Silence

Quiet… the vastness strides with a silent pace,

whispers await, in secrecy.

Stars tremble, awaiting the sanctity’s blaze,

before the waves, hush your voice silently.

It is a wave of silence deep,

human echoes yearning behind him.

In sacred cup, where secrets repose,

unspoken words strive to redeem.

Chaos whispered in the silence,

guard… eternity and transience struggle.

Inkiness is seeking my compliance,

redemption screams, growing vaster.

Silent plea! May peace resurrect .

let wrath shatter in the hush of light.

In the mirror of dusk, hopes reflect,

in the soft twilight’s tender might.

The beginning and the end! Glory to them,

let the chant sing like a sparkling lullaby,

like mother’s face that you can’t forget,

Prayer chants with the endless sky.

Glory to silence, herald of grace,

it waves shattered strands.

In enchanting depth, like a distant glance,

where last shall be first and first shall be last.

                       Storm

A storm is brewing, in the heart chaos reigns,

Noise dances wild everywhere,

The vessel, delight for timeless wanderer,

Is gliding to my soul carrying an embrace.

A depth of grief in the vast expanse,

without its shield, tears veil the path,

Sorrow emboldens the army of darkness,

captive of tears has no more tears left.

The past, a blade to the stumbling heart,

lifts the veil upon the soul’s capture,

tears are ticking away fast,

none can endure, a silent rapture.

I’m an exile of the infernal mill,

redeemed by majestic grandeur,

before the emperor’s crown… I stand still

it shines marvelous in its splendor

Unnamed song

At the limen of time,

I stand as a stranger

Here, might doesn’t intertwine

soul is a tireless passenger.

We need light, glow of glances,

human heart forgiveness,

we’re yearning a sip of repose,

seeking solace in the stillness.

Weary of darkness, we seek dawn,

I seek those eyes, precious of mine,

woken from the dead, seeking the forgotten

shadow beside me, companion of time.

Though sawn wood whispers time’s embrace,

each grain a tale, a memory traced.

Moments linger like echoes,

In the music of a rhyme as eternity grows. 

Ana Petrovic was born on 05.02.1985 in Serbia, where she currently lives. She wrote a book of poems, but it is not yet published She finished medical school, VI degree. Many songs of hers are published in magazines and portals. Some of them are translated into English. She has been working on special programs with kids who have paralysis cerebralis. She likes working with kids as much as she likes poetry.

   
                                                          Eary Problem

This problem has led to marital problems because of my persistence.  I just don’t want to quit despite its reputations for causing health problems.  I’ve had to have something extracted from my ear canal because of my compulsion, but q-tips feel so good in my ears.  Am I the only one with outer ear itching?

                                                          Head Scratcher

This should be a private vice, but it is so ingrained sometimes I do it in public.  Eczema or dermatitis makes my eyebrows, beard and hair itch.  Nothing I’ve tried has eliminated the dry, itchy rashes.  Quitting drinking would be easier.

                                                           Child (dibble and a half)

My father read the Oz books to my sister and I at bedtime.  To refresh my memory I bought a set of Oz books.  I used to listen to Cinnamon Bear stories in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s.  I bought the cds so I could listen again.  A few years ago I restarted playing softball.  As a child I did childish things.  That still works now that I’m eighty, so I’m keeping at it.

                                                          Negotiation

You will have the sun and the stars.  I’ll take care of you in sickness and health.  You’ll have a lovely home and no worries.  All I ask is that you love me too.
Will you lower my taxes?
I can’t do that.
Then I’m voting for the other guy.

                                                          Maroon

I like my aloha shirts.  I feel that a colorless person - me – should have colorful shirts.  Solids are OK if they are out there – orange or maroon.  My maroon shirt fits well, feels good, and looks good.  It’s OK that it’s a dead man’s shirt.  He can’t use it.

                                                           Joints

Our joints allow us a variety of movements until they don’t.  Learn from this arthritic old man.  Years of jumping from heights, lifting excessive weights with bad form and repetitive strain left me with bad knees, one bad shoulder and one questionable one.  Treat them right and they will last.

                                                       Game Over
 
Last inning, behind by two runs.  I got a walk, and there were three on base.  The next batter could tie or win the game.  The manager replaced two of us with pinch runners, which caused our second and third outs for batting out of order.  We lost, I quit.
                                                        Time

A few months ago, I tried to get in touch with a woman that I went to grade school with to organize another get together.  Cheryl had been an insurance adjuster and had kept track of our grade school graduating class.  She had died in memory care three months ago.

                                                      Rejection?

The response to my submission was “Nicht include”.  Sounded like a rejection.  Was my sub too political?  Should villains have gotten away with plotting the destruction of much of the world?  The next day I got an email explaining that the rejection was a typo.  Story will appear tomorrow.  Woo-hoo!

                                                           Pitch
He had been following her for over an hour.  Just his luck, she walked into an alley.  When he followed her, she reached into her bag.  When he became conscious she was picking up a baseball by his head.  “Don’t stalk the star pitcher on my baseball team you creep.”

                                                         Spill Rules

One second for spilled tequila, whisky, or gin drinks to be sucked out of the carpet.  Chocolate, peanut butter, or wheat thins three second pick up, most other food the usual five seconds.  Brussel sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli, or most cooked vegetables, next time carpet is vacuumed, and into the garbage.

                                                           Scatterbrain


Odd remembrances haunt my lazy, bored brain.  Almost drowning when very young.  The now great grandmother and widow that I made out with sixty years ago.  A small clothing store that I walked past in Portland fifty plus years ago.  The traumatized beauty that abruptly rejected me while in college.


                                               Northeast Portland Years Ago 
 
As a teenager, I was walking through Northeast Portland to get to a friend’s house.  An older male pulled up and asked something like “Do I know you?”  I didn’t and told him so.  He wanted to know if I wanted a ride.  I was a bit nervous and passed. 



                                                                   Oval

Joe asked the man next to him “Do you believe this flying saucer nonsense?”
“No it’s absurd.  The ships are Oval.”
”Huh?”
“Aliens aren’t little green men.  We come in many colors.”
“Where do you get these ideas?”
“I’m an Oval pilot - check my pants.  I’ve got four legs

                                  How Old Do I Look?

About forty on the average.  
What do you mean on the average? 
 Your face is an 80 and your body is a 30.  
Wait a minute, that averages 55.  
Well, the guy part is about 10.
So, to look younger I should stop wearing pants? 

                                               Memories

I worried that I had age-related memory loss.  Editor would tell me it’s a hike day, minutes later I wouldn’t know.  Then I repeatedly saw two men in black suits walking away from me.  Because I had seen the movie, I knew it wasn’t age, it was Men In Black.
 
                                                     The End

light snowfall tonight
but no accumulation
oatmeal for dinner


—


cups of coffee at
eleven-thirty at night
can’t find my ear drops


—


bus leaves without me
guess I’ll stay home & try out
those detergent sheets


—


bio/graf

J. D. Nelson’s poems have appeared in many publications, worldwide, since 2002. He is the author of eleven print chapbooks and e-books of poetry, including *purgatorio* (wlovolw, 2024). Nelson’s first full-length collection is *in ghostly onehead* (Post-Asemic Press, 2022). Visit his website, MadVerse.com, for more information and links to his published work. His haiku blog is at JDNelson.net. Nelson lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

La Boheme   class signifiers at intermission




she sucks the juice of grapefruit over the kitchen sink




dozing off in tassel rue
the emptiness
of sin




scent of crushed sage through the loophole in the cinder block wall




the evaporating puddle I'm in




by now he's entering the diamond-mansion heart of Saint Teresa




the liquid mercury nail heads on the gray planks at sunset




the fallen arches of the Donegal mussel catcher




sheltering in place on a hairpin of jade




oatmeal cookies for the unsung genius in plumbing supply




the skinflint's only Latin phrase





six realms and I'm dragging my ass in this one




imprisoned by his attention to the insignificant




in physics, he would entertain no more questions about hula dancers in outer space




why do I have to hear about how miserable you would've been




the accuracy of the mad

Exploring Love, Spirituality and the Black Experience in “Their Eyes Were Watching God”, a Book Review

[Excerpt from Fleury’s book: Chain Letter To America: The One Thing You Can Do To End Racism, A Collection of Essays, Fiction and Poetry Celebrating Multiculturalism]

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all the things they don’t want to remember and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”

So begins Zora Neal Hurston’s epic story about an emotional and spiritual journey of self-discovery. Through my incessant study of literature and the craft of writing, I have learned that what grabs a reader right from the onset of a story is by having a fully formed voice and vision that prepares us to go along for the ride; that we will be transported elsewhere to another reality.

In honor of Black History Month, the historical inauguration of America’s first Black President and Valentine’s Day, I’ve decided to offer a dichotomous exploration of variant thematic ideologies of love and Black literary contributions to American culture and “Their Eyes Were Watching God” allows me to do just that.

“A graduate of Barnard…, Zora Neal Hurston published seven books—four novels, two books of folklore, and an autobiography—more than fifty shorter works between the middle of the Harlem Renaissance and the end of the Korean War, when she was the dominant Black woman writer in the United States. The dark obscurity in which her career then lapsed reflects her staunchly independent political stances rather than any deficiency of craft and vision,” writes Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in the afterward to Their Eyes.

Hurston, whose life spanned between the years 1891 and 1960, was a novelist, folklorist and anthropologist. Her fictional and factual writings of Black Heritage remain unparalleled. “Their Eyes Were Watching God” is Hurston’s most highly praised novel and is considered a classic among the best of Black literature.

Their Eyes recounts the story of Janie Crawford’s burgeoning selfhood through three marriages with loving empathy and stinging urgency. Janie, who is described as “fair- skinned, long haired and dreamy as a child” advances in years to anticipate better treatment than she actually receives; that is until she has an unexpected encounter with an amusing, smooth and fast talking younger roustabout named Tea Cake, who entices her into an emotional and spiritual journey that will change her life forever. He proffers to her an opportunity to see herself and life through his eyes without being regrettably adorned with the formerly disparaging labels of being “one man’s mule” or another man’s wallflower through her previous two marriages.

Over the course of the story, the character of Janie unfolds, as she will learn that she does not have to succumb to living a life ripe with rife, acrimony or maladroit romantic dreams. Towards the end of the story, the reader will learn in Janie’s words: “two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh themselves. They got tuh go tuh God and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh themselves,” since her character struggles with the incessant panoptic surveillance and potentially spirit crushing criticism of her neighbors.

Every good writer or story-teller has to have motif and Hurston’s Their Eyes is swimming in a crystal clear blue- eyed sea of symbolism. In Their Eyes she uses an overworked, underfed and tormented mule to illustrate the dire living conditions of her main character Janie, what she endures on her way to spiritual, emotional, and physical freedom and awakening. Her depiction of Janie’s life of strife serves not only to demonstrate essentially the mistreatment of Janie as “one man’s mule and another man’s adornment”, it also attests to the meager living conditions of women, that is to say in terms of oppression and maltreatment, during her time period. Since she died right at the cusp of both the Civil Rights and the Women’s Equal Rights Movements, Hurton’s Their Eyes would go on to achieve greater respect and acknowledgement as an indispensable part of Black literature.

Also in Hurston’s novel, I was particularly enthralled by her use of Black vernacular speech (i.e. go tuh God…livin’ fuh theyselves…) to chronicle her Black female characters’ coming to the best of their being or emerging consciousness. In his afterward, Henry Louis Gates offers a keen observation of some of the most indispensible key elements regarding the deceptively simple trajectory of Hurston’s story. He writes that “The Charting of Janie Crawford’s fulfillment as an autonomous imagination, Their Eyes is a lyrical novel that correlates the needs of her first two husbands for ownership of progressively larger physical space (and the gaudy accoutrements of upward mobility) with the suppression of self awareness in their wife. Only with her third and last lover, a roustabout called Tea Cake whose unstructured frolics center around and about the Florida swamps, does Janie at last blooms…”

In other words, towards the end of the story, Janie did not find love and happiness as presumably defined by her first two husbands by the often superficial veneers of status and ownership of fancy property, ironically she found the bond of love, God and community living by a swamp with a mere unrefined and uneducated vagrant whose only means of sustaining Janie was through a daily dosage of love, laughter and whatever he could muster with his bare hands to put food on the table.

Therefore in honor of Black History Month, you will find that in “Their Eyes Were Watching God” concurrent themes of Hope, love, and an affirmation of Black Heritage are enough to make you want to put Their Eyes on your reading list this February.

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 here.

Neven Dužević

Southwest of the center


Southwest of the center is my neighborhood
I went to school there and had a start
There was also a cinema there
After the second shift
I had time there
He imagined her and me in the last row
All the movie scenes themselves
But those are old days

More or less, only on the same route
Only the Tram knocks
He only hides his name
What was and is no longer

They still walk there
My dream mates
Boys lost in the years
They are looking for Peter Pan
They talk about drinking
Ribicija and black maca

Southwest from the city center
It's Trešnjevka...

The Unlucky Sun


Forest bandits weave dreams in the eyes of the river 
The noise of civilization robs the fish of sleep The hearts of the far-near roads are wounded
The tree stump is now an ammo
Shadow walks on a bullet-ridden leg
 A changing climate attacks the world of clouds
 The fetus of poison vapor is in the womb of the sky 
Discrepancy of seasonal cycles  is on the horizon 
The language of blood in the chest of green grass 
The Mathematics of Dissatisfaction is on Butterfly Wings
Democracies of defeat in seven days of the rainbow
 Inventions in fresh account books kill themselves
 Nerve cells in the brain melt in the reproductive system 
Vascular blood vessels in clotted lesions
 The calendar is defective in the clutter of days
 Intellectuals are bought and sold 
Sometimes the sun itself seems unlucky .