When I drink tea in New Jersey
Like a girl who writes poetry about a boy she has never seen
My day sits with all this disappointment
Counting her fleeting moments
I remember my mother using the smell of onions
To shed her tears in the kitchen
For the absence of my father
Who climbed his life war by war
Whenever he wore his military belt
He wished that war was just an old shoe
He could take it off whenever he liked
And he didn't need to think of fixing it at the cobbler's shop
I remember my brother
Who asked in his letters--
When will the war understand that we are not good at dealing with death?
I remember us forty years ago
We were kids, very much kids
With colourful clothes and hearts
It was enough for us to see a balloon
To drown in big laughter
I remember all this now
When I drink my tea
And
I practice my loneliness.
Faleeha Hassan is a poet, teacher, editor, writer, and playwright born in Najaf, Iraq, in 1967, who now lives in the United States. Faleeha was the first woman to write poetry for children in Iraq.
She received her master's degree in Arabic literature, and has now published 26 books, her poems have been translated into English, Turkmen, Bosnian, Indian, French, Italian, German, Kurdish, Spain, Korean, Greek, Serbia, Albanian, Pakistani, Romanian, Malayalam, Chinese, ODIA, Nepali and Macedonian language.
She is a Pulitzer Prize Nominee for 2018, Pushcart Prize Nominee for 2019. She's also a:
Member of International Writers and Artists Association.
Winner of the Women of Excellence Inspiration award from SJ magazine 2020,
Winner of the Grand Jury Award (the Sahitto International Award for Literature 2021)
One of the Women of Excellence selection committees 2023
Winner of women the arts award 2023
Member of Whos’ Who in America 2023
SAHITTO AWARD, JUDGING PANEL 2023
Cultural Ambassador - Iraq, USA
Email : d.fh88@yahoo.com
Dreams...
Like a person, dreams never lived..,
From every trace, finding without love,
A million questions in his heart,
Hope waited,
dreams of a false covenant...
Buried. The faithfulness of love is buried,
Ishq.
I made a mistake in your trust,
The life of the heart is shriveled,
thoughts disappearing from pain...
Astana. Don't make me feel that you don't love me once I lived.
Pampered and deceived dreams...
Tell the world!
What is love? One question.
Was it our fault that Laila Majnun was crazy?
Halfway, we lost half of us,
Mountains cry in my thoughts. Thoughts...
It came without a trace and left without a trace, without noticing...Dreams...
Greetings
Saying hello is actually
A piece of decency,
In the language of Uzbek,
A wish to say.
Haw many years have passed?
It is a legacy for generations.
Shame and modesty,
It is characteristic of the Uzbek people.
About this in hadiths,
A useful world is collected.
It is permissible to acquire knowledge,
Haw little we know.
The habit of greeting
Begins to be good.
Those who follow it,
Takes a right step.
FUnowTUwasRE
Ecstatic electricity freezes into pulse as biologies become magnets / your eyes lip my cheeks / my koi mouth plumbs your pond / our trunks forest together, organs tromboned by desire fingers / perpetual fleshmachines yinyang existences / masses gasseate / consciousness shrinks to cosmos / our my-your selves merge, we share atoms
we downlings deitise
TAKE ME IN
"Take me in," the poet said, "take me in." The prophet hid.
"Take me in," the poet prayed, "take me in."
No banker paid. "Take me in." The soldier fled.
"Sink or swim," the lawyer pled. "Take me in,"
the poet said, "take me in."
A woman did.
"Make me warm," the woman cried, "safe and warm."
The poet sighed. "Words are thin," he did reply, "weak and thin.
But yet I'll try. Weak and thin, but yet I'll try."
In the bin by page by page,
in the bin the books were laid,
inch by inch were set ablaze.
Line by line the match was lit.
Word by word
the poems all went.
"Now I'm warm," the woman said,
"safe from harm. But poet's dead."
Poet dead?
Poet dead?
He lives on inside her head.
Words go on inside her head.
ESOTERIC
as eager initiates
in lovers’ freemasonry
that true and ancient order
we are illuminati
of the night’s old mysteries
through its well-established rites
its scripts, shared grasps, finger codes,
its postures, pledges, passwords
we advance by slow degrees
our prescribed intimacies
CONTRETEMPS
The tense contentment of the nights before
now in contempt
give way to temptation.
YOU SAY I SAY
You say
your bees come alive
when I prod your hive.
I lift your balloon
and hold you to ground.
I say
I pour and pour ghee
and you absorb me.
...
From Sex to Super-consciousness
(Musings of an anonymous MAN on sex, spirituality and everything else in between)
As I am wasting my monotonous days, reminiscences began creeping in of those sex-full days of wondrous, wanton lust, languidly fueling up my torn-up moods of boredom with something magical. And I allowed these emotions to distressingly float along the milky way of guilt and joy, dreads and dreams, being and becoming, and the suppressions and exuberance of an immaturely coming of age man in the city of never-ending little circles.
It combines everything together in a banquet of marvelous delight. I remember my love for that cheeky, whore-like colleague, one with brown black hair, a white-like face, and not-so-soft skin, for the pain of pushing, pulling, falling, digging, eating, and at the end, throwing something from my pocket and something for my horse-like thing—no wonder they call me a real hunter; I was always loaded on with my pestle those days, ready for a fire. Too cool, I thought, or perhaps just a fool.
I allowed my life to remain as an itchy despair.
I, the Hunter, as my colleagues have marked me, am a lone employee in the financial sector of the economy, working in little boxes in big buildings, counting and recounting huge cash with nothing in the hand, kind of analogy, here, eating and getting nothing wearing a leather cap. This kind of situation is so easy to put me off. I would shake and spring out life every night.
For those days, I considered myself a sex seeker; I was a sex guru's imperfect disciple, but out of resentment, the gaze of “the other” fixed me as a hunter or for some a Billy goat. Yes, I was addicted in sex, but what does it mean for a man of twenty-four to have this addiction in comparison to those horribly ugly things that everybody watches without any disgust? No, I never abused, manipulated or harassed any one for my lust, it was all straight or nothing, all my passions were congenial partners or affordable professionals.
My habit of chasing fantasies began during my college days. They, with rugged cheeks and a bit of soft, tight tissues, all had to come down to this dull valley to make something out there to survive for their families. For happy buck goats like us, we were a pack of four back then. It was the days of abundance; they were everywhere and we were pushing, pulling, and throwing, and they were grabbing, blowing, dunking, and bucking. It was all white and blue.
Anyway, it all started in a small wooden box. She had a soft smile. I put my hand all over her and then sucked from her nipple. It tasted awfully sweet. I was already high. I emptied my pocket and walked home alone.
In those days of thoughtless sex, I was there almost all the time, at the intersection of seven distinct turns inside the old house.
Sometimes even the prostitutes found it hard to take my push; her juices were not enough.
After some time, my lousy friend arrived from Australia—wow, it was already down under—to find a young girl who would sleep with him for his foreign gate pass. The first thing I said to him was, Have you done it yet? He was perplexed. I still remember that docile rat running away from his horny girl when she wanted to kiss her. It's vivid, and I wanted to take him to my place, a new and recent one I have found near the holy place. Shiva X, and what next?
They were ripe from the village and falling down in the valley with soft and sharp breasts; it was too good to miss. Again, what next? As the white explosions continued, I told my lucky-less friend to join me in my exuberance, but he was a bit too human, not half a kind of animal. I was sure that he had come back to Kathmandu to sharpen a dull pencil on a virgin cutter. He had a magical card to juice up any girl out there. That magical thing works for every middle-class girl?
I can’t understand the black line of separation between middle-class young girls and my better-loved prostitutes; they both easily give up, don’t they? One for the money, two for a show, and three for a pass to fly away. All the same, I am not mistaken between a few thousand and a hard card.
My friend said, I am in search of a life partner to work with and sleep down under. I searched with the face of a sober hunter and found a young woman who was bright, glassy-eyed, restless, and tired of her stepmother and a confused father. I asked her, Are you interested in traveling to Australia? I was not surprised when I got her close, and she agreed. After a few cups of coffee, the deal was done; things will never be the same again.
However, I the hunter was not called for the marriage; I was not bothered, and can’t you see it? What an embarrassment it would be for them to find the presence of a hunter when both of them were thinking about goating each other.
My friend slept with his wife, and that evening, without any disgust, I did the same with a girl in exchange for cash. It was relaxing.
After a while, a thought came rushing into my mind of that soft-skinned pale girl my friend was digging in all the while. What made her so lovely was that she was pretty and tall, like a slate pole. I wouldn’t reach for her hole; it seemed too tight and obstructed for me. Every time Prakash did something with her, it felt as if my spirit was being rapped through my asshole.
It was too much and too big for that girl, Sony, and my boy, Prakash. They traveled across the long lane to the filthy resorts to do that thing. Am I going to tell you more about Sony? Probably NO. Sony was among the girls I dropped for, but she was hunted down by my friend, and I would only say to myself that her grapes are tasteless and sour.
Still, I remember the day of her marriage; it was astrologically supported and arranged, and I even saw tears in her eyes. Her husband was dissimilar as my friend, but he was another kind of hunter; he was rich, round, dull, and bit of hairless in front.
As I go through the news these days, I realize that sex has indeed become a bit too complicated and dangerous because people are too either curious or judgmental. It’s a looming disaster when sex ceases to become straight and spontaneous and begins as a point of abuse and bargain. What if you bump into a stranger who can trap you with lust and completely wreck you?
You may say I got away because I am not a celebrity; I was young and too fit, fine, smooth, and healthy, but I say to them I was an addict because without sex in that zone of quantity, I wouldn't have survived. I have never undermined a woman; even if I had bumped off a feminist, she would have never complained, because there were no tactics, tricks, abuse, false promises, or power involved; it was my nature; no betrayal. And thanks to my ocean guru I never turned into a suicidal man or a suppressed serial killer.
I don't know how I ended up in a marriage—from which side I don't know—but that was the day, around thirty-two, I realized the hunter also got hunted out and the Billy goat in me got castrated. I think to move out of sex addiction is something like moving up in the ladder of seven chakras, channeling that energy some more into the heart and head, and allowing those impulses to find their expressions on something else; there is no need to push or pull so much as these days, I paint, poet, music, focus more on math, and meditate; my guru would say take that leap from sex to super-consciousness.
Oh, my master, I have not touched it yet; I am hanging in between. But I have realized that in the cosmic scheme of things, a sage moon as he was, my master Rajneesh spoke that the urge for sex is an unconscious way of searching for your soul. Indeed, it gives a sense of transcendence to be with the mind, not obsessed with sex.
(Gaurav Ojha is a writer, researcher, and educator at different educational institutions.)
The Girl of Lugansk
Barefooted walking girl on the street
In prickly frost of morning hours
On icy slippery scald- head of the earth
With broken bloody knees.
Standing up and falling down,
Going alone nowhere.
Teared away from the world and herself.
Becoming more wicked.
Cold touching upon the bones
Of the kept silent victim.
Passers- by not finding any word.
Somebody tightly hiding the neck
Under fox collar,
Feeling sorry deep in the heart,
But not asking her anything.
Another one looks askance at the girl,
Expressing the contempt.
…O, Umpire judge!
Sometimes we can hang
The lock of indifference,
Not hear the dumb scream for help.
We are deaf, as caterpillars,
No demand from us,
And the conscience
Becoming blind,
The fire in the eyes is gone.
Nigar Nurulla Khalilova is a poet, novelist, translator from Azerbaijan, currently in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. She is a member of Azerbaijan Writers Union. She graduated from Azerbaijan Medical University and holds a Ph.D.
My tongue that entered my ear as lullaby,
My valiant tongue in the bosom of the ages,
I will write you every moment,
My blood, my language, oh, my motherland.
Come strolling, meaning my language,
Always sing like a nightingale my tongue,
It has the spirit of Navoi, he has Babur,
Let every dialect be beautiful, my language.
Every word has a hundred meanings in my mother tongue,
Every flame is a fire in every heart,
Everything ripples in this language,
Endless treasure, legend in my tongue.
This is my language, which the whole world respects.
This is my language, inherited from my ancestors.
Abdunazarova Khushroy was born on December 21, 2008. She is 15 years old. Currently, she is a pupil of 8th grade of the 15th DIUM of Mingbulak district, Namangan region. She is interested in English and Mathematics. She wants to become a interpreter in the future. And also she is a member of the international organization "All India Council for Technical skill development".
