Thrills Let me introduce beauty in a non-physiognomical form: A ripple lapping reclusive toes that have shunned the elements for a century or so, that never graced the ground with silken soles for barefootedness is only common among the low in this sad part of the globe. A tremor running through my bones Upon meeting the eyes of a life-sworn foe, having repented his gall, replenishing his ocular liquid with sheets of gold, intricately woven by a contrite soul. A shadow that was banished decades ago before I could utter my very first words, before I could even walk, conjured up from the other world, gliding into my dreams to illumine their void. Downfall Of all his traits, furtiveness repelled me most, a secretive nature that coveted moss, that concealed the truth, and cloaked every action with a surreptitious look. I could never digest his oxymorons, his classy puns and tinsel tropes. I was straightforward. I always spoke not from the depth of my heart but from the bottom of my stomach. Un-arrayed, the words came naked, unchaperoned by punctuation modes, with un-softened tones, unfiltered by social codes or decorum protocols, unabashed and bold. This capacity to divulge my innermost thoughts brought about my downfall. Domestic Eloquence He wants her utterly silent around the house. She wonders whether her utterances are full of discordant sounds, for his persistent repudiation of her voice has begun to aggravate knots of nerves. He says she is always very loud, but when she softens her tone, her words produce the same impact: a face full of repugnance and some articulate spite. She recalls being once told by the only man with whom she fell in love that he would be contented with listening to her voice for the rest of his life, a relationship of the verbal type if it should come to nothing else. Others had intimated that she possessed mellifluence suited to some public broadcast, or perhaps singing if she had the gift! Such remarks make his revulsion even worse. She examines their daily interchange to see what stimulates his undisguised disgust. She usually speaks of long-needed repairs that derail the orbit of their life, of grease-stained plates that he loves to pile for his favorite germs, of expenditure that taxes her every hard-earned pence. Now she realizes after years of domestic eloquence that what unsettles the parasitic in him is not her voice: It is finance. What About We tend to dwell on the sorrowful what renders us lachrymose, what piques and wounds our pride, what robs us of cheerful discourse, but what about the precious moments that we snatched despite all vigilant foes, the bouts of hearty laughter the cordial episodes, the communions we held with surroundings, the ripply warmth, the feelings that no matter how fleeting can buoy us up until our final repose. Burdens I wonder how the Swiss can cope with their surplus of annual gold. It must be a burden on one’s thoughts to have much more than one can hold. I wonder how the glib dispense with their surplus of sugared words. It must be a burden on one’s tongue to feel the trickle that audiences shun. I wonder what Arabia would do to its surplus of petroleum fuel. It must be a burden on one’s secretion to pump such liquid to warring nations. I wonder what new world orders can do to combat their surplus of nuclear feuds. It must be a burden on one’s mind to save the planet from spurious wile. When there’s so much When there’s so much ugliness in our daily norm where can we purchase beauty in an undiluted form, neither canned, modified, nor cloned? When there’s so much hate in our daily debates, where can we excavate love that’s not outdated, neither a relic nor reincarnated? When there are so many fumes in our modern rooms, where can we distil pure air into our tubes, with no filters sticking out of our throats? When there are so many creeds scattered like seeds, where can we worship without excludees, a temple for all, at home and overseas?
Category Archives: CHAOS
Synchronized Chaos June 2020: Hermetic Thoughts
Hermetic thoughts. These words, taken from Henry Bladon’s imagistic poem, reflect the state of many of us, sealed up in quarantine.
Whether we have gained longer hours to spend in reflection, or just changed up our schedules and daily rhythms, we’re likely living and thinking in different ways.
Each contributor’s creative works in this issue are highly distinctive and personal.
Some writers meander into nostalgia. Ian Copestick remembers vibrant young love while reflecting on mental and physical aging. J.D. DeHart depicts the loosely shifting sense of space and time on a road trip.
Others look within themselves and to their pasts for a sense of self-understanding. Norman J. Olson recollects his favorite styles of painting and the development of his personal aesthetic, while Robert Ragan’s protagonist wonders whether he could have done more to prevent an old friend’s suicide.
Some of the ruminations turn sorrowful. J.J. Campbell contributes subdued pieces on aging, weakness, melancholy and death, Abigail George writes of heartbreak, abandonment, and the vertigo of hospitalization.
Sometimes the same pieces, or collections of work, vacillate between hope and despair. Chimezie Ihekuna’s personal essay describes how he developed the inner self-worth to withstand social exclusion due to a facial disfigurement, and how practicing the craft of writing gave him strength and a different focus and source of identity.
Mahbub’s poems speak of a fanciful romance out in nature, yet also criminal and ethnic violence and dangerous weather within his homeland of Bangladesh. Ahmad Al-Khatat brings us the death and grief of the refugee experience, yet the potential for rest and healing for humans and the rest of the natural world while sheltering in place.
Steven Croft conveys the tension of war and other disasters by illustrating the small visual details that can loom large when strong emotions distort our perception of time and space. A glimpse of a woman’s hair under her headscarf, the sight of church windows overlooking an empty baseball diamond, and a rescuer replacing his shoes after saving a swimmer in distress draw and keep us within Croft’s scenes.
Another piece harnesses details and objects to illustrate larger themes: Daniel DeCulla turns a single high-heeled shoe into a meditation on the power and grace within traditional femininity.
Tidbits of ordinary life take on artistic meaning within the films of independent director and university professor Dina Abd Elsalam, profiled by Jaylan Salah. Elsalam’s movies often portray regular people, sometimes elderly people, enjoying and making the most of their lives, and celebrate friendship and neighborliness.
Joan Beebe reaches out to all of our readers in a spirit of caring, with a gentle poem about roses, an expression of sympathy for our neighborhoods with empty streets, and a prayer to the Virgin Mary for an end to the pandemic.
Ike Boat offers up a radiant celebration of life, reciting a spoken word piece that’s an ode to the beach where he stands on a brilliant summer day in his native Ghana. A man of faith, Boat gives thanks to God for his existence.
Other contributors are also spiritual, or at least philosophical. Ken Rutkowski ruminates through drawings on his time abroad in Vietnam, where the people he met lived with equanimity and optimism. Hongri Yuan lets his imagination penetrate the heavens with a lengthy bilingual English/Mandarin vision of a golden city and supernatural statues, flowers and trees.
Christopher Bernard comments through poetry that the pandemic-emptied streets have reduced our urban crowds to a more human and manageable size, where we can actually see each other – and the return of nature and wildness.
Other pieces from J.D. DeHart describe how isolation affects our creative minds. Uniquely, he reviews a book through poetry, shifting among artistic forms just as our lives are shifting with the pandemic.
Mark Young’s artwork also shifts our expectations, combining the abstract and the concrete, lines and curves, defined and implied shapes and spaces. He incorporates text that’s meant to be aesthetic rather than literal and readable into his fanciful and at times humorous images.
We hope that readers resonate with the aesthetics of this issue, whether in the abstract visual art or poetry or in the concrete images or emotions or the narrative storytelling.
Everyone has different ‘hermetic thoughts,’ we all experience this season of isolation in our own ways and follow our own trains of thought. This issue points towards making space for all our varied mental states and different pathways towards co-creating a healthier future.
Poem from Connor Orrico
song & self-compassion
a weight on my chest and a still in my limbs,
a spill from my heart of a will within,
I wait on my best and just instill my grin
to wash up the mess of self-listening
Poetry from Christopher Bernard
Two Poems
by Christopher Bernard
Urbi et orbi
Myself, I prefer a city with no one in it,
or, if not exactly no one, only a few.
It’s like being in an enormous sculpture garden,
immense minimalist slabs
of glass and concrete throwing shadows
dark as poetry across streets grown modest
with stillness and opening trustingly as a child’s hand.
The few people there look less grotesque
when teased out of the crowd –
the way a solitary farmer turning his field,
a pair of friends or lovers, a daydreaming
hiker, seen in a summer countryscape
between bays of woods and folds
of pastureland and field, under
an ingenuously immense sky
make the dignity of humankind,
its vulnerable nobility,
palpable, and not the poorly spun joke
it seems so often
in a city hysterical, delirious, and crammed.
No: our monuments, our things,
the traces of care in the woodwork,
the shadow of a mind molded from a sun –
tools and toys and trinkets, engines and edifices,
the shape of a hand on a prehistoric cave wall,
a flute played shyly on a Sunday morning –
make me less ashamed of being human.
I wander the empty city like a hunter
in a wilderness, except that I have found
the object of my hunt, and hold it close
inside my coat, where I can feel its heart
beating, and its warmth, and its wings.
*****
The Coyotes of North Beach
Sunset, spring: a strange wailing
rises from the gorge under our house
cautiously balanced on a cliff edge
as on a knife
above a valley where coyotes are gathering.
Strange indeed for a city
(our neighborhood, part declivity, part escarpment,
is strange enough for any city).
But maybe not strange for a city
largely emptied from a malady
emptying much of the world –
and giving meaning to the "pan"
in panache, panama, pancake, panjandrum,
Panglossion, Pandragon, pandemic –
and so giving way to wilderness
seeping back into the streets,
crows appraising the roof tops,
mountain sheep strolling about in Wales,
curious spiders measuring bus shelters
with their delicate silks,
coyotes gathering at cross streets
and dancing in the glimmering streetlights
as they flicker on in the dusk
and making their coyote-like noisings,
as sweet as they are uncanny,
in the city's deepening twilight.
Why are they wailing so?
Is it from fear, or loneliness, or need for love?
How did the coyotes know
that they are speaking for us?
*
Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new novel, Meditations on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020.
Poetry from Ike Boat, Ghanaian spoken word artist
Poetry from Mahbub
Rohingya Repatriation
It was left no stone unturned
Doctors, nurses, relatives all engaged
How to restore to life
Having them all behind the spirit flies away silently
This carefulness we serve for the humanity
Humanity cries for humanity
But what can we see on the other part of it?
Thousands and millions of people left to experience death and suffering
Rohingyas living in Rakhine with a severe torture on their body flew away
Took shelter in Chattogram of Bangladesh
A pathetic Asian history
Passing their days in the sun suffering from starvation and rain
Under the open sky in unsafe and shaky habitations
Every day the earth blooms pale and grim
Like the old brown leaves in the tree, we see
Every day they would like to go back to their home
But ignored as the citizens or any ethnic group
People flee from the forests in fear of the tigers and the lions
Along the edge of a sea to not to get lost on the vast waters
What a sigh to be deprived of the right!
Not to be able to say
It’s my own land, my own country
The rulers serve people, delivering much of love
Ironically say again and again the same
Deceive them; kill them, a scene of massacre
From this clutch who can save themselves anyway
Try to take the breath fleeing to the other place
Sorry to say its second time failure the attempt-repatriation
Of the Rakhine people living in Bangladesh.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
29/08/2019
Lots of Rain but No Clouds
The sky turns into black from the blue
All seem to be dark and glue
What a restless time!
Though so many fans are running
In this unbearable hot
What feels the mind and body?
The scent of rain through the nostrils
Change the thought to envisage
We see the sky but from black to white
In the meantime the sun shines
We hoped a lot but there is no drop of rain
The world always gains some moments
Our hearts rejoice, beside the heavy rain drops
There floods the rivers causing deaths and sufferings
Where I stand here I see the sky with much of hope
But this overhead is always covered with drought and fog.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
06/09/2019
O My Love
When you love me in true sense
The waves of the river flow in tune
I see and see the full moon in the sky
A sign of love in the rainbow
What a rising after the rain, a new glow
Grasp me all my body and soul
A dream in reality
A promise to reach my destiny
O my love; please hold me in tongue
A wriggle never to be lost
O my heart, my love.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
06/09/2019
Backlash Fear
He turns his face like a ghost
The victim standing before him forgets all
She mumbles and recollects the lashing and dashing to her
A rosy beauty
The cop with his gang stings
The rose full of fragrance and attraction
Torn into —– on the soil
Soft and blooming
The burning eyes encircling her
The mischievous roles a iron rod
The helpless victim reclines silent
The broken heart fumbles on the board
Mr. Judgment is hung on the wall.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
09/09/2019
The Love Shrine
There is no shrine except you
I lie and fondle in the jungle
This mound is only for you and me
Shakes my hands and heart
In this shrine there will be no goddess or god
At the ultimate point of joy
You are my soul mate, my all
Our blood is running too fast
Leaning over I see you on my hands
A full bloomed rose, a full moon starry sky
We wander and enjoy
In this heavenly lagoon
What is more than this idyllic beauty?
Where you and I
In this coral island the blue water sparks into your eyes
The water color eyes, fix into
I find no other heaven in this world
Wherever I see, I see this coral island
You are my atolls
Only you and I this entity century after century
Round over body and soul
After the burial of hundreds or thousands of years
The archeologists may find out
Engraving on the gate ‘The Love Shrine’.
Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh
29/08/2019
Artwork from Ken Rutkowski
I have been living in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam for the past six years. We, everyone here, calls it Saigon. I have traveled extensively around Asia, but I am most familiar and indebted to Vietnam. It is a misunderstood, small, but lively country.
The city is very colorful and bustling, flowers and plants everywhere, outdoor markets, packed alleys and daily services often forgotten about or disregarded in Western cultures. It is a collective mind in this country, life is good, not always easy, but they try to live well, by standards that have seemed to fit my own sensibility.
I call these pieces “picture poems”, a Kenneth Patchen reference/ vernacular, but travel memoirs/ photo essays/ instances in themselves that reflect how I see the world in Vietnam, immersed, and always through learning and contribution.
I am most comfortable with words, but images are usually how the words take form, through the physicality of thought.
Some of the pieces were created in the 3 months our lives have been on hold…three months for us…we have been set free, “man is condemned to be free”, I have seen great acts of determination and hospitality, trade and love, but also dire circumstances that have made me break down. Still, throughout this experience, “we” have remained calm and accepted this as survival first.