Let tie our broom sticks together and sweep the floor in our society.
A word of peace is like a kettle of water,
But we are now ruled by the kingdom of pieces.
Nowadays
Neighborhood is like enemies of yester age,
Where two neighbors live in the same compound but opponent heart.
The tree of hatred planted into our minds,
Who’s bear the fruit of conflict,
Growing stronger and bearing more fruits.
Hatred killing the foundation of good Morrow
Now today
Hatred is building the tower of conflict
Injecting odium Into the heart of today child.
Killing love in the mind of tomorrow men’s
Where indeed in yester age
A child spent a day in friend house
Where they Will play together
Eat lunch together
And even call the friend mother mummy
But in today years
We are lost in a black forest
Where our hatred have distract our children friendship
Always avoiding them from eating neighbors meals
Giving them toys to stop playing with the neighbors children
This are not the anthem of democracy we heard from larks during quadrennial replacement.
Half dead tree unlikely to bear fruit,
Watering with patience,
But refuse to change.
They are quadrennial replacement,
Yearning for the votes from our thumbs.
The trees are becoming enormous,
Like tree’s in the forest,
Standing with dry leaves.
They keep rejecting works
Becoming more baren than ever.
They grow to consume our toils,
But serving us nothing.
Moon(haiku)
Shining all the night,
In the gap between darkness,
That lighten the earth.
Market
A panel board,
That bridge different wires,
Red, black and yellow,
With different insulators
Wealth
Wishes that makes dream
Come true,
The pride of human
That defines existence.
Precious stone
Oh precious stone
Human are thirsty to have,
Hustle through curdles day and night.
Green fingers
The wealth of the nation
Waving at us
Agriculture growing
Crops mingling with us.
Stay in gist with them
From dawn to dusk.
Green fingers that wave at us
Like calabash on a river
Accompany us with air.
Green fingers
Our marketer
That we undergoes barta trade
Exchanging health and joy.
Argony(haiku)
Always Mood changer
That fills the heart with anger
Like a mourning one
I am in pain
Blood flow like stream
Embracing the soil
That reduce our fertile.
Bandit and Boko Haram
Acting of their choice
Insecurity embracing us
Victims have no fear for law again
Kill and earn
Murderer becoming occupation
Rule of law abandoned
People suffering from pieces
Peace have been buried cause by low security.
Nuraini Mohammad Usman is a passionate writer and student from Minna, Niger state with roots in Kano State. Inspired by his experience and culture, he crafts uplifting poems and stories that ignite positive change with a strong foundation from Better Treasure international school and Al-fawzul Azeem International School, Nuraini is currently honing his skills at Legend International School and Hilltop Creative Art foundation. He believes in the power of words to inspire and motivate others.
Evaluate D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers as a case study of Freudian psychoanalytical genesis of the emotion of love.
A son loving his mother too dearly and in turn, the mother who lavished all her affection upon her son. Elusiveness and mystification of the psychic conflicts between mother, lovers, father and sons framework engenders the Freudian psychoanalysis and thus underscores the Oedipal and Electra complexes. Mr. Lawrence voices the struggle of the central protagonist Pual Morel to emancipate himself from maternal allegiance and thus transfer his affections to a fiancee who belongs to another human creed. Furthermore, mother and son are one and the husband is completely effaced and the father exists merely as a harlequin humbug.
Obsession with the possessive love between mother and son salvages the creaking domestic hearth’s explosive ambience from the parental violence and physical intimidation including banging fists, muffled voice, hurling of attics. Paul Morel’s tokens of love and appreciation such as the bouquet of flowers and extracurricular activities accomplished with accolades, medals and laurels become entirely dedicated to the heartfelt charismatic lady, Mrs. Gertrude Morel. This possessive obsession is explicated in the statements from the textual reference: “In the end she shared everything with him without know … She waited for his coming home in the evening, and then she unburdened herself of all she had pondered, or of all that had occurred to her during the day. He sat and listened with his earnestness. The shared lives.” Furthermore, this recreational exchanges and emotional correspondence provide salvation to Mrs. Morel’s macabre existence that compelled her life to a maniacal debacle, haunting the Derbyshire coal mining family.
Eventually with the demise of the patriarchal head of the family, Paul Morel’s dilettantism and hedonism frame the newly orphaned boy to earn a thirty and/or thirty-five shillings a week. With that petty finance Paul Morel intends to pursue a Bohemian lifestyle except purchasing a real estate shanty cottage in the neighbouring countryside and live there with his mother happily ever after. In this episode, Paul Morel develops a romantic affair for the neighbouring farming family maiden Mirriam Leiver, a loner, reticent, exalted and reserved girl. Herein, the intruder motherly figure creeps into the lives of these romancers to a hellish extent and that her intrusion, however, can be solely vindictive in case of apprenticing Paul Morel to surgical warehouse for the rapid surge in effeminization.
Nonetheless, Mrs. Gertrude Morel admonishes the camaraderie of vampirish girls such as Miriam Leiver emphasizing that, “She is one of those who will want to suck a man’s soul out till he has none of his own left.” This commentary satirizes the trenchant of a scathing wife to her husband. Relationship between the newly piquant romancers thus prove to be a futile endeavour if analogies to textual references are contextualized: “Oh, Lord let me not love Paul Morel. Keep me from loving him, if I ought not to love him” and “He was afraid of her. The fact that he might want her as a man wants a woman had in him been suppressed into a shame.” Tumultuous turmoil invades the relationship and thus virulent acrimony plagues their relationship through rhetorical estrangement and psychological alienation. Except the church gatherings harboured a sense of spiritual reconciliation by reuniting his two loves under the spell of the place of worship.
Even the maternal allegiance disintegrates to a dread and dreary affair as soon as gerontological diseases and William Morel’s death inflicted Mrs. Morel. Off late Paul Morel’s Lincoln Cathedral excursion proves to be a bizarro after witnessing Mrs. Morel to the emblematic manifestation in idolized version of an old sweetheart.
The amorous conquest progresses toward Clara Davies, distant relation of Miriam Leiver. She possesses sensual mysticism as revealed by the intimation of Paul in the statement that “She was to him extraordinarily provocative, because of the knowledge she seemed to possess and gathered fruit of experience. Afterall, Clara advises Paul that Miriam wanted sensual gratification instead of soul communion and fantasy imagination. In this way, she thus, boldly wields the shield of courage in the fantastical Paul Morel that he couldn’t have achieved out of his own accord. .
Morbid manifestations of the abnormal environment transforms the hero of the narrative fiction from a wreck and a ruin to a ruthless egotist and a vicious weakling in his dealings with the feminine characters. Even his masculinized maleness can be challengingly grisly by his dealing with his elderly mother whom he had stooped to get rid off. These human flaws are the result of the love instinct that gradually partakes with the sudden efflorescence and poetic charm booming from evolutionary stages of puberty. Freud explicates motherly love to be maidenly love that blooms during maternal caresses and intimate feelings of oneness, thus we feel a conscious passion for another individual of the opposite sex. Frank hostility and incessant jealously invoke the spirit of childhood and adolescence love fantasy and this testimony testified unbridled egoism. Paul Morel is tenaciously rooted in his maternal parent and doesn’t relinquish his hold upon her unless her elderly transition to old sweetheart.
Paul Morel’s dejection and desertion of love life is the result of the interweaving of immature phantasies of procreation with his former ideal adoration of his beloved mother Gertrue Morel. Furthermore Freudian psychoanalysis implies that male characters like Paul Morel chooses a girl who most resembles his mother and the heroine figures are likely to mate mostly with the man who reminds themselves of their fathers. Our fathers and mothers are ingrained imagoes in the veil of forgetfulness ever since childhood which we cannot obliterate.
Further Reading
Sons and Lovers: A Freudian Appreciation [1916], Alfred Booth Kuttner, Psychoanalytical Review, Vol. 3, No. 3, July 1916, pp. 295-317, D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, A Casebook, Editorial of John Worrhen [Emeritus Professor of the University of Nottingham] and Andrew Harrison [a tutor in English Literature at the University of Warwick], Oxford University Press.
to the manner born, of letting the man be the man,
however dumb, & riding the waves towards twin
peaks, rather than Lost Twins, behind glass doors.
Adam Fieled is a writer based in Philadelphia. His books include Equations, Opera Bufa, and Apparition Poems. Manuscripts-in-progress include Something Solid, Letters to Dead Masters, and A Poet in Center City. A magna cum laude Penn grad, he edits P.F.S. Post.
Room A: The room where you watched the sun set with a dyslexic boy you named Squirrle
Room B: The room where your rejected lover tapped a Morse code against his shaved head
Room C: The room where your father-on-parole hid his little tin men under your bed. At night, they marched and drummed and sang German beer songs until you cried Uncle
Room D: The room where Penny dropped her glass eye and you could never hold her in the same way
Room E: When you’re 3 sizes too big for everything and can’t stretch backwards or sideways, you’ll reconstruct the room as floating space
Room F: Where you shared popcorn with a pickpocket who snuck rare coins into your dirty jeans
Room G: Where your brother returned home with his junkie love
Room H: The visiting nun who forgot to close the door to your room and left you to melt
Room I: When the room collapses from a fire, you are lighter than ash
Room J: The room where a boy named Jesus played banjo until your knees bled
Room K: The room where you gave birth to another room
That 70s Show
It was different then. We were as careless as near sighted thieves. We drank rock & rye until our hearts were too water-logged to beat an even rhythm. We dated people who didn’t believe our real names. We re-invented ourselves in the dark and couldn’t see what we made. We finally met again adrift in an empty ocean. “Are you floating alone?” an old friend asked me. “Yes,” I said, still am.” He smiled wistfully the way he once did.
All-Night Diner
Today’s special: Death at a discount
Choices: charcoal broiled, braised, fried with onions,
or just quick & dry.
served with truffles and parsley echoes.
Orange mushrooms too, if you prefer.
Family Guy
you took the rap
for your starry-eyed
father who never
learned how to swim
or how to collect
snowflakes in a
petri dish.
they hung you
from a cloud
A Ku for Emily
The warmth of your mouth
My words form couplets & thaw
Mars Brocke has been published in Otolith, Ink in Thirds, and elsewhere. He loves old garage bands of the 60s and still adores Iggy Pop. He also loves soft-serve ice cream.
The town ran out of graveyard. So they buried the dead in the air. But the night winds were so strong they blew all but the heaviest corpses away into the desert. So they buried the dead in their dreams. But this made sleeping unpleasant. So they ignored the dead. But they kept tripping over them during errands and chores. So they outlawed dying. But the town was full of rule breakers. So they lived with the dead. But this required shutting one’s eyes to see. So they forgot the dead.
A Treatise on Human Nature:
The only women with bulletproof smiles
are those who know
there are no bulletproof smiles.
All men with bulletproof smiles
have been shot dead.
Death discharges all debts
male, female, or other
but most the population
is alive.
Half the world knows
blonds are responsible
for most the world’s woes.
The other half
should meet more blonds.
The human heart
is a wine cork caught
in a kitchen sink’s eddy—
wild, undrownable,
governed by forces
not its own.
We cannot think.
So don’t.
Brooks Lindberg lives in the Pacific Northwest. His poems and antipoems appear in various publications. Links to his work can be found at brookslindberg.com.
Notes on the Confederacy’s Next to Last Battle in Georgia
I leave US Highway 17, take the quiet oak-lined county road that divides subdivisions along the Ogeechee River to the entrance of Fort McAllister where history folds back on itself today, wormholes two dates —
December 13, 1864, Fort McAllister falls,
December 9, 2023, the Final Battle of Fort McAllister.
Beyond the portal of the Visitors Center the Yankee encampment has the symmetry of a movie set, tents geometrically spaced as if soldiers were required to measure their separation before raising them. An officer’s wide wall tent in the center, twice the size of others, has two flags guarding the entrance. A former Army soldier, I almost say “Permission to enter” before a bluecoat in slouch hat walks out, introducing himself as a colonel. He tells me he is frying sweet potatoes for breakfast, the smoke and sizzle of his iron skillet over the fire in front of his tent rises to join smoke from other campfires in the late morning’s winter bite of cold wind. He tells me his Union flag has 34 stars and the other’s a gold Irish regiment flag, a Celtic harp visible in its hanging folds.
The night before I searched the web for Civil War era facts —
In 1859, the year construction of The First African Baptist Church of Savannah was completed, an auction of 400 slaves occurred in Savannah, one of the largest in US history.
After Fort Sumter was attacked, President Lincoln called forth 75,000 soldiers to put down the rebellion.
Some young boys who volunteered wrote the number 18 on paper they stuffed in a shoe so they could say they “were over 18” honestly [a folksy tidbit in Smithsonian].
Elderly Confederate veterans were paraded before cheering crowds during the 1939 ‘Gone with the Wind’ movie premier festivities in Atlanta.
He falls out of character quickly, the drumbeat of battle still hours away, says he’s been a reenactor since retiring from the Army in 2014. I ask the obvious question for me, “Afghanistan and/or Iraq?” Like me he was in both wars. He, a retired Lieutenant Colonel, tells me of going home with the body of one of his soldiers, taking him home to his hometown, at the end of their Afghanistan tour. I tell him it somehow seems worst when soldiers die with only days left. He looks at me and doesn’t disagree, but behind his eyes are other deaths he will forever consider.
I think of another Civil War fact, from American Battlefield Trust: Military Losses in American Wars —
Civil War —————————————————————————————— 620,000
Iraq-Afghanistan – 7,000
I tell him I would wish him battle-luck, but, except for those of one Yankee grandmother, all my relatives fought for the South. He salutes. I flash a wave and walk the grassy lane to the Fort.
Two Rebel soldiers stand before a period plantation house outside the fort’s high earthen walls. Rifles long and bayoneted, one says to an audience of mostly children that his cap is called a “‘kepi’ based off French headgear.” His brown-coated chest crossed by straps, holding, as he points to them, “cartridge box,” “haversack,” “canteen.” His so far quiet fellow, much older, with the same coat and gear but sloppy-brimmed cowboy hat and black pullover-strap sneakers, asks the kids, “Has any of you’s heard a Rebel Yell?” After they shake their heads no, he lets out a high-pitched yelp that morphs into a guttural bark. Younger kids laugh and scurry. He asks if anyone can match him? Some older boys try, and, as if planned, a cannon’s earsplitting boom sounds from the fort as a shock to everyone, the children dissolving in squeals and laughter.
I walk inside the dim house where women sit around a spinning wheel in period dresses, glazed by light from the crackling fireplace. One rises to greet me, “Hello, visitor.” She tells me this is the officers’ barracks, bunk beds lining the walls. She says enlisted soldiers will sleep outside on the ground. I think back to sleeping on a cot in the winter woods of Fort Stewart, only a few miles from here, the cold from the ground making my cot feel like a wet towel I can never get comfortable lying on, and that some conditions for soldiers have hardly improved. I also think that to a soldier these women must truly seem lovely.
Back outside in the daylight I find a seat on a low, mock powder keg, against the faux-coquina side wall of the house, facing the yellow hazard tape closing off the area of imminent battle. Some families picnic on blankets in the intervening space, some have set up folding camp chairs along the tape. Children are running everywhere. A Girl Scout troop marches together loosely to a space near the now taped off footbridge entrance to the fort where a Confederate soldier and a ranger speak to them. “Sherman’s troops have been sighted by scouts and are close by and a battle is imminent. The Fort is preparing now.” I pull out the pocket New Testament I carried in the Army to read during periods of waiting. Looking down, I see a toad sitting in the shadow between barrel and wall make a few hops as I rock my seat slightly. I read in Hebrews, “In the time of David, and of Samuel, and of the prophets: Who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of foreign invaders.”
I imagine a rebel officer sitting here last night, unable to sleep while knowing Sherman is coming with his demon’s desire to give Savannah the same fiery fate Atlanta has suffered. Watching a toad hop around in moonlight,
he mouths a prayer —
Almighty God, whose Providence watcheth over all things, in Thine infinite wisdom and power, so overrule events, and so dispose the hearts of all, that this fight may end in defeat and rout of the Yankees and lead to the honor and welfare of our Confederate States. Glory to Thee, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Rat-a-tat-tat of a drum about 300 yards away where the Union soldiers are now leaving camp with rifles slung over shoulders in a two-by-two file, heading for a track where they disappear into the woods to the west of Fort McAllister.
Another cannon fires from the fort. The sun now lighting the western side of the oaks lining the river, makes shadows along the river’s bank. The fort was never taken by bombardment from the river despite Union attempts by wooden gunships and ironclads during the years of the war. Now Sherman, needing to move materiel over the Ogeechee, carried by Federal ships waiting offshore, to assist in taking Savannah, sends 4,000 troops commanded by Brigadier General Hazen to take the fort by land. In the growing exchange of rifle-fire between fort and woods, smoke rises in the woods to give away clumps of Union soldiers. Things settle again briefly. Then, sustained cannon fire. One of the cannons is visible through a valley in the earthen wall, its rebel artillery crew loading, firing, reloading. Then, another pause. After some time, an eager boy lining the hazard tape with his father asks, “How many minutes?!”
More rifle volleys come from the woods, and Union soldiers appear between woods and fort making a rough line. There is a raised soldiers’ chant from the woods then sustained combined yell as Union soldiers race across the open ground and into the moat, through its pickets. Much gunfire and yelling as additional Union forces run across the open ground, surge into the fort.
I imagine thoughts of a confederate soldier inside the fort as the fighting becomes hand to hand:
A tremor of exhaustion rifles like the wind along our line, and we know our bodies are more than our bodies. They are the only things holding back the end of our world.
Finally, the yells in the fort cease and a park ranger walks the footbridge over the moat from the fort. She tells us Fort McAllister has surrendered and invites anyone who wants to enter the fort. After the crowd makes its way in, the reenactors standing idle now, the ranger says she wants to thank Georgia Department of Natural Resources, the City of Richmond Hill, and all the reenactors. She tells us the last act of resistance in the fort was by Captain Clinch, CSA, who drew his sword and challenged Captain Grimes of the Union Army, who insisted his fellows allow him to accept the challenge. When Captain Clinch gained the upper hand by landing a cutting blow to Captain Grimes’ head, Captain Clinch was bayoneted “five or six times” by Yankee soldiers. However, Captain Clinch would survive, she said, and was visited at his sick bed by Captain Grimes who returned Captain Clinch’s sword to him. This story somehow believable in a war where men touted valor and honor so highly.
During the waning days of 1861, President Abraham Lincoln signed a Congressionally approved bill creating “Medals of Honor.” The government presented 1,523 Medals of Honor to recipients during the Civil War, more than in any subsequent war.
After Fort McAllister’s fall, Confederate General William Joseph Hardee rejected Sherman’s demand to surrender Savannah, but this was just a bluff to buy time to recall his troops from their trenches and move them across the Savannah River into South Carolina. By abandoning Savannah, General Hardee saved it from the destruction Atlanta suffered. With no shots fired, Sherman’s troops entered the city of Savannah at the invitation of its mayor, and on December 21st, 1864, General Sherman sent a telegram to President Lincoln:
I beg to present you a Christmas gift of the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.
Four months after the fall of Fort McAllister, on April 9th, 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army to General Grant at Appomattox, Virginia. Lee rode away accepting and returning the salute of the Union officers present.
Seven days after Lee’s Surrender, Union General James A. Wilson would besiege Columbus, Georgia, defended by Confederates commanded by General Howell Cobb, and lay waste to much of the city (as yet unaware of Lee’s surrender, Wilson would say after the war that had he known of it, he would not have visited such devastation on Columbus) — effectively the last battle of the Civil War.
That war-torn, hollowed out South an eon ago of 160 years now.
In growing shadows of late afternoon, I walk with families of excited and talkative children back through the portal of the Visitors Center, back into our United States of America.
Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. His latest chapbook is At Home with the Dreamlike Earth (The Poetry Box, 2023). His work has appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, So It Goes, Synchronized Chaos, and other places, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
