Simone Weil

 If I had seen her in Marseilles,

smelling of mûre-musc soap,

I would have thought her a poet

as we hid from the rain in greyblue cafés—

till she enriched her coffee with her blood. 

At times she was almost a tourist,

a young student curious about living,

passionate about dying.  In photographs of her,

she was the fixed moment among eternal blurs. 

History, a firefly in her hand,

wrestled in the frames of her mystical glasses.

 She hated the Author of her script.

Her scream was prefabricated,

the war to fight before

 the ensuing battles of buildings and men,

 before adopting Tarzan’s yell

  with all the passion of that endless afternoon

in Golgotha. 

Tropical Dance

You throw yourself into the dance

As a drunk would against a wall,

Your flowery dress splashing wildly

Like a flower garden in a windstorm,

But no flowers drop to your bare feet. 

With what joy, with what marvel,

I watch your hands rise, your hair fly,

Your dress swing like a cape in the wind.

Your mouth opens and you shout fiercely

The voluptuous thrill in your squinting eyes. 

Oh how you dance: is it to show your thighs?

The night you suck up under your dress,

A music heavy as papayas and coconuts falling,

A sensual finish like morning glories

Splayed for the night after a rainstorm.

No Rewind

Some flowers droop

down the shoulders of the vase

like exhausted tongues.

They rebelled against themselves,

refused to live.

Others look away, their necks rough,

their color faded

into the same zone

where our love disappeared. 

“They don’t last,”

you said, so matter-of-factly,

the morning you choked them

into a tight bouquet in water.

Yesterday you brought me a tape,

and a note in a small cream envelope.

Today I listened to the wrong song,

somehow missed the right one.

When your hands fumbled

with the tape player, when your finger

trembled to my silence—

“You’re a dangerous man,”

your note had read.

“Let’s talk about God”—

and your hand orgasmic

followed in its wake,

I knew that today

a death would separate us.

Whatever music had glued us

during the minutes

we converted into history

was frozen in the violet frenzy

that rounded your eyes

and the tape player

that had no rewind. 

Stopgap

It was your face that darkened over me

In the back seat of your father’s car.

It was your name I whispered

To the moon on a hilltop in boot camp.

It was your letters that fired me

Through the snow to the freezing latrine.

But in the Black Forest in rain

I trembled like a wet bird for another. 

Saturday Inspection

By the time they arrived

Our polished dress shoes

Were white with frost

We had stamped our feet

Walked around in our morning crate

Our Friday night preparations

Saturday morning deteriorations

But what joy when it was over

When we again were free

In our fatigues and boots

When we without duty

Could delude ourselves

Downtown in our civvies

That no war was raging

In our streets, at our table,

And somebody’s jungle and rice paddies

Would not fit in the box home

Ivanov Reyez was an English professor at Odessa College.  His poetry has appeared in Paris Lit Up, The Galway Review, The Blue Mountain Review, The Cafe Review, Pinyon, Sierra Nevada Review, and elsewhere.  He won the riverSedge Poetry Prize 2015.  He is the author of Poems, Not Poetry (Finishing Line Press, 2013).

Turkic-speaking people

Today, Turkic-speaking peoples are spread not only in Central Asia, but also from the Sea of ​​Oxoto to the shores of the Black Sea, from Siberia to northern Afghanistan and Iran, partly in Iraq and Eastern Europe, and the total number of speakers is more than 200 million.

The largest number of Turkic-speaking people are the Turks, that is, the people living in the territory of Turkey, their number is about 100 million, and most of them live in Germany. The second largest group is the Uzbeks, the total number of which is about 50 million. because about 8 million people of Uzbek nationality live in the geographical area called South Turkestan, that is, in northern Afghanistan.

At the same time, I must say that in the Republic of Azerbaijan, more than 9 million people of Uzbek nationality live in the northern Ereon area, which is the unofficial name About 15 million Azars live in southern Azerbaijan. As we mentioned above, Gagauz people of Turkic nationality live in Eastern Europe, that is, in the Republic of Moldova, and they have their own administrative territory and language. Currently, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan are part of the United Nations.

There are a few independent Turkic states, but the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is partially recognized and there are also about 20 autonomous or separate Turkish states. For example, Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic in Azerbaijan, Gagauzia in Moldova, South Turkestan in Afghanistan, Eastern Turkestan in the PRC, i.e. Uyghurs. and many other republics in the territory of Russia: Bashkirstan, Tatarstan, Tuva, Yakutia, Chuvashia, Crimea, Karbadino, Bulgaria, Karachay, Cherkessia, etc., and in the territory of Uzbekistan there is also the sovereign democratic republic of Karakalpakstan, and the population belonging to the Karakalpak nation lives here.

These peoples speak several languages ​​belonging to the Turkic language family. We will divide them into 4 large and 2 small groups. The first group is the Kipchak group, this group includes: Kazakh, Karakalpak, Kyrgyz, Karaim, Bashkir, Karachoy, Nogay, Tatar, Crimean Tatar, the second group, Oghuz, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Gagauz trills, and the third group, Qarluq.

It includes the Uzbek and Uyghur languages, and then the big group is the Siberian group, which includes the Altai Tuva, Khakas, Shora, Yakut languages. The other two subgroups are the Bulgar group, which is grammatically and lexically slightly different from the Turkic languages, the only language of which is the Chuvash language, and the second subgroup is the Khalaj Gurhi, which includes the Khalaj language and the Khalaj language of Iran. used by the Turkish ethnic population.

By Jakbaraliyev Zafarbek Ziyodbek, 8th general secondary school 

Now he is an 11th grade student in school. He has a B2 level in English, besides he knows Turkish and Italian.  Until now, I have been the “Laureate” of the “Rainbow Stars Art Festival” republic.  At the same time, I am a participant of the republican stage of the “most exemplary school captains” competition.  I am a participant of the regional head of the 2023 History Olympiad.

All Together Now

The joy of it, the joy of hate

spewing from every mouth,

like orange-candy spittle waterfalls.

Drowning in the joy of bile

in the close coughing parasite crawling

many-legged, sparkling gasoline rainbow

from the orifices of our faces,

out of the corner of our eyes.

Where would we be without each other

to weep these insect legs upon?

Brittle and squirming

with little hooks on the end

to tear off skin

like laughter curling up in a skull.

he looked at the map of the stars, a map he had gotten from a National Geographic book. he had affixed it to the wall and tried to remember it. he couldn’t remember the constellations though, not the way other people did. he was terrible at geography of the earth, and apparently could not remember the sky either. but still, he found that he liked the stars, and the whole idea of it. why not? what other posters were there on the wall? it was difficult to remember. Jim Morrison. The Silver Surfer. outside then the rain and the wind, the fall leaves sometimes twirling around as if guided by a spirit. nobody ever home, or hardly anyhow. emptiness. and no trouble there either, no bad people per se, but no good people either. nothing. a certain emptiness. perhaps it was because the past was over but the future had not really begun. open the window. let the night air go through the screen. sometimes angelic light or feeling. feeling. and actually sometimes the bad. what they call the Old Hag Syndrome, where a being sat is on your back and tried to steal your soul. she arrived twice. had to be fended off with will power. the first time she called his name. but was it real? or a medical thing that sometimes happened to people when they slept. music. soft music. plush carpets w/nightlights. the real stars out there, beyond the poster of such. but not as of late in those long nights, because the cloud cover made for an opacity. memory. nostalgia. ghostly. it wasn’t really eating, or sports, dating, or money or music or drawing or travel. what was it? sometimes something in the words read or written. sometimes that if something had to be picked. yes books. and the wind. books and the wind inside the night. the tarot often said the third eye was open. interesting. he wished no harm upon the ones that wished harm upon him. yet, the diviners say much trouble arrived for them. the wind goes through vines, over and around the old graveyard, and atop plum trees. the wind comes into the room and rustles papers, makes a pen and pencil to roll. friendship w/the night. prayer meditation vision mysteries. a group of deer must wander up the path. to appear just then in the dawn, in the very first inkling of the dawn when the light arrives so suddenly and has been borne and born, travelled and birthed. day was okay. night more spacious, wild, its capricious winds and restless clouds, its electric eclectic ephemeral ethereal dreams and the fall rains against the windows in the witching hour.

The Green Jalapeno On My Tongue

I think of the man who was very briefly in my life. I don’t want to think of him but I do. After all this time he comes into view but this time he is saying goodbye. The relationship doesn’t feel quite as magical for him anymore. It’s twenty minutes past one in the afternoon. It’s raining. There’s a chill in the air. I give up wondering who he’s with, what food he’s eating, if he still does his laundry and irons his shirts, or if the young woman in his life does everything for him, like the cooking and cleaning in his house. He was always interested in property and in having plenty of space around him.

You are a newborn. I count your magic digits. Your nose, lips, eyes and mouth are a requiem. You have eczema. I was unemployed. Across the valley’s face you came home. I did not expect you. I did not help paint your room a bright sunshine yellow. I regret that. This bundle. The science of sinking flowers. Magus visiting on a floating ship. Milk-fever on your brow. You cannot speak my name yet. One day you will hate me and say I hurt your feelings. This will happen as a self-aware four year old. I will feel ashamed of myself. I shouted because I was afraid. Afraid you were going to hurt yourself. I did not speak when you turned your head away. I felt afraid. You’re a good psychologist at five. You tell me a baby will make me happy. I believed then in hope like a girl. A man enters the picture when I am thirty-nine. The man I think I am going to marry. It doesn’t work out. In reality it doesn’t but in my head it does. I can hear something that draws my interest as I try to fall asleep. The dogs move in the dark. Their silent maneuvering was disconcerting to me at first. The one walks behind the other. 

Then it is the art of serving and helping during Covid-19. Everybody thinks it’s the apocalypse. I don’t think of anything but of getting out of this tiny isolation room they’ve put me in. Now two years seems like such a long time ago. I shit in this room and everyone can see. I pee. Everyone can see. That is not lost on me. My paternal grandfather came from Saint Helena. I was a guinea pig. When I was in the normal ward, whatever normal means, the male nurses could see us showering and would just stand there and watch. They had to. To keep us safe because of safety matters or matters of safety. 

The aftermath of the promulgation of the Group Areas Act in post-apartheid South Africa should be a matter of every South Africa’s interest. Might I add it is very much a disquieting Jungian path. 

To a sister in Europe that I feel as if I’m learning these things much too late. The things I needed from you. The things you needed from me. You needed someone to listen to you. Well I needed that too. It has come much too late. 

I conducted an interview with water in the swimming pool. The droplets of rain feel like ice on my skin. Underneath I am surrounded by giant tap roots and blue trees. A safe blue forest. I can live here forever like I did in high school. I was baptised in the swimming pool hitting forty by an Apostle Harmse. 

My mother’s face falls. My father interprets this as both cunning deceit on her part and lovely. Joyce Carol Oates frightens me. The way her mind is engineered to think. Her conditioning. Of this I am certain. Gravity. The leaf falls. You are something that I have lost and that will never be returned to me. 

I know the wildflowers of pain. It sucks. I know how to live in the moment. Sometimes it is cool to live in the moment. To wait for the eclipse of this sweet reversal of fortune. The edge of this knife-jab-twist in my sobriety. You, the gorgeous saint of a man who was very briefly in my life, I think have sufficient world peace now. The peace that you were longing for. That I could not give. 

I am trying to get my ficus plant to hit the ceiling. It means I will win a prize. The universe will just hand this to me and say, “This is your consolation prize for never having got married. Never having those children.” You never think of me anymore. This of course comes as no surprise to me and why should it? It’s been years. Nearly half a decade. 

I wonder how your coffee tastes in the morning that the woman now in your life makes for you. Does your lady make it for you in the exact same way that I did? I wonder how your doctoral studies are going, are you thinking of teaching again, taking up that vocation? You told me that you would only do it for the money. You also told me that you would only teach overseas. 

I wonder if you’re still inventing robots in your garage. After all this time, I still know pain. I am still writing sad poetry and books about the woman who never gets the man, who never quite gets it. Love or the domestic affairs of the heart. My parents are still alive. My father is eighty now, can you believe it! He outlived his university contemporaries. 

A very young child’s toys covers a mat. My brother has had a daughter since I saw the man who was very briefly in my life last. The child’s mother works at a fast food restaurant during the day. I take care of her daughter with my mother and brother’s help. The child is my consolation prize. It’s not raining so hard anymore. 

I joined a film forum. I have a film that is in production. Life is good. It should be good, right? But I keep telling myself that the man was my twin flame. That we were meant to be together. There are others, but what exactly does that matter?

What’s a Cambodian sunrise like? What was a Cambodian sunset like? What was life like now so far away from everything you’ve ever known, what you grew up with? I just wanted you to know that I still think of you sometimes and that when I am older than I am now I will probably still think of you. My tears, a forest of tears, are falling now but I have no idea why I am crying.

I sit in a darkened room drinking a woody cup of tea that nourishes my spirit and I think of my sister far away in Europe locked in a battle for her own survival. I think of my brother falling out of love with the mother of his daughter but who he still sleeps with. I think of my mother whose beauty has never faded, my father who still has all his mental faculties intact. The man who was very briefly in my life has faded from view. Once I walked victorious but now this man is in love with another. I still long for those inescapable moments where he held onto me so tight as if he would never let me go. My being and his were interwoven. It gave me courage and now nothing does. All I want are answers to my questions. Why did the relationship come to an end, why could he not love me, marry me, why could we not make it work, why did I fail to hold him captive and why was I so easy to replace?

Children are in my life now that have replaced the man’s absent love. My brother’s children. A son and a daughter. I am growing older, past the marrying age, past the age of having children. I dream of having a past in which the man is non-existent. Then I won’t have to think of him anymore.

There’s a sweetness to the day, to this light pouring into this winter’s day and the cold, pouring into my limbs and the whistle of the boiling kettle, pouring into this simple meal for a financially inept individual, an individual who finds it difficult to save. I bite into a green apple, make a face at its tartness, its sourness and chew. I swallow the apple and feel calm. The still air composes itself anew at the open windows. I watch a bird fly into the window and compose itself anew and fly off again. I get up and close the window and the thin net curtain in the sitting room. I remember a thin woman called Althea from high school who I didn’t like. I wonder what her children are like. If her husband makes her coffee and breakfast in the morning. She is a doctor now. She’s done well for herself but I remember how she used to make fun of me and pretend to speak like me. I remember her friends of Indian descent. How they seemed clever at life, had all the right moves and always aced their tests. With their high test scores, good looks, fathers who were an amalgamation of dentists, doctors, pharmacists, and business-owners who drove minivans or posh sedans to drop them off they seemed to have it made in ways and means that I did not have it made.

I think of feeling numb. Coming home in the afternoon after school and having no friends, nobody to speak or communicate with. I would wait for the arrival of my younger sister and brother and mother. I would sit in the front of the house and listen to CD’s. I wasn’t frightened of loneliness yet. I didn’t have words yet for that altered state of consciousness.

It is winter but it doesn’t feel like winter yet. It’s still warm outside. I feel hot under the blankets and kick them off me. I have regret on my mind that comes to me in waves. Regret becomes this kind of a personal attack on my sobriety and I think back to what the loss of the man meant in my life and the hours it took to produce published and unpublished manuscripts. Both were significant losses. My brother thinks he is in love but he has experienced much sadness in his life. The kind of sadness that is windswept and forlorn, torn between the wildflowers and the beating heart, the sun and interplanetary alignment. I want to ask the dark shadow of the man looming over me in the shower, in the garden, in my childhood bedroom, in the kitchen, in the lounge who he loves now but instead I lose my nerve and light a menthol cigarette instead. I blow the smoke out of my mouth, bite my bottom lip, and chew my fingernail, and stare out of the window remembering when he held me close and told me that he would never let me go. But he did. He did. Whether it was because of my chronic illness or disability or my poor mental health or my weak, limited thinking I will never know but what I do know as I stare into the past and into the eyes of this illusion that I had loved and given my heart to is this. I wish him well. Yes, I wish him well. I play Erik Satie and as the music fills this room I wish that the man is happy and in love with life. That after all this time he has found what I could not give him.

I write to his mother. I still write to her even though her son is no longer in my life. I still write sad poems about the end of our relationship. The end of this tragic yet significant love affair. She writes back. She is full of wisdom and spiritual insights. She tells me to move on with my life and forget all about him but it takes me a while to do this. It takes me years. I even find myself dreaming about him sometimes. In one dream we attend church together. In another I drove around looking for his house. I listen to Hillsong. His favourite band. I sing along. I lift my hands and sing and do praise and worship and then I think of him flirting at church, flirting in the workplace, in high school, in bars and clubs. It makes me feel better to think of him as the villain and myself as the victim. Sometimes I do think of how he has made me happy and then I smile and start to cry when I think of how I called him “Husband” and he called me “Wife”.

I made a bottle of milk for my niece. It’s the children that are important to me now. Other mothers’ progeny. My father and I watch cartoons with my niece. My father sings and does actions. I drink lukewarm coffee. My heart aches for something that doesn’t exist anymore. A love that might have been. It gives rise to a feeling of indecision. The clock ticks away while I sink into a lounge chair while light fills this room.