(Photo of a female statue in a dress with no head and no left hand, surrounded by stones and trees)

A stunning photo from Brian Michael Barbeito’s collection of vignettes and photographs, Still Some Crazy Summer Wind Coming Through 

The digital net of Brian’s camera captures the look of so many things, and his visions linger long and sink deep in the well of memory.  Sure, as the Winged Victory still stands tall in the art history of Greek sculptors, the artistry in Brian’s photos lingers in a sensitive viewer’s memory and thoughts.  Each pictorial image preserves a certain place at a certain time, and the reader of this book’s writings can experience vicariously the feelings and thoughts of its author, over and over, time and time again.

From forest paths to bridges over bogs and water lilies with ducks and swans abiding, to crowded shops, carnivals, city streets old barns and snow-clad woodlands, Brian takes you on many outings through his world and shares his intimate thoughts and feelings of the unseen as well as the seen.  Brian presents the subtle other-worldly as a robust and palpable part of everyday life.  Brian, as an image-builder, shows us ways to see the plainest of ordinary things as special and wonderful.

Each image in this book Still Some Crazy Summer Wind Coming Through makes an immediate impression, as the writing adds more and more gateways through which one’s imagination can enter to roam and mix with Brian’s own.  The spontaneity of the photographer’s own actions moves a reader to welcome their own heartfelt spontaneity as it encourages one to venture out exploring and preserving in photos or in writings some impressions of the local natural scenery, featuring combinations of as animals, plants, rock walls, old barns, road signs, marbled skies, and other wonders.

I have known Brian for many years, and he has a wealth of photographs and vignettes, which I hope he will be presenting soon in additional books comparable to Still Some Crazy Summer Wind Coming Through.

John L. Waters

Scribbles

[Written at  a Boston-based writing group and included in Fleury's book "You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self"]


La vie

Ah, la douleur de la vie;
So sorrowful this life can be,
We live in a constant that is uncertainty,
Waiting to awaken each morning can be tiresome,
Waking from a nightmare can be winsome,
‘Til we see the dreadful daylight of reality!
Yearning to sleep;
Daring to wake;
What comes next?
Life is but a haste!


Bird Bath

The mockingbird emerged from its bath,
Singing while it sat on a raft,
Looking into the distant path,
And poised with some sass,
Swiftly flew off in a fit of wrath!


Insomnia

I dreamed I had insomnia
And birds of prey roamed
‘Round my sphere
My heart rhythm’s tachycardia
Abided in a bed of fear...
I dreamt I slept with insomnia
echoes of children
Resounded like nostalgia
My senses somewhat forlorn
Yearning for the years bygone
Wishing to wish away my melancholia
I dream of sleep
Awake I weep
I dreamt i prayed
My soul to keep
I fell asleep
Or so it seems
Wishing to weep
For my esteem
Alas to sleep
Perchance to dream...


What Place is This?

Surrounded by a shadowy grey environ,
Sitting cross-legged on some ground,
Looking up in a circular motion,
I wondered why there was no one else around...
Yearning to hear a sound;
Something has blurred my vision,
Suddenly I hear a pound,
Could thunder be a thing I found?!
Alas...The dawning of my wakening,
I am living in a cloud!!!



Jacques Stanley Fleury is a Haitian-American Poet, Author and Educator. He holds an undergraduate degree in Liberal Arts and is currently pursuing graduate studies in the literary arts at Harvard University online. Once on the editing staff of The Watermark, a literary magazine at the University of Massachusetts, his first book Sparks in the Dark: A Lighter Shade of Blue, A Poetic Memoir was featured in and endorsed by the Boston Globe. His second book: It’s Always Sunrise Somewhere and Other Stories is a collection of short fictional stories dealing with the human condition as the characters navigate life’s foibles and was featured on Good Reads. His current book and hitherto magnum opus Chain Letter to America: The One Thing You Can Do to End Racism, A Collection of Essays, Fiction and Poetry Celebrating Multiculturalism explores social justice in America and his latest book, “You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self”  along with all other previously mentioned titles are available at public libraries, The Harvard Book Store, Porter Square Books, The Grolier Bookshop, Goodreads, bookshop, Amazon etc…  His CD A Lighter Shade of Blue as a lyrics writer in collaboration with the neo-folk musical group Sweet Wednesday is available on Amazon, iTunes & Spotify to benefit Haitian charity St. Boniface.

A Whole Afternoon of Terror  

Before dusk arrives, skeletal horses

loom outside the darkness, lingering off the road.

I encounter ghosts in the mirror,

the wind sniffs beneath fallen leaves, through a door-crack,

scenting the faint glow of flesh revealed.

Axes, slingshots, cleavers all line the window sill painted blue,

even my stiff six-year-old elbows bear the grain of wood.

The yard’s pale wooden gate is locked, the door to the cottage too,

I stare at every tremble of the wooden gate

and the passing sound of the whistling poplar trees.

Mother hasn’t returned yet, I don’t know how many years

how many winters have passed, I hear the door handle softly turning,

the quiet voices of family members, and the slow movement of a golden lamp.

But I can’t wake up, can’t bolt that door wrapped in a sack.

A Near-Forgotten Craft 

Destruction is space, allowing new horrors to emerge

yellowed pages can no longer be turned

invisible ghosts make you cough incessantly

the painted landscape keeps shrinking

until real places become indistinguishable:

a century-old iron bridge as dark as a bagpipe

now creaks like a knee by the water’s edge.

Punish life by writing everything down

let the sunset hover forever in a still cave.

As long as this book is opened once

everyone will be resurrected, the precise machinery of hell

will start again, with wild winds, hail, and flames

with the asphalt stiffening their joints, the suffering of others continues

unbeknown to anyone.

Reliant on the reader’s sympathy and testimony

time continues like dashed lines in the snow.

Snow falls, falling forever,

yet never falling on the bent heads of pedestrians

always walking in the same place, never avoiding a snowfall.

Few believe in these kinds of games anymore.

Perhaps it’s just a harmless game

which offers us the image of time

like a watchmaker with weak eyesight in his workshop,

where metal parts and various-sized gears reflect the dusk light

through the carved glass revolving door, candlelight, flickers

at the door, an unidentified white horse appears

snorting with contempt, carrying the decay of generations.

Encounter with a Cat on Midnight Streets

You lay sprawled in the centre of the street, eyes half-open.

Poor little thing, what happened to you?

Your gaze seems to ask me, what is life?

I had just returned from a meeting discussing the meaning of life,

drunk on wine because life is so beautiful,

though the discussion was dull, led by zombies.

I never expected to meet you like this,

“Death” lying on the path I, “Life,” must take.

As if questioning me, unknown death, how to understand life.

The midnight street suddenly falls silent, and I hesitate for a moment,

thinking to find a branch to move your flattened body to the roadside,

where passing cars will crush it repeatedly,

until your emaciated pain is swept away by the sun’s custodian,

or it becomes a golden beehive, dripping with blood honey.

But in the end, I did nothing, exchanging a meaningful gaze with you.

I turn away, like a soul leaving its shell.

“Here”

“Here” is a signpost, not really here,  

the earth beneath your feet is a vertical, transparent void,  

you can only recognize here by its “non-existence”.  

You’re familiar with these signs, a street, a road,the house behind houses,  

a date, a name, the sound of poplar leaves brushing each other,  

and songs from the last century playing on a radio hanging from a branch.  

You can no longer make out their lyrics,  

as if they’ve been encrypted at the far end of time,  

that’s fine—no words to smudge this perfect balm,  

no other you, old, young, or in between,  

walking out of this maze of “here”,

to watch a sunset elsewhere,  

or see another autumn rain falling in another realm,  

another of you, nose buried in a colour-blurred map,  

collar wore the wrong way round, searching for a “here” you’ve been before.

Ma Yongbo was born in 1964, Ph.D, Since 1986 He has published over eighty original works and translations. He is a professor in the Faculty of Arts and Literature, Nanjing University of Science and Technology. His studies center around Chinese and Western modern poetics, post-modern literature, and eco-criticism. His translations from English include works by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, W.C.Williams, John Ashbery, Henry James, Herman Melville, May Sarton and others. 

Ancient Egypt: Zahi Hawass and the True Face of the Golden Masks 

Prof. Zahi Hawass is the world’s most famous archaeologist and has been active for decades in bringing to light sensational discoveries about ancient Egypt that illuminate the modern world with knowledge. 

The archaeological mechanism works that from one discovery you access another and so on and so it is happening regarding the latest discovery of Prof. Hawass: the “Lost Golden City” in Luxor, the most important discovery of 2021, as Daily News Egypt writes.

Over the millennia, the sand of the Egyptian desert has covered archaeological treasures, but ancient Egypt itself must be explored through an immense maze of secret underground passages. It is as if an immense golden mask, which would represent death, covers and watches over the secrets of life that rejoins death, in a flow that challenges immortality. 

Prof. Zahi Hawass achieved a personal success in 2023 through his lectures in the USA and a real triumph in SF at the De Young Museum, directed by  Thomas Patrick Campbell, for the colossal exhibition of the pharaoh Ramses curated by Mrs. Renée Dreyfus, the most relevant curator of exhibitions of ancient civilizations in the world.

The United States wants Zahi Hawass back and he will be returning to the US and Canada in the spring of 2025 with his very interesting lectures that will widely reveal in detail the most sensational latest discoveries of the mysterious ancient Egypt. 

Fall 

A partly frisky fall, a lonely jump
Across the plane
A watershed benchmark
Full of throttled wishes 
The macabre knew what to do with anxiety
Your face a full flanked rose garden
Tattooed in Australia, knows what to do
Coming over a backfired cameo at the end 
Why is that blue flower so small? 
I floated friskly at the fall garden
Silencing the primary force
For all at once I swamed a whole gypsy plane. 

Guilty Pleasure



He’s watching

The latest season

Of “Selling Sunset”

On Netflix,

One of 

His many

Guilty pleasures.




Taylor Dibbert is a writer, journalist, and poet in Washington, DC. “Rescue Dog,” his fifth book, was published in May.

Progress Toward Victory

I wrote a lot of poems in my 20s.

They were all bad.

Everyone said they were bad.

The keyboard stank like sweat and rotten fruit.

There was a great outcry among the editors.

So I gave up

And then 20 years later I tried again.

And my poems were better!

Everyone said they were better.

Among the editors there was a great sigh of ambivalence.

I will quit for another 20 years.

When I come back my poems will be truly great.

The keyboard will smell of roses and triumph.

The editors will scuttle around my feet like beetles.

I will go to my grave like an apotheosis of Pulitzers.

And on my headstone I will write with my luminous hand,

“That’ll show ‘em.”