Translation from the French by Michael Steffen In a Nutshell What is this foam in the mouth of the West since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia? Nearly everywhere around the world we’re writing Russian culture off. Who has the authority to issue this order unjust as it is reprehensible? No need to cite examples. Everybody knows what’s going on here. I’m ashamed of these gravediggers who confuse Chekhov with Kalashnikov. Like that’s going to help save the Ukrainian people bravely facing bombs, missiles and torture. Are we going to throw Dostoyevsky in jail without a fair trial and have him executed? Trash Pushkin and Pasternak? They are also dictators who aim to erase artists by assassinating their thoughts. This is not Democracy and Liberty. Culture is international, it doesn’t have borders. I’m still listening to Rachmaninov, Shostakovich, some days over and over. I’m still reading Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva, often with tears in my eyes. I say No to the Thought-Police! Long live Russian culture! Denis Emorine (original) нет ! Quelle folie s’empare de l’Occident depuis l’invasion de l’Ukraine par la Russie ? Partout dans le monde ou presque , on excommunie la culture russe et ses représentants ! Qui a lancé un mot d’ordre aussi injuste que méprisable ? Je ne donnerai pas d’ exemples : tout le monde les connaît. J’ai honte pour ces fossoyeurs qui confondent Tchekhov et la kalachnikov ! Qu’ espèrent-ils ainsi ? Sauver le peuple ukrainien qui affronte les bombes et autres missiles , les massacres et les viols avec courage ? Faut-il emprisonner Dostoïevski avant de le juger puis de l’ exécuter ? Jeter aux ordures Pouchkine ou Pasternak ? Ce sont les dictateurs qui s’en prennent aux artistes en assassinant la pensée ! Pas les pays libres et démocratiques ! La culture est internationale, elle n’a pas de frontières ! J’ écoute toujours Rachmaninov, Chostakovitch parfois plusieurs fois par jour ; je lis toujours Anna Akhmatova ou Marina Tsvetaïeva souvent les larmes aux yeux… Non à la dictature de la pensée quelle qu’elle soit ! Vive la culture russe ! Denis EMORINE Translation from the French by Natacha Rostova НЕТ! Что за сумасшествие охватило Запад , когда Россия ввела войска на территорию Украины? Везде или почти везде в мире выкидывают русскую культуру и ее представителей! Кто отдал такой как несправедливый, так и презираемый приказ? Не хочу приводить тому примеры, их все знают и так. Мне стыдно за этих могильщиков, которые не видят разницы между именами Чехов и Калашников На что они рассчитывают? Спасти украинский народ, который смело противостоит бомбежкам, ракетам, массовым убийствам, изнасилованиям? Нужно ли посадить Достоевского в тюрьму до суда и следствия, а потом его казнить? Выбросить Пушкина и Пастернака на помойку? Диктаторы, убивая мысль, ведут наступление на представителей культуры. Не только свободные и демократические страны! Культура интернациональна, у нее нет границ! Я люблю слушать Рахманинова, Шостаковича, иногда слушаю их несколько раз в день, всегда читаю Анну Ахматову или Марину Цветаеву, часто со слезами на глазах… Нет диктатуре мысли, в любой форме! Да здравствует русская культура! Денис Еморин
Poetry from J.J. Campbell
i try not to think did you ever think the rain would end did you ever think love had an expiration date did you ever think your dreams wouldn't come true did you ever think your demons were better than mine did you ever think this love would mean more to someone else did you ever think death was a good conversation starter did you ever think how fast flowers die did you ever think i was going to love you this much did you ever think you would as well did you ever think we were suicide lovers meant to find each other on the same fucking cliff only to jump before anyone could say no ------------------------------------------------------------------ supposedly still winter it is around 60 degrees today, supposedly still winter these are the days that tease us just enough to get everyone fucking sick a little collusion between mother nature and the fucking medical industry two days from now it will snow and then we'll all be running to the pharmacies to get our pills rinse and repeat death is quickest opt out i can think of ---------------------------------------------------------------- yellow and blue for freedom watching the bombing right before i try to go to sleep probably isn't the best way to sleep peacefully but it does paint the dreams in these vivid colors red for blood black for death yellow and blue for freedom there's always a madman worried about his legacy more than the citizens of his country or the country he's trying to destroy and i know everyone is worried about world-war three i'm more worried about what happens if freedom loses --------------------------------------------------------------- like her life depended on it remember when she said she would love you forever that every day without you would ache more and more as she got older remember how she would kiss you like her life depended on it how the sex was more amazing each and every time how you used to laugh on the front porch of the farm while talking about marriage, children, what a future could possibly look like and then remember this is the shit you wanted a relationship to look like reality is a cruel bitch ----------------------------------------------------------- if we are alive i had a doctor tell me once that pain is often the only way we can tell if we are alive or not and as the pinched nerves provide the waves of pain for me to ride, i guess this is what the fuck she was talking about yet another fucking thing i won't miss when i'm dead
Poetry from John Culp
Spiritual Advance
Purple Heart
for Freedom's Stance admits
choices I've drawn from
the Well of
Endless Light ,
Where Being is Laid
in the presence of
GOOD
Knowing all is Well.
Poetry from John Thomas Allen
The moon is a damp alloy curdling
with a blue snarl. Chilling ministries
speed hearts on October nights,
your sleeping face hammered with moon.
A simple walk is all of my duende’s
deep song. I will trek the Liberty Taxes,
abandoned storefronts and dark arcades,
easy noir mosques, sober gas stations.
Brittle fangs grow in vacant craters,
a stinking smog seals an astronaut’s
scream. Night’s natal gnosis rings
in dormant dilation, woolly syllables
ring in the cicadas’ splitting aural assault,
a discordia’s assonantal, atomic ablation.
An ill choir doubles: You can stay here
when things get warm. You will only hold God’s
hand to chew it off. A knee bends in the desert,
coptic scripts of lunar foil nicked with rotting stars.
And where are you? You of retail revolt,
misshapen hubris, pragmatic puppetry.
A simple waltz of eloped faces, Slenderman elisions
and discarded industrial beer cans
are all of my days and nights.
I’m sick of hearing about your condition.
In a forest’s blue rot, fireflies will eat
on the body of your poor person,
You’ll struggle in the dark, and only be found
as something witchy.
John Thomas Allen likes the slow unfurling of meditative poetry which is almost too much poetry to be poetry–Wallace Stevens, James Wright, and the early surrealists.
Poetry from Gabriel T. Saah
The Beauty of Poetry The beauty of poetry String words together, Make them look better, It shows you, How our fair lady is. She is a honeycomb dripping honey that tastes biter sweet. She is a bird sitting over a still pond, Singing a tone to the fishes swimming below of the approaching fishermen. She is a medicine for the heart, A wind with hands to calm the beasts that bellow inhumane and immodest acts. She is a wine that eases pain, Therefore he who knows her name, sit and dine with her, and he has his fills. She is a cup of solace, Eases one of his melancholy, She is a paint brush tossed in a bucket of paint and create a picture on an empty canvas. She is enigmatic in form, She is the peace that comes after a breakup with the Devil, She is the ring of the bride and groom, she puts hearts together. She is a blanket of cloud that covers the cold, wandering souls, She is a lamp house on an island of where do I go, Her commitment is beyond understanding.
Driving on a rainy day Sloppy hills with muddy waters running down its sides, Frostbite chills that runs deeply into your marrows, That's how life is like a bitter today and sweeter tomorrow. But you have to get your art together, Stop gallivanting about be keen on her. Like a driver drenched from the soaking beat of rain, We sometimes become soak with rain of adversity, Life sometimes becomes like riding on a rainy day, Calamity splashes on your face like rain drops on sloppy hill in a thunderstorm. After a while of intense rainfall, Comes a bright and beautiful sun sitting at the face of the horizon, In our ways tress fall, But we have the will power to make our ride better, Or to make it worst. Riding on a rainy day, Is like taking a trip into an ocean of the worst has happened to, But if you prevail against its perils, You come out vigilant, The journey of life is like a day out in the thunderstorm that seems never ending, The clouds of despair clapping their hands with frustration, The lighting of fear drumming with the band of doubt, Playing along for defeat. You have got to see yourself as victor, And see them as victims, But don't defeat yourself. Drive without fear, Move on with no dread.
Poetry from Howie Good
Welcome to Hard Times Under the hard stares of armed guards, the work parties dragged corpses to the ovens or simply threw them into the mass burial pit. Passersby couldn’t see over the fence, but they could hear what sounded like the tinny music of kiddie rides. Until you asked why I was smiling, I hadn’t even realized I was. Mysteries always ultimately seep to the surface. I’ve tried to learn to live with this, to not overly analyze or philosophize, and just observe. Out walking before dark, I saw today, amid the lingering grays and browns of winter, dead-looking trees beside the road just beginning to bud, gnarled, knobby fingers of fierce invalids. A Cautionary Tale My wife and I were sitting at a wobbly little table in the window of the bakery/café. As we waited for our superhot coffees to cool, the town’s orphans and foster children were paraded past in chains. Some of the people clustered on the sidewalk behind police barriers wore white arm bands or had white ribbons pinned to their coats, but whether a symbol of support or a silent form of protest, I don’t know. We could hear ripples of gunfire coming from the direction of the warehouses, the local militia shooting into alleys and cellars where they suspected fugitives from the dragnet might be hiding. The soul of man prevails, I remember my wife quoting, but only when moral struggle is present. Any wonder I love her? The gunfire sounded more intense now. I lifted the paper coffee cup to my lips and took a careful sip. A Whole New Ball Game A massive glacier heads for home. The catcher tears off his hockey-style face mask and shockingly the top half of his face with it. In the visitors’ dugout, the manager is busy applying Kabbalistic numerology in an attempt to uncover a hidden message in the uniform numbers of the players still on the bench. Slowly a dirigible emblazoned with a death’s skull logo comes floating over the stadium. The first base umpire points up and signals for timeout and then flees the field as fast as his sizable bulk permits, setting off a general rush toward the exits. Women are knocked down and children trampled, but vendors in the stands just go on howling, Beer here! The next day’s sports pages carry no references to Marx or Lenin or the withering away of the state. The Personal Is Political My words echo before I can say or even formulate them. It’s been that way since you went in for tests and didn’t come back out. Now the Russians and Ukrainians are centerstage singing a tortured love duet. I’ve taken an oath against modernity, the sheer vacuousness of it, real people who base their identities on fictional characters. Rumor is that the North Koreans have a missile that can hit the West Coast. I’m no ornithologist or any other kind of -ologist, but the gulls flutter in the wind like dirty scraps of paper. Before the Fall I was three years old, maybe four, lying on my stomach on the itchy wool carpet and filling with ecstatic scribbles the blank pages of an old business ledger my father had brought home from work, the future, with its mistakes and setbacks, the hot smell of scorched metal, still unscripted, undefined, formless, and my heart still a soft red peach without a savage bite taken out of it.
Sketch from Santiago Burdon
Face Of A New Moon On A Sunlit Night We walk together arm in arm, her head resting on my shoulder, the Sun decides to call it a day, permitting the night to spill darkness into a jealous sky, pouting over the star's sparkle obscured by clouds that bullied their way into the empty space left by the Sun, the moon grows larger and brighter as the Earth turns, spinning night’s beacon of light into a brilliant shining white, the scent of magnolia blossoms travel on every breeze, the sweet gum and oak trees appear taller and seem to scratch the sky with their fingered branches, the light from street lamps dance on her brown skin, highlighting the minute almost invisible hairs on her arms, her hair smells of lavender and her skin is soft like the fur of a sable, she possesses a celestial angelic air about her, it draws me to her with a hypnotic charm, there's a distance in her eyes, and if I gaze into them, I become mesmerized as though she had cast a spell, I'd be in a trance, drifting off to a place where the night comes to rest, the dawn tucks in the moon, and the stars go to dream.