Mr. Tough Knuckles 

"I want you to understand what you've done, Johnny." The man looked at the boy sternly. "I want you to understand what it means to destroy property. It means something." 

The boy looked worried in a vague way, but was silent. 

"It wasn't just the window you broke, Mr. I-Like-Throwing-Rocks." 

The boy's expression did not change. 

"There was a complete set of very fine heirloom china on a table in the room where the window was broken. Most of the china was negatively affected. The window, all that very nice china, and the memories contained in the china, all broken by you.Also, on that very day, there was, by a twist of medicalized fate, a bottle of human urine in the room that was by consequence of your impulsive and selfish actions, over turned. A large part of the carpet was stained and the resulting odor was pervasive. Mr. Littlejohn has recently informed me the stench is still lingering." 

The boy's nose wrinkled as consequence of the man's description, but the boy still said nothing. 

"I'd like you to think, Johnny, of the meaning of your actions and their consequences. I'd like you to take some time and think. Really, really use your mind. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, Johnny." 

Silence. 

"Well, Johnny?" 

A longer silence. The man folded his arms impatiently. 

"I’m waiting, Johnny." 

"I'm thinking," said the boy softly with a hint of firmness. 

"Good! Very good, Johnny. I'm chuffed to hear you're thinking. Please, keep thinking, and I'd like for you to tell me exactly what it is you're thinking. I'd like for you to put actual words to your thoughts and to communicate them to me directly.”

Silence.

“Can you say something, Johnny?”

Silence. The man leaned toward the boy, and the boy made a fist and scratched his knuckles on his front teeth. 

“Well. This defiance is unacceptable. I can only conclude, Mr. Tough Knuckles, you’ve been toying with me from the very start. I think you actually desired to cause damage to private property. In your mind—the law calls it mens rea, Johnny—you truly are a destructive little turk, aren’t you? Henceforth, we will have to seriously correct this attitude.”

“I wouldn’t piss into the wind of this market.”

“Excuse me, young man?”

“Pissed away years of gains.”

“This is completely unacceptable, Johnny.”

“Piss on me, I piss on you.”

“I’m nonplussed! I simply have no choice now, Johnny. This issimply beyond thought! Your days at this school are over, and I will be contacting your parents immediately. Piss on me?Indeed.”

Johnny found his way outside and walked around the parking lot as the night approached. He picked up a rock and threw it at an Audi SUV, shouting, “The bond market’s goin’ to the pisser!” 


MJ 

"I've never met a chest of drawers I didn't like, and you, dear, are no exception." 

"Joseph, you've become tiresome. The most deadliest of sins, really." 

"Your drawers are of exceptional quality. They slide silently with the best of them. They slide on air." 

"Words slide on air. Yours do." 

"Your legs. Let's not forget them. A chest of drawers is nothing, nothing, nothing at all, without sturdy legs." 

"If you keep this up, you will realize what it means to have neither leg to stand on." 

"I will perorate upon your drawer knobs. In a class of their own, darling." 

"I’ll terminate monthly payments to your account if you don't stop talking immediately." 

Joseph raised his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders. He twisted swiftly away from the woman towards the open balcony doors, picking up his vodka ice. He took a sip and looked over his shoulder at the woman, asking her tartly, "Who was it who said life is a brief wave from a balcony?" 

"Twas my dear husband, Jojo." 

"No, no, it was MJ.” Joseph danced toward the balcony railing, laughing, drinking, and beckoning to the woman. “Isn’t it time for a little moonwalk, darling?"  

PRAYER TO GOD

Dear God, prayer and hope

Thank you for giving love to my soul

So I know how to love both, a grass and a flower

And all the people on this planet.

Thank you for guiding me along the paths of beauty

That you give me strength to fly with birds

You are in my heart with the angel of goodness

As a blessing and as light itself.

God, that I praise you with a song

My whole being breathes with you

Hear the prayers that the heart does not bleed

Give peace that is no more.

Do not allow departures from home

Let the chaos, bombs and rockets stop

Refugees, uncertainty without an aim and hope

And the pathlessness of this suffering planet. 

Enlighten the reason of this madness 

Cease the wars and conflicts 

Unite the hearts that do not know love

May everyone find peace and freedom.

GORDANA SARIĆ

MONTENEGRO

LION’S SHADOW

(Translated from Serbian)

Clad in lion’s skin, he stands in stillness,

his gaze — a fire burning through the ages.

Within his grasp, the world trembles,

yet his heart speaks only in silence.

Not a hero, but a shadow of defiance,

neither god, nor man without a road.

In every sinew — a hidden wound,

in his smile — the dusk of old.

He bore the burden the world bestowed,

but never let his dreams corrode.

For Heracles is not just force —

he is the flame that walks the darkened course.

LAVLJA SENKA

U lavljoj koži ćutke stoji,

pogled mu kroz vekove gori.

U pesnici svet se lomi,

a srce — u tišini zbori.

Ne junak, već senka bunta,

ni bog ni čovek bez puta.

U svakom mišiću rana,

u osmehu — večna tama.

Nosio breme što svet mu dade,

al’ nikad snove da mu ukrade.

Jer Herakle nije samo snaga —

on je plamen što gori iz mraka.

Maja Milojkovic

Serbia

Poem based on the sketch of

Artist

Κωνσταντίνος Φάης 

Ιδρυτής του πολιτιστικού εγχειρήματος

Ηρακλής ως πυλώνας Πολιτισμού

Maja Milojković was born in Zaječar and divides her life between Serbia and Denmark. In Serbia, she serves as the deputy editor-in-chief at the publishing house Sfairos in Belgrade. She is also the founder and vice president of the Rtanj and Mesečev Poets’ Circle, which counts 800 members, and the editor-in-chief of the international e-magazine Area Felix, a bilingual Serbian-English publication. She writes literary reviews, and as a poet, she is represented in numerous domestic and international literary magazines, anthologies, and electronic media. Some of her poems are also available on the YouTube platform. Maja Milojković has won many international awards. She is an active member of various associations and organizations advocating for peace in the world, animal protection, and the fight against racism. She is the author of two books: Mesečev krug (Moon Circle) and Drveće Želje (Trees of Desire). She is one of the founders of the first mixed-gender club Area Felix from Zaječar, Serbia, and is currently a member of the same club. She is a member of the literary club Zlatno Pero from Knjaževac, and the association of writers and artists Gorski Vidici from Podgorica, Montenegro.

The Claw

The older man was buried in thought.
“Penny for your thoughts,” said the younger man, scratching an inflamed patch on his neck.
“Oh, sorry, I was lost there. Could you repeat the question?” came a voice from the back of the plain white panel van. He moved out of the shadows. The younger man responded with revulsion which he attempted to disguise. There was something uncanny about the older man, who wore a thick uncombed beard and had pale blue eyes that seemed to be floating in a sea of glue.

“I just wanted to know what you were, I mean, w-what you were…”
“What we’re doing here?”
“Yeah.”
“We have orders. Targeting, usual protocol.” He patted his laptop, which was attached to a 17 inch monitor that showed an infra-green 3D portrait of the subject’s body, tracked in real time, with a cross-section of their brain highlighting the parietal and temporal lobes.

“Soo basically what we’re doing…” the older man scratched his own neck, fished in his pocket for a cigarette, found a sole Marlboro Red and fired it up with a silver Deadhead Zippo. “We’re using the old Raven’s Claw to pulverize the subject’s brain. Slow cooking. We can fry them deep and they’ll never be able to track the beams back. The entire idea is to cause the subject to completely despair after incurring massive brain damage from no known source.”

The young man had heard all this information recounted countless times, but he asked every night nevertheless, like a child anxious to hear his favorite bedtime story.
“This man must have done some fucked up shit to merit…extrajudicial punishment,” he managed, struggling to enunciate the syllables.

“Yeah, not really,” said the older man.
“What do you mean, ‘not really?'” Again, the younger man had heard this too recounted countless times; it just amazed him that he was playing a vital role in the 24 hour government sponsored torture and mutilation of a U.S. citizen who, as far as he could tell, was really innocent of any crime whatsoever.

“He’s on the list, that’s all we need to know.”
The audio feed clicked on. The two men simultaneously started as the target first groaned, then screamed into the void.
“Jesus Christ, have mercy on me!”
On the screen, a trickle of tears down his beautiful face.
“He must have done SOMETHING wrong,” said the younger man again, seeking assurance.

“Not really,” said the older man, letting out a wet fart.
“So, he’s been accused of crimes he didn’t commit, and our job is to ensure that he eventually succumbs to his injuries and attempts suicide?”
“Yuppers.”
“It’s so cruel, it’s almost…sublime.”

“Fucking A right, like some Marquis De Sade shit. Do you wanna do some crank?” The older man thumbed the volume on the speakers, muting the shrieks.
“Yeah, ok, it’s the good shit you got from that chick in West Sac, right?”

“Fucking A right.”
“So what’s going to happen to his mom and dad, in their 80s, with no one to take care of them after he finally commits?”
“You know the answer.”
“I do?”

“Yeah you do. Shit, his old man will have a heart attack, his mom will die of a broken heart. They’ll look at our dude’s Kaiser Permanente record and write him off as a head case. The man will be instantly forgotten, his memory erased like tears in the rain.”

“Ya know, this shit is really bumming me out.”
“Then let’s talk about his bereft, super hot girlfriend who will be left vulnerable and in need of..comforting, shall we say.”
“Yes, let’s.”‘

A tribute to the memory of a beloved dog, Taylor Dibbert’s London explores the many nuances and dimensions of grief. The collection shows how loss and the associated emotions are not linear, but more like waves that crash and recede (“Riding the Waves”). 

The narrative begins with London’s death in “Today”, making the book’s focus clear. Like the narrator’s grieving process, the collection jumps between happy memories “This Sweetness” and “Packing Up” and poems on losing London “More Ink” and “Required Writing” and “Nine.” A continual theme, highlighted in “Unhelpful,” about friends giving advice too soon, is that no one, no matter how well-meaning, can rush healing after loss. Not even the poet himself, as he finds in “A Quiet Friday Evening.” 

The main character, an ordinary man who was very close to his pet dog of many years, speaks in small free-verse segments that resemble haikus or haibuns. Words are simple and understandable, which highlights the universality of his experience. Unfortunately, grief is accessible to everyone. The common language and short pieces reflect how a heavily weighted mind processes thoughts and feelings more slowly. 

As Dibbert’s poetic speaker says in “Learning to Live,” grief is not something we ever fully overcome. He realizes that we learn to live with our losses, and that he does not yet know how to exist without London. The final two poems express acute sorrow “London” and a determination to carry forth in hope inspired by her life “The Triumphs to Come,” illustrating that both states of feeling can exist together. 

Taylor Dibbert’s London can be ordered here from publisher Alien Buddha Press.

first publication in Hellbender Magazine, Winter 2025 issue. 

Who it was 
To be honest, I don't know who it was. He just came out and said that he would live with us in the kitchen now. A small piece of a man inside a stone. We decided not to argue, and a small piece of a man inside a stone settled in our house. 

Over time, he needed more space to live, so we moved to the basement (we imagined that it was a bomb shelter, and not a basement where we could be buried to death by rubble). The khaki-colored sea was burning with the sun, but we know that the sun doesn't care who it shines for, and the side and the gun don't care either about blood or sperm. An endless sea. Such a space. 

If you repeat the same actions every day, time will not stop. Even if you die, time will not stop. The parents got tired of sitting in the basement and went outside into death and old age. Old age smells like a burden, like childhood. 

The parents looked around: there were animal corpses and soldiers' guts lying around. I feel most sorry for animals because it is not their fault that they live on a human planet and are not capable of thinking so deeply that they can fall into the abyss. My parents went outside and disappeared like pigeons in a minefield of life (plants and flowers grow on the earth, but the bones of the violently killed lie underground). 

The light bulb in my personal basement was constantly blinking, and I was stealing money from my health and talent to pay for artificial light. A friend of mine had a grandmother who was fed condensed milk from the Third Reich by Wehrmacht soldiers during the occupation. 

My grandmother was not fed condensed milk at all for the first five years of her life. These years just happened to fall on the post-war hungry years. I am increasingly showing signs of diabetes. Perhaps I ate too much condensed milk as a child. And the flowers without graves continued to grow. 

And the graves without flowers continued to grow. Graves without names: just remains dumped in a pile (this is called, according to Soviet tradition, the "tomb of the unknown soldier"). Another friend of mine didn't have a grandmother (how his mother was born remains a mystery). 

It's very difficult to change light bulbs in the dark. My personal basement was damp, and bones were growing stickily under my bed (at night, the same bones were burning in the red prison sky). My grandmother, or as she called her babushka, will never see this again. 

My grandmother didn't see much, for example, the northern lights or the southern Italian embankment. My friend's grandmother only saw endless concentration camps and the rails on which prisoners were transported from a German concentration camp. And straight to a Soviet concentration camp (it's something like an Indian ghetto or slave labor in Africa, only without any connection to nationality). 

Sooner or later, they will kill everyone: even themselves. Sometimes, I let the cat out of the basement: it reflexively hunted mice, then played with the corpse for a long time, then gnawed. I could regularly see the mouse remains at the entrance to the basement. And my cat often vomited (usually grass). 

I, too, often feel a sense of emptiness at the frozen snowy silence from what I have seen. My cat doesn't see anything and doesn't even know what war is.  And I don't tell him about it anyway: what if he starts protecting our house from the blast wave and dies? 

It’s funny, I still haven’t figured out the gender of my cat, but by default, I think he’s a boy. Actually, this isn't even my cat, and I don't understand how we ended up on the same ark together. When I first saw him, he was clean and skinny, like a Jew who found himself in the gas chamber of Auschwitz or a Polish prisoner about to be shot by the NKVD. 

This all reminds me of a sad fact: someday my cat will die without ever knowing that a war has broken out. What’s more, my cat will never know why the war started. I will probably die, too, without ever finding out why people go to war. 

I want to die without finding out that there is a war. my basement was gradually filling with the water of time, and I couldn't swim like a statue of a dead man. Something was bursting in my eardrums of memory. 

Sometimes, the crow king would visit me like a picture and peck at my hair. Someone coughed blood into my eyes. Somewhere in the basement, the pipes of tired lungs hummed.

Some god soared up and did not kiss me like Hyacinth (I probably won't come back). Some day, i looked into the mirror of my own world history. The reflection did stirred. To be honest, I don't know who it was.

Where I’ve Been

If you want to know where I’ve been,

Look at the musty side of the earth with no air or rails

Where the knives spit rust into the blood

Like steel guns.

If you want to know where i’ve been, picture a black tide

Swelling until it overwhelms the sea.

The wolves howl overhead.

Picture the dark sun

Simmering, the air thinning.

Picture the red-hot moon

Hustling so it can feel the heat inside.

Picture all that

Then picture me rising.

secrets

secrets can be sweet

whispers until the whispers

yell and people hear

Skeletons In The Closet

Our skeletons

Are made up

Of everything we are told.

But your blood,

Is everything you would give it for.

Who We Are

We are

The sunrise

And sunset

We are

The rain

And the rainbows

We are

The flowers

And the weeds.

Daydreams

the only

words

my pen

wants to write down

are the ones that won’t

come out.

the words that whisper

in my sleep

telling me

to wake up

to face the day.