Beauty Is Where You Find It

We went to the art museum

But the art museum was closed.

My stomach hurts, and outside the clouds

Sit somewhere while I look at my phone.

That’s not art.

Closed Hearts 

 

She said I’m not what they say I am 

I can’t help but cry  

Just a little 

The knot in my throat  

And weight on my chest  

 

Leave it unsaid, he said 

She never mentioned how his silence hurt her 

Leave it unsaid, she said 

He didn’t tell her how many things were seething to come out 

Death by so many small nicks along the way 

You never know what goes on behind closed hearts 






Eating My Shovel 

 

Rolling in the cold San Diego waves  

the up brings life value  

and the down, maybe not 

 

I eat when I’m depressed,  

when I’m happy, whenever  

I self-medicate with coffee and food 

 

So many people say that life is too short 

I disagree 

Life is so, so long 

 

My hopes for happily ever after  

faded to midnight 

 

Every choice narrowed the prospects 

Fewer possibilities now  

 

I’ve dug too deep  

and the only tool I’ve kept is my shovel.  

 

 

My Dead Body 

 

At the funeral of my husband’s best friend’s father, for the first time, we broached the topic of what we want to happen to our dead bodies.  I have always wanted my body to be useful to others once I have lost any need for it. I told my husband that I want all of my remaining healthy organs donated, and the rest of me donated to science.  I would be happy for my body to be a cadaver or thrown out into those body farms in the middle or south United States to help forensic scientists hone their craft.  My husband was appalled at this.  He could see himself donating organs, but he wanted the rest of him buried, so his family would have a place to visit him.  I pointed out how environmentally unsound burial is and what a waste of human tissue, when he could help science, even after death.  After a bit of back and forth, we settled on organ donation, then becoming trees to be planted where our loved ones could visit, but we’d be friendly to the earth in death. 

 

He wants a headstone 

I just want to help someone 

We’ll see who dies first 







San Diego Beaches 

 

Heading north, waves chase my left side 

As the water pulls back, little puckers appear in the smooth wet sand 

The sand crabs are reaching toward the sun 

If I’m lucky, I’ll find a sand dollar 

Or one of those butterfly shells 

The former home of a muscle  

Clam 

Or oyster 

Splayed open 

Revealing its shiny vulnerable inside 

I remember when La Jolla’s seal beach 

Was once the children’s cove 

Instead of the home of so many ocean puppies 

It was the perfect wading spot for little ones 

Protected by the sea wall 

Bordered by tide pools 

We used to gently press our fingers  

Into the center of the sea anemone  

Until they recoiled into themselves 

Now the seals take up all the space 

And bark either in delight or warning 

To all who dare to venture near 







We Can All be a Stranger 

 

She knows exactly how  

to break my heart 

My perfect little girl 

with all those imperfections 

Her cherubic face 

makes me want to  

give her everything  

She wants and more 

my obligation as her mother 

is to not give her everything 

 

When she lies 

She’s a stranger 

When she’s obstinate  

She’s a stranger 

When I raise my voice 

I’m a stranger 

When I punish her 

I’m a stranger 

 

I can’t just be  

her best friend 

I cant just give  

her what she wants now 

I have to help guide her to the best self she can become 

My little girl is a woman  

in the making  

and the making is the hard part 


 

CLS Sandoval, PhD (she/her) is a pushcart nominated writer and communication professor accomplished in film, academia, and creative writing who performs, writes, signs, and rarely relaxes.  She’s a flash fiction and poetry editor for Dark Onus Lit.  CLS is raising her daughter and dog with her husband in Alhambra, CA.

FOLLOW ME

 I'm giving you a secret sign, follow the white rabbit. 
My shoulder tattoo says it all. 
Yes, I forgot, we are not in the movie The Matrix.
I want you to be my companion, 
but you don't know how to read the signs 
which is set by the Universe through numbers and in the child's speech. 
There is a celestial artist whose pen writes the signs of the horoscope. 
All this is as clear as the future in the palm of your hand, in answer to prayer. 
But instead of looking, you sleep and dream of me in a silk nightgown, 
and you don't understand that I'm warm on a hot night, 
and not to provoke your senses. 
I am giving you a path that is walked without material desires
and to head to the Himalayas where we will see with different eyes. 
We will dive into the mountain of snow, in whose interior there is a world of abundance. 
Close your eyes and follow me. I will take you, companion, 
when you learn that tattoos speak, 
when you recognize the signposts written with a pen of gold, 
we will not need a body made of earth. Follow me, 
I'll take you to the abundance of dreams brought to life. 
And once you step there you won't want to go back, but he wants it first. 


I AM YOUR MASK

In kindergarten you wanted to be a clown. 
I painted over your features 
and you were so adorable with a round red nose.. 
You are at a ball in your youth 
put a mask over his eyes yes poor girl 
she wouldn't recognize that you are the son of a rich man, 
It looked perfect on you because I can make you be what you want.
And in your passion you were afraid of illness 
and convinced you to be your protection of polyester cloth over the mouth and nose. 
Your ears started ringing, and no one saw the sad eyes 
because they have become dull. I, who was your servant 
and mask of life I humiliated you 
and you forgot to be free man.
I shout to myself: "I am your mask, get off my face and smile, captive man, because there is a way out!"
 

Maja Milojković was born in 1975 in Zaječar, Serbia.
She is a person to whomfrom an early age, Leonardo da Vinci's statement "Painting is poetry that can be seen, and poetry is painting that can be heard" is circulating through the blood.
That's why she started to use feathers and a brush and began to reveal the world and herself to them.
As a poet, she is represented in numerous domestic and foreign literary newspapers, anthologies and electronic media, and some of her poems can be found on YouTube.
Many of her poems have been translated into English, Hungarian, Bengali and Bulgarian due to the need of foreign readers.
She is the recipient of many international awards.
"Trees of Desire" is her second collection of poems in preparation, which is preceded by the book of poems "Moon Circle". 
She is a member of the International Society of Writers and Artists "Mountain Views" in Montenegro,and shealso is a member of the Poetry club "Area Felix" in Serbia.

Pompidou

On a September afternoon in 1986, under a sunny Paris sky, my brother, Dorian, and I walked into a BNP bank to open a student account.  We had arrived from New York that morning, jet lagged and weary.  

I was in my senior year of college, taking a semester abroad.  Dorian was 36 and had decided to come with me and stay for my first few days.  

The mood in Paris was tense.  There had been a string of bombings in crowded places, and the French police were armed, suspicious, and everywhere. They seemed just as threatening as the terrorists, with their machine guns slung over their chests and their fingers resting on the trigger.

I was glad Dorian was with me. But even though we just arrived, I couldn’t stop thinking that he was going to leave. This was the longest time I would be away from home. Queens College was a commuter school, and I lived with my parents. When I had suggested going away to college, my parents acted like there was something wrong with me.  This semester abroad was supposed to be my chance at independence. Now it seemed like it might be very lonely. 
We had come to Paris a month before my classes were to start because I had to take a French language proficiency exam in order to enroll in the university.  French was my first language and the language Dorian and I used when I was a child. Our parents were from Lebanon and spoke French and Arabic and sometimes a mixture of the two. The exam was scheduled for the next day. 

At the bank there was a long line.  I told Dorian I wished he could stay in Paris with me. I told him I was worried because after he left, I was going to have a lot of time on my own, without any opportunity to meet other students. I pleaded with him, working myself into a panic.  
The line at the bank was moving by small increments.  I sat on the marble floor with all the other students from overseas, waiting my turn. Dorian said, “I’m going to take a walk.”

The line snaked endlessly, and when I was finally near the front, Dorian reappeared.  “Les, come here for a second.”  He wanted me to meet someone.  

I was afraid I’d lose my place, so Dorian turned to the guy behind me and unfurled his French, which was better and smoother than mine. Rolling his rs, he asked him to hold my spot, and then he took my arm and led me back to the lobby.  

There was Terence, the one he wanted me to meet.  He was a student, like me. He went to Parsons School of Design.  He was stylish in a Duran Duran kind of way.  Dorian had met him the year before, taking Chinese classes at the New School.

After the introduction, I turned to leave.

“Wait,” Dorian commanded. “Exchange numbers.” I glared at him, and he said, “You’ve been bothering me all day about not having any friends.” 

I blushed and got out a pen, my hair falling into my eyes. I told Terence I didn’t know anyone in Paris.  He said he had traveled from New York with his classmates and arrived with his social life intact.  This made me ache for my two best friends in Queens.

Terence and I were both renting rooms in someone’s apartment, so it was going to be tricky to get in touch with each other. We scribbled our phone numbers as fast as we talked, and I said, “Nice to meet you,” and ran back to the line, hoping I hadn’t missed my turn.  

The next afternoon, I was seated in a room on a high floor of an old building, taking the language placement exam.  More than halfway through the test, there was a loud explosion that shook the floor and our desks.  The proctor was startled, but after a few long moments instructed us to continue with the exam.  Minutes later, sirens blared.  We weren’t let go until we’d completed the test.  

All of us filed down the stairs. As I stepped out into the rainy night, I saw a commotion nearby. I saw people running.  A five-and-dime store called Tati had been bombed.  I learned from the people around me that five were dead, women and children, with dozens wounded.  I dug my hands into my pockets and walked in the opposite direction, wishing I could speak to my parents, conjuring their voices in my head.

A few days later it was time for Dorian to leave. I begged him to stay just another day, then I went with him to the airport and watched him go.  “You’d better write me,” I shouted.  “I will,” he said.  

When I got back to my apartment, the landlady snarled, “Quelqu’un a sonner pour toi,” and handed me a paper with her scrawled writing. It was a message from Terence. It said, “Party tonight,” with an address.  

I put on my jeans with the flower applique on one thigh, my tan cowboy boots and my brown leather bomber jacket and took the Metro to my destination.  Depeche Mode’s “Never Let 
Me Down Again” could be heard a block before I got to the building.  The sounds of New York accents ricocheting through the stairwell made me take the steps two at a time.  There were many people my age, all potential new friends. They were more fashionable and sophisticated than my friends back home, drinking and swaying to the music.  Cigarette smoke hovered above everyone’s heads.  
I wandered around the crowded apartment looking for Terence. 

Someone was writing on a large paper taped to the wall.  As I stood next to him, he handed me the pen.  I wrote, “Dear Terence, I couldn’t find you.  Leslie.” I stayed a little longer, bopping my head to the music; I danced with a boy with spiked studs on his shoes and then went home.

Soon after, Terence left another message with my landlady for me to meet him at Place Saint Michel that night.  He was already waiting when I arrived, wearing a long wool coat.  We found a table in a tiny cave-like restaurant, and he told me that he had been in Tati when it was bombed. He had been buying a radio and cassette player when it happened.  His hands were shaking as he described the scene, the dead, all the blood. How he got out. Then he said, “I just wanted to go back home. Part of me still does.”  He was near tears when he said this last part. 
 
After a long silence, I said, “Why did you take Chinese lessons?” He explained that although he was Chinese, he didn’t speak the language. He giggled, and it was infectious, and we both had a good laugh.  We finished dinner and stepped out to the street.  “Okay,” he said, “let’s meet next Tuesday in front of the Pompidou Center, say 6 o’clock?” He raised his eyebrows.  

“I’ll be there,” I said. 

The Kingdom of Foam

Whom I saw old yesterday
Is young today 
Thinking dead who was buried 
Is walking on the yard
The ill-fated man having no legs is running in the field
Today the vast sand dune is rambunctious with the sea foam
Dead fish are jumping and bathing in the river

Arjuna who never lost his aim
His arrows are aimless
Despite meeting again and again
Radha and Krishna were never in affair
The blind poet Thamyris is looking toward light
Wrinkle skinned Zulekha is 
Becoming young gradually

But Jesus had not yet been taken down from the cross 


From The Stage of Execution

I exactly don’t know why
From behind the prison cell I remember my mother
Mother used to say you know- writing poem doesn’t bring bread and butter
I remained silent in humiliation

But today I have time
I can ask question like a brave son
Mother, who don’t write poems- can they bring bread and butter either

My mother is now counting her last days
And the predecessors are lying in the graveyard
I don’t know if they died of hunger or not
And the science of the lords doesn’t blame 
Hunger as the cause of human death 

I will be hanged at the third watch of the night
To know the final message
The concern of rainy winds floats in the eyes of my comrades
May be my death has settled the dew of countless pains 
In the sky of their eyes
That will be twinkling like pearls 
In the sun of love

I am indebted and grateful to my fellow comrades 
The poems written by me
Are the essences of their life indeed
I’ve just decorated them with immortal ink of the truth
I have not forgot their love
By the ordinary pain of death

The love that no one- can unearth
Even throughout his lifetime 
Standing at the edge of death I feel that today

Now I am heeding toward the place of public execution 
I’ve only one minute left to be hanged
Meanwhile what else may I leave for a nation in decline 
Without the example of igneous death 


Curiosity 

I keep a cloud of many words 
In my chest pocket,
I keep the anxieties of unknown
In my mind’s locket.

Where do the blue stars live
Or blue fairy wings, 
Where does the red lotus
White seagull swings.

Where does the King Cobra dwell
In hidden hilly rest,
Where is the cave in the North or
In the Southwest.

In which sky does the eagle fly
Lays eggs in the sea
Why is the bird’s heart frozen
When cloud sounds bee.

To which distance the rainbow
Bend its face behind,
Why do these questions arise
In the corner of mind.

As a child looks everything
In the blinks of eyes,
So have I opened my eyes
To listen the cries.


Rezauddin Stalin is a very famous Bengali poet, born in 1962 in Nalbhanga village of Greater Jessore district.

Many local and foreign awards including Bangla Academy. His poems have been translated into 42 languages ​​of the world.

Along with poetry he established himself as a successful media personality. His basic thoughts on various issues of the society give us light. Rezauddin Stalin is now the international voice of Bengali  poetry.

CHERRY

I hide in you
like a stone in  
an overripe cherry.

I float in 
your fragrant juices,
Trembling
from the 
bird's greedy beak
that will
tear us
apart.

And,
I will not answer your
question:
Are fruits also doomed
to
loneliness?


Azemina Krehić was born on October 14, 1992 in Metković, Republic of Croatia. Winner of several international awards for poetry, including: Award of university professors in Trieste, 2019, Mak Dizdar award, 2020. Award of the Publishing Foundation of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2021. Fra Martin Nedić Award, 2022.

She is represented in several international anthologies of poetry.

“Brainard Bullion: Creative Consultant”

by

Mark Blickley

            What do I look like to you? Don’t be shy. Do you find me attractive? Repulsive? Charming? Scary? How about determined?

            Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Brainard Bullion and I am a certifiable creativity coach, a conduit to the sacred hermaphroditical muse, CYN.  I reside in a Long Beach, New York rental unit that offers a partial oceanfront view. My passions include somersaulting in the nude and doing unusual things with eggs. As a devoted disciple of CYN, I praxis and teach reasonable and sound enchanted thinking that invariably leads to the achievement of affirmative outcomes.

            Let me offer you an example of the positive power of my sacred CYN praxis that occurred just last week.  I was riding the F line subway train to Neptune Avenue when a foul smelling young man of great height boarded the train and pushed his way to the center of the car. He wore a white baseball cap with the words EAT THE RICH stitched in large lavender letters.  As the young man cleared his throat, I expected him to either spit or begin an agonized plea for money.

            He did neither.

            Instead, he pulled out a pistol and ordered an attractive woman in Tanzanite heels to pull the emergency stop chord.  After the train pummeled to a stop he began to rage how humans have become lactose intolerant because we stopped ingesting mother’s milk and replaced it with the cow milk that has made American women look like heifers and American men look like castrated bulls. “You fools! Your last glass of milk actually came from a bull,” he screamed.

            When a trio of teenagers tried to rush him from behind, he shot the ringleader. He then punctuated each sentence of his memorized dairy manifesto by pointing his gun at a different rider and yelling, “Pow Cow!”  While transit riders cowered and many wept, I remained calm and silently invoked the healing power of CYN. Much to my surprise, these words leapt from my throat:

            “Coughing milk through your nose is one of the seven cleansing rituals of dairy yoga.”        “Milkshakes are the gift from heaven that come in different flavors.”

            “Life happens, honey. What are you going to do? Cry into a bowl of milk?”

            Upon hearing this, the gunman shot himself.  

            They called me a hero, responsible for saving many lives on that train.  But it wasn’t me. What saved us was CYN’s oral response to my silent desperate plea for guidance. My mouth was just used as Its vehicle of protection.

            There are many creative consultants who live to milk the bank accounts of the anxious and insecure. Not me.  I live to share this sacred praxis of CYN with you. I, Brainard Bullion of Long Beach, specialize in the reclamation of frustrated, disillusioned, humiliated and blocked artists suffering within all branches of the humanities. My post-graduate work in the fields of Scatology and Sanitation are the perfect precursors for my present avocation as a creative conduit to aesthetic satisfaction and artistic fulfillment.

            My consultations are done exclusively through house calls because creativity must engender movement and momentum in order to succeed.  Skeptics have accused me of using house calls to avoid office overhead while living off the pipedreams of others. I abhor pipedreams. I make a virtuous living as a pipefitter.  I install, assemble, fabricate, maintain and repair artistic ambitions by helping artists secure airtight connections to their creative process and products.  I work with an array of national and international non-profit/commercial art networks.

            To begin with, I never submit an artist’s work. To submit means to be judged unfavorably as a possible non-equal.  Submission is the acceptance of creative surrender. An artist must never submit to any authority except to that of CYN.  I offer up a client’s work to prospective dealers, curators, producers and publishers in the same spirit one offers up a gift –as an enticement for pleasure, prosperity and affable enlightenment.

            I first came to understand the unique powers of CYN’s gift of individualized creativity when I was a young child who still believed in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. A CYN inspired epiphany occurred one Christmas Eve while I was playing a Wise Man in our Church’s annual Christmas pageant.  While in bearded costume bowing and presenting a gift to the baby Jesus in the manger, tears suddenly spilled down my face and I wept so loudly Pastor Weber had to pull me off stage.  After the church service ended I was brought to the sacristy and given cookies and coco while the pastor, my parents and the Sunday School teachers who supervised the pageant tried to calm me and discover why I was so upset.

            In between sobs I told them I could no longer believe a wise man could ever be joyous over Jesus’ birth and that anyone who says Merry Christmas, throws parties, decorates trees, strings lights and exchanges gifts all in celebration of this infant must be a cruel liar. Why is everyone so jubilant to see this baby born? Just three months later comes Easter and this baby is a grown man who is mocked, betrayed, tortured and murdered in a most excruciatingly sadistic manner that ends with his broken body tossed into a stranger’s grave. Ho! Ho! Ho!

            Instead of acknowledging my precocious Yuletide insight into raw truth they became upset and told me it all had to do with sin. My sin. And then I was slapped into a decade of psychotherapy.  But unbeknownst to my parents, one of my shrinks practiced Reiki therapy, which means “spiritually guided life force energy.” Reiki involves the passing of energy from a trained Reiki practitioner’s body to the client’s body as a method of healing. This Reiki practitioner used a series of established hand positions as a means for allowing energy to move freely between her body and mine.  That’s when CYN first formally introduced themself to me and I learned how most people corrupted CYN’s name because of their fear of visionary thinking and so chose to misspell it and interpret it as sin in order to obliterate Its healing, mystical properties of unique contemplative thought always turns into affirmative action. 

            I’m currently working with a client who is a prolific and accomplished fine arts photographer.  Not too many years ago she was a widely exhibited and published winner of multiple N.E.A. artist grants as well as a recipient of highly competitive residencies at both Yaddo and MacDowell artist colonies. However, for more than a decade her work has been completely ignored and she’s become dangerously despondent.  When we met she presented me with a shocking proposal.    

            My client is a purist who refuses to succumb to digital photography and give up the excitement of her darkroom discoveries. However, film and chemicals are just too expensive and spatially she can’t afford the extra room in which to develop her photographs. Her last two agents dropped her when they insisted she needed to create art videos based on her images in order to revive her photographic career.  She abhors video art, claiming they are mostly repetitive, appropriated images and soundtracks sans the fingerprints of a personal humanity. Her proposition was for me to help her complete her first and final art video that will chronicle the soul crushing loss of her artistic voice.  She engaged me to help her conceptualize and create the world’s first artistic suicide snuff film, a final ironic protest against the cruel indignity of her cultural neglect. She was determined to kill herself on camera in a most powerfully imaginative manner.  Her expectation was that her video would be her swan song that would fly into international galleries and museums, thus avenging her neglected and rejected late period artist life.

            Upon hearing her goal, some may call me crass as I always accept checks and credit cards, but I amended this policy and insisted she pay me cash up front.  I thought her project cutting edge and I immediately came up with a conceptual title for her terminal performance video, Sentenced to Death by the Muse. She loved it, but a few days later my conscience got the better of me, as well as fear of the legal implications of assisting a suicide.

            When I tried to talk her out of filming her suicide and change course for her first and final art video, she was defiantly adamant that the reason for her taking such a drastic, innovational lethal action was “the lost echo of my uniquely artistic voice.”

            Hmmmm. The loss of her artistic voice?  She claimed not being able to afford print photography supplies, a dark room and the total lack of art world attention to her work the loss of her Artistic Voice?  That kind of thinking is irrational and is most certainly not to die for.

             Thanks to the intervention of CYN, I was able to explain to her the scientific conceit developed by physicists that sound waves never disappear. Sound waves spread out and get weaker and weaker until they just about disappear and that’s when they transform into thermal energy units that are eternal.  According to this highly respected theory, we are surrounded by the voices of every word that’s ever been spoken by both the living and the dead, but we can’t hear them because the ultimate sensitive listening device has yet to be invented. Thankfully, after much debate she finally accepted my proposition.  

            Using this concept, I sketched out a new video I called Babel On And Off White to be shot within Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery’s kinetic landscape of funereal monuments and sculptural ossuary patinas.

            The goal of this new artwork is to have the viewer experience what I call a seduction from the graveyard dead who are excited and impatient to recruit mortals into their powerful and extremely vocal eternal community choir. This terminal seduction will be achieved by inducing a kind of video viewer trance rooted in an escalating aural and visual cemetery cacophony. This rising dissonance approximates an ethereal heart attack by allowing her viewers to pass over into the world of the dead when the jarring crescendo of flashing funereal sculptural images and the humming, hissing, screeching garble of overlapping voices abruptly ends when the screen is suddenly filled with a silent, blazing white. There are dead in this art video but in my updated version, thank CYN it isn’t the artist herself.   

            We were recently notified that Babel On And Off White has been short listed as a finalist for the prestigious and lucrative Alfred B. Sloan Foundation Grant, awarded to artists who seek to build bridges between the two cultures of science and the humanities in order to develop a common language to better understand and speak to one another.

            So, how may I be of service to you?

Mark Blickley grew up within walking distance of the Bronx Zoo. He is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center. His latest book is the flash fiction collection, ‘Hunger Pains’ (Buttonhook Press).

Dario Saraceno originally hails from Ripacandia, Italy, and is a professional musician, actor, and author of the guitar method book, The Shape Remains the Same. His band, Dario and the Clear has opened for John Entwistle, Leslie West, The Alarm, Pat Travers, and Warren Zevon.