Twilight of the Superhumans

No one expected this. Kid in a gasmask helping an old lady across the street, even though the crosswalk is in excellent working condition and traffic doesn’t really exist anymore under this big green radioactive dome, shielding The Metropolis, the pillar of the Steel-Kingdom, held and dominated by the House of Steel, founded by the first man of tomorrow Steelman and fully established by marriage with the Amazonian demi-goddess Madame Miracle, though now it’s King and Queen Steel and we are all damned on this entire planet.

Under the dome, we’ll either die from cancer and other forms of radiation sickness or meet a brutal end in an unnecessarily operatic war of reluctant superhumans and egocentric mad gods.
The old lady never got a chance to cross the street, as a hulking behemoth of tumors once a Gamma-ray scientist landed into the center of the street. Skull faced, contorted super-strong beast howling at King Steel, wispy white hair in a black and red leotard, silver steel S in the center holding a pristine white cape into place, yet you could see he was yellow with cancer, the years of storing energy like a battery but dying of radiation poison this new god yearned for victory at any cost.

He condemned himself to essential death in what was a superhuman arms race. Create new soldiers to usher in a militaristic peace into the world since the great fragmentation between the various fractions of The Alliance. The Peacekeepers would make a comeback and despite the membership not consisting of the original seven champions of justice, everything would be fine and orderly or King Steel believed with cancer eating his brain.

The incredible Brute raised himself up and being a mass of terminal disease with just as much rage and insanity as the levitating being above grabbed the only speeding truck on the road and threw it at the bane of his current existence, showering radioactive isotopes upon the ground, through fissures made by gamma saturated grasps of fury.
 Kid in the gasmask pushed the old lady out of the way but it wasn’t enough as she was struck across the eyes going blind and swallowing another whole and kid in the mask referred to as Robin-Jay by his ailing mother who may have hinted around that his father was once a vigilante sidekick, not that it mattered as a gold chain with an archaic religious significance dangled from the boy’s neck.

King Steel incinerated the automotive projectile with laser vision and gasped as he saw the young lad’s golden talisman. Gold. Another weakness in conjunction with radiation. It was a slow agonizing death this poison but gold like the kryptonite of fiction weakened him like a man of steel from another time.
He looked down at the kid in the gasmask and something caused his spine to shiver for the first time in decades.
	“Son, stay back. We need to be united…God is coming and it’s not a good thing.”
The cancerous mass lunged at his floating nemesis and just like the truck out of sheer impatience from years fighting and fear of the figure below, King Steel melted Brute right on the spot, leaving a charred twisted skeleton not much different than a Dali painting among the broken street.

Meanwhile, on the West Coast, isolated from the East Coast of the radioactive dome had trouble of their own. The Masters of Marvels fully assembled with an army to crack open the dome and take what they needed from the House of Steel to fully win this war. It wasn’t too long ago when the various superhero teams of: The Peacekeepers, Fearless Five, Justice Guard and Supremacy Squad had decided to officially disband and rebrand themselves as one unit…THE ALLIANCE to rid the world of evil doers by any means necessary…even the numerous bands of mutants had set aside their differences alongside many of mentally scarred street vigilantes. However Dr. Universe sat upon his high throne stationed above the roundtable to ensure everyone was equal beneath his vast superior power and knowledge, serving as a force of guidance more than anything instead of being just another demi-god like a certain extraterrestrial with his humanoid resemblance who dared call himself “king.”

An armor encased master with a bionic heart wrapped in a mystical purple cloak wearing a spectrum of rings adhering to all the colors of a rainbow, it was a hard won battle against Atlantis but the war was far from over, he once foresaw that in his sidekick Jimmy Jett’s magic eight-ball glasses, even after they defeated the House of Steel, the Mutates who had left Earth to terraform Mars and renamed it Planet Z after the Z-gene which bestowed their powers would return with much greater force, which ultimately formed an alliance on a nigh omnipotent level.

What could be considered as God was coming which spelled the end of everything they originally fought for. There would be another mass extinction on a planetary level rendering the existence of battle between good versus evil quite meaningless and the good doctor and his illuminated colleagues couldn’t manage that which is why he sent the bat-shit crazy one to finally execute that cancer ridden warped alien who started out as just a good old Michigan farm boy only to find out he was “gifted” with a power from beyond the stratosphere. The Alliance was never meant to hold and usher in a utopia like they wanted and eventually they dismantled it from so much in fighting after the execution of the villains, then the toppling of sinister global regimes and finally just usurping these small minded yet narcissistically engineered societies which only further plagued the human condition and the eco-system itself.

The Atlanteans of course had something to say as did the Amazons who after their pantheon was taken out make a hasty alliance via marriage with the House of Steel spawning demonic descendants which would have Steelman’s powers yet none of his weaknesses though those abilities would be diminished the genes from the mother would make up for it and this concerned council which consisted of the best and brightest of superhumans who were more human than human with the exception of the designated executioner Knight Shadow, the typical rich boy scenario only it was more sexual for him…a trip to see Dracula, wetting himself over a blood sucking scene with something that wasn’t urine, embarrassed socialite parents rushing out of the theatre to be gunned down by political protesters screaming “Eat the rich!”

There was something more erotic about his costume and implementation of extreme violence than brutal street justice, just ask his sidekick Squire…oh you can’t…Arachnakid had suffocated him within his own web of terror, in an effort to be more man, than kid so he could join the big league of superhuman killers and eventually get a seat at the king’s table.
Dr. Universe sighed as he stood to greet the rest of the incoming counsel, he wouldn’t tell them of hopelessness of the situation nor how it was completely useless to officially decimate not only Metropolis but to engage in battle against that which created them in the first place, but he would tell the story of the egg.

The herald soared the space-ways. A slender chrome being encased in a field of celestial upon a disk made of the matter as his skin and surrounded by the same field of fire. He had a name once and sometimes wondered if he had truly been born a man or what sort of inferior abomination from a backwater forsaken planet did, he hail from? 
He could barely remember the words to articulate, but remembered the number zero-zero, whatever that meant. There were fragments, one of a nihilistic shaven headed monk hellbent on proving the meaningless of existence by exterminating his sect with his forbidden lover whose name was Shal…and before the executioner’s laser axe could come down on upon their necks, RAI-SHI arrived…swirling series of electric storm clouds and obsidian armor. The dark seed of what really governed the various forces in distant and unknown galaxies.

The planet was ripped apart, as they were suspended in space as RAI-SHI shed the armor and implanted itself into what remained of the planet…a hovering quasar pumping egg containing the darkness of the blackhole, then reborn after shedding its original husk, it turned to Shal and Kul (was that his dead name?) who were remade as two chrome heralds to search out the eggs hidden on other planets so that RAI-SHI could prolong itself for millennia more without exhausting precious cosmic power or warfare which would have more than likely included weapons made of gold, the weakness of his race and there were offshoots upon other planets he knew of.

Kul soared alone as Shal panicked, dismayed by the fact she couldn’t breathe air, ripping her own chest open to expose her lungs in order to breathe. He saw her exposed torso about three hundred years ago as headed toward the Earth to herald it’s destruction and engage in combat with the inhabitants. 
RAI-SHI the machine god who created a series of techno-organic bodies in various planets incubated in these eggs, naturally it had enemies ergo its inhabitants were engineered to be hostile to defend the eggs from various invaders yet somehow there were obstacles such as a planet’s own eco system building its own series of defense mechanisms to subvert control from the artificial deity’s agenda.
Professor Z, sat in his levitating chair on largest built earthen tower erected onto Martian terrain. He communed with what could only be conceived as god and wept in silence as they went through a cycle of eternity experiencing the births, deaths, and rebirths of universes. He didn’t have to make amends for Weapon Zinn anymore and gladly shut down Pablo’s brain with his near limitless healing ability and plethora of adamantine bones which was a combination of diamond and platinum capable of scratching through any surface yet incapable of being rejected naturally by the human body. 

Adamantine like gold was still a weakness for RAI-SHI and Pablo also known as Raptor had too much of an independent streak.
Dr. Universe hovered above the Earth, tears streaming down his face knowing that this was the last time he would ever see it, conjuring a web of crisscrossing energy surrounded by a fleet of Copper-Giants (fully automated but operated by the original Copper Giant on Earth full of cancer and hiding down below King Steel’s utopia). The fabric of space and time ripped open, an unholy alliance was to be made as tenacles protruded and the albino emerald eyed Octo-King and Queen emerged.


Down below Knight Shadow, tumbled out of his armor, still clad in helmet and chainmail. His gauntlets grasped King Steel’s flowing white hair and forced plasma bursts into his ears which even though he was dying of cancer and severely weakened still only annoyed this far distant descendent of RAI-SHI. He tore from his world’s finest ally the symbiote which once belonged to another insect influenced hero, disintegrated with sun-vision, and tore the Mystic Hamsha Eye which clasped his attacker’s cloak together and crushed it beneath his cracking white boots.

“Without the manufactured symbiote and Hamsha, you’re nothing but bone and meat Wayne, how did you even conceive a plan of this pathetic magnitude would work?”
Knight Shadow tripped over himself and grasped a short golden sword. 
	“It wasn’t intended to work.”
King Steel boisterously laughed at the display of futile resilience.
	“I’m not going to launch myself at you, we’re not young and stupid anymore.”

Knight Shadow stood still with the sword at his side observing his once best friend turn rigid as his flesh and organs slide off his skeleton.
Kid in the gasmask stood over the corpse.
“Well, kid…what’s next?” He rasped.
Kid in the gasmask removed his mask, his skin shining brightly in the sun over the cracked radioactive dome.


	“The name’s Golden Boy, now melt me down into a colossal bullet and shoot me into the head of God.”

Michael’s Dream

Early morning there is a moment of stillness within me is noticeable. It is three o’clock… A deep sleep takes me to another place separate from the world. Takes me to a soothing place before the sun rises while the moon lights the skies. Seeing more stars covering the skies of Vermont. Mild thoughts along with a calmness comes. A separation of a world which is full of noise and hustling people during daylight. It’s three o’clock and sleep evades me. It’s always this time in the morning in which there is tranquility. A place where the trueness of life is renewed. While the cardinal sleeps before waking up the world with its melodies. It always been like this as the moon watches. Sitting at the old royal typewriter there was no search and pecking. My fingers danced as they leaped into the air, striking the keys. Thoughts took form as a meditative state came. A moment in time when my thoughts melted like snowflakes.

Grey skies dispensed flakes of snow falling into the winter air. Each flake evaporated upon touching my skin. My soul delighted in the wetness of the snowflake melting on me. Snow always woke up something within me. It was the first time realizing God’s existence. Feelings of softness which blended with my thoughts. Thoughts falling and melting leaving no sign or presence. The taste of nothingness remains within me. Perhaps it was the whole point of snow. A reminder of nothingness. One moment of life. Thousands of snowflakes coming and going like thoughts in early morning. Snow has a quietness. While the snow touches die upon touching the ground. Similarly, life is a snowflake touching our essence before dissolving into the ground. It is five in the morning and the moon recedes and the sun lights the sky. It is time to wake up. It was those hours that harmony existed for me. My dream brought a familiar feeling within me. Perhaps this is reality, and the world is a dream. Who knows for sure? God watches over me.

11-23-2021

This month’s contributors beckon us within, to the inner landscape of our memories, thoughts, and emotions. Each of us contains a whole world, which is worth developing and exploring.

FYI Dennis Mann, a national of Ghana, is the head of a nonprofit donating children’s books to low-income children in the country. This group is known as Wide Reading Among Kids and readers may find more information on the organization and how to support it here.

Hongri Yuan’s glimpses of transcendence, translated by Manu Mangattu, connect ordinary people to the vastness of the universe. Abigail George turns to poetry to express longing for a cause and a connection that is both practical and inspiring. John Thomas Allen captivates with a lush rendering of the Tarot, an ancient spiritual way of understanding life and human nature, set in a circus setting.

Deborah Kerner’s work links herself with a modern-day hitchhiker/bag lady through the sisterhood of history and nature. Kerner’s other pieces describe life seen through a veil of interiority: from a train window or during insomnia. Sanjeev Sethi’s poetry collections Bleb and Hesitancies, here reviewed by Cristina Deptula, also highlight the intricacy of our innermost thoughts, fostering reflection and respect for all people.

Mahbub looks to birds and other creatures in nature for life lessons, building on his inner understanding through contemplation. Nature, nighttime and storms become metaphors for both the passionate beauty and the hidden dangers of romantic love.

Doug Hawley writes of romance as well, in an elegant piece on the twilight years of a long marriage. Dennis Mann spins the tale of another wedded couple together until death does them part, although more tragically.

Robert Thomas reflects on what life might be like after his wife’s passing, a pre-emptive elegy of love and grief. J.J. Campbell mourns relationships and other human connections that almost happened, or never happened. Chris Butler poignantly comments on not being able to go home again, not being able to recreate one’s lost childhood, in a collection that includes an elegy to a stranded and dying rabbit along with descriptive, near-musical odes to bees.

Charlie Robert mourns the Berlin Zoo’s animals lost during WWII bombings along with the Jews and other minorities who died in the Holocaust. Ahmad Al-Khatat’s piece presents marginalized people who call forth their own dignity, determined to leave a record of their presence. Gaurav Ojha calls out corruption and lack of concern for important matters within his native Kathmandu.

Chimezie Ihekuna’s screenplay collection featured this month looks within individual, ordinary lives and relationships for deeper truths about compassion and understanding.

Mark Blickley created his performance art piece, shown here through video, with the intention of bringing us back to simpler times at a slower and less distracting pace. Alan Britt writes of nostalgia as well, remembering the youthful beauty of double dates with a friend. Britt also semi-playfully reflects on our connections with other species as well as with God, whether we explicitly believe or not. Marjorie Thelen offers up a narrative from someone who’s become a relic in a post-human, post-philosophical era.

Richard Chetwynd integrates words and letters into visual art that alludes to concepts of faith, mental health and spiritual connection. Mark Young’s technical wordplay is thoughtful and poignant, with a piece on soul-building and visual imagery that evokes thoughts of loss.

Raquel Silberman describes the psychological rebuilding and ‘cleanup’ after a disaster in a poem that makes some traumas seem messy, but survivable.

Z.I. Mahmud looks into the rich panoply of characters in Dickens’ works to find allegories that promote compassion and respect for all people. Christopher Bernard also draws upon the language and narrative techniques of fables and children’s literature in his monthly installment of The Ghost Trolley, which comments on power, justice, equity, and grace.

Elizabeth Hughes reviews Mike Honeycutt’s hunting and travel memoir Into the Wild.

We invite you into the world of this magazine and also more deeply into your own world as you read this month’s issue.

 
 
 
ODE TO MULES, CATBIRDS, INSECTS, AND GOD
  
  
 Interspecies friendships?
  
 They’re great, aren’t they?
  
 A bonding of pure affection
 sometimes unequaled in human civilization.
  
 A mule wearing a snorkel and goggles enters
 the high school convocation flopping rubber 
 flippers against the smooth terracotta tiles.
  
 You gotta love that!
  
 [Yeah]
  
                           *……*
  
 A catbird screeched high above a tulip poplar
 near the local middle school earlier today,  
 then warbled hieroglyphs before entering 
 our forsythia hedge and vaporizing  
 inside its prickly branches.
  
                     *……*……*
  
 I wonder if we pay enough attention to insects?
 We mostly complain about them, but they’re 
 preoccupied day in day out with whatever’s 
 required to evolve their DNA.
  
 Sounds a lot like us, eh?
  
 And what about lusty zebra mosquitos
 who just want to our be blood brothers?
  
 We shouldn’t overlook such things.
  
                    ◄   ◄…..►   ►
  
 What’s the last thing that goes
 through an existentialist’s mind

 when he smacks the windshield 
 at 90 miles an hour?
  
 That’s right, God.
  
  
  
  
  
  
   

 

 THE NIGHT JOE WATSON & I DOUBLE-
 DATED TWO BEAUTIES FROM THE 
 THRIFTWAY SUPERMARKET
  
  
 I told Joe, pick whomever, but I prefer 
 the Italian in a canary one-piece 
 with poppy white collar.
  
 So, he picked Meg.
  
 I liked Meg.
  
 I liked Meg a lot with her tamarind
 arms, bronze legs, & eyelashes like 
 dragonflies haunting my dreams, 
 but, alas, I was mesmerized 
 by the Italian Aphrodite broiled
 to perfection in a canary one-piece 
 with poppy white collar. 
  
 So, off the four of us cruised, two
 of us ending up below the spidery
 legs of the Lake Worth pier.
  
 That night kisses like wild bruises 
 migrated from lips to necks 
 to shoulders in the casual blink 
 of a full moon’s penumbra 
 tattooing hair, flesh, 
 monkey blood, & bones. 
  
 I told Joe, pick whomever, but I prefer 
 the Italian in a canary one-piece 
 with poppy white collar.
  
  
  
  

Alan Britt has been nominated for the 2021 International Janus Pannonius Prize awarded by the Hungarian Centre of PEN International for excellence in poetry from any part of the world. Previous nominated recipients include Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Charles Bernstein and Yves Bonnefoy. Alan was interviewed at The Library of Congress for The Poet and the Poem. He has published 20 books of poetry and served as Art Agent for Andy Warhol Superstar, the late great Ultra Violet, while often reading poetry at her Chelsea, New York studio. A graduate of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University he currently teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University.

Discussion of the success behind the authenticity of the novel

“Perseverance for knowledge and passion for dreams” engender the issues explored in David Copperfield to be interweaved in Great Expectations. Fact and fancy, reality and imagination or private and public encapsulating life sketches of memoirs: memorial, monument or testimony chronicles a spiritual autobiography. The world of the biographer’s existence has been socially, morally and imaginatively much more complex, compromising and more essentially ambiguous than one David inhabits as interpreted in the parenthetical thesis of Anna Foley foreshadowed within bibliography.        

 Enslavement by a heartless society, destructions of war, mass genocide and totalitarianism engrosses modern critics such as Chesterton’s shrewd criticism apprising and appreciating Dickensian character Tobb as the vitality of real humanity or humility, those who have nothing but life. Furthermore, George Orwell, the satirist of political and moral allegorical fable quintessentially denotes in his essay on Dickens always, “respond emotionally to the idea of human brotherhood.” 

Differentiating Advantages and Disadvantages of Reading The Autobiographical Narrative Fiction Great Expectations

Psychoanalysis Freudian theories and gender studies by modern critics today, question the integrity of memorable characters, boisterous humours, intrigued plot twists, precipitous cliffhangers or suspenseful ending and universal themes. Bread and butter (graveyard scene) were connoting alleged erection employed by Pip to hide and cover adolescence. Victorian ideals abhorred and despised the tendency of incestuous relationships, masturbation, lascivious or carnal desires, adultery and so on. Magwitch and Herbert’s guidance or guardianship excessive handling of Pip is a striking matter of moral degradation in modern criticism by shrewdest psychoanalysts or gender studies theorists.      

 Mr. Pumblechook appearance of that of a Sheriff and the reticent patronage of Compeyson disdains readers or critics detesting demonic characteristics in Mr. Pumblechook’s personae. Another striking fact in debate is the emotional setting of prison infirmary. Incidentally, Pip reconciles in salvaged spirit to acquire redemption for the penitent sins encountered after demonizing feelings about Magwitch. Withdrawal of snobbery from the redemptive minds of Estella and Pip ending doesn’t disseminate justification in absurd ending despite smugness shattered by the discovery of great expectations. 

Further drawbacks of the novel discusses the issues of being the idealized gentleman in the ironical witty commentaries of Dickens to satirize being gentleman to table manners, style of dressing, body language, speech, wealthy fortunes and so forth. Interestingly, the irony here talks of Victorian tradition of mass graveyard shameful, embarrassing, defame or guilty conscience because bereavement of working class or middle class bourgeois should be preserved in sepulchers and epitaphic tombstones inscripted. Farm labourers, coal miners or domestic servants weren’t exempted from the case study. Socio economically youngsters were passionate about being marines or veterans and clergymen whilst the legacy was endowed to the elders. Daughters inherit dowries or petty estate unless the male relations remain obscure. Dickens employed the character of Drummle from Somerset as neither aristocrat nor Shropshire gentry which provokes the issue of class distinction and classification of a gentleman. Romantic delusions implored Pip to board the accommodation Boars Hotel with the illusion that Miss Havisham [fairy godmother]’s Estella, the ward would be his fiancée.              

 “Poisonous” and “pernicious”, “infamous” and “shameful” the novelist epitaphic phrases paraphrase poor living conditions in prison. “From head to foot there was convict in the very grain of the man” demarcate English, French or Convicts curtailed from European civilization  “a savage air that no dress could tame.”  In reality Dickens shrewd criticism allegorizes the Victorian prison reformation. Gospel of improvement or progress brightening or heightening metropolis with passing of traits in the transformed sub urban hypnotizes colonial enterprise. Dickens forgets to narrate the vanishing or exclusion of Abel Magwitch symbolizing injustice. These extremism of characters resonate unrealism oscillating in the novel. In the novel, Estella, the heroine marries the doctor from Shropshire after Drummle’s death. Pip understands that she has developed maturity through suffering –irony of resolutions. Superficiality of the gentleman sways away as soon as the hero, Pip’s inferences and conscience awaken. What really matters in life is being honest, true, loyal and kind. Great Expectations is nothing but a work of genius by modern critics. It is also very widely read by ordinary people except those who dislike fiction. Dickensian vocabulary, complex and lengthy sentences and verbal irony are obstacles in interpreting modern Dickens.       

When snarling, Orlick, the tangible flesh and blood presence denounces Pip as “young wolf” and remonstrates Mrs. Joes, “You’re a foul shrew, Mother Gargery”. Dickens contrasted this to the boarding school educated counterfeit money con artist bcause he could copy handwritings that appeared behind the scenes- elusive and shadowy. Compeyson blights the lives of Miss Havisham, her ambiguous half weak brother and of Magwitch on the one hand. And on the other, the deal of treachery trial’s betrayal stimulated white terror vengeance of the open book of crime and punishment-the symbolic of ripest exploitation. Magwitch “marries” Molly “over the broomstick” unlike his counterparts Orlick and Compeyson [Compeyson breaks Miss Havisham’s heart]. Why brevity and humour? The barbarity of the justice system sentences mass and Dickens mocks the judge’s verdict in ordering a special censure for Magwitch. [“My Lord I have received my sentence of death from the Almighty, but I bow to yours”]

Orlick’s indulgence of vengeance after being dismissed from the forge and Miss Havisham’s caretaking, tempted him as Compeyson’s dupe luring Pip into lime-kiln [*lime kiln- kiln or furnace of reducing limestone shells to lime through burning or incineration]. Orlick was sentenced to imprisonment in the final part of the novel through a commit of blundered heist: the robbery of Mr. Pumblechook-the ostentatious caricature. Dickens’ laughter and humour reflection in Pip’s  appraisal that the villainy of Orlick showed atonement is subtly the question of moral integrity. [Pip acknowledged Orlicks’ temperate behavior of stuffing the nose of Mr. Pumblechook with flower annals]. However, critics like Andrew Moore, disparaged shrewd glimpses of analogous to a loose ending of the plot.

John Thomas Allen is 38, loves stained glass, and loves imagery for imagery's sake.  He also enjoys giving single dollar bills to crack addicts at real carnivals, igniting charity balls for people who don't work, and entertaining strange strangers online. He admires the work of Peter O Leary, Bernadatte Meyer, and Mina Loy.


The Carnival Tarot

I was there the night the carnival tarot began
  In a glass mosque of magic satin 
flooded with fireflies 
     winding the meditation boxes 
   to a focus levels flooded without grounding 
        To a focus level split in the screaming   
        sonar whistles 
     dew drops of dim deja vu, 
         beads bodiless with worlds shed aflame
           echoes of billiard halls in their boozy spider glass 
           echoes of hobo clown gangs split in galleys  
               of long handed shadow  
           echoes of orchestrated lightning in black boxes 
           echoes of paint chips patterned after a decayed 
                  glass marquee in downtown LA
              The third eye all smoke  
                and thus frying the Om…
   now with the dowsing snakes hushed buzz. 
     The fleecing syncopation of All In All   
                            All At Once
    Before falling they’d seen ameythistine temples,
               rising tide of movie monsters eloped
                   from the moving pictures 
                   in the singular monstrosity of self possession
         gravity’s cells swallowing each free breath of even
                                 air.
      In the EVP library’s soundscape, the voices freed
      the dead’s sound bytes inside holofoil crypts.
       The pale swan arms, bonding afterlives, braille echoes on the No. 5
      pencil 
      She sang the Hours with carnie ministers, crowned ghosts.
        The icons were flooded out with sound mirrors the body 
                                        of a saw
      Refracting icons in the library’s reading room 
         Howling and nude in caged specters of lightning, 
               eyes smoked like a blue owl
                     a  dribbling decoy of light.

The elevated language in Sanjeev Sethi’s poetry collections Bleb and Hesitancies draws readers in, encouraging multiple readings of each short piece. Although the collections consist of small vignettes without a true narrative thread, some characters take shape: the speaker’s tiny grandchildren and aging parents.

Many pieces explore memory and internal thought processes: In “Palmer,” the speaker reflects on solitude: “The aftermath/is soaked in sapience./ Richness of receptacle/
endows the individuation/of insights.”

Others comment on the writing process and on words and imagination. In “Cry for Clemency” Sethi compares writing to raising children. “Poems are like progeny, after parturition they are nursed and nurtured until they fasten their futurity.”

While some would consider this metaphor unusual for a male writer, Sethi’s sensibility is delicate, full of grace for the human condition. He shows this sensitivity by including people of all ages and genders, including the elderly, as poetic subjects and describing them with dignity.

The slow pace of both collections encourages us to ‘hesitate,’ to step back and think, to develop and honor our interior lives. Sethi uses the word ‘hesitancies’ directly in a few pieces, many of which concern physical and emotional intimacy that deepens as people take the time to let relationships unfold.

Bleb and Hesitancies call to readers with a quiet insistence, pulling us in to matters of the heart and mind with the voice of a wise friend.

Sanjeev Sethi’s collections can be ordered here and here.