Step Five: Admitted to god, ourselves & another human being
– First confessional
Bless me father for I have sinned. I’m not going to tell
you I don’t buy anything you’re selling. Or twelve years
from now I’ll be driving blackout drunk, arm roped out
the window. You are not going to hear that twenty years
from now I will know the barrel of a gun tastes sour cold
sharp. You’ve no idea that one day she’ll not have to say
a word. The sky will burst in flames, heavens will plunge
into the sea. So, go ahead Father, tell me God’s forgiven
my sins. To go in peace. I have paid my penance by fire
and ash. Been absolved in cinder and smoke.
How to Drink Yourself Sober
Preamble: The only requirement is a desire to stop drinking
Let it bleed baby, bleed till we’re white. We are pale riders. Ghosts sucking the light
out of the tunnel, our bones left to blot out the sun. We are sons and daughters waiting
to mourn; ready to set the world on fire.
she calls me by name but I don’t recognize her
voice, the smell of her perfume, soap, shampoo
her body against mine is light:
all legs, long hair and ready
to start a revolution
she starts to say something but I can’t hear
I can only watch,
thinking I’m clever, knowing
she can see right through me
I am that fly on the wall. Yes. A thousand eyes. Unfocused, unclean, unable to swallow
and she knows. Yes she does. It is not to her advantage to forget. She’s watched
every move I make. I know. I know and there is power in knowledge.
I have that power. Don’t waste it. Don’t waste it.
How to Drink Yourself Sober
A Design for Living
When she’s five her mother spun a tale
of an angel who dropped to earth,
landed in a quarry.
She fell in love with a mortal,
asked him to bind her wings tight
against her back,
tried unsuccessfully to fit into his world.
Years later, when he died, she found herself
unable to fly back to heaven.
In her grief she flung herself into a marble slab
where she waits, to this day, for god to split it
in two to be reunited with him.
Alex Stolis lives in Minneapolis; he has had poems published in numerous journals. Two full length collections Pop. 1280, and John Berryman Died Here were released by Cyberwit and available on Amazon. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Piker’s Press, Jasper’s Folly Poetry Journal, Beatnik Cowboy, One Art Poetry, Black Moon Magazine, and Star 82 Review. His chapbook, Postcards from the Knife-Thrower’s Wife, was released by Louisiana Literature Press in 2024, RIP Winston Smith from Alien Buddha Press 2024, and The Hum of Geometry; The Music of Spheres, 2024by Bottlecap Press.
Bardiyeva Dilnura is a student of the 7th grade of the creative school named after Ogahi. She was born on January 11, 2011 in Kosmabad, Khiva. She is a participant of the Hippo Olympiad and various Olympiads. At the same time, she is the author of several poems.
David Sapp, writer, artist, and professor, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and the visual arts. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior, chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha, a novel Flying Over Erie, and a book of poems and drawingstitled Drawing Nirvana.
I walked briskly west to 40th and Sixth to catch the F train home to Queens, where I lived with my parents. It was already dark and cold even though it was only 4pm, early for me to be leaving the bank, where I had worked for six years, since I turned 24.
In the station, there were a lot of people on the platform. An empty train arrived, and I got a seat. Commuters hung over me, so I bent my head down to my paperback copy of Wuthering Heights. It had been my mom’s favorite book when she was a girl. I was midway through, engrossed in the story of Catherine and Heathcliff.
I loved imagining my mom young. It wasn’t difficult, even though I came late in her life. We had so many black-and-white pictures from her youth in Lebanon, where I could tell she had lots of friends and was clowning in almost every shot. In one she hung upside-down on a metal bar; in others she was skiing, swimming, and sticking out her tongue.
In junior high, I used to think that if somehow my mom and I were classmates, she wouldn’t choose me as a friend. I would run through every possible scenario where we might become friends and turn over in my bed with a sinking feeling that it could never happen.
In school I was bookish and had only one or two friends. We wondered how we could become like the popular girls, but it seemed out of our reach.
My mom was popular even at age 66. She had many friends. She oozed charm and wit. Maybe it was because she was my mother, but I saw her as the vibrant center of any gathering. I admired the magnetism in her.
The subway car screeched to a halt as someone stepped on my black ballet flat. I looked up. It was my mother.
She never took the subway anymore. When I was a teenager, she was nearly choked in the turnstile by a mugger trying to grab her gold chain, which wouldn’t break. Instead she drove a Caprice Classic with velvet blue seats.
I couldn’t believe I was seeing her under the florescent lights of the subway car, amidst the advertisements for clear skin and hemorrhoid creams. She wore dangling earrings and looked glamorous. She seemed out of place, out of context in her stylish coat and high-heeled boots.
“Mom,” I said, loud enough for many to take notice.
“Lellybelle!” she said with a smile that embraced me.
I stood up, grabbed her arms, turned her in coordinated baby steps, and placed her in my seat. “What are you doing on the subway?” I asked
“My car broke down on 57th Street,” she said, brushing her brown hair out of her face.
She had been at a bridge tournament that day with her friend Mireille. She played all kinds of card games and was good at them. As we headed home together from the Forest Hills subway station along 108th Street, she told me that when she was walking down Lexington Avenue, she was overcome by perspiration, so much so that she went into a coffee shop and got napkins to wipe down her panty-hosed legs. “That’s weird,” I said. “Maybe you should go to a doctor.”
“Don’t be ridiculous” she said.
Instantly I stopped being ridiculous. We made a right on 68th Drive and were finally home.
Two days later, my mother collapsed.
That night as she was dying on the floral couch of our house, my sister, Debi, cradling her until the EMS arrived, I was on the subway. The trains were delayed. I got out at my exit; the air was arctic, my boots crunching on the snow, my breath visible in the night sky. Walking along 108th Street, I hopped aside as an ambulance went by, lights flashing and sirens wailing. I didn’t know it was racing down side streets to save my mother. I came home while they were trying to get her to breathe. A machine was doing it for her, and the ambulance took her to the hospital, but she was never able to wake up and breathe on her own. Four days later, declared brain dead, the apparatus was unplugged. For those four nights, my brother Dorian stood vigil at the foot of her bed.
Dorian and I left the hospital and made the arrangements at the funeral home and cemetery for a burial in the morning. That night, I fell into bed exhausted and depleted and finally went to sleep. I dreamed I was in bed with my mom having coffee. We were in her bedroom, which for some reason was on the first floor instead of the second, and we were wearing our nightgowns. Her gold bangles chimed as she lifted the cup from the saucer to drink. The doorbell rang. It was a couple, friends of my parents, a box of pastries in their hands. “Who was it?” my mom asked. “Valley and Marco,” I said and showed her all the goodies as if we had won a prize. As I was climbing back into the bed and getting settled for a grasse matinee, the doorbell rang again. “What’s going on?” my mom asked. I shrugged, ran to get the door to find more of her friends, and then got back into her bed. But as I snuggled next to her, smelling her smells, I realized that her friends, whom I’d known all my life, had looked at me with pity.
After the funeral, the friends who had populated my dream came to our door. It was the first night of the shiva. The friends had food just like in the dream, but my dream had been kinder.
I didn’t pick up Wuthering Heights again until the shiva was over and I had to go back to work. On the subway that morning, seated on the hard plastic orange seat, I opened the book to where I had left off.
The next chapter was the funeral of Catherine. I gasped. How had I stopped reading just before that point? Catherine saw Heathcliff again and was sick with regret. But I didn’t expect her to die. The shock of it made me cough out a sob. I closed the book and gathered myself. My mom was gone, brutally taken from me, like an excision. Here I was on the train, after an interruption of 10 days, going back to the mundane advertisements overhead like nothing had happened. But I had changed. I didn’t know how to be. I didn’t know how I was going to continue my life without my mother in it. I wasn’t ready to read a book and be in the subway. I wished I could look up and see her again, right there, stepping on my foot. My mom was in the hard cold ground in a cemetery in Queens, snow already covering her grave. The finality was savage.
My stop was next. I got up to leave the train, and with one last searching look, I stood clear of the closing doors.
Sanjeev Sethi’s latest full length collection of poetry, Legato without a lisp, is a work of exemplary fullness. A fullness of language and of intention. Comprising a collection of works rendered by a poet sure of his abilities and expression, it comes in its sheer robustness into an era marked by frail superficiality. Legato without a lisp is projected in its fullness to stand apart from the mere apparitions of art, those things that shout but barely speak, that garble as they scream with nothing to say. This is not at all in their company. This is a work solid and tangible.
It begins at the level of the line. Each feeling fully formed as though pulled from some remarkable ether and yet each line comes together, cobbled together with striking unity. Poetry born both together and apart. ‘Menarche left its mark/on your left leg’ – from Adolescence and ‘The meter of mederation fails/to direct my dinghy. A sneeze’ – from Effectuation are two such examples. This language, while transformative in its solidity, is not forceful, not violent but inviting, wise and open in its delivery. At times it almost comes like a sermon, Sethi pronouncing from his pulpit, tome in hand, somehow quiet yet booming. A gentle tone from an angel megaphone. A sound that does not speak with reluctance but with vigour.
All this is not to say that it does not have its moments of playfulness and humour. When the humour does come it comes with wit and with a sense of play that eschews the tired figure of the overly serious and dull artist. In passages such as ‘In Meatspace, we meet slices, too’ – from Rifeness, Sethi shows he’s not afraid to have fun. So too in the exemplary rhythms of the poems. They roll by on the gentle musicality, freely played with but always disciplined enough to not crumble into sing-song emptiness. You never get the manipulative feeling of being dragged into another’s song but feel compelled to sing along with Sethi’s gentle tune. ‘Do you know of anyone who dickers/with destiny? Meet the unsexed who,/like everyone, breathe some/more, and leave without a forwarding/address – from Olio, illustrated Sethi’s mastery of the rhythmic form.
The poems themselves are concerned with the movements of life, the chronological and the appreciative frozen moments where lyric poetry of this quality is born. At times political, at times gently instructive, at times traversing memory that concretes the past rather than descending into sentimental nostalgia. This shapes a world removed from attempts at the homogeneous universal and into the individual. The abstraction of the personal, the subjective waltz of place and time. One gets the feeling that Sethi has a mind for pondering the small moments of life and taking from them something entirely individual. These are not the rehashed platitudes of the churned out postcard poignancy of so much modern poetry. These stand alone. When Sethi writes lines like ‘Mortality forwards its memo,/through a long-lost friend./Senectitude wrests my mentor/and I am quietened by lines left by him;/as an impulse larger than me/chooses to triturate my ego’ – from Au Revoir, you sense his authorial presence in each utterance. He is not interested in the familiar, only in what he can grasp from life through his art.
Legato without a lisp is a book well worth the time. As an art object, it stands as a physical structure against the tide of so much that withers and falls, weak work created with so little thought apart from the on-trend and the easily consumable. Work that it is made to be quickly exhausted and disappear. Work that has no physicality and cannot stand. Sanjeev Sethi has here created a work that wishes to stand, that demands to be remembered. What more could one ask?
Nathan Anderson is a poet and artist from Mongarlowe, Australia. He is the author of numerous books and has had work appear widely both online and in print. He is a member of the C22 experimental writing collective. You can find him at nathanandersonwriting.home.blog or on Twitter/X/Bluesky @NJApoetry.
Christopher Bernard will be reading at the Poets for Palestine SF Marathon Reading at San Francisco’s Bird and Beckett Bookstore. For a donation of any amount to the Middle East Children’s Alliance, a nonpartisan and nonpolitical organization helping all children in the region, poets can come and read at any time at the store on October 14th, Indigenous People’s Day. Please feel welcome to sign up here or email poetsforpalestinesf@gmail.com to be scheduled.
This month’s issue addresses our fears and aspirations: whether life will become what we dread, or what we hope.
Wazed Abdullah revels in the joy of the Bangladesh monsoon as Don Bormon celebrates flowers and wispy clouds in autumn. Maurizio Brancaleoni contributes bilingual haiku spotlighting days at the beach, insects, cats, and the rain. Brian Barbeito shares the experience of walking his dogs as summer turns to fall.
Soren Sorensen probes and stylizes sunsets in his photography series. Lan Qyqualla rhapsodizes about love, dreams, flowers, colors, poetry, and harp music. Ilhomova Mohichehra poetically welcomes autumn to her land.
John L. Waters reviews Brian Barbeito’s collection of poetry and photography Still Some Summer Wind Coming Through, pointing out how it showcases nature and the “subtle otherworldly” within seemingly ordinary scenes. Oz Hartwick finds a bit of the otherworldly within his ordinary vignettes as he shifts his perspective.
Kelly Moyer crafts stylized photographic closeups of ordinary scenes, rendering the familiar extraordinary. Ma Yongbo paints scenes where ordinary life becomes unreal, suffused with images associated with horror.
Sayani Mukherjee speaks of a bird’s sudden descent into a field of flowers and comments on our wildness beneath the surface. Jake Cosmos Aller illustrates physical attraction literally driving a person wild.
Mesfakus Salahin asserts that were the whole natural world to become silent, his love would continue. Mahbub Alam views life as a continual journey towards his beloved. Tuliyeva Sarvinoz writes tenderly of a mother and her young son and of the snow as a beloved preparing for her lover. Sevinch Tirkasheva speaks of young love and a connection that goes deeper than looks. llhomova Mohichehra offers up tender words for each of her family members. She also expresses a kind tribute to a classmate and friend.
Meanwhile, rather than describing tender loving affection, Mykyta Ryzhykh gets in your face with his pieces on war and physical and sexual abuse. His work speaks to the times when life seems to be an obscenity. Z.I. Mahmud looks at William Butler Yeats’ horror-esque poem The Second Coming through the lens of Yeats’ contemporary and tumultuous European political situation.
Alexander Kabishev’s next tale of life during the blockade of St. Petersburg horrifies with its domestic brutality. Almustapha Umar weeps with grief over the situations of others in his country.
In a switch back to thoughts of hope, Lidia Popa speaks to the power of poetry and language to connect people across social divides. Hari Lamba asserts his vision for a more just and equal America with better care for climate and ecology. Perizyat Azerbayeva highlights drip irrigation as a method to tackle the global problem of a shortage of clean drinkable water. Eldorbek Xotamov explores roles for technology and artificial intelligence in education.
Elmaya Jabbarova expresses her hopes for compassion and peace in our world. Eva Petropoulou affirms that action, not mere pretty words, are needed to heal our world.
Ahmad Al-Khatat’s story illustrates the healing power of intimate love after the trauma of surviving war and displacement. Graciela Noemi Villaverde reflects on the healing calm of silence after war.
Meanwhile, Christopher Bernard showcases the inhumanity of modern warfare in a story that reads at first glance like a sci-fi dystopia. Daniel De Culla also calls out the absurdity of war and the grossness of humor in the face of brutality.
Pat Doyne probes the roots of anti-Haitian immigrant rumors in Springfield, Ohio and critiques fear-mongering. Jorabayeva Ezoza Otkir looks to nature for metaphors on the corrosive nature of hate.
On a personal level, Nosirova Gavhar dramatizes various human responses to loss and trauma. Kendall Snipper dramatizes an eating disorder ravaging a woman’s life and body.
Donna Dallas’ characters are lonely, bruised by life, and drawn to what’s not good for them: drugs, bad relationships, lovers who don’t share their dreams. J.J. Campbell evokes his miserable life situation with dark humor.
Meanwhile, Maja Milojkovic savors each moment as she creates her own happiness through a positive attitude. In the same vein, Lilian Dipasupil Kunimasa celebrates the power of a free and self-confident mind and the joy of spending time with small children.
Tuliyeva Sarvinoz urges us to move forward toward our goals with faith and dedication. Numonjonova Shahnozakhon echoes that sentiment, encouraging perseverance and resilience. S. Afrose resolves to move forward in life with optimism and self-respect.
Michael Robinson reflects on the peace he finds in his continuing Christian walk. Federico Wardal reviews anthropologist Claudia Costa’s research into spiritual fasting practices among the Yawanawa tribe in Brazil.
Duane Vorhees explores questions of legacy, inheritance, and immortality, both seriously and with humor. Isabel Gomes de Diego highlights Spanish nature and culture with her photographic closeups of flowers, religious icons, and a drawing made as a gift for a child’s parents. Federico Wardal highlights the archaeological findings of Egyptologist Dr. Zahi Hawass and his upcoming return to San Francisco’s De Young Museum. Zarina Bo’riyeva describes the history and cultural value of Samarkand.
Sarvinoz Mansurova sends outlines from a conference she attended on Turkic-adjacent cultures, exploring her region as well as her own Uzbek culture.
Barchinoy Jumaboyeva describes her affection for her native Uzbekistan, viewing the country as a spiritual parent. Deepika Singh explores the mother-daughter relationship in India and universally through her dialogue poem.
David Sapp’s short story captures the feel of decades-ago Audrey Hepburn film Roman Holiday as it describes a dream meeting between lovers in Rome. Mickey Corrigan renders the escapades and tragedies of historical women writers into poetry.
Duane Vorhees draws a parallel between Whitman’s detractors and those who would criticize Jacques Fleury’s poetry collection You Are Enough: The Journey To Accepting Your Authentic Self for having a non-traditional style.
This set of poems from Jacques Fleury expresses a sophisticated childlike whimsy. A few other pieces carry a sense of wry humor. Daniel De Culla relates a tale of inadvertently obtaining something useful through an email scam. Taylor Dibbert reflects on our escapes and “guilty pleasures.”
Noah Berlatsky reflects on both his progress as a poet and editors’ changing tastes. Sometimes it takes growing and maturing over time as a person to create more thoughtful craft.
Alan Catlin strips artworks down to their bare essential elements in his list poetry, drawing attention to main themes. Mark Young focuses on kernels of experience, on the core of what matters in the moment. J.D. Nelson captures sights, experiences, and thoughts into evocative monostich poems worthy of another reading.
Kylian Cubilla Gomez’ pictures get close up to everyday miracles: a beetle, car components, action figures, a boy in a dinosaur costume.
We hope that this issue, while being open about the worries we face, is also a source of everyday miracles and thought-provoking ideas. Enjoy!
