Grace
God’s hand over my heart,
As the bullets fly into the sky,
Like fireworks on the Fourth of July.
It’s the kindness of Spring,
With the flowers blooming,
And my soul.
My soul is the soul of many,
Who has not died,
In the winter snows.
Poetry from Michael Brownstein
AN ISLAND ABOVE THE OCEAN
After we landed
Montserrat floated into the sky
Mountain chicken, goat water,
Black sand lines on the beach:
Look, I shouted, the volcano
Throws more smoke into the air
Coloring the trade winds grayish gray.
She answered, dust masks, oxygen masks,
Quick, buy me something to keep
The dust out of my hair.
Everywhere goats and sheep,
Lemons and lime, a great number of potatoes,
And once a week a boat rose to the occasion
From the Dominican Republic
Full of fresh fish and more fresh fish.
When the volcano erupted one night,
We went to the veranda to listen
To the march of debris.
Morning, everything covered with ash:
Look, she shouted, this stuff is everywhere.
It’s on the chairs and the floor,
In the kitchen sink.
I answered, brooms and dustpans,
Mops and water. Where are the rags?
We left a week later, our gums bleeding,
A lack of vitamin C,
A lack of calcium, a lack of .
Temperament of temperature.
Poetry from John Chisoba Vincent
FUGITIVE
I am learning how to leave
how to hug many lonely roads
walk through the roads in pains
how to mourn those lost brothers
without feeling guilty-wandering
this is what life has taught me:
how to pack my bag and walk,
walk to the river bank and stay
I’ve been forgotten in between
fingers, two unequal fingers
i know I am a street shattered,
littered with filth agonies.
finding home in a graveyard
finding solace in the bosom of
emptiness and foliage of vacant
lonesomeness taught me this:
how to name the street a home
how to hold death in my pocket
how to talk to the wind as a friend
building sadness and excitement
when a dice of stupidity is thrown
fools like me look for gold of sanity
these broken poems in my head
hurts, wish I could split them like
Igbos’ hearts, like Edo and Delta!
the history created has made me
learn more on how to lose home
in every moon, in every star
but am afraid of what the streets
talk about me in their closet.
JD DeHart reviews Chimezie Ihekuna’s upcoming novel Santa in Two Worlds
A Note on Santa In Two Worlds by Mr. Ben (aka Chimezie Ihekuna)
written by JD DeHart, author of poetry anthology The Truth about Snails
JD DeHart
As you may tell from the synopsis below (provided by the author), this is a strong story of crime. It is interesting to read a poet who writes prose and poetry, and what I noted here about that transition is the way the story breathlessly uses descriptive phrases to convey its meaning.
There is much creativity at work here. There is crime, certainly, and violence, of course…but there is also a nice sense of silver lining to the book.
Chimezie Ihekuna
Synopsis
Santa’s world was in shambles. Just released from prison, having spent over a year, he was always the talk of the entire Santiago town. His long criminal records of stealing and drug-trafficking were reasons the 22-year-plus-old-man was always on the lips of every Santiagoan. Santa walked the length and breadth of the town in confidence but asked himself: “Why in the world are people of Santiago keeping me at arms length, whereas I don’t mean any harm, I want a change but this addictions of crime wouldn’t help matters?!”
Like the old saying: “blood is thicker than water”, Santa’s family was an epitome of crime. His father was said to have died in a gun-battle with the popularly known Men of Peace, The Santiago Police Force after an unsuccessful robbery operation, three months before Santa was born. His mom, the prostitute and drug addict, was a happy-go-lucky woman; flirting with any man she is on the streets of Santiago and beyond in exchange for drugs and money. Santa, having being raised by single-handedly, grew up to embrace crime wholeheartedly. Santa thought of turning a new leaf; change for good and for the better. He craved for a sense of belonging and acceptance by the people. Santa looked forward to when the people of Santiago would embrace him like their brother. How to go about it was very confusing… There was no he could confide in. Maria knew next to nothing! Her life was all about prostitution, drinking, smoking, despite being hospitalized at the Santiago Maternity Home.
In his ‘blur’ quest for the desired change and to avoid being ridiculed by people of the community—young and old, Santafoot-matched to the forest to the San-Amazona forest, Santiago’s most interior part to think about his life. There, he encountered a strange-looking plant but remembered what his mom would tell him about anything he saw as strange…The Tree of the gods. He chewed the leaves very well and swallowed them. Santa’s sudden weakness turned him to sleeping on the floor, under the canopy of the ever-green Tree of the gods.
Santa saw one thing he has never known—The unknown world of nature—where he saw exactly him in another world under a different situation but one thing connected them: CHANGE! Though they couldn’t get to see each other physically, both of them got what they wanted.
It was a world that would translate as: Santa in Two Worlds.
Poetry from Joan Beebe
STORMS
Suddenly it seems so quiet. The birds have stopped chirping,
No longer do you hear the rustling breeze through the trees.
Now we notice the sun is slowly fading and quickly
Darkness enfolds us in its eerie and encompassing determination.
Everyone is wondering when suddenly a thunderous boom is heard and
Streaks of bright light emanating from them are whip lashing in
Jagged forms across the sky.
The wind has become a gale and the rain falls in a cadence of dance,
Pouring itself out in a rhythm of its own.
You watch at your window at this splendid display of nature’s fury.
It seems dangerous but still you are frozen in place.
Nature, in all its magnificence is putting on a display long remembered
All is quiet now and the sunshine brings forth
Beauty in the sparkling raindrops on trees.
Children laughing and splashing in puddles they see.
A spirit of peace dwells within us and we know
That, once again, Nature will cause us to stop and wonder.
Christopher Bernard’s novel installment – Amor I Kaos
Christopher Bernard’s “AMOR i KAOS”: Seventh Installment
It could be a lifetime. Between the screed and the admonition, the command and the oath. Your followers lined up like soldiers on a ridge gazing down at the ignorant city. The horses neighing as they slip on rocks wet with dew. The dawn treacherously beautiful and cool, as if carrying, clutched in its hand, the message that will never reach them. Stop. Do not attack. We have surrendered, the war is over. And they descend, silent, to a pointless destruction. It could be like that. Or it might be briefer, a sojourn over a weekend or no longer than a summer of one’s youth. Remember that? It feels like yesterday. But it was a lifetime ago. It might be a gentler doom, more quiet, discreet, causing damage to only two people, bruised and aching and left for dead on the indifferent battlefield of love, cruelest of tyrants, your gauntlets bloody, your banners torn and fluttering in the dust-filled wind.
xxxxx
He closed the book and gazed at her gravely.
—I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, she said. You hopeless romantic!
His mouth smiled. Which looked strange since his eyes were so bleak.
Novel excerpt: Bewilderment by Michael Onofrey
It is a long stretch of flat roadway through terrain that is
dry and in need of trees, shoulder of the road dusty with
orange silt that lifts in the draft of passing trucks, but there
aren’t many trucks and traffic in general is sparse. It is hot,
and the sun dwells in a lightly hazed sky that is whitish
blue, tires of their bicycles gummy on the macadam that
runs beneath their moving shadows while they pedal side
by side as if in the ease of companionship.
Up ahead and on their left and set back from the road’s
shoulder there is a tree and in the tree’s shadow there
appears activity, and near that activity a pile of large rocks
sits in the sunshine, and since Wade and Herta are
traveling on the left side of the road, as does all traffic in
India, they will pass very near that activity, and in this way
discover its nature.
Between Herta and Wade there is no conversation
because they are too tired for conversation. Rivulets of
sweat gather airborne dust to streak their arms and legs
and necks with reddish slime. Their legs move as if on
automatic, yet at the same time there is this continuous
pushing feeling even though they are not on an incline,
nor is there a headwind.