DECREATION

It is one moment past midnight

on the 8th day of morning.

Our Styx ferries become consumed

with the burning of bibles.

Seven heavens eighten themselves

and shrink and infinitize.

In this silent Babel

the sciencemagic we learned

while head over heels upside down

from hanged Marut and Harut

is finding and losing its feet.

Apocalypse collapses.

Ahuramazda unities

vanish darkness into bright.

Medusa’s pale horse Pegasus

comets Quetzalcoatl;

Fenris swallows the Eighth Archon

and then pukes and pukes him out.

The set sun eludes prediction.

No west exists to rise from.

CARNIVAL OF LOVE

The bearded lady

has two lovers,

the apeman and the geek.

Their sex is crazy,

peeling rubber

on high wires and the street.

When bearded lady

becomes mother

to a new circus freak,

the lucky baby

has two others

to help him feel unique.

FOWL WEATHER

Six ducks in a pond

swimming through a warm sweet spring rain–

pond is duck is air.

STILL STRANGERS:

EROS

IN EROSION

After years

of wear, she would sew

with those sharp dead

beads, new thoughts

into the threadbare pattern of memory,

and he solder

his older, darker, thoughts into place….

… Long ago…

they learned to slaughter

their eager laughter and tear

their deepest tears out of each’s other,

they taught themselves to utilize their exquisite words

like hamhamhammers and broadswords–

then, their mutual wounds

they wound all about their lives like poison ivy.

(Each just one more bothersome

clone to the other…)

But

There had been a time

,once,

before the tiny

mutiny,

when they were still strangers

to anger,

when they could lie naked,

sun-baked upon the jurassic sands

or beside the slow hearth,

unearthing new treasures from their together,

when, in some safe

cafe, their yes

-eyes could swallow entire

their sweet menus

of Venus

and for many an hour

pour their love

from lip to mouth like milk from a pitcher to a glass.

But that time passed…

Strangely

angel-like, two

naif

waifs

blown

down,

unable to unwind all the ivy accumulation

in a rugged wind – they just

shrugged, unable to face down

the demons of their facetious selves.

(This is not simply

to imply that they weren’t determined.

But, over time, stubborn assiduity becomes undermined,

especially when connubial cement lacks

reinforcement.

So, by fragile grapevines, over

tangled ravines,

the values they were hanging onto

kept changing.

They were unable to forge a structure anew

or to forget old collapse.

Neither the heights of their dear science nor

the weight of alerted conscience,

And not Keats, and certainly

not Yeats,

could keep the crevices in their isolate selves

from inventing the devices of their together’s undoing.)

Beached,

they discovered the sea:

inequal parts nausea and mystery.

HIGH COUP

O moon, so distant…

I’m not smokin’ in Tokyo,

my poem will not fire.

“Revolution bursts

sunlight on stained stainless steel:

your yolkcolored hair.”

Night’s vaunted Shakespeare:

just flaccid Little Willie,

cold to geisha stars.

“Nestraw hair – egg’s eye

blue – honeyed limbs; trunkhugging

bearcubeMe:     climbing.”

Sake enflames verse

(you say), arouses rhythm,

kindles rhymes sublime–

mine (old drunken whore)

fires up unsuccessfully,

sucks relentlessly,

till we fall asleep.

And Basho the monk remains,

red raw poem limp, still.

…

IN SOLITARY 

1. SAMIZDAT*

 Writer’s craft: manacled to conviction 

           like any zek to his sentence, 

            like a blatnoi to a pen

: assaults its own position 

: like a gaybist missionary, assassinates its friends

: like any other virgin –

just another bloody period, 

and another conception ends.

2.  YOUR BODY TELLS THE HIGHWAYMAN 

If prose is just a page running across your face, 

poetry is the line lying between your thighs.

Your body tells the highwayman’s short story life:

The drama of poems at the point of conception, 

but just one more hackneyed form in execution.

3.      LIFE/SENTENCE

 key in the cake –

(in music, truth hid?)

oh,

the poet’s prison is 

the rhythm of his

poem 

                        starved, 

                        scarred – 

he makes his

break

*inspired by Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago

…

My dear sister

He filled my beautiful life with joy

He brought meaning to my life

Dear sister like my mother

He gives love early and late

She always held my hand like a sister,

My umbrella is my sister, my shield is my sister

Have a little laugh because of me

Dear sister, dear sister.

he asks me every day

how are you sister

She is kind like my mother

And he looked at me day and night

Beautiful faces like my mother,

Dear sister, I have

Sweet words like my father

My supportive sister, dear.

Sister Dilnoza, stay healthy always

Be a legend to the world

Let everyone know you, Sister Dilnoza.

May their names spread throughout the world.

Let the whole world know, my beautiful sister,

Let them feel your sweet love

You fill the whole world with joy,

May those who see us be envious.

May God protect us always

May we have many sisters like you

carrying you on my shoulders

I will take you on a pilgrimage.

You just laugh with joy, that’s all

My beautiful sister is the light of my life.

Remember me once a day

My life is beautiful sister.

Thank you dear Dilnozam 

i love you 

He always protects me

His kindness shook the world

I am Sobirjonova Rayhona, a 9th-grade student of the 8th general secondary school of Vobkent district, Bukhara region. I was born in December 2008 in the village of Chorikalon, Vobkent district in an intellectual family. My mother and father supported me from a young age. I am also interested. I started writing in my 3rd grade. My first creative poem was published in “Wobkent Life” newspaper. In addition, many magazines were published in America’s Synchaos newspaper, India’s Namaste India magazine, Gulkhan magazine, Germany’s RavenCage magazine and many other magazines and newspapers. my creative works have come out. I actively participated in many contests and won high places and received many gifts. Creativity is my precocious nature. I am very interested in creativity and enjoy every line. Of course, I will become a great person and bring the name of my country Uzbekistan to heaven, God willing!!!

FIT

A cocktail party cruiser,
a broker working the room, 
cornered me and asked,
“What do you do to keep fit?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m active
but not for the sake of fitness.
I hunt and fish.”
“Oh,” he replied, “I run.”
He looked at his watch,
touched his wrist as if
to check his standing heart rate,
already looking for another prospect.
“For What?” I asked.
“To keep fit, of course.”
“For what?” I repeated.
He paused, smiled nervously
and cleared his throat.
“So I’ll live longer.”
He was ready to bolt.
“For what?” I asked again.
He drifted off, shaking his head.
He only had wrong answers


Gregg Norman lives and writes in a lakeside cottage in Manitoba, Canada, with his wife and a small dog who runs the joint. His poetry has been placed in journals and literary magazines in Canada, USA, UK, Australia and India. 

Mailbox                                                                                             

On occasion this distant memory surfaces at curious moments. I’m unsure why. However random and peculiar, I suppose the event, over fifty years ago, had some significance for my young mind. One night when I was six or seven, in my pajamas after my bath but before bedtime, close to Hop on Pop and Green Eggs and Ham, we are all in the kitchen, Mom, Dad, me. I’m eating either cereal with six teaspoons of sugar or Nestle’s Quik chocolate milk and Oreos with even more sugar. There may or may not be a brushing of teeth soon. There’s a knock at our door and there’s the neighbor kid, the Klines’ oldest teenager sheepishly apologetic, informing Dad that he just hit our mailbox with his father’s car at the end of our long, washed-out lane. I worry about getting a letter tomorrow from Patty, my girlfriend. He is opening his wallet offering to pay Dad for the damage – the few dollars he has now and the rest on payday.

Dad said later that he could have kept on going and no one would be the wiser, except maybe the father if he looked closely at the fender or grill. But he stopped and did the right thing. This made an impression upon Dad and apparently it made an impression upon me as at that age anything that would impress Dad was certain to impress me. Here was the outset of an honorable young man. Dad told him not to worry about it – to put his wallet away. The next day Dad and I went to the hardware store, bought a new box, and affixed our numbers to it. Dad showed me how to dig a post hole, setting a flat stone in the bottom so the wood would not rot, righting the post with the level, then tamping the dirt down around the base to firm it up. I used this knowledge a few times for my own mailboxes at the end of my own driveways. When I began driving, I was lucky not to destroy any mailboxes, although I do recall scraping against a city limits sign on the way to school – but there was no one handy to confess to. And fortunately, so far, none of my mailboxes have been demolished by a neighbor.

When a person comes into the world, he should take the wise word “seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave” as his motto. It is this knowledge that saves humanity from destruction, preserves the decadent, and determines its prestige and influence in life. I remembered his wisdom: “Be angry without enthusiasm, be a lover without sorrow, be a scholar without a student.” Indeed, the work of my parents and my first teacher is immeasurable in helping me to reach these days. My parents taught me humanity. “if they taught me, my teacher brought me up with the knowledge of education and morals. When a person comes into the world, he is a cave baby who does not know anything, if he thinks with a real life example Just like a small and delicate sprout, if we take good care of it, we can get fruit from it, we can enjoy its scenery, if we don’t take good care of a small sprout, we can’t get fruit from it.

If you don’t get education, it won’t help you to study a thousand times. The first person who encouraged me to love the country, to love books, and to study science is definitely my first teacher. I am studying in the field of science. About ten of my stories have been published in foreign magazines, I am working as an international ambassador in two countries on behalf of Uzbekistan, alhamdulillah. I am a member of the Volunteer Academy of Uzbekistan, I regularly participate in the “Legendary Youth” forum, in a word, I am slowly taking steps towards my goal, the “Zulfiyakhanim” award. All this is my tireless work and knowledge. I can say that it came from behind.

As I mentioned above, these achievements are due to the hard work of my mentors and coaches Hasanova Tursunoy, Boronova Aziza, Teshayeva Dilrabo, Talibova Muhabbat, who taught me. Not only me, but my classmates who studied with me, fought and fought at the same desk for eleven years, are also achieving the achievements they were looking for. First of all, it is not an exaggeration to say that our first achievement was that we earned the happiness of being a student by justifying the trust of our teachers. Each of us was honored and dear to our teachers. When I remember my school days, the times when we did not listen to the teachers, when we ran away from the class, when there were competitions, when we argued with parallel classes, all this has become a thing of the past. It’s been more than two years since we heard the school bell, and those who said “I don’t miss school” are now walking past the school gate in a whirlwind of memories.

We have found our way, we are slowly flowing from our own tributary like a spring water from a mountain, but I must say that without our teachers we are absolutely nothing. We would be an example of a creature that does not understand anything. That’s probably why they say that the teacher is as great as your father. As much as our father thinks about us and gives us advice, our teachers see only good things for us in the same way. Thank God that after me, my brothers and sisters will pass through the threshold of the school where I studied, and the teacher who taught me will teach them. My teacher Hasanova Tursunoy, if you are reading this article, I would be very happy. May your students always be healthy and happy, your student Sevinch who loves you. This poem I wrote is dedicated only to you.

                             My teacher

The first day I went to school,

I remember every moment.

My first note in the notebook,

Tursunoy is my teacher

No matter how much I thank you,

It is true how much knowledge you have given.

The lesson we learned for life,

It is an unpayable debt for us.

Pupils of my teacher

As if they are lovers.

Like their children,

Children seeking knowledge.

Every day I go to school,

I spent the whole night studying.

My achievements

The reason is my teacher.

No matter how much I do, I bow down.

A word that cannot be described.

This poem is for you,

MY DEAR TEACHER.

Nothing

I have never existed

Before

Being Here

I will never exist

Here again

After this

Everything else is just

Something that happens

In between nothing

When life takes an empty turn,

The performer collapses off the stage

The fire put on for the cremation burns down the script

The actor has nothing left to do in this drama

From all the glories of human pursuits,

Each of us can only take our portion of nothing

Gaurav Ojha

Kathmandu, Nepal

Love story

  “O Allah, make all my dreams and goals come true as soon as possible, I still want to be a great person, I have a lot of work to do, a career… please don’t get distracted from studying, don’t fall in love…”

   But for some reason, Laylo writes these words in her diary, and “she” does not leave her imagination. 

   He always kept a diary and wrote about his plans and goals. He never wanted to fall in love. Because he knew well what a person he loved would fall into, he had seen it in the person of his sister. But something happened and he met her on the way to study. They met and talked twice. On the third date, the young man asks Laylo for her phone number. Normally, Laylo didn’t talk to anyone and didn’t trust guys, but she gave her number to this guy with some feeling. In this way, correspondence and talks continued. The guy was not that handsome, just an ordinary boy. Both studied at the same university. That’s what love is, but somehow he won Laylo’s heart. There were no scheduled meetings, they only communicated virtually. Laylo felt that she was becoming more and more attached to him. Should he stop talking, but he couldn’t.

He was waiting for her to call him. The guy is also good, he also loved Laylo, but not from Laylo. He seemed different to Laylo, good, sincere, kind, as if there was no better person in the world than him. Their characters also liked each other. But they haven’t told each other that they love each other yet. Their love was like unconditional love. But Laylo found it necessary to put an end to everything one night.

   I’m distracted from reading, let’s stop talking, don’t write anymore, he said goodbye. He didn’t write back to you either. It’s been 3 months since they met. In that short period of time, he felt that he was in love. He went out and it was a quiet night. It seemed to Laila that this period had passed like a dream. The only full moon in the sky was looking at Laylo. Laylo took a deep breath, a drop of tears fell from her eyes, she felt relieved. He thought that he did the right thing and now everything will be fine. He went in and lay down. But he couldn’t sleep until morning and came out full. He had a severe headache when he stood up. He didn’t drink tea, he had no appetite. Yesterday’s incident did not go away from his imagination. His heart hurt, he was very depressed, he even cried for 3-4 days without regaining consciousness. Her mother consoled her by saying, “My daughter, what’s wrong with you, come to yourself” and said that first love is not always true.However, Laylo really fell in love, she became different. He also thought that this situation would pass, and said that he would be fine if he went to university. And while studying, when her friends talked about her boyfriends, she remembered “him” again. The guy didn’t write back either, he was waiting for her calls. 

  So, a month passed in agony, crying and thinking. At the beginning of March, while watching social networks, he noticed that he had written it. 

He was so happy, so happy, as if he had found what he had lost like a young child. He answered immediately. 

Those correspondences and conversations continued.

This time a real love story began. Both are happy. They even went to study together. But he had never met before studying. The young man begged to come around, but Laylo did not give in. Gradually their relationship deepened. They also helped each other in university textbooks. Laylo’s mother was worried about this. He did not trust his daughter to anyone. To be sure, his mother did not like the young man very much.. “Daughter, you don’t know what kind of boy he is, keep your promise to us, you still need to study, develop, and travel the world, that’s what your father dreams of,” he advised. 

  Laylo really felt that she did not think about studying. He also saw that there were many plans left in his diary. 

   Gradually, the young man began to talk about marriage. According to him, his mother died without him. Only the two brothers lived in the house where the sisters got married. His father is abroad. Because of this, the relatives are getting involved in the wedding movement this year because a woman should come to the family. 

   Laylo felt sad again. He does not plan to get married yet. Not even ready for family life. She thought that it would be appropriate to talk with the guy for a couple of years, understand each other, and then get married. If he marries her, his goals will definitely remain. Because there is no woman, household chores and raising children fall on her. Now he was realizing that he had made a mistake. His mother was right. But how does he refuse it? After all, he convinced her and made so many promises. He said he loved…

Laylo is thinking whether to choose love or study?!

  And if he didn’t say no, he would not want to lose her like before, and he would be crushed thinking that he would miss her. He thought a lot why lovers can never be together. 

He told the guy to wait and explained. But he also said that he could not wait without help. He said that it was hard for him to do all the work. And he asked her for the last time, “Will you marry me?” 

   After a long hesitation, Laylo answered him “No”. He wanted her to be happy because she loved him from the bottom of her heart. Laylo was afraid to make him unhappy because she did not believe in herself. 

He prayed that he would get married, have a family, have children, and be happy. 

  At the end of the summer, they broke up without any reason. Now for life. The young man has been calling a lot lately, but Laylo did not answer, she was holding on to her heartache. Then the guy stopped calling Laylo realizing his purpose. Thus their love ended.

Laylo’s love could not be said to have ended, hers continued secretly. After that, she didn’t meet another guy. Maybe he is married, maybe he is happy now, it was unclear to Laylo.

   No matter how many years have passed, when he listens to the music that is related to him or when it rains, he remembers the words he said and the sweet memories he had with him. After that incident, Laylo never loved anyone as much as she loved him. He became the first love of his life. She met a lot of guys, but she didn’t like any of them. He also graduated. He developed in every way, in every field, his dreams came true one after another, he learned languages, went to the international arena, got a job. At present, he received the prayers of his parents and devoted himself to them. But he hasn’t started a family yet.

Aytuvova Khurshida was born on June 5, 2002 in Saykhunabad district of Syrdarya region. She graduated from Gulistan State University, Faculty of Philology, majoring in Russian. Official delegate of several forums, member of international organizations, Global Education Ambassador, SPSC ambassador. She is a member of the “Juntos por las Letras” international writer’s association of Argentina. Her creative works have appeared in international newspapers and magazines. Her stories were also published in the national anthology “Languages ​​to creativity” and in the republican magazine “Izhodovlar”. Currently, she is a Russian language teacher at school No. 4 in the district.