Category Archives: CHAOS

Poetry from Mahbub

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Mahbub, a Bangladeshi author and English teacher

Reunion

The word ‘Reunion’ is very sweet

We celebrate the word in so many ways

As the sky is decorated with so many lights

Years after years people of different section

Make the party with so many items and

Enjoy the moment head and heart

Though sudden but expected and curious

We see the recent reunion of the children with their parents

Feeling so much hilarious, joyful and emotional

Gets back a heart’s – blood to move forward

Rushing to the own place feed your children

Look Crystal Clear

There you find no bar, no chain, no hindrance

A long and wide space though living under the trees

A lesson through tension can ever be forgotten?

 

Freedom

We got freedom

Freedom to live, to say, to publish and what not

We got freedom

A freedom is so high as the sky

We got freedom from the clutch of tyranny

From the clutch of exploitation

From the use of your devil thought

You can have your dogs loving

Other pet animals useful to you

Human beings are more that

They can love you, obey you

Give you service for assistance

But he wants freedom everywhere

Any power or trick can’t defeat him

We got our freedom from Pakistan in 1971

But the fate of the common people did not change

Politicians have become more powerful making others helpless

When one minister is on the way so many jeeps run behind him

So many forces guard the one man

When many people are lying beside for want of food

When any procession goes on the way

The common die an unnatural death

We are deprived of our rights can’t say any more

They always try to hold the sits opening their poisonous teeth

We hope to see the golden Bangla in real sense

When our leaders give us the chance to sing that song?

 

Distracted Love

You went away in this ferocious mood

Never thought of that

I bought the golden sun for you

Nourished for years together

A love you can’t imagine

You went away in this tigress mood

Can it be thought any more?

You loved the one

Your heart always bent for him

O beauty, my deity, my love

I call you them so

You took sit behind him and

Went away by motorbike in the dead of night

Can it be thought before?

On the way of conversation you slapped me on my face

The world became dark to me

My whole body trembled with pain

You swam away leaving me alone on my bed

With your boyfriend waiting for you at the door

I only keep my hands on my forehead

In the meantime I see the sun rising

Morning birds surrounded all around me

Till then the sound of groaning I heard to myself

After so many years even now at this moment I can’t forget.

 

An Appeal

I like to die only loving and caring for you

My love, O my dear!

I want to get in touch of you always

Even living hundred or thousand miles away for this or that day

When my eyes will get stopped to see any more

My body will not be able to move to you

I do have my promise

To pass the whole night speaking and loving in the light of stars

Conscious, subconscious or unconscious mind for you

O my dear, behold the vast ocean

How the waves fall down one after another

My heart overflows, please advance

Hold me tight till the end ——-.

 

You Are My Poem

I never thought you would be my poem

To make a journey on the ocean, water and water

Hundreds and thousands of poems

You prevail there

You are my golden ornamental asset

Glitter in the darkness

My speech in the speechless

My sight in the sightless

My potentiality in the impotent

I fall down every time if you turn back

I become senseless if you remain silent

But sometimes silence speaks more than speeches

You are the words to flow the emotion

Through the lines of the verses

Mentality filled with the sources of glory

Lay bare in my writing script

How can I decorate?

You stand before me a complete poem.

Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh

23/06/2018

Elizabeth Hughes’ Book Periscope Column

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Precious Treasures from Grandie River by Wilton Broome

Precious Treasures from Grandie River by Wilton Broome is a fictional story about a family from Tobago. It goes through the life of Mickey and his friend when they find treasure at the Grandie River. The treasure becomes a blessing for their families and the story follows them through childhood to adult. This is an absolutely perfect book for teens and adults. I enjoyed it very much. One of the features I thought brilliant was the key in the back of the book translating the pidgin English to regular English so that the native English-speaker reader can understand. I am sure others will enjoy this as much as I have.
About the book, from the author: 

This book is a literary fiction whose setting began on the Caribbean island of Tobago, but was expanded to Europe and other parts of the world, to mimic the movements of the Caribbean peoples during the Colonial era and after the islands had gained their independence. The book contains elements of some real events, which might have been exaggerated, and were stitched together like the various pieces of fabrics in a quilted sheet in order to link together the discourse of the book. Where a portion of the book is similar to a real episode, the names of the characters have been changed, and the spellings of some of the characters and places in some conversations were intentionally misspelled in order to imitate the broken English that is commonly spoken in Trinidad and Tobago. The reader is advised not to try to associate any of the names of those characters and places to any real person or location they know, seeing that some of the real stories might not have been connected to each other, or might have been fictitious altogether and were used just to suit the narratives of this book. The work attempted to capture what life was like during the period which the book covers, and to promote national unity and racial harmony.

Precious Treasures from the Grandie River is available here from publisher Book Venture. 

Greyhound Therapy by J.R. Conway
Greyhound Therapy is a suspense/thriller that definitely will keep your adrenaline pumping from the first page to the last. Sheriff Craig is the sheriff in Sweetwater County in Wyoming for nearly 20 years. Memorial Hospital is where people are held in detention lock up when they are deemed a danger to themselves or others. The problem is the lock up area can become overwhelmed when too many people are brought in. Then two men are brought in by the police department and Sheriff Craig is called. They put them in the same lock up room and are cuffed. However things go south quickly. Get a copy of Greyhound Therapy and find out how Sheriff Craig has to deal with the problems that have just begun. Really great book! I absolutely loved it!
About the book, from the author:

There is a practice sometimes used by under-funded law enforcement departments and medical facilities where troublemakers or unwanted people with mental illnesses are put on a bus out of town to become someone else’s problem. This practice can go on for extended periods of time, the same people repeatedly getting kicked out of one county and into another.

Author JR Conway has written a book called Greyhound Therapy, which is what this practice of dumping undesirables into neighboring countries is called. The novel follows a county sheriff with a jurisdiction along an interstate, which like an artery is pumping criminals and mentally ill strangers into his community. Undermanned and overwhelmed, the sheriff is faced with an exploding population, inadequate facilities and law enforcement from other counties all the while sending more difficulties his way. Having to solve a murder that occurred in his jail, a wife who has been diagnosed with cancer and a continuous flow of transients, the sheriff must use all his ingenuity and problem solving ability as he deals with crime, personal struggles in his own life and carrying out his responsibilities to care for the transients.

This thrilling and touching novel shows that tragedy and adversity can bring people together in a common purpose of caring for what is truly important in our lives.

Greyhound Therapy is available from publisher Book Venture here. 

I Saw Leaves Last Night by Lisa Musall
I Saw Leaves Last Night is a delightfully cute children’s picture book. The story is about imagining fall leaves doing all kinds of fun things, dancing, singing, and other fun things. The pictures are bright and happy and will delight babies and small children. I enjoyed it very much.
About the author, from Lisa Musall: 
Lisa lives in a rural community in Western New York. She is a wife, mom, farmer and a full time school-based occupational therapist. In her free time, she helps her son show goats at the county fair. This is her first published book.

Poetry from Brian Rihlmann

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ARTISTS, ALL
if we cannot leave behind
poetry
a garden
or children
wiser than we were

then we will leave daydreams
of an ideal world
like traces of music
unheard
reverberating across the sky

and etch the scars
of our separation
like bathroom wall vandals
onto other bodies and souls

and the earth

leaving our denuded
and scorched masterpiece
with not a creature left
to piss on the ashes

CASTING OUR NETS
On New Year’s Eve,
a young woman writes in the sand
with a stick of washed up driftwood
faded white as bone:

“Joy”
“Love”
“Empowered”

and then lets the ocean
pull the words into her depths,
as though casting a net
to draw from the universe
the desired things themselves.

I remember writing our names
on a beach somewhere,
inside a heart,
with the word “forever,”

and how we stood
on the cliff above,
looking down on it,
wrapped in each other’s arms.

The waves took that, too.

You know
how this ends.

Maybe I should tell her about that,
but she probably read about
this inscribing-hopes-in-the-sand technique
in some bestselling book,
and I am just a nosy guy
walking alone on a beach.

WE LONERS
we loners
drift far from the harbor
of family and friends
solitary buoys bobbing
on a swollen sea of time
too much time
riding relentless waves
of contemplation
mad surfers with
but one life
yet unafraid of what
curiosity
did to the cat
we pursue threads
of memory and imagination
through crooked passages
howling and dark
snipping the pieces
that stick to our grasping fingers
stuffing our pockets full
and with these
invisible fibers
weave a cocoon
to huddle in
over the years
adding layers
patching holes
and inside
echoes of echoes
swallow the original voice
as their volume swells
a whirlpool of static
mistaken for self
as burly white coated men
drag shackled sanity
off in a padded van
alone
one’s madness
becomes the truth
of a god
whose whims
are chiseled
in stone
we kneel before
our mirrors
then destroy them
THE ROUGHEST DRAFT
You were my roughest draft of all,
a piece written
and rewritten
until my brain smoldered,
and the pen
grew too heavy
for my fingers to hold.

We’re a story
no one could write,
though I tried.

Pages upon pages of you,
of angrily slanted scrawls
and wild loops
crossing lines into margins,
sometimes plunging
off the sharp white edge
like a 2 a.m. drunk
driving off a cliff.

I keep them
in my bedroom closet,
their futile ink fading
inside a cardboard coffin,
buried beneath a pile
of old clothes
that don’t fit anymore.

Short story from Michael Robinson

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Absolution

Michael Robinson (right)and fellow contributor Joan Beebe

 

 Absolution  

She had left the church at age sixteen never wanting to return. Now twenty-six years later she found herself sitting in the pew quietly weeping. She thought, would there be absolution for the kind of life she had had? It all was a blur, the drugs and prostitution. It started the night that her father wanted to have sex with her when she was sixteen.

He came into her tiny room with the shades closed, with the smell of jasmine in the air. She was a medium sized girl. He body had developed nicely, and her father watched her attentively while she lay in bed with a sheer night gown surrounding her delicate body. He stood in the shadows of the room and watched her for a long time. Finally he got the courage to sit next to her.

She awoke, alarmed to find her father watching her with probing eyes. He began to touch her shoulders and her body froze. He continued to move his hand down her breast. His hand started to shiver.  She was unable to mutter a sound other than a weak whimper as he continued to probe her tender body. He was physically demanding in his sexual advances with her. There was no sensitivity as he all but forced himself onto her.

She found herself staring at the ceiling while he pleasured himself with her. She was numb that night that her father forced himself onto her. Now for ten years there had been a chain of unspeakable experiences with pimps, Johns, and being hooked on cocaine. One day it quietly came to her that if she could make it back to the church, she could regain her life before that night with her father.

She had always believed in god since she could remember and she did not blame him for the many years she was mental, physically, emotionally scarred by life. She stumbled into the church with her tattered soul, her clothing revealing her now fully developed body, damaged from years of abuse.

A nun was kneeling at the altar for her morning devotions when she noticed the young woman. The young woman’s physical appearance brought tears to the nun’s eyes. The nun knew her story and had lived the story herself. Both women kneeled at the altar and simultaneously began to weep. It was at this moment that life began for them both. A nun and a prostitute had found peace and absolution for sins that had been committed against them. It was their faith that had allowed them to discover the true meaning of absolution.

Poetry from Margarita Serafimova

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We were on the beach, and then we weren‘t.

There is nothing more to say.

It is empty, seen from above.

 

In a Capsule of Close-up Infinity

 

When we look at one another,

and only our bodies are between us,

our tenderness is surgery of a star.

 

The whale before the horizon is serenely

and solemnly breathing.

And who are we?

 

The wild stones, in love with the sand,

with curls and quaint beauty,

they breathe too.

And I am breathing with them, mouth to mouth.

 

Leaves, my kings, your bright is dark,

and your dark is bright.

You are in the sky.

 

The stars are coming.

Time is racing asphalt.

 

Leaning on the window’s shutter, eyes closed,

I was inhaling deeply from the bunch of sage you’d hung up there.

“I am having sex with the Earth”, I told you.

“How so?”, you asked.

“Here, like that, with the scent – it enters me, and I give myself.”

 

Soaring is the hyacinth,

a crown of itself,

a crowning of the own,

and an I above the crown.

 

The permutations of love were taking place in a sunlit space.

Spring was maturing into summer,

death was evolving, it now involved planets and roots.

 

It was a circle.

Somewhere in it, I overflowed –

my eyes had mirrored themselves in the deep of yours.

Gray flecked, with lights.

 

 

Margarita Serafimova was shortlisted for the Montreal Poetry Prize 2017, Summer Literary Seminars 2018 and 2019, and Hammond House Prize 2018; long-listed for the Christopher Smart (Eyewear Publishing) Prize 2019, Erbacce Press Poetry Prize 2018 and Red Wheelbarrow 2018 Prize, and nominated for Best of the Net 2018. She has three collections in Bulgarian. Her work appears in Agenda Poetry, London Grip, Waxwing, Trafika Europe, Landfill, A-Minor, Poetry South, Great Weather for Media, Orbis, Nixes Mate, StepAway, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Leveler, Mookychick, HeadStuff, Minor Literatures, Writing Disorder, Birds We Piled Loosely, Chronogram, Noble/ Gas, Origins, The Journal, miller’s pond, Obra/ Artifact, Arteidolia/ Swifts&Slows, Memoir Mixtapes, glitterMOB, TAYO, Guttural, Punch, Tuck, Ginosko, etc. Visit: https://www.facebook.com/MargaritaISerafimova/?ref=aymt_homepage_panel.

Short story from Michael Robinson

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One Night in the Shadow of Bliss

III 

Michael Robinson (right)and fellow contributor Joan Beebe

Lace bra and underpants covered her body, as she stood, in front of the mirror, her eyes were strong. Her pupils opened wide filling with moist tears. Her memories returned to the night when the moon was full when the stars were bright in the night skies, she saw a glimmer of life. The smell of sweetness remained in the air while there was darkness reflecting from her heart. She wanted to leave those thoughts behind and accept warmth of a man’s touch. It was more than his touch, it was her life she began to remember her past which was painful. The following morning her emotions would be raw. However, for now it would be safe to be a woman in love, to feel the sensations of womanhood. She would forget the painful past for those hours with him.

The gentleness between them was electrifying with foreplay. Holding her close to his body, kissing her from the top of body gently, and quietly moving his fingers across her lips. She laid there with her eyes closed enjoying the moment. He touched her breast with his fingers playing with her pierced nipples between his fingers. She knew what would be next because they had always made love with his lips replacing his fingers on the left nipple. The earring in her navel made his touch even more exciting to her.  

She began to moan, breathing deeply. Her skin was smooth, and his tongue covered her stomach the movement of his lips and tongue made her cry as she had several orgasms. She was in a state of total surrender to his every touch. Knowing that her pierced clitoris would be next. Her pubic hair was soft from the wetness of his tongue. He didn’t mind kissing her vagina. He loved the fluid of her body mixed with his saliva leaving a tart taste. It was always like this when they had intercourse. He would wrap his arms around her midsection holding her tight enough that the sweat between them united.  

She loved being this close to someone that made love feel love for herself in this manner. Certain that he would always be gentle and sensitive to her sexuality. It was not being fucked like with the others. It wasn’t that kind of relationship between them. He wanted to satisfy her to make her feel love and connected to him. He wanted her to feel like she and he was more than a one-night stand and each time he was determined to express his desire to be the only man she would ever want to be with. She loved him so she gave herself to him without hesitation.

Touching his eyelids slightly with her manicured red fingernails with her open palm she closed his eyes. Her lips were soft and full. She touched his nipples with her lips biting the hardened nipples of his. He would shake with excitement, as she moves down his body, slowly with intense she made him moan. She gentle climbed on top of him and for what was a moment of ecstasy both had an orgasm together. A quiet moan which gave her gratification knowing he was fulfilled by her.

He was the one man she gives herself totally and he knew it by the way she made him feel and respond to her gentleness. The street lights pierced through the closed curtains reflecting the soft powder blue color of the them. She saw his reflection as she stood with glazed eyes watching him. Her brown eyes did not reflect life but rather despair. She quietly put on her red skin-tight dress. Lying on the dresser was an envelope with payment for the night encounter. The light in the corridor was a shock to her eyes. Her red heels were lost in the thickness of the carpet in the hallway. She returned to the corner in which she worked and waited for her next customer knowing she was loved in a world of pain. 

Poetry from J.J. Campbell

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Author J.J. Campbell

Author J.J. Campbell

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 The Rye Whiskey Review, The Dope Fiend Daily, Fourth & Sycamore, Horror Sleaze Trash and Cajun Mutt Press. You can find him most days on his mildly entertaining blog, evil delights. (https://evildelights.blogspot.com)
———————————————————————————————
long days of pain
 
there’s an old
black soul deep
inside me
these long days
of pain are nothing
new
the ache starts
in the small of
the back and
climbs the spine
until it rests in
my brain
on the good days
i’m only crazy
on the bad days
some motherfucker
is going to find out
how much evil is
inside me
———————————————————————————–
when the darkness takes over
 
laughter is the last
thing that leaves
a crazy mind
when the darkness
takes over every
nook and cranny
it can either be
the slow decline
or a rush of blood
to the head
there’s a shotgun
in the corner for
a reason
——————————————————————————-
sign language
 
my mother
is losing
her hearing
i let her know
the only sign
language i
remember is
how to sign
eat shit and
die
she laughs
and gives me
the sign that
i am number
one
———————————————————————————
the same year you were molested as a child
 
picture that
utopia you
fantasized
about as
a teenager
and then
remember
you realized
what death
was the same
year you were
molested as
a child
utopias never
have existed
at least not
without the
help of
chemical
substances
and a
repressed
society can
never reach
its full
potential
ever
———————————————————————————–
getting warmer
 
the weather is
finally getting
warmer
soon, it will
be short skirts
and a lonely
man seeking
an adventure