Welcome to September’s second issue of Synchronized Chaos! First, some announcements.

Author Eldar Akhadov requests reviews of his title Philosophy of the North: Notes of a Mine Surveyor – Arctic Prose and Philosophical Essays. More about Akhadov and the book here:

Author of the book *Philosophy of the North: Notes of a Mine Surveyor — Arctic Prose & Philosophical Essays*.  I have authored 111 books in seven languages; I am a polar explorer who writes both non-fiction and creative works about Arctic exploration, philosophical poetry inspired by nature, travelogues on Siberia, and literature celebrating the northern wilderness. 

My books are not the product of an armchair scholar’s ​​imagination but reflect the harsh reality of the Arctic and the courage of the people who face it. Please, find a few kind words for my book. To write these works, I have descended kilometers underground, paraglided over the wild taiga, and encountered wild beasts; I have faced two attempts on my life and was once nearly sold into slavery—yet I am alive to share these incredible, true stories with you.

Also, our regular contributor Rui Carvalho invites readers and contributors to submit poetry to the next annual Nature Writing Contest.

Our contest, Nature 2025-2026, is a new opportunity that we, as organizers, create to reach the rest of the world. Every Contest is a challenge for authors participating and to people that make it happen. This year we invite all authors to write poetry about:
(i) Flowers;
(ii) Trees and wind;
(iii) Water;
(iv) Nature Conservation;
(v) Turtles;
(vi) Love for people and nature;
(vii) Hope and Happiness.

Rules and submission information here.

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Next, we turn to this month’s issue: The Human Atlas: An Essay in Maps.

There is no single map of a life. The territory is too vast, too contradictory, too layered with joy and loss and the strange persistence of hope. The writers gathered here, hailing from Uzbekistan to Nigeria, from Bangladesh to Serbia, from Australia to the United States, collectively produce something remarkable: not a single narrative but an atlas. Each contributor traces a different region of the human condition and together suggests that to be human is to carry every map at once.

Book One: The Body

The first maps are drawn on flesh itself.

Feruza Jumanazar qizi Boymurodova charts the quiet crisis of maternal iron deficiency. Kamolabonu Rasuljon qizi Inomova extends this cartography of care, mapping the preventable contours of cervical cancer in Uzbekistan, a map drawn not in despair but in the sharp lines of public health and awareness.

The body ages too, and here the atlas shifts. Ri Hossain maps the slow relinquishment of ambition, the acceptance of mortality as a landscape one enters rather than resists. Milka J. Šolaja redraws aging not as shrinkage but as expansion, a body making room for even more love as it burns toward its end. Graciela Noemi Villaverde offers a royal metaphor for this same territory: the inner sovereignty that arrives with self-respect and wisdom, a throne built from the inside out.

And what of the body wounded? Mickey Corrigan maps the workplace as a terrain of vulnerability for women, with the cost of survival etched into bodies and minds. Emmanuel Barnabas insists on a full accounting of war’s toll on the human frame and psyche, a map of bodies that no one wants to look at but that must be drawn. Eva Petropoulou elegizes childhood innocence lost to war, mapping the before and after as two countries that share no border.

Book Two: The Heart

Some maps are drawn with emotion. Türkan Ergör traces a simple moment of love and connection, a small, but sincere, map. Munira Abdullajanova celebrates family, paying tribute to her beloved mother. Rayhona Sobirjonova maps the territory of sisterhood, honoring her sibling as her mentor and best friend.

Darren C. Demaree asks the hardest question on this page of the atlas: can love, stripped of fairy-tale romanticism, consist of daily choices to persevere amidst ordinary suffering and mortality? Philip Butera maps the human craving for certainty in love and wonders if this exists, even between two people who genuinely care. For Bahtiyar Hidayet, a photograph of Jennifer Lopez becomes a mirror for the poet’s own despair and yearning for permanence, the celebrity images a compass pointing inward.

Betrayal leaves its own topography.

Diyorova Zuhra Bobonazar qizi maps the lingering effects of trust broken by lovers or friends, a landscape where every landmark is a reminder. Milena Pčinjski draws the quiet exhaustion of loving someone who is already gone, the difficult work of accepting a separation that the heart keeps refusing. Mesfakus Salahin’s poem depicts grief, abandonment, and the stubborn endurance of love in the face of irreversible loss. Shannon Scoates speaks to the ache of being overlooked: a map of negative space, of the person standing right there whom no one sees.

And yet the heart persists. Elmaya Jabbarova reflects on romantic passion as a sweet illusory escape, a pleasure map, knowingly drawn in pencil. Jacques Fleury offers a clever and tender vision of romantic idealism, the heart’s own Mercator projection of how things could be. Dr. HC Rozalia Aleksandrova draws love as what it may actually be: a fragile, cosmic force that bridges distance and risk, sorrow and joy, a silent compass living within us.

Book Three: The World

Open the atlas wider. Joseph C. Ogbonna maps the global prejudice against Black African men, a cartography of suffering drawn overlaid on the actual continents. Pat Doyne frames the U.S. war with Iran as distraction and misfortune, a map drawn by power to obscure other, truer geographies. Mykyta Ryzhykh captures the existential despair of populations shaped by centuries of totalitarianism and colonization, a map written in the bone memory of peoples.

Saeed Koushan speaks for the uprooted, those displaced by war, persecution, or personal tragedy, a map that keeps moving as it is drawn. Calì Velela names the experiences society fails to see, illuminating the blind spots of the dominant cartography. Mark Young dramatizes war as scripted performance from which everyone could simply walk away, the ultimate unmapping of conflict.

Alan Catlin bypasses conscious control entirely, letting the subconscious speak through associative leaps and Surrealist juxtapositions. Rus Khomutoff’s moon-masked figure recalls carnival traditions and the unconscious, a brief video that maps the space between dream and ritual.

Book Four: The Home and the Hearth

Here the atlas breathes. Manasa Reddy Chichili and Uchechukwu Onyedikam jointly send up five vignettes of daily life in a rural West African community, a map of rhythm, of the ordinary made sacred by attention. Christina Chin’s haiga and artwork capture the making of cocoa, drawing taste and labor and culture in brushstrokes and syllables. Oruj Dadashi Elman celebrates the long history of Tabriz, an ancient Azerbaijani city mapped in layers of civilization.

Hassan Musa Dakasku reveals the inner world of the introvert: depths of love and thought that never make a a sound but fill an entire country. Egamnazarova Shahina Shaxriyor qizi draws a hopeful map of kindred spirits who may one day meet, a geography of the not-yet. Abigail George maps the resilience of a child who must invent sanctuary when adults are absent or dangerous, the most urgent and desperate cartography.

Amonboyeva Shahnoza describes Uzbekistan’s efforts to promote reading and literacy: a map of access, of opening doors that were closed. Shodmanova Rukhshona charts the rise of bank cards in Uzbekistan, the mundane revolution of plastic and PINs that reshapes daily life as surely as any river.

Book Five: The Mind and the Soul

Some maps are drawn inward. Priyanka Neogi’s “At the Crossroads of the Mind” traces the shift from intellectual control to emotional surrender, from isolation to connection. Maja Milojković seeks deep within herself for understanding and grace, a map that keeps extending its own borders. Young-eun Kang probes the wound of language itself, how it can divide and conquer and erase, and searches for what might exist before that wound, a pre-linguistic country no one remembers.

Nataša Radanović reminds us that the Earth is older than we are, drawing a map on a geological timescale that makes human concerns both trivial and sacred. Danijela Ćuk highlights the power of the written word, the cartographer’s own tool, capable of mapping truth or lies. Mauro Montachiessi reviews Dr. Jernail Anand’s Conversations with the Infinite, which laments the post-truth era and calls us back to rigorous ethics, a map of the way home.

Xursanaliyeva Sanobar resolves to pursue the eternal security found through her faith above earthly riches.

Latifa Harbaoui explores the mystery of death and the inadequacy of philosophy to map it, the edge of the atlas. Niloy Rafiq draws on Bengali geography, Jain philosophy, and literary homage to explore spiritual awakening, a map of transcendence. Mahbub Alam traces light and darkness, memory and spiritual renewal, a meditative map of the soul’s journey.

Book Six: The Making and the Breaking

And finally, the maps we make with our hands. Shinha Sarder portrays the creativity and resilience of the engineer’s mindset, a map of problem-solving. Stephen Jarrell Williams offers a short piece about being centered, fully present in a body and a history before the day begins, a map of the present moment. Md. Sheikh Rayhan profiles himself as an enterprising digital entrepreneur who contributes to the ecosystem, a map of ambition and self-construction.

H. M. Omar Faruk Ahmed Pobitro presents integrated success: deep Islamic faith, musical ability, and digital business acumen, a three-dimensional map of a whole person. Brian Michael Barbeito writes a manifesto for the poet and mystic as outcasts in a world driven by population and profit, a map of the margins where, it turns out, the most interesting people live. Tanja Ajtic urges us to make the most of the present moment together, to build a kinder world, a map of the possible.

Asalbonu Otamurodova reframes comparison to others as inspiration rather than despair, a map of the healthy gaze. Sayani Mukherjee suggests a middle path between self-righteousness and selfishness, a map of balance. Soumen Roy celebrates the sweet seasons when life begins again, the annual remapping of the world by spring. Shangguan Changfeng commemorates a poet’s birthday by comparing her to the moth orchid, a map drawn in flowers. Nidia Amelia García celebrates childhood dreams, a map before we learned to doubt.

O’tkir Mulikboyev’s poems speak to nature, wisdom, and human connection, a triptych of three panels of one map. Menda Vreto’s poetry urges gentleness, drawn with a soft hand. Kushi Nanayakkara argues through surreal imagery for a reawakening of the human spirit, a map of the resurrection the world needs.

Alex S. Johnson portrays Liv Jagrell as one who transforms loss into fierce art and activism. Her roar is a sound map of resistance. Dr. Jernail S. Anand advocates for educational reform in the digital age, a map of the future. To’lqinova Marjona Nazarxon qizi discusses AI’s impact on education, another future map, drawn in code.

Mohammad Qutubuddin sends up a cyberpunk allegory of surveillance and fragmented agency, with literary echoes of the panopticon. Fernando Sorrentino’s “The Prankster Goose” shows how a harmless joke escapes control, a map of unintended consequence. J.J. Campbell maps the grim comedy of persistence: we keep going because the alternative is unacceptable, fueled by equal parts humor and bitterness.

Bill Tope probes forgiveness, boundaries, and the cost of protecting one’s peace, a map of the hard yes and the harder no. Duane Vorhees notes wryly that each generation’s truisms are social constructs, a map that reveals pack ice where we thought there was solid ground. Ali Hasnain centers trauma, inherited shame, and the difficult recovery of agency, a map of coming back to oneself.

Epilogue: The Atlas Is Unfinished

After all these maps — of body and heart, of home and world, of mind and making — what emerges is not a single human shape but a constellation. The writers of this atlas do not agree on everything. They map different territories with different tools: some use the sonnet, others the case study; some draw in medical data, others lean into surreal juxtapositions. But they share one conviction: that life’s territory can be mapped, that attention is a form of love, and that to name an experience — however painful, however overlooked, however tender — is to bring it into the shared geography of the human experience.

There is no map that captures everything. But these maps, laid side by side, begin to suggest the shape of the whole: a creature who suffers and loves, who betrays and forgives, who builds cities and flees them, who prays and doubts, who tends cocoa and plants and mothers and strangers, who ages and dreams and, against all evidence, keeps beginning again.

The atlas, mercifully, is not yet complete.

BOATS IN THE REACHED LANDS

ALI Hasnain

PART I

The first thing Elias Vale searched for after the plane came apart was a flint stone.

Not water. Not the pilot. Not the red emergency case he had seen beneath the rear seat before the world turned sideways. A stone. Something with an edge sharp enough to strike against steel, something old enough to know fire before men gave it names.

The fuselage had broken among black spruce on a high shelf of wilderness, its tail hanging twenty yards away like the discarded half of an animal. Fuel scented the rain. One wing burned in the moss with an orange flame too neat for what had happened. Elias stood in his torn shirt and listened for voices. He heard only the ticking of cooling metal and, far down the slope, water moving through rock.

He had been flying north to meet his father.

Professor Gideon Vale: archaeologist, seminary lecturer, excavator of ruined sanctuaries, expert in burial thresholds and the migration of sacred symbols. Elias had spent four unpaid semesters cataloguing pottery for the seminary’s field institute because his father called the position a fellowship and told him experience was a kind of payment.

The title had almost made him laugh. Fellow to whom?

He found a gray stone near the roots of an uprooted fir and tested its edge with his thumb.

Chert, maybe. Not flint exactly.

Good enough.

The pilot was dead. Elias knew before touching him. The man’s eyes were open toward the torn ceiling, and a white feather from the insulation rested at the corner of his mouth. Elias took the emergency knife, a half-full bottle of water, a lighter that clicked but would not catch, and the small signal mirror from the vest pocket.

His own phone showed a white spiderweb across the glass and no service.

“Of course,” he said.

His father had texted before takeoff: DELAYED AT SITE. WALK TO BASE CAMP IF THEY DROP YOU AT SOUTH STRIP. I MAY NOT BE THERE.

Not I’m sorry. Not I wish I could meet you.

The message felt now like an artifact retrieved from a civilization whose cruelty had been so ordinary no one had recorded it as cruelty.

Elias put the phone away.

He needed fire, shelter, and a route down to the river. He knew that. He had taken enough field methods courses to know the hierarchy of survival. But his hands kept looking for stone, for clean fractures and waxy surfaces, because stone was the one language his father had taught without touching him.

The bear appeared while Elias was kneeling beside a wash of gravel.

At first he thought the black shape beyond the alders was a burned stump. Then the stump moved sideways and became shoulders. A head rose. The distance between them seemed to collapse before either creature had decided anything.

Elias stood slowly.

The bear huffed.

He remembered every pamphlet at once: do not run, look large, speak calmly, back away, do not surprise, do not threaten, do not become prey.

“Hello,” Elias said.

The bear lowered its head.

“Bad day for both of us.”

It came forward.

Elias ran.

Branches whipped his face. The emergency knife struck his thigh through his pocket. Behind him, brush broke with a violence that seemed too quick to belong to flesh. He did not look back until the ground dropped from beneath his boots.

For an instant he was still running in air.

Then the ravine took him.

He struck a shelf of dirt shoulder-first, spun, hit a tree root with the back of his skull, and continued downward among stones that seemed to rise in turns to meet him. His mouth filled with the taste of pennies. He saw sky, root, sky, a white slab of granite, and then a childhood hallway.

Not a memory exactly. A door.

He was eight and waiting outside the principal’s office with blood on his school shirt because a boy had shoved him through the wired glass beside the gym. His mother had arrived first. She held a dish towel around his forearm because the nurse had run out of gauze.

His father was at a dig in Jordan.

“He called,” his mother kept saying.

Elias remembered staring at the phone on the receptionist’s desk as if love might crawl out of it if the cord were long enough.

The ravine turned him over.

At thirteen he had stood in a hospital corridor while his mother’s lungs drowned by degrees. Gideon arrived six hours after she died. He kissed Elias on the crown of his head and immediately began discussing the funeral with the chaplain, as if grief were a site requiring permits.

At sixteen Elias had been arrested for breaking the side mirror off a teacher’s car. Gideon sat across from him in the police station and said, “You understand consequences are a form of education.”

Elias had wanted him to ask why.

He never did.

Stone struck his ribs. Pain flashed white.

At nineteen, in the seminary annex, another fellow had followed Elias into the basement archive after midnight.

That memory did not come as pictures. It came as locks: the click of the stairwell door, the pressure of a wrist pinned wrong, the smell of dust and wool, his own mind abandoning the room before his body could. The other man had used him. Later, other people used older words for what had been done. Elias learned that one of those words was sodomy, and for months the word seemed to accuse the wrong person.

He showered until the dormitory water turned cold. He stopped answering friends. He stood once on the pedestrian bridge above the freight tracks and waited for the will to step forward.

His father came three days later because an administrator had called.

Gideon sat on the edge of Elias’s bed without removing his coat.

“You should speak to someone trained for this,” he said.

“I’m speaking to you.”

“Yes, but I’m your father.”

Elias waited for the rest.

There was no rest.

Gideon found a counselor’s card, placed it on the desk, and began explaining that trauma often confused memory, that reporting had procedural consequences, that Elias should not make a decision while distressed.

“Do you know what happened to me?” Elias asked.

His father closed his eyes for one second too long.

“I know what you told me.”

That answer became a room Elias lived in for years.

The ravine narrowed. Elias struck something hard enough that his breath vanished. He came to rest against a fallen cedar with one leg twisted under him.

Above, the bear appeared at the lip of the ravine.

It looked down.

Rain began, light and cold.

Elias tried to move his foot. Nothing happened. His left hand tingled. Blood slid warmly behind one ear.

The bear did not descend. It paced once along the edge and disappeared into the brush.

“You win,” Elias whispered.

He thought of the trip’s purpose. Gideon had found something at the seminary excavation—a set of carved stones, his last message said, “possible threshold iconography, anomalous sequence.” He had asked Elias to come because Elias knew the catalog system better than anyone. Not because he missed him. Not because they needed to speak.

Because Elias was useful.

The rain strengthened.

He pulled the gray chert from his pocket. During the fall it had split. The fresh face shone darkly, almost blue.

His father would have approved of the fracture.

Elias laughed once and immediately coughed blood.

He pressed the stone into the mud beside his cheek and thought, absurdly, of writing a field label.

OBJECT: MAN.

CONTEXT: COLLAPSED.

PROVENANCE: DISPUTED.

Then the cedar, the rain, the ravine, and the whole known world went out.

PART II

He woke to the sound of an oar entering water.

There was no pain.

Elias opened his eyes and found himself lying in the bottom of a narrow boat whose wood was pale as old bone. The sky above him was enormous. Crepuscular clouds folded from violet into rose, lit beneath by a sun he could not locate. Rain hung in the distance like silver hair but had not yet reached the water.

He sat up.

On every side stretched a lake without visible shore, yet the country rose from it in impossible nearness. Houses stood on green islands with white walls and roofs of blue-black tile. Meadows descended directly into water. Fens shivered with reeds taller than a man. Beyond them, hills had been cut into terraces so precise they looked written upon: barley, vines, flowering beans, red-leafed orchards, bands of saffron yellow and lucid green.

People—or figures like people—moved far away among the terraces. Bells sounded from somewhere behind the rain.

Elias touched the back of his head. No blood.

His clothes were clean.

“What kind of coil,” he said, “does a person have to shed to deserve this?”

The rower behind him laughed.

Elias turned.

The man was narrow, ageless, and dressed in a dark coat despite the warm air. His hair fell to his shoulders in gray-black waves. He rowed with one oar, changing sides without causing the boat to turn.

“You ask about deserving before asking where you are,” the rower said. “This delights me.”

“Where am I?”

“Reached Lands.”

“Reached by what?”

“By you.”

Elias looked at the water. It held the sky so perfectly that the oar seemed to cut through clouds beneath them.

“Are you dead?” he asked.

“Frequently.”

“Am I?”

The rower considered him with open pleasure.

“You are the seeker,” he said. “For whom I elate.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I have been lonely.”

The boat passed close to an island where women in white aprons shook rainwater from carpets patterned with golden birds. A child ran after a hoop. A black dog slept beneath a fig tree. Everything looked unbearably complete.

The rower rested his oar across his knees.

“You may call me Oberon.”

“That’s your name?”

“No. I enjoy it.”

“What is your name?”

“No.”

Elias almost smiled.

Then Oberon leaned forward and studied him with the tenderness of a physician discovering a symptom.

“A sodomite,” he said softly. “For whom grows the hemlock, creased in the dampened hollow where Nature remains fallen with her young tresses.”

Elias stopped breathing.

“What did you call me?”

Oberon dipped the oar.

“You heard.”

“I was assaulted.”

“Yes.”

“That doesn’t make me—”

“No.”

“Then why say it?”

“Because the word followed you farther than the man did.”

Elias stood too quickly. The boat barely moved beneath him.

“You don’t get to do that.”

Oberon’s eyes widened, not in alarm but admiration.

“Good.”

“Good?”

“Protest is one of the few honest instruments brought from Earth.”

“You make a filthy accusation and then congratulate me?”

“I made no accusation. Your world made it. I merely showed you the brand still smoking.”

Elias stared at him.

Oberon rowed on.

They passed a flooded orchard where pears floated among the branches without falling. On a low bank, an old man repaired a roof while rain passed through his body and struck the shingles beneath. Farther on, a procession carried empty chairs into a meadow and arranged them facing the west.

“What is this place?” Elias asked.

“A place reached.”

“By the dead?”

“By those who arrive.”

“Same thing.”

“Earth trained you to love categories because categories can be buried in neat rows.”

“My father would like you.”

“Your father likes the dead because they cannot interrupt his theories.”

Elias felt anger rise so quickly it frightened him.

“You know him?”

“I know the shape he left in you.”

Oberon’s answer was quiet.

For a while they moved without speaking. Rain finally crossed them—not drops, but a soft vertical brightness that cooled Elias’s face and vanished before touching the bottom of the boat.

On another island, terraces climbed toward a palace no larger than a farmhouse until Elias looked away; when he looked back, it covered half the hill.

“This is beautiful,” he said despite himself.

“Yes.”

“That feels like a trap.”

“Yes.”

Oberon smiled.

“You are improving.”

Elias asked why the rower had been waiting. Oberon said he had not been waiting, exactly. He had been rowing. Waiting was what people called motion when they disliked its direction.

“How long?” Elias asked.

“Long enough to prefer ‘Oberon’ to several better names.”

“And you’re happy I came.”

“I elate.”

“That is not how that verb works.”

“Here it is.”

They entered a channel between banks of lavender-colored grass. White cattle drank from one side. On the other stood a row of unfinished houses, each with a table set inside and no roof above it.

Oberon looked at Elias suddenly.

“Remain.”

It was the first word he had spoken without wit.

“What?”

“Remain in the Reached Lands.”

“You just said we were going somewhere.”

“We are.”

“Then why ask me to stay?”

“Because asking after departure is useless.”

His face had changed. Beneath the amusement was fear.

Elias sat very still.

“What’s ahead?”

Oberon resumed rowing.

“A larger channel.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“No.”

The lavender banks widened, and the water darkened from mirrored blue to the color of iron. The air acquired a faint warmth. Bells ceased behind them. Elias noticed that every distant figure in the fields had stopped moving.

Ahead, the channel opened.

At first Elias thought the horizon was red with sunset.

Then the horizon moved.

There were boats.

A thousand, perhaps more, assembled on the wider water in ranks so vast that their masts made a forest. Some were long as freighters. Others rose three and four decks high, broad enough to carry orchards. Their silhouettes were unmistakable: hull, mast, rigging, rudder, prow. Vessels made for distance.

But no timber had built them.

The nearest hull flexed.

Its sides were paneled in skin.

Not hide, not leather prepared by tanning, but pale human skin joined in enormous overlapping fields, pores visible where the water lifted it. Seams ran from bow to stern like surgical scars. At intervals, ribs curved outward as braces, ivory arcs wet at their lower ends. The boat breathed. Elias could not call the movement anything else. The planking expanded by fractions, paused, then drew inward, sending dark ripples across the channel.

Its mast was a column of vertebrae bound by glossy cords. Between each bone sat a disk of cartilage, and when the wind shifted the whole mast bent with terrible grace instead of creaking.

“What—” Elias began.

Oberon did not answer.

Another vessel crossed their path at a distance. Its sails were translucent and veined. Light passed through them pinkly. Elias watched wind inflate what looked like acres of membrane, and the veins darkened as if blood had been driven into them by the gust. Along the lower edge, eyelids had been stitched together in a fringe. They opened one after another as the sail filled.

Hundreds of eyes regarded the water.

Some were brown, some blue, some milk-white. One rolled until it seemed to find Elias.

He looked away and saw worse.

The rigging was braided hair and tendon. Knots tightened themselves. Great blocks swung from hooks made of fused finger bones. The anchor of one ship was a pelvis widened with hammered metal, its chain a procession of interlocked jaws. Teeth clicked beneath the surface when the vessel drifted.

A crew in bright clothing moved over the decks laughing.

They looked human. Alive.

A woman stood at the rail drinking from a silver cup. Two men played dice upon a table whose grain, Elias realized, was not wood but the whorled pattern of a giant fingernail. Children ran between coils of rope. Musicians tuned instruments near the stern.

None of them seemed to notice what carried them.

“Do they see it?” Elias whispered.

“They see a ship,” Oberon said.

“So do I.”

“No. You see its grammar.”

The next boat had a prow shaped from a cluster of faces fused cheek to cheek. Their mouths formed the line where spray broke. Each time the bow struck a wave, the mouths opened together and expelled a low chord. The sound passed through Elias’s chest like organ music.

Behind that vessel came one whose lower hull was dark red muscle exposed to air, the fibers arranged lengthwise as though the entire ship were a single leg straining through water. Every contraction drove it forward. Its rudder was a shoulder blade. Its deck was paved with squares of hardened tongue.

The smell reached them then: salt, iron, milk, smoke, roses left too long in a hot room.

Elias covered his mouth.

The fleet extended farther than vision. Some ships were white with fat, buoyant and softly luminous. Others were blackened as if roasted, their surfaces lacquered by heat. One carried three masts made from femurs bundled into towers. Another had no mast at all; six enormous lungs rose and collapsed on its deck, inflating sails from within. Their exhalations made fog.

There were beautiful ones.

That frightened Elias most.

A narrow crimson cutter passed with a hull polished smooth as a lip. Pearls had been set along its rail, until one pearl blinked and he understood they were eyes coated in something nacreous. Its figurehead was a pair of hands clasped in prayer. Each fingertip held a tiny flame.

A barge behind it had gardens growing from its deck. White flowers rooted in exposed marrow. Bees entered hollows in long bones and emerged dusted gold. From a distance it might have been a wedding boat.

Then Elias saw the keel trailing beneath the water: a braided spinal cord thick as an ancient tree.

The boats bumped one another gently as the channel narrowed toward something not yet visible. Wherever two hulls touched, skin dimpled against skin.

“You said this place was reached,” Elias said. His voice trembled. “Where are they going?”

Oberon’s oar rested motionless.

“The Unreached Lands.”

A ship close by erupted in cheers. Its captain, a broad woman wearing a coat embroidered with pomegranates, had climbed onto the rail. She raised a bottle and shouted toward the fleet. Other captains answered. Horns blew. Drums rolled across decks stretched with skins Elias refused to identify.

“What’s there?” he asked.

“Feast.”

Oberon counted on his fingers.

“Folly. Sex. Music. Babies enough to repopulate dead empires. Palaces where every room opens into summer. Wine that remembers the grape. Fruit that bruises when you think of biting it. Beds large enough for dynasties. The captains have been promised abundance without accounting.”

“And the crews?”

Oberon looked at him.

Elias already knew.

“No.”

“The crews are the accounting.”

A gust crossed the channel. Every membrane sail snapped at once. The sound was like a city slapping its hands against a wall.

“They’re going to be killed.”

“Slaughtered,” Oberon said. “The word is uglier and therefore nearer.”

“For the feast?”

“For many feasts.”

Elias looked at the laughing children on the nearest deck.

“They don’t know.”

“They know they were invited.”

“That isn’t the same thing.”

“Very little is.”

The awful fleet seemed suddenly ceremonial. Garlands hung from rails. Lanterns glowed in sockets made of skulls. Banners streamed from muscle-masts, painted with suns, lions, crowns, lovers, grapes, infants, musical notes. Every emblem promised life while the material beneath it testified to consumption.

Elias saw a sailor lean over a rail and trail his fingers in the water. Beneath his hand, the hull twitched.

“Where did the boats come from?” Elias asked.

Oberon closed his eyes.

“From the last feast.”

Elias turned to him.

“No.”

“The remains are useful.”

The phrase was so much like his father that Elias almost struck him.

Bones for structure. Skin for sail. Tendon for line. Fat for lamp oil. Teeth for fastening. Hair for cordage. Blood thickened into pitch and pigment. Nothing wasted. A civilization of perfect reuse.

Elias imagined banquet tables being cleared not into graves but shipyards.

The fleet around him became an equation that solved itself through appetite.

For the first time he understood why the vessels were beautiful. Beauty was not mercy. Beauty was how the invitation reproduced.

He bent over the side of Oberon’s little pale boat and retched, but nothing came from him.

“You wanted me to remain,” he said when he could speak.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Oberon watched the great ships pass.

“Because I have delivered many who believed heaven was the absence of refusal.”

“Delivered where?”

“Forward.”

“And what happened to them?”

“You have seen the boats.”

Elias looked down at Oberon’s vessel.

Pale as old bone.

He touched the gunwale.

Wood.

He hoped.

“What are you?”

“A rower.”

“Were you ever crew?”

Oberon’s smile returned, but it had no joy in it.

“I liked another name then.”

The great channel narrowed toward two vertical darknesses standing in the distance. They were not doors exactly. The sky bent around them. Water poured toward them without lowering. Between the dark pillars hung a region of gold light so intense it made every flesh-built vessel cast a shadow backward toward the Reached Lands.

The metaphysical gates.

Elias understood without being told.

Oberon set the oar in the water again.

Their little boat turned toward the gates.

“No,” Elias said.

Oberon rowed once.

“You said remain.”

“I pleaded.”

“Then stop.”

“I cannot stop after the larger channel.”

“You brought me here.”

“Yes.”

“Take me back.”

“No.”

The word was gentle, and that made it worse.

Elias grabbed the oar. Oberon did not resist. For one second they both held it.

“What happens if I jump?” Elias asked.

“You enter the water.”

“And?”

“You discover why the boats float.”

Elias released the oar.

The golden opening between the gates widened. Music drifted from beyond it—drums, strings, laughter, the dense human roar of a festival too large to imagine. He smelled bread. Rain. Charred meat. Orange peel. A perfume his mother used to wear.

His knees weakened.

“That’s cruel.”

“Yes.”

“What do they want from me?”

“The Unreached Lands want nothing. Wanting is what arrives.”

“And my soul?”

Oberon looked directly at him.

“Will not return to Earth.”

Elias thought of his body in the ravine: rain gathering in his hair, the broken chert beside his cheek, perhaps rescuers days away, perhaps his father standing eventually above a zipped bag and asking someone for coordinates.

He thought of waking.

He thought of not waking.

“Am I being punished?”

Oberon shook his head.

“That is the oldest vanity. To imagine terror must be about justice.”

“Then why me?”

“Because you arrived.”

The answer hurt more than judgment.

Elias watched the captains cheer as the first enormous ships approached the gates. He watched their crews set tables on deck, pass bottles, tune fiddles, lift children to their shoulders so they could see the golden country ahead.

He remembered Gideon saying consequences were a form of education.

For once Elias wanted no lesson.

He wanted only to see.

That desire frightened him because it felt pure.

“What if I agree?”

Oberon’s hands tightened on the oar.

“To what?”

“To go.”

“You are going.”

“No. You know what I mean.”

Oberon searched his face.

Elias looked back at the Reached Lands. The terraces were far behind now, bands of green under the violet storm. Rain walked across them in luminous curtains. Houses shone warmly. Somewhere back there were chairs facing west, pears floating on branches, a dog asleep beneath a fig tree. A place beautiful enough to remain in forever, if remaining had still been possible.

His father had spent a career studying thresholds, as though a threshold mattered because it separated two rooms.

Maybe the important thing was that someone chose to cross.

Elias felt anger at that thought because it sounded like Gideon.

He laughed.

“What?” Oberon asked.

“I spent my whole life waiting for my father to explain what happened to me.”

“And?”

“He never could.”

“No.”

“I thought if I understood it, I’d get my life back.”

Oberon said nothing.

“The word you called me—” Elias continued. “It isn’t mine.”

“No.”

“The shame isn’t mine.”

“No.”

“The wanting to die was mine.”

“Yes.”

Elias flinched.

Oberon leaned toward him.

“And the wanting to live was yours also. Do not make an idol of only one desire.”

The gates towered ahead. The nearest flesh-ship crossed between them.

For an instant its membrane sails became transparent enough that Elias saw the silhouettes of hundreds of bodies inside the hull, not passengers—materials, layered and joined. Then golden light swallowed the vessel.

A roar of celebration came from beyond.

Another ship followed.

Then another.

Elias’s fear did not lessen. It clarified.

He understood that agreeing to see the Unreached Lands was not bravery. It might be surrender. It might be curiosity so violent it had eaten self-preservation. It might be the old bridge above the freight tracks in a new costume.

But it was his decision, and for once no father, counselor, dean, assailant, pilot, bear, ferryman, or god would be allowed to rename it after the fact.

“I’ll see them,” he said.

Oberon inhaled sharply.

“The Unreached Lands.”

“Yes.”

“You understand the boats.”

“As much as anyone can.”

“You understand I cannot promise captaincy.”

“I don’t want a promise.”

“You understand feast may mean being eaten.”

“I understand your words mean less the closer we get.”

For the first time, Oberon laughed without mystery.

“That is exceedingly good.”

He rose in the boat.

Around them, a thousand vessels of blood and flesh moved toward the impossible gates, their eye-fringed sails full, their bone masts bending, their crews singing of pleasures they had not yet paid for. The smell of rain came from the Reached Lands behind them. The smell of the feast came from ahead.

Oberon lifted the oar and pointed it toward the golden breach.

“Look, seeker.”

Elias looked.

Beyond the gates he could not see palaces or tables or bodies. He saw only brightness arranged in depths, like doors opening behind doors. Somewhere inside it, music changed key.

Oberon’s face became radiant with the old, unsettling eagerness.

“Be elated,” he said.

Elias gripped the sides of the boat.

“As you are?”

“As I am.”

The little vessel entered the shadow of the first gate.

The water beneath them turned gold.

Oberon whispered the word again—elated—as though it were not an emotion but a direction.

And Elias, who had spent his life asking absent men to tell him what things meant, let the question fall behind him.

The gate opened.

Ali Hasnain is an Information Science student at CUNY School of Professional Studies in New York.

The Focus of the Moon

As the moon rises in the morning sky,
Why does my courtyard not fill with light?
As the deep darkness casts its shadow over the moonlit glow,
Why does my sky still remain without light?

At the twilight of life,
How many faces appear before my eyes,
Floating through the pages of memory—
By the shore of the sea,
Where water glimmers beneath the moonlight,
Upon the breast of distant, unknown mountains.

What is that line of shadow
That reaches into the faraway?
What is that path
That brings two distant journeys together?

Ah, the moon has risen upon the moonlit water—
And perhaps the stream of life awakens once again.
Across the courtyard, the shimmering light
Spills and scatters like a sparkling cascade;
And once again, across that vast sky,
A thousand stars shine, washed in silver moonlight.

The dawn breaks through the darkness
And draws a new path across the sky.
From life to life,
The stream of life flows on and on.

Perhaps that is why
The sky becomes so lost within itself,
Drunk with its own radiance.

Perhaps that is why…

Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh

11 August 2026.

Md. Mahbubul Alam is from Bangladesh. His writer name is Mahbub John in Bangladesh. He is a Senior Teacher (English) of Harimohan Government High School, Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh. Chapainawabganj is a district town of Bangladesh. He is an MA in English Literature from Rajshahi College under National University. He has published three books of poems in Bangla. He writes mainly poems but other branches of literature such as prose, article, essay etc. also have been published in national and local newspapers, magazines, little magazines. He has achieved three times the Best Teacher Certificate and Crest in National Education Week in the District Wise Competition in Chapainawabganj District. He has gained many literary awards from home and abroad. His English writings have been published in Synchronized Chaos for seven years.

Once when he was in grade ten in 1990, his Bangla letter was selected as the best one from Deutsche Welle, Germany Radio that broadcast Bangla news for the Banglalee people. And he was given 50 Dutch Mark as his award. They would ask letters from the listeners to the news in Bangla and select one letter for the best one in every month.     

From 17 to 30 September, in 2018 he received a higher training in teaching English language in Kasetsart University of Thailand for secondary level students through a government order from education ministry. 

On 06 November 2015 he achieved Amjad Ali Mondal Medal for his contribution in education field by a development organization in the conference and felicitation function for the honorable personalities at Rajshahi College Auditorium. 

On 30 December 2017 from West Bengal in India he was declared a ‘Literary Charioteer’ in Bangobandhu Literary and World Bango Conference and they awarded him with a Gold Medal in their International Literary Conference and Prize Giving Ceremony.

In 2018, he achieved Prodipto Lirerary Award in Prodipto Literary Conference at Kesorhat, Rajshahi for poems in Bangla literature. He received honorary crest from the administration of Chapainawabganj District Literary Conference and Cultural Function in 2021 and 2022 consecutively. 

His poems have been published in many international online magazines such as Juntos Por las L Raven Cage Zine, and Area Felix.  His poems have been translated and published in Argentine and Serbian, and he participated in many international online cultural meetings. 

How Fortunate That You Exist, My Sister Gulnoza

(To my dearest mentor in the medical field, my dear sister Karomatova Gulnoza)

Enduring so much hardship, staying awake at night,

Feeling your patient’s pain as if it were your own,

Speaking sweet words, never getting tired,

How fortunate that you exist, my sister Gulnoza

Because of you, my heart has also found peace,

From the bottom of my heart, my love and loyalty are for you,

I love you, and only you,

How fortunate that you exist, my sister Gulnoza

Tell me, what would I do if you weren’t there?

I would still be walking with a heavy illness,

I would fade away hopelessly and sorrowfully in grief,

How fortunate that you exist, my sister Gulnoza

May you always be healthy and safe for my happiness,

May you always walk with joy and rejoice,

Know that you are the absolute best for me,

How fortunate that you exist, my sister Gulnoza

Opening my hands in prayer, I ask of Allah,

I wish the most beautiful blessings and happiness for you,

How can I ever repay the debt of your kindness?!

How fortunate that you exist, my sister Gulnoza

Rayhona Sobirjonova is a talented young writer and first-year university student, born in December 2008 into an intellectually nurturing family. Supported and encouraged by her parents from an early age, she has developed a deep passion for literature, history, and creative expression. She began her creative journey in the 3rd grade, and her works have since been published in numerous international journals and newspapers. This curious and driven young writer continues to constantly explore and grow!

CALÌ VELELA, FROM ITALY TO INDIA: A VOICE AGAINST INVISIBLE WOUNDS

Literary awards, Milan Design Week, a new book and her participation in IMMERSIVE VOICES: the Italian author’s work crosses the boundaries between psychology, literature and rebirth

There are wounds that leave no marks on the skin. Calì Velela has chosen to write about them. Today, her voice is beginning to travel beyond Italy’s borders.

With a degree in Clinical and Community Psychology and eighteen years of previous registration with the Professional Register in the Emilia-Romagna Region, Calì Velela is today a writer and communicator working at the intersection of psychology and literature.

At the heart of her writing lie the less visible dynamics of violence: psychological manipulation, the gradual loss of self-determination, isolation, silence and the fragmentation of identity. Yet her work does not stop at the wound itself. Above all, it seeks the moment when a person begins to recognise themselves again.

Her new book, Ho ballato con il diavolo (I Danced with the Devil), published in 2026 by Pegasus Edition, is an epistolary memoir built around a true story of violence, loss and rebirth. Through its protagonist, Estella, and a correspondence that gradually brings the fragments of a life back together, the book leads readers into the most intimate dimensions of abuse, survival and resilience.

Calì Velela’s literary journey has already received significant recognition.

With La Rishika – colei che vede dove nessuno guarda (La Rishika – She Who Sees Where No One Looks), she won Third Prize in the Unpublished Fiction section of the International Juan Montalvo Literary Art Prize.

The same work also received the Special Prize for a Book Outside Competition at the 8th International Literary Award Carità è Donarsi.

A further recognition connected to La Rishika followed at the 9th edition of the 2026 International Poetry and Literature Prize Isola d’Elba – Ascoltando i silenzi del mare.

The title itself contains an essential part of Velela’s poetics: seeing where others do not look, recognising what remains submerged, and giving words to experiences too often lived in silence.

Calì Velela has also appeared on one of Italy’s most important cultural stages.

In April 2026, during Milan Design Week, she was among the guests at Custode, an event by 03STUDIO LAB held at the historic Rotonda della Besana and dedicated to USIC – Unione Sindacale Italiana Carabinieri.

She was joined by Dr. h.c. Milena Renzi, writer, journalist and international cultural communicator, and architect and poet Rodolfo Vettorello, a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020.

The evening brought together art, design, literature and music, with performances by countertenor Angelo Bonazzoli, accompanied on piano by Mateus Gardellini.

That Milan experience has become another stage in a cultural path that is now continuing in the prestigious setting of Brera.

Calì Velela and Dr. h.c. Milena Renzi are currently developing the cultural and educational project La violenza che non lascia lividi (The Violence That Leaves No Bruises), created to address psychological violence without sensationalising it or reducing violence solely to physical aggression.

The project explores the “sloping path” through which trust can become imbalance, manipulation can lead to isolation, and fear can result in the loss of self-determination — before moving towards recognition, the recovery of one’s voice and, ultimately, reconstruction.

Velela’s books thus become part of a broader cultural project in which literature and psychological knowledge can serve as tools for awareness and prevention.

Now, a new chapter is taking her writing beyond national borders.

Calì Velela is among the poetic voices selected for IMMERSIVE VOICES – Poems of Sensitivity and Sublimity, a new international anthology promoted by the International Academy of Ethics – IAE, an India-based institution fostering dialogue between ethics, education, literature and the arts.

The International Academy of Ethics is led by Dr. Jernail Singh Anand, Founder President, an internationally recognised Indian poet, philosopher and author, together with Dr. Maja Herman Sekulic, Vice President, poet and scholar of international standing.

Its international cultural network also includes Greek poet and author Eva Lianou Petropoulou, World Ambassador of the International Academy of Ethics, India, whose commitment to international literature has helped create meaningful connections between writers, poets and cultural figures from different nations.

A special and heartfelt acknowledgment goes to Eva Lianou Petropoulou for the passion, generosity and tireless cultural work through which she continues to build bridges between people, countries and traditions. Her ability to bring together voices from different parts of the world has made possible encounters that go far beyond geographical borders, creating genuine spaces for dialogue, friendship and cultural exchange.

Through her work for the International Academy of Ethics and her wider commitment to international literature, Eva has become a vital link between different cultures. Calì Velela and Dr. h.c. Milena Renzi wish to express their deepest gratitude to her for believing in the value of these connections and for helping Italian voices enter an increasingly broad international conversation.

IMMERSIVE VOICES is edited by Dr. h.c. Milena Renzi, writer, journalist and international cultural communicator, with Dr. Jernail Singh Anand serving as Chief Editor.

The anthology brings together poets from different countries and cultures, united by a form of poetry that speaks to sensitivity, the human condition, shared values and the challenges of contemporary life.

For Calì Velela, participation in the anthology also marks a new stage in her own journey: from narrative prose to poetry, from Italy to India, and from individual experience to international literary dialogue.

Her voice thus enters a cultural community that sees literature as a means of crossing geographical, linguistic and social boundaries.

Awards, books, cultural encounters and new international collaborations tell only part of Calì Velela’s story.

The thread running through all her work remains something deeper: giving a voice to what often remains unseen.

Recognising manipulation before it becomes a prison. Giving a name to one’s own experience. Transforming silence into awareness. And remembering that, even after losing oneself, a path back to one’s identity can still exist.

From La Rishika to Ho ballato con il diavolo, from Milan to India through IMMERSIVE VOICES, Calì Velela is now taking her writing into an international dimension, making literature not only a means of telling the story of a wound, but also a tangible possibility for rebirth.

An Italian voice that has chosen to look where others often do not — and that is now ready to be heard beyond every border.

Orbit

The stars in their orbits

are lit by the imposed beacons.

Only you have continuously moved yourself

from the orbit—

In a circle of a thousand great ages;

The boundary of the path

is an endless pitch darkness.

Your accumulated brain is drained in the illusion of illusion;

The sensors of the brain are useless—lifeless robotic characters,

Invisible manholes at the bends of each galaxy,

A trap is waiting—a giant wave of scratching.

Innumerable drones circle your circle,

Keeping constant watch;

Monitoring your movements and course.

Where you have built a mansion of tranquility,

By pressing the button on the remote, you will absorb the pieces of the iceberg;

The desired ice water will melt in your brain server.

Look—

Every one of your limbs is trembling,

Shaking in fear of missiles.

Hydrogen and helium are full

The time for your existence to be destroyed is approaching

However, you are enjoying the mouth of death due to your carelessness.

The life takers are aiming at the sniper’s barrel.

Measuring the algorithm of time, the high vision of the hawk

Continuously approaching—intoxicated with prey.

Mohammad Qutubuddin.

24.08.2026 

Mohammad Kutubuddin is CEO of Skymode International. He’s also a poet, editor, and writer. He’s the Chief Advisor at Novo Joti News and Founder of the National Writers Council. Also, he’s a Central Member of the Nationalist Writers’ Forum. 

MY TABRIZ

You are an old city, the very history itself

You have greatness, great Tabrizim

In your blood is a volcano, the eye of Sahan

Your white forehead is full of stars, Tabrizim

The shore of love, the sea of ​​love

Wings of desires, the dream of souls

What is the world of Turks without you?

You are the arm that lifts you up, Tabrizim

Sattarkhan is strong, Shahriyar is eloquent

You are a garden of gardens, with mirrored eyes

Your name is the essence of an unquenchable hearth

You paved the path with silk, Tabrizim

You are an impregnable fortress, an invincible army

Saz is the anchor of words, the land of delicacy

You have the immortal gray wolf of the Turks

Your left, which is visible from your right, Tabrizim

Your deer-filled trench, your Erkin, your Erkan

Your blood is red, silver, and red

Your son Ismail, the Crowned Turk

Tabriz, the lake of the kings, is a place to visit

You are the eager soul of Azerbaijan

You are the warmth of your unquenchable soul

Your excitement is tied to your hand

I am Elman, the flower of my poetry, is my Tabriz.

Oruj Dadashi Elman was born in 1978 in Iranian Azerbaijan. He is a poet, lives in Tabriz city. His poems are published in Tabriz, Urmuy, Tehran magazines and newspapers, and in Azerbaijan in “HAKARI”, “SÖZÜN IŞIĞI” and “BÜTÖV AZERBAYCAN” newspapers. His poems are also published in “AY IZİ”, “HİCA TAŞLARI” and “GERGEF” magazines in Turkey. His poems are also published in AQSU newspaper of Khurmatuz city of Kirkuk region in Iraq. A one-volume book titled “MÖVLA MAHABBATİ” ​​was published in 2023.