In Which Mallory Learns Three Important Things
About Herself as She Pinwheels to Death, Among Other Things

p.1
Dear Mother,
I do not regret the time we never spent.

Dear Father,
I am you and you are me. Who came first? The chicken or the egg?

Dear Self,
You must accept the fact that your imminent death is not and will never be glorious.

p.2
The worst part of realizations,
is they are cruel because
they cannot be changed.

Mine is that I will die
in exactly 17.12 minutes,
(my suit calculates)
whirling between
green, blue, black
speckled with
pinpricks of distant
light from a
different age.

I do not scream.
I do not cry.
I accept.
I am streaking
through time and
the atmosphere is
so close, filling my polycarbonate
visor with wisps of white.

I am glad that the last
thing I will see before
I asphyxiate is the
pacific ocean. I wonder
if fish look up
and wonder what it
is like to breathe.

p.3
I do not envy anything.
I am here, staring at my
entire life defined to
four numbers ticking!

(I have moved past
all things in life. I have
moved past staring at
twin tombstones and
I shall move even when
my synapses shall not,
forever freefalling into
nothing.)

the third thought
that cartwheels across
me squealing heavenly
mercy cries⸺
who will remember you?

The birds twittering under the shingles
of my roof, the squirrels eating the acorns
left on my porch, my posters hanging in
my room are all bits of my
existence and remember me in of
themselves.

I am real; my pain is proof of this.

p.4
00.10
there
00.09
is
00.08
nothing
00.07
more
00.06
beautiful
00.05
than
00.04
earth.
00.03
I
00.02
am
00.01
happy.

God, why are You, the Creator of the known universe, letting Palestine die

Virgil, please look at me

my sad face that was once full of

love for you is now empty, made up

of lonely nights, Palestinian-Israeli

conflict, the ball found in a refugee

camp. I wake, get out of bed. Barefoot,

I  walk to the kitchen. I boil manifestos

in the kettle. I eat leftover egg mayonnaise

on bread. I map out pain but I don’t have

to do that now, not yet. The silence is waiting

for me. My bathwater is getting cold. The

horse impatient, but, instead, I then map out

pain with these hands. My pain. This

pain that tastes bittersweet. It tastes like

dark chocolate and rain and sweet like a

banana. I drink in this pain like I drink in

Palestine. I get lost in the clouds above

the refugee camp. The clouds made of

a fallen empire, cities of night. The clouds

made of children’s faces. I see the man’s

face again. I am holding it in my hands. The

leaf falls and it’s buried in the ocean. The

ocean that I am swimming in is filled with

orphans. Look at me! I am swimming in

ketchup and grease, fish fingers, hot chips,

blue wrists, lifeless wildflowers. I’m writing

a letter to God. Look at the sadness in my eyes.

Let the sun and grass grow in every soldier’s

heart. Let every soldier on both sides hear a

child’s laughter in the barrel of the gun. Let

them remember their mothers’ eyes and

childhood for Palestine’s sake.

And let them remember the words of this poem.

So Now What

(for Charles Bukowski)

During war,

milk is the colour of blood, honey

the colour of bone

The skulls here are bored

They want a new life, not this tragedy

I’m listing all your war crimes

I remember being happy

But I don’t want to remember

I don’t want to remember the man

I remember bombs and Gaza instead

Amputated limbs like branches

Here, everything tastes like seawater

I hope I’ll wake up from this dream soon

And that the man will return to me

in the morning and to numb the pain

I take the pills one by one

and a fog descends upon me

I wish you had decided to stay

so that we could make things work

but you never did and the truth is

I must accept that as fact and choose to live

For some time I breathed easier

in this world because of you

Because you had become all my reasons

I have questions and they trouble me

Do I still live inside your heart and

inside your life as a passing thought?

I write a letter to God and put it inside a poem.

At night I pray for Israel too, because in war nobody wins.

I pray for soldiers on both sides.

That their blood will turn into flowers.

Antigone, there are no more trees in Palestine, or, salt found in earth (in Palestine)

I found a child’s body lying in

the dust of what was once a mosque

I told the child I would write a letter

That I would write a letter to my

Christian God who abhors brutality of this

kind. Maybe my God could do

something about this kind of pain

and suffering. I’ll put it in a poem,

I said to the child’s soul

I buried the child’s body in that street

where the mosque used to exist,

have its own universe. There are

no more trees in Gaza. There are

only refugees in Palestine and dead

children lying in unmarked graves

but there are unmarked graves everywhere.

Africa, for one, Europe, for another (because

of wars), and Israel, reason being

because of genocide.

Dear God,

Thank you for suffering

I’ve been through so much myself this year

Thank you for pain

my heart is a survivor

Thank you for the wildflowers

they provide happiness, a sense of self

Thank you for this rain

it offers me tranquility and comfort

Thank you for the fog

that hides my tears

Thank you for the children of Palestine

They give me hope

Thank for the man

who was briefly in my life

He loved me and made me

feel beautiful for a short while

Thank you for this year, however,

it was sad, long and exhausting

and I am glad it’s nearly over.

Refaat Alareer

There is hope born in death and death born in hope

These are not empty words, you said

I looked at the exhaustion on your face

I thought of the flowers in Gaza, the orange

and lemon trees, the last olive you ate,

the last shower you took, the last prayer

you said, the last time you boiled a

manifesto in the kettle, stirred coffee

and sugar into a mug, the last time you watched

an American film, the last newspaper you

read, the last dead body you saw, the

last book you opened, the last time you

saw your family, your wife and children.

I have stopped watching the updates of

the Palestinian genocide. They use to

call it the Palestinian-Israeli conflict but now

it is a genocide. It’s become to much

for me to take. My tears can fill an ocean

and carry the orphans in an ark until

this war is over but there’s no end to a war

like this. Perhaps when we reach the end

of the world the war will end. Perhaps. Perhaps.

Where are all the wildflowers, what happened to the books

You walk like the trees, you will

always walk like the trees from the

river to the sea, Palestine. I offer

you gifts. Oranges, tea, flowers, life.

You do not beg, you do not steal,

you do not say anything at all when

they say they have to amputate

I listen to two poems by Ali Sobh

I make spaghetti and watch the fine

sticks that I can so easily snap into

two with my fingers turn into noodles

Noodles not dead bodies. Not heads

I have something to eat and I’m grateful

for that but Palestine is hungry. How

she longs for the sweetness of milk, the

kindness of honey, the protein that

chicken provides. By now, the river

has turned to blood and the children into

angels and the mosques and hospitals

into dust. I cry me a river. My eyes are red.

My tears, the memory of blood.

I know what it feels like to be broken,

heart shattered, body in pieces

So do you, Palestine. So do you.

Flowers for Palestine, forgiveness in this time of war

It’s late. I should be asleep but I’m not.

Instead, I’m watching a 60 minute interview

with Colson Whitehead, he won the Pulitzer

back-to-back, John Updike being the only

other writer to win consecutively. I sleep-

walk walk-slouch to the kitchen and make a hot

cup of tea. I listen to a reading of

Yevtushenko’s Babi Yar. It is read in Russian

and I cannot understand a word. Then it is

read in English and I understand every word

but not everything. I know I will forget these

poems by the time I wake up in the morning.

I will forget writing this poem in response

to Yevtushenko’s Babi Yar poem. No tears

fall but something creeps into my heart and

my heart drops. There is something I cannot

escape in this life. Having bipolar. Bipolar

comes with rejection from family, isolation,

the label of the outsider and the writing of

 these poems. Very soon, I will take a pill to

fall asleep. I will wake up with a brain fog. In

war, as in psychosis, there is a price to pay

for both sides. The poet lives with truth, and his

poetry contains life just as much life as that

which seeps out of a dead body in the snow.

The rain falls and washes the blood away

purely to keep the streets pure and clean.

In the hospital, the sick body recovers.

Lux

The skin, thunder, her skin is perfect. It is milk, it is

pale, it is privileged. I talk about this in

romantic undertones. I write a novella about

it. I mask my envy, live in my house, and live.

 My skin is the colour of a green sea. It is

orange peel and stretchmarks. It is a tapestry. Stars are to

be found there, the universe, a tribe of singing

angels. No woman is proud of cellulite, of the scarring on her

heart that she has carried into middle-age.

She bathes in light and this privilege I want

so badly. This author bathes with bath salts and Pears

soap, lavender Vinolia bath oil. Fenjal is on the

bathroom windowsill.  The blood washes over me.

I taste blood in my mouth. The bullet. I can’t

get the stain out. I turn the bullet into a rose.

It’s futile. You can’t turn bullets into roses.

My mute paternal grandfather taught me that.

I expose Palestine’s smoke to the light. The

light turns the air strikes on Gaza into a pilot.

The bombs are sent to a storage holder on the moon.

The war is abandoned and peace reigns but

then I woke up and I realised I was dreaming

and that today was Palestine’s funeral.

Rubina Anis is the Headteacher of Harimohan Government High school, Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh. She has obtained her honors’ and masters’ degree from the department of Arts and Crafts at Rajshahi University.

At night 

curves in the road
multiply

when there are no
street lights

on those posted- 
25 miles per hour 
and they mean it
two lanes

Excessive drinking
is what the young
and the feckless islanders
do

tourists as well
willfully riding
their motorcycles

rented mopeds
ATV’s

dune buggies

without helmets
where none are
supposed to go

Their roadside
memorials are
everywhere

homemade paint chipped
white crosses losing
their luster
 

Death Comes to the Harborside 

Historic turn of the last 
century hotel and lounge’s
self-immolation produced

smoke and flames
visible on mainland
miles away

We wonder what happened
to the speakeasy ghosts

the good time girls

flappers and spirits
of the murdered and
those who died of natural
causes

Days later numbered
striped cue balls
are found unearthed
from rubble along with
a long forgotten
floor safe

Marked cards inside

Tally sheets and chits
IOU’s dated and signed
100 plus years ago

 
A community of crows

gathers in yew trees
bordering the inland
cemetery

The oldest headstone
date back to 1700’s
but the crows are timeless

By dusk there are
hundreds of them
silently inhabiting the trees

 
Surfing the Hurricane

A few 12 packs
and surfing the storm
seems like a great idea

a plan

“Oh, man, look at
the swell”

The rip tides
and the submerged
rock

the killer waves

 
The Chainsaw Artist

works nights in
a barn lit by flickering
kerosene lamps

Such an uncertain light
for carving dread beasts
never seen anywhere in
this world except
in his mind

When they are finished
the artist hides his creations
amid the clutching brambles

the decaying drooping trees
where hikers come upon them
in unexpected places

Unearthing these creatures
instills the kind of fear
that can never be erased

leads to illness
and despair

The woods feel haunted now

alive with unseemly beings
wherever the artist has been 
 
We can hear incessant

tolling of church bells
from the far side
of the great salt pond
where no structures
are

Such a mournful sound
propelled across
the surface by a steady
off-shore breeze

We listen wondering
why we are being
summoned from so far
away

gone

it’s the first time 
since she went 
that i’ve been back here
to this outdoor café
in a crowded square 

by the busy beach 
at the same time
in the late afternoon

i use to come here 
twice every week
after i saw her
spent an hour or two 
with her

in the nursing home
where she lived
for years

today i came here 
at the time i use to
and am feeling sad
as i thought i would be
and thinking lots of her 

while having a coffee
enjoying the sun
and reading the paper

i suppose thoughts 
and feelings 
are expected
coming back here  
as i’m missing her

and still find it hard
to believe
mum is gone

Stephen House has won many awards and nominations as a poet, playwright, and actor. He’s had 20 plays produced with many published by Australian Plays Transform. He’s received several international literature residencies from The Australia Council for the Arts, and an Asialink India literature residency. He’s had two chapbooks published by ICOE Press Australia: ‘real and unreal’ poetry and ‘The Ajoona Guest House’ monologue. His next book drops soon. He performs his acclaimed monologues widely. Stephen had a play run in Spain for 4 years. 

Who among us is unfamiliar with the holocaust, forever etched in history and to some, their memory?

In Duane Vorhees’s introductory poem from his latest work Between Holocausts:  “A Mind Rewinds” Vorhees captures something indescribable, when he writes:  

My psyche is littered with living Its/ Disregarded superegos still whine/ Od and Ob hiss between young green vines/Bony hilltops strain to catch day’s first light/ their bloodguilt insufficiently contrite/My psyche is littered with living Its…” Perhaps he is describing sephardic warriors of yore and in extant …who were  “disregarded” [and[ deemed “insufficient”.

I found the book’s neurodivergent style instructive, creative, intuitive, alarming and haunting….as it grapples with a subject matter such as the holocaust with a sort of classic poetic indirectness that reads like a literary puzzle with a cartage of sometimes obscure literary symbolisms  and references that compels further investigation.

Take the use of  “midnight”, which in literature can symbolize death, despair, hope, a place between life and death. For example in poetic forefather Walt Whitman’s poem “A Clear Midnight” midnight represents death as a peaceful ending of the day. Whereas in contemporary Chinese literature, midnight can suggest despair OR hope, emblematizing the emotional incongruity in the culture.

The repetitious nature of the poems make for a particularly eerie experience, like an ominous cautionary tale emanated from the sagacious tongue of someone GRAND..whether grandfather or grandmother, you want to lean forward in attention and anticipation. The author achieves preternatural phenomena in the way that he presents his writings, which I found quite refreshing.

Scholastic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas of Sicily– who synthesized Christian theology with Aristotelian philosophy,  contended that the “supernatural” comprised of “God’s unmediated actions” while the “natural” is “what happens always or most of the time” and the “preternatural” is “what happens rarely, but nonetheless by the agency of created beings…” 

In “WHAT I DID LEARN”, Vorhees goes full throttle for the macabre and melancholy in this “preternatural”  self-revelatory poem. I say “preternatural” because having been voraciously reading early 20th century poetry like Robert Frost and E.E. Cummings since the 8th grade, I have never come across a Vorhees-like style and I consider myself as having been around the “poetic block” a few times…in WHAT I DID LEARN, he writes:

“My music group’s hit singles/stopped so many songs ago/I’ve learned my shakes and wrinkles and still I wait for wisdom…” 

As I read these words I felt like an exposed viscera on legs, figuratively inside/out vibes…for I too am learning “my shakes and wrinkles” yet still “I wait” to acquire the wisdom that I presumed would come with the drudging accumulation of years. 

LIke Frost, Vorhees investigates complex social and philosophical themes with mastery but with a poignant bout of relatable and humbled vulnerability which is the plight and euphoria,  conundrum and exaltation of any type of artist.

Could Vorhees be described as an itinerant troubadour, who in the middle ages were the shining knights of poetry?

Troubadour from an old Occitan (an ancient province that stretched from south of France from east to west) word meaning “to compose”? Perhaps. Or maybe he’s just a guy with something to say about some things that matter to him and he conceivably hopes that they matter to you as well.

The poems read like a heuristic and Socratic exercise replete with mythical biblical and literary symbolisms.

While we’re at it, why not add Mimetic Theory to the list? This terminology is described as a theory of human behavior and culture that explains how human desire and imitation lead to conflict and violence:

What better way to exemplify the ideologies of mimetic desire-conflict- and scapegoating than the horrific and fugly HOLOCAUST!

Here is a synopsis of Mimetic Theory, it’s inception and evolution:

• Origin The theory was developed by French philosopher, literary critic, and anthropologist René Girard (1923–2015). 
• Process Mimetic theory moves through four stages:
  • Mimetic desire: People imitate others and want what other people want. 
  • Conflict: People compete for the same goods, leading to conflict. 
  • Scapegoating: A group singles out an individual or problem as the source of their problems and violently expels or eliminates them. 
  • Cover-up: Human culture springs up around the scapegoating mechanism to cover up the founding murder. 

Throughout history, scapegoating has been the instigator of many atrocities. From the inception of slavery, to Adolf Hitler’s holocaust exterminating millions of Jewish people and what he considered “undesirable” people to the Chinese Exclusion Act of the late 19th century and now Haitian immigrants, both having been branded as “dog and cat eaters” which makes it easier to draft laws against them for you must dehumanize to make it easier to vaporize them from the planet, right?

Although the book is replete with an infelicitous subject matter, after reading it, your resistance to transfiguration could conceivably be an exercise in futility; you will emerge from the chrysalis of self-consciousness to a wise sage having been dug up from the darkness of an egregious past and exposed to ebb and flow of a reformatory present through poetic light and historical literary erudition.

Nothing is nugatory, every word, every nuance seems carefully selected. Vorhees is serving fluid paradoxical wordplay and intrigue, cajoling the reader to read on and hopefully decode the cleverly coded script.

Vorhees writes with ingenuity, authenticity and authority. A MUST read for anyone willing to trek a trip down a dark path with a promise of light ahead. The stuff of LIFE! A familiar trope done in an unfamiliar way…a literary TRIUMPH!

Duane Vorhees’ title Between Holocausts will come out later this fall from Hog Press.

Duane Vorhees is an American poet in Thailand. He is the author of THE MANY LOVES OF DUANE VORHEES, HEAVEN, GIFT: GOD RUNS THROUGH ALL THESE ROOMS, MEMORIES ARE LINKED LIKE OASES, A CONSIDERABLE SHARE OF FELICITY, and THE WOMB AND THE BRAIN. Born in Farmersville, Ohio, USA, he graduated from Bowling Green State University with a doctorate in American Culture Studies. He has taught at Seoul National University, Korea University, and the Asian Division of the University of Maryland University College (now the University of Maryland Global Campus).

Jacques Fleury is a Boston Globe featured Haitian-American Poet, Educator, Author of four books and literary arts student at Harvard University online. His latest publication “You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self”   & other titles are available at all Boston Public Libraries, the University of Massachusetts Healey Library, University of  Wyoming, Askews and Holts Library Services in the United Kingdom, The Harvard Book Store, The Grolier Poetry Bookshop, amazon etc…  He has been published in prestigious  publications such as Muddy River Poetry Review, the Cornell University Press anthology Class Lives: Stories from Our Economic Divide, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene among others…Visit him at:  http://www.authorsden.com/jacquesfleury.

In the Middle

Lord, in the middle of all

this world of woes

I look up into your sky

peace in the blue

even when the clouds thunder

and pour their rain

you are above

watching over us

seeing the unseen

feeling the unfeeling

healing the suffering

whispering to all the hard hearts

and the nights come

covering us with sleep

and dreams of your peace

sunrise opening our eyes

and your freeing light.