Meanwhile, in a galaxy not that far away Last night The Empire Strikes Back, & a shot of Yoda resting his 900-year- old chin on the hand grip of his walking stick. & today I am sitting with my weary chin on the handle of my walking stick, waiting for the plane to take us to Sydney, five years after I last flew. In between, faulty knees + hearing + breathing. & no holograms around to en- able me to use The Force. & on the flight south I find in the seat-back pocket in front of me a finger-sized bar of milk chocolate, & The Road, a book by Cormac McCarthy. Though temp- ted, I leave the chocolate where it is, but take the book to take home with me. There it will be placed at the back of a queue which already includes the last half- dozen Lucas Davenport novels by John Sandford which I am re-reading & a number of other crime novels picked up at remainder prices in the (almost) local Big W department store. Do not remove all the chairs The pipe is overhead. Free from all disc- ursive attachment, it can float anew in its natural silence. Make no mistake, nothing is easier to recognize than a pipe. This is the first rule to be observed. The second? Never sit down to the piano unin- vited, unless you are alone in the parlor. An old custom not without basis, because the entire function is so scholarly as to allow the object it represents to appear without hesitation or equivocation. & the third? The small articles of a wardrobe require constant care. Should be of such material as will bear the crush of a crowded store without injury. A dignified, modest reserve is the surest way to repel impertinence. No truer remark was ever made. In vain the text unfurls below the drawing with all the attentive fidelity of a label in a scholarly book. A figure in the shape of writing. The image of a text. Sources: This Is Not a Pipe, by Michel Foucault The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette (1860), by Florence Hartley
Poetry from John Grochalski
the masturbator hear him in the library stacks oohing and aahing beating that rhythm to chinese beauty magazines see him head down on hard wood tables snoring and scratching his balls sleeping like a child of heaven a wad of paper towel still clutched in his hand. this work email today i’m not going to answer this work email i may never answer it i want the person who sent it to sit in their office and wonder why i didn’t respond yes i’m going to let this email sit in my inbox and rot like raw meat in the hot summer sun because it’s the only form of independence that i truly have left. bait box blues i watch the exterminator put poison and steel wool into the holes in the wall of my office watch him set a huge yellow trap with a dollop of chocolate and line up bait boxes like rows of black, plastic apartment buildings the rat has run by me twice in a month the second time i sprained my foot trying to get away from him the exterminator looks at peace while he sets the traps he gets up off the ground and says, we’ll get him fooling me into a certainty that i haven’t felt in a long while even though tomorrow i know the steel wool will be pulled out from all the walls the chocolate from the trap licked up and gone those bait boxes pushed around like an earthquake hit and a small pile of rat shit will be waiting for me on my desk reminding me of my true place in this pecking order. halcyon each human transgression is its own freshly sharp blade of grass i try not to hold it against anyone but sometimes you just want someone to blame for all of this sadness and futility a god to shake a fist at and i could say i make the best of things in my spare time but i don’t i’m a hungry man with a fork in a world full of nothing but soup angry almost always and growing older ungracefully another car wreck of a human life musing those halcyon days that never were as the stoplight changes from green to red and any semblance of home seems an eternity away. everything and when she said it feels like you hate everything now there was nothing left to do but wash the dirty dishes sitting in the dirty sink. John Grochalski is the author of five poetry collections, three novels, and the forthcoming novella Wolves of Berlin Play Amateur Night at the Flute and Fiddle Pub. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Poetry from Mesfakus Salahin
Circle Family Can someone find me a map? Where there is no bloody barbed wire fence There will only be lines of love Villages of humanity will undoubtedly reach the sky The paths along the way will be dreamy The song of communism will be heard in the flock of birds The tone of union will anchor the language of the earth The footprints will not be pierced by the arrows of hatred A flower's aroma will grow in the congealed wound Let our children draw that map Poetry will touch the edge of that map All the accumulated troubles will be removed There will be no tears in the world of circles Hungry eyes will not burn.
Poetry from Ahmad Al-Khatat
Trading I will trade my rusty flesh and cold blood for a pack of cigarettes and a liquor. I will trade my emotions and lifeless harmony for a pack of cigarettes and a liquor. I will trade my citizenship and foreign passport for a pack of cigarettes and a liquor. I will trade my morals and unspoken ethics for a pack of cigarettes and a liquor. I will trade my broken heart and warm hands for a pack of cigarettes and a liquor. I will trade my ageless smile and falling tears for a pack of cigarettes and a liquor. I will trade my heathy organs and memories for a pack of cigarettes and a liquor. I will trade my unclear accent and colourless dreams for a pack of cigarettes and a liquor. But I’ll never trade my past and homeland for a casket of the war I barely survived by hanging…
Poetry from Terry Trowbridge
Tiny Eschers After Rain If one of these unrolled pillbugs looked up, glassy, beaded dew would refract the light from the sky and bend their world of vertical green lines into spheres of shining blue. Even if the pillbugs were too nearsighted to see the geese above them arrowheading their way north, the potato bugs could hear them. Honking-honked birds with their straight necks crissing one season, crossing the next: for centuries they’ve been stitching the north and south together so that pillbugs can have a whole world beyond their tiny patch.
BIO proving I am not an AI or bot:
Pushcart Prize nominee, researcher & farmer Terry Trowbridge’s poems are in Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Masticadores USA, Poetry Pacific, Carousel, Lascaux Review, Carmina, untethered, Progenitor, Miracle Monocle, Orbis, Pinhole, Big Windows, Muleskinner, Brittle Star, Mathematical Intelligencer, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, New Note, Hearth and Coffin, Synchronized Chaos, Delta Poetry Review, Stick Figure, miniMAG, and 100+ more. His lit crit is in BeZine, Erato, Amsterdam Review, Ariel, British Columbia Review, Hamilton Arts & Letters, Episteme, Studies in Social Justice, Rampike, Seeds, and The/t3mz/Review. His Erdös number is 5. Terry is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for his first writing grant.
Essay from Norman J. Olson
on pacifism I guess I have just recently recommitted to, or decided I need to accept, that I am and must be a pacifist… in this year of 2024, there are wars and armed conflicts in various places around the world… some of these wars seem justified on one side or the other and some just seem to be the result of blundering on the part of national governments… but, the more I read the news, the more I think about these conflicts, the more true it seems that if the human race is to flourish, or even survive, we must find a way to eliminate war from this planet… my first argument against war is always to appeal to logic… even if one has no moral objection to the killing and maiming of other human beings in pursuit of some national goal, war or indeed, even smaller armed conflict, is seldom efficacious in resolving the dispute… so often international affairs seem like building houses of cards based on negotiations and diplomacy while war comes in with a sledge hammer… that simply destroys everything and makes matters worse… war is built on the foundation of violence and the belief that killing certain people will make nations live together in peace… that does not work… killing people just makes their families and friends angry and outraged… they do not want to live in peace with the killers of their loved ones, they want revenge on them… war begets hate which begets more war which begets more hate, etc. etc. etc… war is not an efficient or effective way to solve international problems… my second argument against war is that it is morally backwards… might does not make right… and just because one nation has a better army and can kill more efficiently, that does not make that nation more right than any other nation… usually the things fought over are in grey areas anyway, so there is no one side that is fully right and no one side that is fully wrong… so compromise and negotiation are the way to make sure that each side gets some of what it wants… my third argument against war is that it is always fueled by greed for money… and the people who wind up fighting in the war and harmed by the war are almost never the people who wind up with the money, no matter who wins or loses… and in trying to negotiate a compromise over things like border disputes, the only way these issues can be resolved is if both sides are willing to dial back their greed and settle for less than all the money, land, water rights, natural resources, etc… killing a bunch of people does not in any way help for any nation to put aside greed and attempt a fair and respectful resolution of international problems… my fourth argument against war is the obvious moral observation that it is immoral for any of us to take the life of anyone else… I believe that each and every human being is born into this life with a right to live and participate in all of the joys and pains that make up our lives… these include a right to food, shelter and safety… the first things usually destroyed in a war are food, shelter and safety… it is immoral to kill our fellow men and women period… under any circumstances, any time… and it is also immoral to allow our fellow men and women to live without food, shelter and safety… war is always always always immoral… war is always evil… English poet Wilfred Owen, who knew a few things about war, called it a “cesspool…” there is nothing glorious about it, ever… okay, now that I have convinced everybody that war is ineffective, evil and immoral, let us proceed to the question of how do we end it… one would have hoped back in the 1950s when I was a child, that the inventions of nuclear weapons would make war obsolete… when nations have this horrible weapon in hand that would make any large war, the last war, because the effect of the war would be to eradicate human beings from the planet; one would think that we would look at each other and say, “let us lay down our arms and look for peaceful ways to solve international problems…” before we finish ourselves off altogether… but that did not happen… instead nations kept building more and more nuclear weapons in an arms race that goes on to this day with weapons armed and ready to launch right now that would bring on a nuclear winter that would end human life on this planet and most other life as well… this is lunacy… it is like a person walking night and day with a razor sharp knife pressed against his or her throat… we must get rid of those terrible weapons… and we do that not by using them, which would be suicidal, but by education and arms negotiations… we need to all know and acknowledge the danger we are in and make our governments destroy those weapons… there is no harm that any nation can inflict on me that makes it morally right for me to launch a nuclear weapon…. killing one person is immoral… killing hundreds, thousands and millions of people is hundreds and thousands and millions of times more immoral… I am not sure how to go about accomplishing this goal but, I truly believe that military actions of every kind will not lead to the goal of nuclear disarmament… military action does not solve international problems, it always makes them worse… increasing the hate and dehumanizing those denoted as “enemy” makes it more and more likely that an accidental international blunder or an intentional act of lunacy will send us over that precipice and start a nuclear annihilation of humanity… so, I advocate demilitarization of this planet… I believe that it is the only way to prevent a humanity annihilating nuclear war… there are so many challenges facing humanity… this planet is rich and abundant but we should be carefully tending it and setting it up to support our human communities so that all people can have food, shelter and safety… we are threatened by disease, by natural disaster, by things like climate change and ozone depletion and dozens of other threats… I think that we could work together to solve these problem and to make a long and healthy life easier for each of us to attain, if we could quit fighting with each other and start working together to make the world a better place for the benefit of us all… the first step, I think, is for us all to embrace pacifism… we must change our attitudes about military in every way… there is nothing good about military actions… all military action is immoral in that it aims to kill people… that is what guns, tanks, bombs, etc. exist to do… to kill people… so we must stop extolling the warrior… we must stop funding the military… and we should be working with every resource we have to spread pacifism to every human being on the planet… it is the logical, moral and decent thing to do… we must accept that every human on this planet is our brother or sister and deserves respect and all human rights and happiness being born here should provide… and we must always remember that might does not make right… it never has and it never will…
Book excerpt from Chimezie Ihekuna (Mr. Ben)’s new book Talking Thoughts
I was lost in the box called life. In it, (I) I wanted learning but my education was deafening I wanted truth but my reality faked its root I wanted to buy the right counsel but my mind controller got me its left sell I wanted to be free but my pursuit turned a tree I wanted information but my vision brought me deformation I wanted wellness but my state showed illness I wanted a wife but my life mirrored a knife I wanted a companion but my plight was in oblivion I wanted the clarity of pleasure but my naked eyes saw the dullness of pressure I wanted to live forever but my death was to question For-Ever I wanted peace but my perception reflected unease (II) I wanted to know more about people but my understanding was a fumble I wanted to be everyone’s friend but my experience was the Pal’s end I wanted to be rich but my efforts didn’t catch a fish! I wanted direction but my limitation was the obstruction 3 I wanted to know the ‘why’ to everything happening but my answer had to cry to all prevailing I wanted to invest in good but my previous return showed ‘fooled!’ I wanted to scream because of pains but my calmness showed up because of gains (III) I wanted people to hear my voice but my quest was a noise I wanted money but my struggle was funny I wanted to know why the world is divided but the response was: ‘it’s control is what is favourited’ I wanted to know what happens after death but my physical life told me I was on earth I wanted to tell people my experience but my words failed me in their presence I wanted to know if I knew what I know my existence replied me with a ‘NO!’ I wanted to find myself through my works but my inner-self whispered: ‘If you want to find yourself, then think OUT OF THE BOX!
Chimezie Ihekuna (Mr. Ben)’s entire book is available here for order.