Elbov Kulmonov was born on 29 May, 1992 in Koson district in the Kashkadarya region of Uzbekistan. His poems and stories were published in local and national newspapers.
His poems were published in a collection of "Ezgulik yolqini" and his poems were published in Uzbek Writer's Anthology in India in 2013 and '*Katla-lntercontinental magazine in 2013.Now he is a correspondent of "Tarovat" newspaper. He is a member of the "Astonishment" creative writing club.
Uzbekistan
My body made by from your soil.
I know some day I will die.
Some day my soul will get across my body,
So my soul is a temporal.
I will take you away with me,
until dead your memory.
I will live in your land till this event,
I will remain in your soil.
Dreams
Dreams, dreams white dreams,
You are a ray lighted my soul palace.
You appeal me to live,
You are an Antelope in my heart.
I am trying to reach the dream's mount,
Everyday, cry an hour with hope.
I admire my feelings to reach you and I will gain a victory some day.
Listen
When the lightning smiles,
let fear not boil your blood
for my voice will be deep into the thunder scream,
give ears when the cloud gets shadowy
and the rain is dancing on your roof,
listen to the wind when the trees dance
look beyond the wave of the oceans
as it chases itself off the shore,
for my eyes will be smiling in each tide
when the sun oozes down the ocean,
as hummingbirds sing lullaby,
as the wind stands still,
listen to those lyrics
from the sounds of crickets beneath your window
for I'll be flying on the wings of butterfly
listen to nature
for I am in every sound you hear.
to paint your heart with kisses,
Listen.
My mother is nature
The fountain of God's love
Her thighs are the roots of cotton tree
And the ground on which my feet first tasted
Her hands are the gravity that held me
when I thought I could fly without wings
Her fingers still taste like raindrops on my heated body
The circulated winds from her nostrils
breathe life
in her smiles-- I see twinkling stars
beautiful flowers from the top of Everest
in her veins-- I see oceans upon oceans
oceans that tide with the peaceful hands of wave
Her face holds the brightness of the sun
as it escorts itself every morning
In her eyes-- I see winging butterflies being chased by Blue Jay
and tiger happily racing with antelope
As the branches of her eyelashes stand tall above
Her chest holds waterfall canals
That flow down from mountains built in heaven
In the heart of nature--I see jewelries
Gold, diamonds that smile with love
She is as green as Amazon forest
The sky shows her eyes
And her body is Sahara
Nature lives in her
Vulnerable
-----------------------------
Half the Moon
through
Broken
Roof
I'll flap my arms
where lips won't Do
And rest my thoughts
where Wings once flew
Half the Moon
the
Owl can
See
feathers Warm
No
tethers
Worn
Wisdom is more
FREE
Snow
Pierced by Small Hooves
Lord's Grace to find
Transition
Where Cold & Light
Meet.
Half a Moon
Half a Moon
The Life
and the Spirit
make Whole.
♡
Text by M.A. Blickley
Licking the Wound
Laying naked in this bed on my back, I tilt my head and I look down with so much pain in my face. This is the third time today my boyfriend has gone down on me. Shouldn’t a girl be happy?
I would be, but this is how he apologizes for the blunt fist to the face he gives when he loses his temper. I tell myself every day I need to leave. Just get my shit and leave. But I don’t. I let temptation win every time as soon as his tongue strokes me slowly up and down until the abuse feels distant.
I look down at him in between my legs, my natural fluids moistening his face. I am in such heartbreak and awe over how the man I love can deliver such pain and pleasure. It’s insane. I stare at him. He looks up at me and whispers, “I love you baby.”
I search his eyes until I can find the apology for the black eye and the blood from my nose that stained the satin sheets we just purchased. My moans grow louder and drown out thoughts of me leaving until I hear my mother’s voice echo inside my head pleading, repeating, “Don’t you ever let a man hit you the way Daddy hits me.”
I have fallen in love with a man who one day will take my life and I continue to do nothing but look at him as we lay in this bed of lies, the same bed I retreat to after he beats me until I’m numb and then licks me until I can feel again.
Today something is different. Something is very, very off. I can feel his darting tongue actually trace individual letters inside of me that turn into words that form a full sentence that rises up through my body and explodes out my throat, “You are not my suicide note!”
His mouth jerks back and he jumps off the bed. For the first time ever, I can see he is afraid. And I am not. It must be true that the third time is a charm because I am going to save myself and leave this cowardly son of a bitch. I wish my mother were alive so I could thank her.
Mario Loprete, Catanzaro 1968Graduate at Accademia of Belle Arti, Catanzaro (ITALY).
Painting for me is my first love. An important, pure love. Creating a painting, starting from the spasmodic research of a concept with which I want to transmit my message this is the foundation of painting for me. The sculpture is my lover, my artistic betrayal to the painting that voluptuous and sensual lover that inspires different emotions which strike prohibited chords.
This new series of concrete sculptures has been giving me more personal and professional satisfaction recently. How was it born? It was the result of an important investigation of my own work. I was looking for that special something I felt was missing. Looking back at my work over the past ten years, I understood that there was a certain semantic and semiotic logic “spoken” by my images, but the right support to valorize their message was not there.
The reinforced cement, the concrete, was created two thousand years ago by the Romans. It tells a millennia-old story, one full of amphitheaters, bridges and roads that have conquered the ancient and modern world. Now, concrete is a synonym of modernity.
Everywhere you go, you find a concrete wall: there’s the modern man in there. From Sydney to Vancouver, Oslo to Pretoria, this reinforced cement is present, and it is this presence which supports writers and enables them to express themselves.
The artistic question was an obvious one for me: if man brought art on the streets in order to make it accessible to everyone, why not bring the urban to galleries and museums?
With respect to my painting process, when a painting has completely dried off, I brush it with a particular substance that not only manages to unite every color and shade, but also gives my artwork the shininess and lucidity of a poster (like the ones we’ve all had hanging on our walls).
For my concrete sculptures, I use my personal clothing. Through my artistic process in which I use plaster, resin and cement, I transform these articles of clothing into artworks to hang. The intended effect is that my DNA and my memory remain inside the concrete, so that the person who looks at these sculptures is transformed into a type of postmodern archeologist, studying my work as urban artefacts.
I like to think that those who look at my sculptures created in 2020 will be able to perceive the anguish, the vulnerability, the fear that each of us has felt in front of a planetary problem that was Covid-19 ... under a layer of cement there are my clothes with which I lived this nefarious period.
Clothes that survived Covid-19, very similar to what survived after the 2,000-year-old catastrophic eruption of Pompeii, capable of recounting man's inability to face the tragedy of broken lives and destroyed economies.
I have to know the wage of text
For a poet, silence is an acceptable, even flattering response,
claimed Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette.
Another claimed
that the calm that is the history of silence
is the poet's revenge.
Look, I walk around with a quill
between my teeth
Some people have their sensory hearing absorbed into in the most unexpected organs, and some will qualify in silence, accordingly I have to know the wage
of
text —
Surely, the initial reaction in humans
in their early lives is the voice, after
which everything else is a charade.
I am new
They don’t know
Where I came from
I must connect the- leg
With the waist
And the pelvis to the spine
That’s the way when items
Are separated from bodies
And an artificial
Lens is implanted
In the - eye.
Who said it’s possible to move
Organs
Away from their
Place?
Who said?
Tali Cohen Shabtai
Tali Cohen Shabtai, born in Jerusalem, Israel, is a highly-esteemed international poet with works translated into many languages.
She has authored three bilingual volumes of poetry, “Purple Diluted in a Black’s Thick”(2007), “Protest” (2012) and “Nine Years From You”(2018). A fourth volume is forthcoming in 2022.
Tali began writing poetry at the age of six. She lived for many years in Oslo, Norway, and the U.S.A. and her poems express both the spiritual and physical freedom paradox of exile. Her cosmopolitan vision is obvious in her writings.
Tali is known in her country as a prominent poet with a unique narrative. As one commentator wrote: “She doesn’t give herself easily, but is subject to her own rules.”
toast on the kitchen floor
the feeling that sulks in my bone marrow and weighs me down
melts into the air pockets of day old sourdough.
i didn't know that wanting to die was meltable.
i hoped it wasn't
now all i am left with is drips of oil and soot i never tracked in on my heel.
patches of raw feeling still keep their opaque huddling figures
but now it just looks like i have plain toast with molding clumps.
the crust is too hard for my crying jaws. i leave it on the cutting board.
a staler slice resides in the toaster that i have grown up with
so i get crumbs under my nails pulling it out.
fresher emotions that give the illusion of being gentle and friendly
are spread across the surface with the cchhh of
butter knife on bread
i don’t close the feelings container because it's a pain in the ass
and i always cut my fingertips just enough to feel the texture difference
but not enough to hurt
i leave a smear of suicidality in the deli container.
of course its not enough for a whole slice of toast
but thats too bad for whoever next finds themselves foolish enough to crave toast.
toast is dumb.
it takes the gentleness out of the fresh-baked bread and prods at over-chewed gums.
i only find myself seasoning a second toast because it's there
and i need something to do.
i pull out a fresh plate and everything for my pretty little crunchy mean bread.
so many favors i've done.
i smeared my feelings out and stared them down
like a single poppyseed on a fucking sesame bagel.
i also have mixed feelings about sesame seeds.
i’ll eat something that i didn't even know had sesame seeds but for some reason
i always wrestle with the tiny little flavor between my teeth for hours before i taste it.
sesame seeds are also dumb.
my stupid little toast is face down on the floor now and i'm not going to pick it up.
