PARENTAL LOVE 

Do you hear how the wind blows gems among the stars, when it blows away their brilliance? They are the diamonds from Bach’s Christmas oratorio and the kind of incense 

Which fills your soul’s house with infinity and their celestial light 

Tradition celebrates parental love through the birth of a divine nature 

There have always been altars in the Heavens, incomprehensible only to the family with a mother through the Holy Spirit 

But at Christmas, every year, in our human way, we celebrate the Father who came through the son to our earth 

The Son, Jesus Christ, the Word who became flesh, is the creative symphony itself, one with All that He created 

Light from Light, in the soul of every man, fractal-miraculous like love, instilled 

The miracle is not only in the one who forever “Is what Is” But also in the sacrifice of love, with which he gave a new message 

So let us understand the Son, as the part of the father who gave himself, to his other sons 

So much, Creation, He loved 

Summer still Lingers

wisps of this summer linger;

where sunlight once kissed my golden crown
the fading etches of triangular bikini tops
feet firm from walking barefoot on rough ground

where freckles crawled across my nose and cheeks
bug bite scars reside on my legs
sun bleached hair and #kill the geese

wisps of this summer linger;

in the pine trees camphoraceous aroma
clinging to my bouquet of ringlets
the citrusy tingles and floral ambrosia

in the dirt caked into the soles of my sneakers
the tye dyed socks and sweat stained shirts
and although my summer tan grows weaker

the wisps of this summer still linger.

A Girl Named Ars Poetica

My bathroom tiles have seen, heard, felt, and suffered

through more tears than your busted up, popped out shoulder

I so desperately reach to stabilize and claw into

With my poorly uncut finger nails.

If salvation is the feeling of my saliva dripping off my tongue

Settling into the grooves of your own,

Then maybe, suddenly,

I do want to be saved.

I’ll read to you until the vocal fry in my voice sounds like tv static

As if you fell asleep on your mama’s couch watching Full House,

The connection between the antennas and power altering drastically

Like the longing when our hands aren’t locked.

We will listen to the soft pitter patter of the rain

Gulping up water that’ll clog up the storm drain

Until I have found you asleep on my bathroom floor

Tear stained shoulders, bubbling foam, crystalized eyes and all.

I reach your tear stained, clawed up shoulder

And brush the cuts with my spicy stained finger tips

Until you jolt up just so I can say it’s the medicine to cure

The pain— and you’ll remember my finger tips.

Can you touch my skin with your own until there’s a film

Of deep red coating the fairness, so that no one can see the beauty

Other than your crystalized eyes that I inhabited in

The second you said “I love you.”

Portrait of Rosa Schapire

The woman sits unwilling and blue

Boxed into a corner by a chair and a red wall

Implicating you in her afflictions

Worn sharp and clean resting

In a pensive position: poised as if ready to leave

At a moments notice she is encircled with wrought waves

Gold curves just short of crossing

The sun past set on the water

She is the only bright moment left

Before you are engulfed

The only thing holding back darkness

She is dressed in bridal white

Suits adorned in a rose and strung beads

Everything that is hers emanates dark

She is your mother dressed up and dolled up

To be young again for a night that dwindles

Four red clouds watch you from behind

The sun is dripping away

And you are stuck painting a woman

That is not your mother

About Rosa Schapire:

Rosa Schapire used her ground-breaking career in art history to advocate for socialist, feminist, and anti-fascist ideals across Europe in the twentieth century. Her family and education in her hometown of Galicia, Poland, introduced her to such ideals, and her studies took her around Europe. Schapire’s contributions to the art world were many, ranging from reviews and critiques to translations to amassing an impressive collection of German Expressionist work. She edited several journals and, along with fellow art patron and suffragette Ida Dehmel, helped to form the Women’s Society for the Advancement of German Art. After the rise of the Nazis and the death of many family members, Schapire fled to England, where many pieces of her collection are still housed in museums. 

A New-year Creed:

Ain’t it laughter for laughter sake?

Ain’t it a wish dreamy star could make?

Hearken, that reindeer with melodious psalm,

With processional parade of HOHO Pope of calm,

That crowning touch of bygone dismay,

Sending signs of hope of ravishing Hurray.

Call it a finale to all going got tough,

That tough got going at the end with a breath-taking trough,

All balladeers forgot those backsies, and uphold bonfire,

Of incandescent infatuating lights in a widening gyre,

And, those threaded buds of children respectively back in shape,

With dolly wagging ducks and snow-man scape.

The strongholds of rallied throngs and spectators cheered with applause,

It was so, that merriment on the cusp of inspiring divine laws,

No more nightmare, no more plea, no more— a travesty, 

 At last but not least, I find my sun replete with bliss and felicity, 

Let alone a new year with a slogan of cherishing hegemonial fraternity. 

**********×************×*********

Written by the Egyptian Poet 

Ahmed Farooq Baidoon

Kingdom, as Our Shelter or Grave

Their kingdom, towering and tainted with avarice,

Was the first place I learned to run from.

I crawled on all fours through the dirt, through the bramble, across freshwater rivers that smelled of a time long before ours,

My lips cracked and dry and the fur between my paws caked with mud.

I ran because they taught me to run.

I sought out hope because all that was left for me in their land was despair.

The sharp glare of their cold metal blades and the stinging alloy of their hollow-point glares seemed to say, “You are not welcome here, beast.”

And after I fled I swore to myself that those words, unspoken yet ringing all too clearly,

Would be the only ones from their mouths to which I would ever listen.

The shaking in my legs and the shiver in my spine remind me of when they first arrived.

Loading their lethal weapons, yelling gruff commands we could not understand, tainting the ocean’s shore with the unwelcome filth of their footprints.

The land upon which they walked had been our domain since time immemorial,

Yet when they set foot upon it they clipped our wings, hoisted us up by our beautiful tails,

Told us our names and what we were to be as if it was our duty to bow down.

As if their soulless, self-centered minds could ever know or understand us, they bound us in black and white and stripped us of our dignity,

Calling us boy, girl, he, she, it, beast, reducing what time knew as precious creatures to a mere curiosity, a conglomerate order of inferior beings which they saw as nothing more than playthings to satisfy their greed and thirst for cruelty.

“Nine coin for a necklace made of rabbit bones.”

“Twelve coin for a pound of venison.”

“Twenty coin for the fur pelt of a fox.”

What was once precious and sacred, by their selfish greed and piercing bullets had become nothing but a target, forced to stagger with matted fur, broken wings, and slit paws into hiding to retain the final scrap of dignity left in our mere breath.

Might I remind you, dearest creature to whom I speak, that we did not choose what we are. We did not choose to belong to the forest – it was the forest that chose us. We will not let them hold us down, harvest our fur for “good luck,” display our formaldehyde-filled corpses as trophies and say it is truth. It is cruelty. If we are to be hunted by those who stormed our kingdom and called us monsters, then let the forest that birthed us be our moonlight, our shelter, our treasure, our true story, so that we may never forget the meaning of peace or harmony. Silent creature, shivering in the cold, never forget your heritage, your homeland, your true colors, or the spirit of the forest that dwells within.

Never, ever forget what it means to be alive.

Love Letter to Myself

Love letters don’t have to be happy.

And if I were to write one to you I know it would have to be sad

Just like it would be if I were writing to anyone else

So I would write to you as if you were someone other than myself

I would not write you a letter about how much I love you

I would write you a letter about my love.

I would write to you:

Dear whatever you would like to be called,

By name or by another thing that calls to you

I could call you stars

Because I do think you shine like them and you’re scattered like them

And you don’t shine half as bright as the other lights do but maybe that’s okay

Or I could call you tree

Because you seem to keep wanting to be or thinking you are

Being stepped on by rubber soles that will slip and fall and it’s all your fault

Or I could call you mine

A pickup line that would never really work unless you looked unlike you do

But in this case you are mine and I am yours we are each other and I could call you

Or I could call you nothing at all.

There’s so much I want to say to you and so little that I do.

Words are less than feelings, I think.

I don’t think I could describe everything I feel for you only in words

But I’ll try to paint a picture of you with your own fingertips:

You are in a tree,

And I know you say that a lot,

You are the tree or you are in the tree but I think it fits,

Because you feel safe in trees and you feel safe here in this letter

And you would sleep in a tree if you wouldn’t fall out

And you’d dream of falling up into the sky

In that beautiful blue that you love so much because it feels to you like a color that’s been lost

To the dull of the modern world but when you see the stars that have been for billions of years

You see the light again and you are happy.

I love how you can be happy.

How when you smile through your eye bags

I imagine I see little stars twinkling in the brown of your irises.

I love how you giggle when anything happens that you like

And I love how it sounds when you laugh.

I love that you laugh at everything even if it isn’t funny because to you it is

I love how you try to calm down when you’re excited but you never can

I love how your dimple on the left side of your face

Shows up when you smile

or when you frown

I love how you can be sad.

How when you cry through your eye bags

I imagine I see little stars shining in the tears in your eyes.

I love how you cry whenever you get upset

Because it shows you have real emotion, you are a sensitive person

I love that you cry at everything even if it isn’t upsetting because to you it is

I love how you listen to sad music and it only makes you sadder

I love how much you feel.

Love letters don’t have to be happy.

But I find that this one has strangely turned out to be.

Maybe I do love you, and so then you love me

Even though there’s a lot of things I still haven’t said

Like I hate how you hate yourself and your face, and your body

I hate how you look when you smile and I hate how you look when you cry

I hate how you’re not cool and everyone else is

But I know that you know about the things that I hate.

Because you hate them too.

Because you never stop and think about the things that you love about yourself,

Except for the occasional selfie that you delete the day after

Because what were you even gonna do with it anyway?

You’re just not all that, you think. But I think you are.

And I think you love yourself anyway.

You must love yourself because I know I love you.

I love you.

Love,

You