Clandestine Journey

I am the man with the biggest mouth in Hebei Province,

Choosing only the words that favor me
from those that drift about the world.

People fly into Lintong—
I do not know them, yet they act as though they know me.
Wherever the boredom of life touches down,
the lines grow long, and the borders of the world contract.
I am a persuasive traveler.
Truth is, the days I have not faced the mirror
pile up damp and dim within me.

I have long dwelled in the darkness
where lions made their camp—
but this, still, is my secret city.

Unaware that arrows were tailing me,
I made my rounds until illness struck me down in Sagugung.
A man slandered by their lips,
mocked, I left Qin again and again.

Now I can understand the Jeolla dialect
that once cursed me for building a grand tomb.
No one has seen my face
since death came upon me suddenly, like burning paper—
a quiet death, making all worldly splendor pale.

A tomb is a warm place
for the one who looks toward the far corner
rather than a neighbor’s plot.
A woman—an aide to the angels—
touches the sleepers in their burial hollows
whispering with a few lingering spirits in Xi’an.

The world you live in is one of deceit and deception.
Pass by coldly, like rain.
If you glance about at unseen followers,
the tail that notices your faltering step—
then comes the jolt, and what follows, no one can tell.

The soldiers of the Terracotta Army
still roll their sorrowful eyes.

I am the man with the longest neck in Hebei Province—
Qin Shi Huang, who sleeps in short bursts like a giraffe.

Profile

Poet Yeon Myeong-ji began her literary career in 2013 with the poetry collection 『Gashibi』, published in the Minerva Poetry Series.

Her published works include the poetry collections 『Sitting Like an Apple』 and 『Where would the House of the  Sorry’ be? 』 the e-poetry collection 『Seventeen Marco Polos,』 and the travel essay 『Step by Step, Walking the Camino.』

She has received the Tolstoy Literary Award, the Homi Literary Award, the Cheongsong Gaekju Literary Award, and the Aviation Literary Award. In 2025, she was awarded the Bronze Prize in Poetry at the Literature Asia Awards.

Her poems have been translated and published in local languages in India, Pakistan, Kosovo, Italy, Egypt, the United States, and Belgium, UK, Germany.

Summer

It is inevitable.

The anticipation.

The delicious certainty that something wonderful is about to happen.

I can smell it before I see it.

Summer announces itself.

It arrives on a warm breeze carrying charcoal smoke drifting from a neighbor’s grill.

Freckled cheeks. Sunburned shoulders. Cute boys. White shorts.

Bare feet toughened by sidewalks too hot to stand on.

Watermelon, buried in the cool, wet sand. Sticky juice running down our arms while opportunistic seagulls circled overhead.

A towel was all you needed.

A swimsuit.

A best friend who lived close enough to hear your whistle from across the street.

The soundtrack was the slap of flip-flops, the crash of the waves, and the distant song of the ice cream truck.

First kisses tasted of coconut oil and lemonade.

Every June, I believed this would be the summer I would grow taller, swim farther, fall in love, and become the person I had imagined all winter long.

Its arrival leaves me breathless.

www.dianneangel.com

Suffering and endurance 

Suffering has no beginning.

Suffering has no end. 

It’s a continuous process of digesting the unkind world 

Through pathos and apathy. 

Suffering kicks in your stomach like a silent killer 

You feel numb.

To suffer is to endure 

Endure the blackness of agony 

Endure the tantrums of moods and hormones 

Transforming like the shades of light observed during the sunset 

A pure endurance 

Of whimsical torture 

A rebellion against mild submission,

You associate yourself with the estranged tramps of Beckett 

Silence prevails like dark evening 

You can hear the whistling of unwanted creatures 

That you want to remove,

You endure life’s drudgery 

Like a spirited adolescent endures 

Thee punishment of the elders,

You become the chief narrator

Of the soliloquy of suffering and endurance, 

You press your feeble arms only to feel the blood veins 

The circulation of blood, 

You endure the resistance

Of immunity fighting against disease 

A cough 

A cold 

A perverse condition,

Melancholy is a long saga of endurance 

Your body reacts to strange melancholia,

Tears come out like the sudden, incessant downpour 

You endure the mischievous rain. 

Your frail lips mutter ungraspable sounds like an imprisoned convict 

Going to be hanged 

A thorough endurance against law and order.

Everywhere I see 

I see the marks of sorrow in the dry cactus land 

Impregnated with hollow men and curses

Alas! Life is a journey of endurance,

A pilgrimage towards the beacon of hope.

01.10.25 

The land of faces

2020

Nightmarish-

Standing on the road,

Bare foot, empty handed,

Placing my palm under the sky-

A sudden rush of wind 

Makes me realize

The shape of my palm-

Gentle for giving

Humble for taking;

I close my hands

In the momentum of awe,

I open my eyes-

I find myself

In the land of 

Degraded machines

Drowsy faces

That I never dream of.

Drowsiness

2021

Drowsiness

Drowsiness comes like a night

Silently approaching towards my eyes

Eyes like the eyes of the sky- stars

Insignificant and numerous –

Something vague.

Drowsiness comes like a new dawn

After the night

With a holy spirit of newness 

And with solemn vigour

Dawn- 

The yellowish vapour of sunrise

Bestows upon my blue-eyes

Like drowsiness.

How far! How cold!

The drowsiness seems to be-

Alas! It becomes the link

Between birth and death

Alas! It is life-

The water-

 The sea. 

13.01.2025

Moment of stillness

2020

(In this painting, I have taken the reference from the painting of Egon Schiele)

Moment of winter

He is sitting and turning over the pages of his books. 

He is sitting and combing his hair.

He is combing and listening to the music from You-tube.

The tunes, the music, the lengthy books- all seem to be longer

Than the evenings of winter.

Winter nights are for contemplation.

One’s life is lesser comparing to the cold sensation of winter.

One can be content if one counts the passing moments of winter.

It does not want to move; 

It does not want to end; 

It does not want to reciprocate

To the songs of the crickets and birds.

Winter days are like these- 

Titillating and still;

So still that a moment can turn into a frozen one

Easily;

Nausea does not bore him any-more.

He thinks- he is more than nausea. 

He is more than moments. 

The hanging clock on the walls is afraid to create a sound;

If it makes a crack in the walls of frozen time

From that crack, some illusory vapour may come out

Signalling the boats on the sea 

To protect the boats from winter- storms.

A sound can be a buzz-

Buzz of the nearby bazaars of the neighbourhood;

Sound of winter-

Are you there?

Almost one hour has passed. He is in the same position. 

Nothing changed except the time-

Eternal time of winter-

That is old age.

A solitary crow on the nearby branch of the tree

Is shrieking to awaken its counsel-

This is the last winter evening 

Evening of doom.

The You-tube music is going on and on and on-

The crow along with its counsel looks at the lifelessness

Around this house.

Some mishap has happened.

Moments of time become silent for eternity. 

14.01.2025

N

           U

M

                B

E

                        R

S

The power of magnet is so much that it attracts the other magnets. If our life is like magnet, it will attract things like fate. I am people and I attract people.  People live with numbers. And numbers attract other numbers. That is how the chain is formed. Like people, dates are special numbers. It adds, subtracts, and multiplies to create other numbers. The date of birth is a bunch of dates/numbers. It exists on earth so does our life. All the numbers are the events, the incidents, the happenings. These happenings happen so we live. We remember the dates/numbers, we forget. Ironically, we become the numbers.

I am terrible at coining words,

Framing my thoughts. 

I believe that thoughts are like vapour. 

Thin, thin, long strands of vapour- 

Like fragmented clouds in the veiled sky. 

We weave; we stitch the foamy particles 

To shape them into a number-

A note- 

The living life lived 

By some lucky-draw champions.

People say that one has to start to reach somewhere

Then-

Start from where?

Where to end?

In the middle, there is a passage-

It is the life

And life becomes the numbers-

A number-

Till the eternal dawn.

22.01.2025

A RIDE INTO THE PALETTE OF MEMORIES 
After reading Ojo Olumide Emmanuel 

Once upon a dream,

I journeyed through the history of me as a page. 

Inside, there’s a whirlwind teaching a boy theories of hell. 

There’s a naked hell glowing from bone-to-skin skin-to-ashes

& ashes into everything the fire named.

I bent down to morph the ashes into bowl of sand. 

Suddenly, Dad’s picture emerged like dust on the pulpit of wind

With a broken image still blurring on the album.

In the album, his sins are mine,

the last duplicate of his sins winged through 

my palms to sky. You see, this body

Has become a temple of forgiveness.

I forgive him. I do, I believe I do.

Outside the album, he’s vomiting all the apologies 

Out of boredom.

Adamu Muhammad Ja’agi (AMJ D’POET) is a young Nigerian poet, debater, public speaker, and a spoken word artist from Minna, the center city of Niger state. Ja’agi is a young voice who is passionate about art and it’s magic at storytelling. He has represented the state including in a project presentation nationwide. Ja’agi is a student of father O’Connell Science college, Minna

The First Shelter

Long before the first lullaby,

before blankets, before names

stitched into fabric

that will never stay clean,

she was learning

what it means to hold something

that does not yet have language.

Time came in small, private signals –

a turn, a kick, a sudden stillness

that no one else could hear.

The world kept asking

whether she was ready,

as though readiness

ever arrives before love does.

Then one ordinary morning,

everything narrowed

to the size of breath in a room.

It fits inside her arms –

this miracle that once lived only as waiting.

After that, days began changing shape.

Shoes left by doorways that never stay

empty.

Rooms rearranged by growth she did not

vote for.

Hands that once held her finger

now testing the distance of departure.

Still, something returns –

not always in bodies,

sometimes only in echoes:

a word spoken the same way she once

spoke it,

a laugh that forgets to be careful.

Perhaps that is motherhood –

not holding everything,

but becoming the place

where things first learn they are safe

and the place they return to

without always knowing why.

A Heart That Multiplies

No one notices

when the day begins inside her.

Before the kettle remembers its song,

before the window quite let in morning,

she is already gathering scattered hours

into something the family can live inside.

She carries invisible things –

an appointment no one else will

remember,

a sweater already folded once into a

schoolbag,

rain waiting somewhere without warning.

She makes an apology

for arguments she did not begin,

simply because peace

has learned her name too well.

There are afternoons

when silence follows her

from room to room,

not like loneliness exactly,

but like another task

she has not finished.

She wonders, briefly,

who she was

before every thought

began with someone else tomorrow.

Then a laugh cuts through the house –

too loud, to alive to ignore.

A voice calls, Mum.

Just that.

And something in her shifts –

not fixed, but pulled back together

in a way she cannot explain.

She does not mistake love for ease.

She knows it is built

the way rivers worry stone:

slowly, without witness,

until every hardness begins to change shape.

Chidimma Ewelukwa is a Nigerian writer whose work explores memory, belonging, identity, and the quiet tensions of everyday life. She has been published in Writer Monk Literary Magazine.

A Burial Place

I could never escape paying rent
all my life.

When I was young,
it never troubled me.
“Bury me,” I would say,
“wherever I happen to die.”

As the years passed,
my thoughts changed.

Now I am searching
for a place far from the city,
with white marble
and a view of the sea—

to be buried there,
and never have to move again.

Barbaros İrdelmen

İstanbul/Turkey

Love

By Dr ©®Barbaros İrdelmen

It cannot be told
by drowning someone in false words,
by smothering them in gifts,
by laying red carpets along their path.

Never with splendor—
love is not wrapped in shining paper.

To love
is to sit at the edge of the soul,
without a rope of safety,
with a lamp that gives no light,
and descend into a mysterious well.

To love
is to wander fearlessly
through the hidden chambers of faces
where fragile dawns tremble.

In that dark silence,
to hear what is left unsaid,
to see what mirrors do not reflect,
to become the sun that enlightens hearts
with sincere glances mistaken for faintness.

Even if centuries pass,
though fragile and trembling,
it is the majestic mountain
whose name never changes,
the one you always seek refuge in—
to love.

Tavşancıl, Turkey
Copyright reserved

We Were Young

I was smitten with your smile

And you, to my compassionate gaze

How we liked each other

When we meet

We held hands and decided

We’re ready to join our lives together

Brides, grooms, in-laws, grandchildren

Half a century of ups and downs

We lived happily together

Now?

Our springs are tense

Our arrows are sharp

Axes at our waist

We dislike each other…

Dr Barbaros Irdelmen

AI in the Classroom: Are We Upgrading Education or Downgrading the Human Touch?

Not long ago, a university laboratory was a place defined by the smell of chemical reagents, the scratch of pens on notebooks, and hours spent looking through optical microscopes. Today, a student can walk into that same lab, open a laptop, and let an Artificial Intelligence algorithm simulate the entire experiment in three seconds.

Technology has moved from the margins of our lives right into the center of our classrooms. For the current generation of university students, AI is no longer a futuristic concept—it is a daily study partner. We use it to debug our Python code, translate complex foreign texts, and organize messy research data. On paper, this is the ultimate democratization of knowledge. But on the ground, the reality feels a bit more complicated. The biggest promise of AI in education is efficiency. In scientific research and laboratory settings, digitalization has broken down massive barriers. Algorithms can analyze thousands of data sets in real-time, helping young researchers spot patterns that would otherwise take months to find. It acts like a super-powered assistant, handling the repetitive, time-consuming parts of science so that human minds can focus on actual creativity and big-picture questions. However, this rapid transition hides a subtle trap. When an AI tool can write a flawless essay, solve a complex higher-mathematics integral, or predict a physics simulation instantly, the human brain gets lazy. The critical muscle of “struggling” with a problem is being bypassed. True learning rarely happens when the answer is delivered instantly on a screen; it happens in the frustrating, messy process of trial and error. Furthermore, there is an invisible element that no language model can replicate: the human connection. A screen cannot replace a professor who notices a student’s hidden potential during a rough lecture. It cannot replicate the late-night debates between roommates trying to crack a logic puzzle together, or the shared joy when a peer finally passes a difficult national certification exam. These deeply human interactions are what actually shape an academic journey. Technology should serve as a bridge, not a substitute. The goal of integrating AI into our universities should not be to turn students into passive consumers of machine-generated data, but to empower them to become sharper thinkers. We must treat AI like a high-tech microscope: a tool that helps us see the world more clearly, but never a replacement for the human eyes doing the looking. As we reshape education for the digital era, the challenge is not just teaching students how to code or use prompts. The real challenge is ensuring that as our technology becomes smarter, we do not lose the raw curiosity, persistence, and human empathy that made us want to learn in the first place.

AMONBOYEVA SHAHNOZA, UZBEKISTAN
FACULTY OF COMPUTER ENGINEERING IN URGENCH STATE UNIVERSITY