a brilliantly angry tattooed daughter of the sun

disembarking the city bus

sharing certain sorrowful lexemes

neighbors at war 

the years he carried around

the First Book of Seconds

now you can Google the face 

you had before you were born

a faint star in the smoky vault of night

all I could carry

butterfly on the sun-washed screen

nobody’s getting up to look

he admitted to worrying about  how butterflies

were getting along in the thunderstorm

easy, it’s merely an orientational flight

of the long-tongued bee

he begins with wanting to incarnate to the Apache horse-paths of heaven

and ends up ordering a corned beef on rye with coleslaw and Russian dressing 

an hour early with a notebook and pen 

pleased as he is timing the water beetle’s change of direction

get the Tai Chi and beaded garden web out of that poem

and tell how you broke your mother’s heart

arching his back to gaze

at a picture of the Himalayas

he’s working in charcoal now

starting with his hand on the garage wall

crushing the earth in my chair

a sparrow dropped-down into clover

Bio: Patrick Sweeney is a short form poet and a devotee of the public library.

Why are these poems called ‘Echoes?” Are you referencing echoes of themes throughout history, or the myth of Echo and Narcissus, or something else? 

“The title ‘Echoes’ operates on multiple resonances. In Mandarin, we have a proverb from the Buddhist poet-monk Li Shutong (李叔同) of the late Qing dynasty: ‘A thought that’s constantly in mind comes with an echo in its might.’ This captures how persistent thoughts reverberate through time and consciousness.

For me, poetry exists as a trifecta—history’s weight, mythic truth, and individual experience. These three elements form an indivisible triangle; remove one, and the structure collapses. When this hybrid translates through memory into verse, it becomes an echo—not unlike the relationship between sound and its aftersound, between experience and its poetic afterlife.

The myth of Echo and Narcissus haunts these poems too, particularly in how exile creates a doubling: we speak, but hear our words return transformed by distance. Every poem here is both utterance and return, original cry and its distortion through time.

We make the echo first, in our bodies and memories, before we ever write it down. The page merely catches what’s already reverberating.”

How and why have Lermontov and Akhmatova become your inspirations? What do you see in their works that you admire, and how have you brought that into your own pieces? 

I knew this question would come, and even arranging these words brings me to tears—because Lermontov and Akhmatova represent the two chambers of my heart, the systole and diastole of my poetic existence.

Akhmatova embodies the terrible arithmetic of staying. Her choice to remain in Soviet Russia while others fled mirrors my own negotiations with homeland and exile. In ‘Requiem,’ she transforms personal grief—lamenting her imprisoned son—into an indictment of state terror. What strikes me most is her austere precision: barely a league of emotion, yet each line cuts like winter glass. Her contemporaries in the Silver Age either genuflected to power or dissolved into their own despair. She alone maintained that devastating clarity. The Swedish Academy recoiled from giving her the Nobel precisely because her truth was too graphic, too unadorned.

Her sacrifice illuminates my own: the mother tongue I’ve had to half-forfeit (in China, to write freely means surveillance; in the West, to be heard means English); the treasures left behind; the solitude required to build an inner world strong enough for creation. This ‘elegant restraint’ you detect in my work is learned stoicism—a necessary armor. Yet beneath it pulses radical empathy for all exiles, geographic or internal. Though we’ve never met, I hear their scream: ‘I want to live!’

If Akhmatova is my yin—witnessing, enduring, distilling—then Lermontov is pure yang: the romantic who transmutes oppression into fury. Where she documents, he detonates. His ‘The Poet’s dead’ and ‘The Cloud’ demonstrate how anger can become incandescent art. Those unsettling, haunting images in my work? They’re Lermontov’s ghost teaching me that sometimes the only response to injustice is to set the page on fire, even at the cost of forfeiting one’s own homeland to uphold one’s self amidst divisive currents. 

Together, they’ve taught me that poetry can be both scalpel and flame, both witness and warrior. In my work, Akhmatova’s ice meets Lermontov’s fire, creating steam—that vapor between staying and leaving, between silence and scream, where my own poems breathe.”

Interesting that you identify Western and traditional Chinese poetic styles and take elements of each into your poems. What has it been like to craft poetry as a bilingual person? Do you compose in English or Mandarin, do you think in both languages as you write? Do you find that languages themselves, and their rhythms, shape the content or structure of your poems? 

The chasm between Chinese and English poetic traditions has shaped me profoundly. Chinese poetry luxuriates in indirection—every plum blossom speaks volumes, each bamboo bend carries philosophy. The poet becomes a humble conduit between nature and reader, never presuming to explain what moonlight on water means. We trust the image to carry its own enlightenment. A closing line merely ‘dots the dragon’s eyes’—essential, yes, but the dragon was already alive in the preceding verses.

English poetry, particularly contemporary Western verse, demands the opposite: clarity as virtue, economy as craft. The poet must architect meaning, not merely channel it. During my first three years writing in English, feedback was consistent: ‘Powerful images, moving emotions, but requires multiple readings.’ Even my lightest lines carried what readers called ‘fatalistic gravity’—that ancient Chinese sense that every gesture contains the universe’s weight.

I spent years trying to reconcile these approaches: the Western praise for accessibility versus the Chinese understanding that ‘nature and human are one’ (天人合一). Only through accumulated life experience—exile, loss, resistance—did I find my synthesis. Now I can achieve ‘readability’ without sacrificing depth, can make a vestment ‘smile’ without explaining why, can connect continents through a seagull’s flight rather than abrupt temporal markers.

I compose primarily in English now, partly due to my Western-focused studies, but mostly because writing in my non-native language offers productive estrangement. It forces me to reinvent rather than inherit, to forge new synaptic connections between sound and meaning. When I write, what emerges isn’t English or Mandarin but something pre-linguistic—an unmodified rumble from my core that chooses its own linguistic vessel. In those moments, we touch the pure pulse of living through sound alone.

Language itself has never been my architect—at most, a carpenter smoothing edges or filling gaps. Emotion, urgency, and message determine form. A protest poem might emerge as experimental fragments (like Echo IV’s compact brutality) or as prose poetry (Echo III’s voice flowing like water from one throat to thousands). The content births its own container, not the reverse. This is perhaps my deepest inheritance from both traditions: the Chinese faith that form follows spirit, married to the English insistence that spirit must find communicable form.”

I notice a theme of human suffering at the hands of others: a violent husband and refugees who flee violence and find themselves still marginalized in their new lands. What draws you to those themes? 

It’s a delicate and profound question. I’m drawn to these themes because I’m deeply intrigued by how systems can deform individuals, transforming ordinary or even decent human beings into figures capable of profound cruelty. Often, an individual’s personal agency is eroded or contested when societal structures thrive upon their trauma or tacitly condone violence. To explore this phenomenon further, one must investigate educational, cultural, and economic factors that silently breed violence and perpetuate suffering.

Crime and tragedy serve as the quietest yet deepest reflections of a society’s wounds—visible only to those who dare look closely. Similarly, the experiences of refugees reveal another dimension of these wounds. Throughout seven years living in the UK, I’ve formed friendships with individuals from diverse global backgrounds. Their narratives of familial histories in London, wars in their homelands, and the existential struggles of reconciling dreams with harsh realities have profoundly impacted me. I’ve realized that we all inhabit a liminal space between war and peace, where understanding and empathy are always possible if we actively listen, both to ourselves and to the voices around us.

Ultimately, my poetry aspires to provide solace, however fleeting, to those who feel exiled or alienated, offering a momentary sense of belonging or home within the shared recognition of our collective struggle.

You mention in your author’s note that “nature is also a teacher.” How do the natural motifs and the natural world function in your poems? 

Nature serves as both messenger and medium. Whenever I encounter emotions too visceral for straightforward speech, I invite the natural world to translate. Trees, flowers, and coastlines vibrate on the same frequency as those gut‑level feelings, bridging the space between stanzas—and between reader and poet.

Nature also acts as a critical mirror: it reveals that the so-called “survival codes” running through our societies did not blossom from some higher ethical soil but from the stark physics of scarcity and fear. By foregrounding that origin, I aim to question whether these codes are immutable or merely inherited habits we’ve yet to dismantle. When I return to the image of a red beacon strobing across a storm-dark shoreline, I’m less interested in its drama than in its dual function—how a safeguard doubles as a boundary, how protection can slip into quiet temptation to what’s beyond. In that uneasy glow, I probe the complicity between safety and sanguine, asking what the comfort of eternity cost and how the sense aliveness ultimately pays toll of solitude without regret.

Do you think your writing has changed over time? How would you describe your style, and how you’ve developed it? 

Absolutely. Writing evolves like any living organism. My first English poems were dense with elusive imagery, and my abandoned early novel—steeped in Woolfian stream-of-consciousness—never balanced character and plot in a way that felt authentic to me at nineteen.

Since then, I’ve forged a dialogue between poetry and prose. Poetry lends my novels an unshakable moral backbone, distilling complex ideas into crystalline sentences that anchor entire volumes. Novel-writing, in turn, lets me dissect psychology in slow motion, testing poetic abstractions inside fully realized narrative worlds. The result is a style that marries lyrical precision with narrative clarity, allowing abstraction and realism to coexist on the page.

What are you writing now, and where do you hope writing will take you in the future? 

I’m currently developing a work of literary fiction that grows directly out of the remnants of my earlier, shelved Woolf‑inspired experiment. Rooted in Eastern European culture, literature, and the region’s stark natural landscapes, the novel filters wider Eurasian geopolitics through the intimate lens of a single life. At the center lies a decent man whose unhealed trauma becomes the very fuel a rigid system uses to reshape him, asking: When the machinery of power profits from pain, how much freedom of choice truly remains?

Alongside his story runs that of a woman determined to carve and protect a private sanctuary—“a room of her own”—in a world where every pane of glass has been forged by the system that would surveil her. Their intertwined narratives let me probe two core questions: What inner resources does it take for a person to resist the constant pull of manipulation, and what must be sacrificed to guard even a sliver of autonomy?

I hope this project—and whatever follows—will lead me toward sharper, more honest inquiries rather than easy conclusions, using language to expose the complex textures of lived experience and to keep testing the fragile boundaries of individual freedom.

Of the rain
~~~~~~~
I am so grateful for the untimely rain
And my waiting hours for sunshine
For the twittering birds
Listening to the most precious song of the hour
They speak the glory of each and every flower
Which were decorated beautifully
With innumerable colorful butterflies
And slowly the salt settles somewhere
Where someone is lighting the diya every evening
Yes the sun will come across gleaming
Each and every morning

*Diya – small oil lamp

Cup of my tea

My cup of black tea lacks sugar
Tastes so sweet filling me with life in every sip
I don’t mix milk in my tea since long
Well nothing happens without reason!
Is it so ?
Perhaps,
who knows?
I kept on filling one after another
Until I realised, it was overflowing
On a note rejection often sung in tables of cafeteria
Unnoticed in some corner
Blotting over the tissue paper
So neglected is was every time!
Until it became a sweetener
So perfect it seemed   only when I sipped and continue to sip
Just for me!

racing to the bathroom

arthritis, a bad back, old bones

not the recipe for racing to the

bathroom to always be successful

and nothing says life like scooping

shit out of underwear and deciding

wash or put in the trash

a ratio determined by holes and

the waistband

the problem with shitting in boxers

is the debris is never contained

thankfully, this doesn’t happen

that often to me

often enough though that my inner

child laughs and grabs pen and paper

———————————————————-

long conversations with lonely women

muscle relaxers and whiskey

must be a saturday night

remember when the liquor

would flow like wine jesus

made

i suppose i have closed

one too many bars in

my life

had long conversations

with lonely women

who obviously had better

choices than me

that isn’t sour grapes

just reality slapping the

shit taste out of my mouth

yet again

one of these nights

i hope to get so damn high

i forget the first thirty years

of my life

i figure such a conquest

will probably take a needle,

a spoon, a lighter and a little

luck finding a vein

————————————————————-

regardless

a beautiful woman

told me if i believed

in god, my mother

wouldn’t have so

many health problems

i chuckled

asked her if she used

daddy’s trust fund

to get those new

tits

she walked away

disgusted, i enjoyed

the view nonetheless

the tooth fairy is dead,

santa is on strike and

reality is dying by

the second

this world is on fire

and we are doing

nothing but whistling

in the graveyards

hope still exists in

some little corner

of this fragile mind

a soft beauty swears

she will rescue me

from all of this one

day

promises, promises

a fleeting echo of pain

we were all abused

by someone

regardless of wealth

or god or any existence

of sanity

———————————————————–

and what is never coming back

paralyzed with fear

every step a reminder

of what was lost

and what is never

coming back

no need to apologize

we will be dead soon

enough

i can hear you crying

yourself to sleep each

night

these are the nights

where i wish the pain

pills were better or these

drugs were actually strong

enough to take away

everything

didn’t think the majority

of my late forties was going

to be spent cleaning up shit

and piss in bathrooms

but alas

there is the life of a poet

knowing the roses grow

better in shit and learn to

enjoy the prick of every

thorn

———————————————————-

left behind to die

it starts as a dull ache

eventually, it overtakes

the body

there is no point in crying

prayer gets you nowhere

left behind to die

there is no other way

to sugarcoat this bullshit

broken bones

shattered soul

a lonesome saxophone

wails in the background

try to find a vein in the dark

there used to be this neon soul

that would wander in and out

of your life at the oddest times

that soul has left

just like the rest of them

another night to drown

your sorrows in a dry

county

i guess the bath salts

are what we have left

J.J. Campbell (1976 – ?) is trapped in the suburbs, probably forever. He’s been widely published over the years, most recently at Disturb the Universe Magazine, The Beatnik Cowboy, Mad Swirl, Yellow Mama and Horror Sleaze Trash. You can find him most days taking care of his disabled mother, wondering which of them will die first. He has a blog, evil delights, he sometimes writes on, given a few free seconds here and there. (https://evildelights.blogspot.com)

---

https://goodreads.com/jjthepoet

I’m your friend

The time has come

When dreams of traveling appear

Other people, other women

I guess there’s room for me too

And it’s even cooler

When you say

That the place is by the sea..

Because everyone knows me here

The tenants of the building and the white walls

Always the same old story

Where my image and likeness are

And when you ask me how it’s going

I say everything the same old way, my old man!

I’m still your friend!

Neven Duzevic is from Zagreb, Croatia.

I remember years later working the day bar getting a call from a Florida police detective and how the line was disconnected.

I remember how the call came through again and the detective said I am putting Vera on the line.

I remember that Vera was my step-mother’s sister and she was around 90 and probably never used a cell phone before in her life.

I remember how the line got disconnected again as soon as she came on.

I remember knowing the phone would ring again and I figured she was calling to tell me Dorrie had died in the nursing home where she was currently residing.

I remember finally keeping the connection and Vera telling me, “Bill is dead and you need to come down here right away.”

I remember Bill was my father.

I remember thinking, despite heart issues my father wouldn’t be the first to go.  

I remember thinking Vera was going to tell me that Dorrie had died from her cancer.

I remember thinking, not for the first time, show’s what I know.

I remember that was the Spring and  Summer of spending six weeks in Florida and not getting any closer to a beach that a crematorium in Daytona.

I remember the first time I saw a blue tattoo in the city at a market with my mother.

I remember my mother telling me that was a phony mark.

I remember I was just a kid but I knew, instinctively, that couldn’t be right.  

I remember, many years later, all the things she told me that were the opposite of what they really were.  

I remember thinking her delusion was a defense mechanism to conceal information she couldn’t process.  

I remember wondering if there was a correlation in her well-diagnosed mental illnesses with Trump’s undiagnosed ones.

I remember how young I looked when I was eighteen.

I remember how young I looked when I was thirty.

I remember the last time I had my proof checked I was forty-four years old.

I remember the summer of my junior year getting my proof checked to see ”My Sister, My Love.”

I remember it sucked.

I remember seeing “Belle de Jour” at the Stanley in Utica and taking turns making up sex scenes to describe to the legally blind guy we had taken with us.

I remember being squeezed in the back of a Triumph driving from Utica to Syracuse in the middle of Winter to see “Carmen Baby.”

I remember, except for one scene, it sucked too, but not as bad as “My Sister, My Love.”

I remember “I Am Curious Yellow.”

I remember being curious what all the fuss was about.

I remember thinking I’d almost like to see it again and find out what the hell they were talking about.

I remember seeing “Last Tango in Paris” and except for the bloody suicide what an absolutely great movie that really didn’t need that graphic sex scene which was only a distraction in a otherwise masterful acting performance.  

I remember thinking, I know why they included it and that people were bent out of shape for all   the wrong reasons.

7-

I remember Sounds of Silence

I remember Mellow Yellow.

I remember the first time I saw Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony Live.

I remember how my heart almost stopped when the chorus stood up in their white robes and began the Ode to Joy.

I remember my youngest son’s third grade teacher being in the chorus and how he died such an unnecessary self-immolation death  and the poem I wrote “The Burning Song Book.”

I remember it was in my long out of print book Stop Making Sense.

I remember drinking unpasteurized milk on St Croix.

I remember toxoplasmosis.

I remember Johnny Jelly Beaner

I remember “Pluck Your Magic Twanger, Froggie.”

I remember the singing nun and wished I didn’t.

I remember “Deck the halls with Boston Charlie.”

I remember Jean Shepard reading Byron with a Spanish guitar accompaniment on his nightly WOR radio show.

I remember his inspirational readings from the Manhattan phone book.

I remember phone books.

I remember In God We Trust All Others Pay Cash.

I remember seeing Curtis LeMay at a political rally in Utica.

I remember seeing Hubert Humphrey and the demonstrators chanting, “Dump the Hump, Dump the Hump.”

I remember that Tommy James and the Shondells were the “musical act” meant to attract and appeal to younger voters

I remember it was the first time we seen Tommy and his friends live.

I remember the dance my friends and I went stag to, stoned out our minds, and hung out with boys.

I remember they got a kick out of us.

I remember wondering why no one stopped us from having complete access to the band.

8-

I remember peace marches through the city.

I remember America Love it or Leave it.

I remember all the Utica cops had that phrase on bumper stickers on their patrol cars.

I remember when President Nixon called for the Silent Minority to be heard, Uticans turned out in force.

I remember when we had a peace fair on campus for the locals no one showed up.

I remember “This Little Bird.”

I remember “Girl on a  Motorcycle.”

I remember Marianne Faithfull’s soulful Ophelia.

I remember Billy Pilgrim

I remember Kilgore Trout and Venus on a Half Shell.

I remember Ace Science Fiction Doubles

I remember Mother Night.

I remember The Penultimate Truth.

I remember The Man in the High Castle.

I remember the first time I heard Dylan Thomas read his poetry.

I remember, ”rage, rage against the dying on the light.”

I remember losing almost thirty pounds when I had double viral pneumonia mid-way through my first semester freshman year.

I remember taking up smoking beginning with Luckies when I got over it.

I remember how stupid I was when I was 19 and immortal.

I remember writing “Visions Fill the Eyes of a Defeated basketball Team in a Showroom: a symphonic poem in three movements.”

I remember think no one would guess where I got that tile from.

I remember seeing Jumping Johnny Green live at the old Garden, at six foot six, out center jump Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlin 7’1’ and it wasn’t even close.

I remember writing “An Explanation Offered to an Extraterrestrial of Bernstein Conducting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on Television with the Sound Turned Off.”

I remember the first time I saw The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.

I remember the second time I saw Marat/Sade and thinking it was a little too close to home.

I remember the first time I visited my mother at Pilgrim State when I was seven.

 Remember the years prior to that on St Croix.

I remember being told we were going there for “a rest cure,” though no one told me why my  father wasn’t going to be there.

I remember understanding that my father was never going to be there or anywhere else in my mother’s life ever again.

I remember  that I was eventually told I would see him again.

I remember it was close to two years after we went to St Croix, came back and she had the “nervous breakdown.”

I remember how I felt being alone twelve hundred miles or so from home with an out of control, hysterical woman.

I remember during the visits on weekends to Pilgrim State how mellow and laid back she was and  I thought this is not my mother, this is someone impersonating her.

I remember on one of those visits watching a movie in a day room with in-patients where I saw Frances the Talking Mule.

I remember how one patient in particular looked at me, as an outsider, as if I was somehow in league with Wilbur and that we were interfering with the messages Frances was trying to convey.

I remember how it wasn’t until many years later when I was writing my chapbook Visiting Day on the Psychiatric Ward that the patient actually believed Frances was a talking mule and had special  messages that needed to be understood.

I remembering wondering if the people who ran Pilgrim State and by extension, were responsible for treating her severe mental illnesses, did not have Clue 1.

I remember the second time she was at Pilgrim State, Involuntarily Confined, on a conference call with family and the doctors in charge of treatment and getting no real answers as to what her condition actually was and understanding that my first impressions was correct; these people had no fucking clue much less an understanding of how she thoguht and why she did the things she had done.

I remember, after my father died, finding the divorce decree and learning that in 1953, if you established residency in St Croix for one year you could get a No Contest divorce in the States.

Liberty or Death

They took our country from us,

They took our lands from us.

Yet could not chain our voice,

Nor silence freedom’s poise.

They burnt our homes to dust,

They crushed our dreams unjust.

But still we rise with flame,

With liberty in name.

They’re harming our people,

They’re killing our lives.

They are the most punishable,

In depth of our eyes.

Are you people ready for

Liberty or death?

Our goal stands for 

Liberty or death.

Our freedom is our breath,

Our oath is liberty or death.

We’ll break their chain,

Or perish in the rain.

Md. Naeem Aziz is a Bangladeshi Author, Writer, Poet, Engineer and Photographer. He is best known for his poems & photography. He was born on 10th December 1998. He is from Dhaka, Bangladesh.