
Jesus is walking, walk with him,
eyes forward, summoned.
Cure
Joy is but a minstrel’s flower,
lightening under the thumbnails.
Preach of mud around the eyes,
myself a centipede, fast but fragile.
I gaze and I know the way is a path is a dream
of a hawk landing and inside that dream
anguish quickens to gold, despair into
overcoming. Inside that dream, Jesus stands
insistent in a child’s purity, burdenless, fresh
as the sun always is and always burning.
A small stone that cannot break, a love so graced
it welcomes the flooding tide. But I am broken,
eaten in tiny increments by the changing mirror -
around the evenings, around the first day’s light,
blind to all but the persistent churning.
Jesus’ great love has left me weeping, has opened
my heart, brought forth the healing, suffering mended,
miracles under a white desert sky. Be mine. Let me be
yours, travel with you, bend fully into your mystery.
The joy you give is small, unassuming,
but is an opening like a lifting,
where all grief and savagery
invert into its opposite, separated
from lasting damage.
Someone other
Someone said - “Be sensible,
a song is essential only if it can be traded.”
Someone squandered decades of rich meaning
then died on the rafters of an abandoned ballpark.
“Pack up your consciousness,”
someone else said “Be out of character
and draw the short straw with glee.”
Intellectual dreams have no limitations,
strong in complexity, strong without drama
or the heartache of disappointment.
I will dream intellectual, taste desire
as an idea, be friends with the professional
and marry into a profession.
How much time does it take to fashion an identity,
keep it with solid sides and a resistant core?
Someone said - “Don’t bother
nothing is for keeps, ideals exist
until they inevitably become soiled and then
start reeking of their opposite intent.”
Many years seized you up in spasms,
aching and making
a mockery of such lofty extremes.
This planet is overstrained, never a gentle
day of just sitting.
Someone said - “Learn mediocrity if you want
happiness. Bark at the impossible squirrel
in the impossible tree.”
Faith must be fought for, in every choice,
in the mid-days of winter and when love has gone astray.
Everyday I own nothing but this day.
Someone said - “Deal with the collapse of
what you hold as true - contemplate it like a cloud
that shifts form and wisps away.”
I heard that someone, but the joy of love
is real even when it lies flattened. Hope
is not for the faint-hearted, but for the persistent,
the reformers of gravity, the warriors against inertia.
I say - Hope void of illusions
draws its first breath as faith
only in the purity of complete darkness.
Casual Garden
I keep a casual garden
burnt in places, lush by
the climbing trees.
When in despair,
I examine the corners of that garden,
pluck the dangerous weeds
and re-set the overturned steppingstones.
I scrub the birdbath
and fill it with fresh cold water
placing stones as platforms
for the bees and small birds.
This garden is my favourite place to walk,
small, but with hidden nooks
and a seat for solitude.
It took years of tending to get to this place.
A once-thought cursed corner is now deep green
with violet hues and the prefect shade.
Still there is more to tend
as it is ever changing. Birds come,
leave their droppings and kill
what can be restored.
Squirrels explore, dig holes, preparing for winter.
Raccoons work their nocturnal havoc -
birdbath on its side, flipped steppingstones - evidence
of their hunting for grubs.
God gave me this garden as a living meditation,
help when all other help is gone.
Before this, I never had a garden.
For twenty years, I had a backyard.
My children enjoyed it, my husband
took care of it.
Now this garden is my sacred duty,
an extension of my wonderous home,
mine to walk in as we all take in
its bright varied living tones -
all four people, cats and even the guinea pigs
have an exclusive window to view its glory.
The sounds when the neighbours
are sleeping or away
are best. The smells are perfect
of marigolds on the deck and the rain.
My mother says this garden is beautiful
and she would know.
I rejoice in its poetry.
Everything wants to live,
expand, overflow in this garden.
I don’t even know how this love affair started
or how over time it has grown into a beautiful marriage.
There is an animal graveyard in my garden -
a place in front of two tall trees, the same place
we buried silver coins,
the best place of ease
where the white dove first arrived,
before walking around the whole garden,
blessing every inch before it took flight
never to return.
When I forget God loves me,
I look at my garden,
I step onto its bumpy terrain
and know I am one -
joined to its hallowed ground.
Revived
Sideways into the thicket
prickly roar, eyelids closed
and then a decade later, a sunbeam
latches to your arm and pulls you out,
renews your skin, the tone of your hair.
A decade lost without a voice, without
connection to your core.
Here you stand, stride, hardly limping,
a queen, tall, sure of your kinship,
sometimes still weakened by past sentimentality,
but mostly preparing for a sacred adventure, remembering
the promise to you that was made on the swing
when you swung high as the swing could carry you -
your childhood legs gleefully kicking, your long hair
behind you, and a smile that was more glorious
than the first spotted spring flower.
Whole again, set right, upright,
shedding the last of your apprehension,
growing deeper into maturity,
letting the shadows go,
as the sweet nectar wraps around you
you start to sing - Hosanna!
finally accepting
love is everything.
Creature
Out of step, filled
with a flame that ignites
a windfall and dreams
upward reaching, past
the umbrella and the cherished flight
of the cardinal.
One step, dancing, then tomorrow
comes and there is no dancing to be seen.
Maimed and fearful - the setting sun
coils its rays around an unhappy future and feeds
the roots with sewage.
Preferring the hope of a soft landing,
I count the pillars and a make a roof, a home.
I fall asleep with this glorious creature at my side.
I wake and it is the first thing I see. It takes me
out into a land of picnics by the water, out
of the stark slam of poverty and ancient debts that
must be repaid.
It takes me to a greener land
where I can walk, turn corners
and run. Where I can do my rituals,
relieved of desperation, at one
with the hand that opens, at peace
with the hand that holds.
Bridle
Tear and rip and proclaim
a path you cannot follow
but can taste its every nuance.
Bend into its horizon as though it
were yours, there on glorious display.
When change does not come, and it sleeps
like a long clouded-over moon, and spirits
are bones sucked of their marrow -
the most vital of these eaten by mechanical doom -
metal teeth and the turning, turning
of grinding eventuality, wait
and watch the images come and go.
The windows are stained
and there is no way to clean them.
Through them I see growth.
I see days I long for that may not come
for another decade, where I will be free.
What is a day? But this thing done, this thing not done.
What is a life? Stealing wakefulness violently
from slumber, pressing into joy
despite the chains and another
book is read. All dreams are singular. Know
the in-breath counts. The out-breath is simply
exhalation.
I Need My Blood
I need my blood.
I need the mornings
sightless of dark duties
and encumbering failures
that rise like a high wave
teaming with unseen predators.
I need a house without deep mud
at its doorstep and a fire menacingly
burning in the furthest backyard tree.
I need to wake up like I used to,
energized, a life to look forward to, bow to,
and say yes, I can do that, I am full.
I need God’s blowing kiss, a dream
that is more than a dead seed or grand illusion,
to step here and there solid in authenticity,
shed the dread and the pounding trip and fall.
I need my blood
not horror-cold professionalism,
being polite while vital body fibres
ricochet against each other, bawling inside,
ripped and rolling like a fish
on a hook, heartlessly pulled
from my home and element, amazed
by how long I am still breathing,
here, without oxygen
or the salty waters of my belonging.
I need a bridge
to walk across,
a landscape of freedom and prosperity,
away from this decaying island I sit upon
where massive reptiles wrap
their spiked bodies around, many
creeping on the shore.
I need my blood,
to keep my blood,
flowing, be a voice at full strength,
no longer a sigh or a held-back moan.
I need this now
to carry on.
My branches are all but broken.
My spirit is hardening, tight, tighter
than a heavy stone.
Building a Temple
I held the hand when the body
lay sleeping, ready to erupt, erode
but it never did.
These words are a goodbye
to the dust-bowl chaos, a vision
to act by, pick up pebbles and throw
across a field, over a fence, almost
to the other side.
The angels make a wall protecting, bending
their bodies of light like shields
over my beautiful children, as they find their way
through uncertainties, undercurrents of terror
and the moon’s dropping glare.
Addiction in the ice.
Organs enflamed and removed.
But God’s love is merciful, takes us
to the threshold, but not beyond.
Secrets are exposed, talked about without shame,
and then are burnt like charred large balls
in a sacred flame, rising
into a steady shimmering golden canopy peace.
Sometimes the storm creates a treasure,
a blooming happiness
after its destructive force, its taking away.
Sometimes after the emptiness, there is finally
a conscious letting go, letting in
the zig-zag flight of finches.
There is love spoken
without conditions, love heroic.
There are ghosts silenced, pathways
rushing forward, hearts so broken,
now repaired, thundering forward, redeemed.
Allison Grayhurst is a member of the League of Canadian Poets. Five times nominated for “Best of the Net,” she has over 1300 poems published in over 500 international journals. She has 25 published books of poetry and six chapbooks. She lives in Toronto with her family. She also sculpts, working with clay; www.allisongrayhurst.com
failure after failure
this endless display
a woman still acting
like a child that needs
attention
trying to figure out
how to attract the
man of her dreams
hard to sit back and
watch failure after
failure
the sheer inability to
get her shit together
too old for games
too old for loose
ends
too old for more
chaos than is
fucking needed
best that none of
us think about what
could have been
--------------------------------------------------------------
the lobby of a hospital
watching porn
in the lobby
of a hospital
tempted to turn
up the volume
just to see if
anyone is
paying
attention
the woman at
the desk gives
me an evil stare
she'll probably
understand when
i ask where is
the bathroom
--------------------------------------------------------------
loved dancing in the rain
you always wanted
to be the carefree
soul that loved
dancing in the
rain
instead that rain
triggers all the
arthritis slowly
killing you and
leaves you
crippled in
a chair
the alcohol only
helps so much
the pills don't
do much anymore
either
there's a bent spoon
and a needle on the
table beside the bed
just enough to take
the edge off
hopefully soon enough
it will be more than
enough to carry you
to the other side
-----------------------------------------------------------------
nowhere to be found
i was asked to take
an honest look at
myself
so, i did
five foot nine
339 lbs.
moderately depressed
morbidly obese
arthritis from head
to toe
a failing liver
a love for alcohol
crazy women and
a passionate lover
of sports, music
and the word fuck
the doctor then asked
where is god in all of this
as usual, i said
nowhere to be found
-----------------------------------------------------------------
dance between the dull moments
after hours in medical facilities
always gets a little creepy
you used to be one of them
perverts on the cleaning crew
you know what kind of thoughts
dance between the dull moments
on yet another boring ass day
J.J. Campbell (1976 – ?) is old enough to know where the bodies are buried. He’s been widely published over the years, most recently at Horror Sleaze Trash, The Beatnik Cowboy, Black Coffee Review, Terror House Magazine and Cajun Mutt Press. You can find him most days on his mildly entertaining blog, evil delights. (https://evildelights.blogspot.com)
