Oranges were the ubiquitous dessert in Morocco. The sweet juicy fruit was always a delight, dispersing the remnant bitterness left from strong Mideast spices infused into the evening meal. That evening, rather than eat one at the very end of our luscious repast, I decided to take it with me and savor it as I walked through the maze of narrow lanes of the souk in Marrakesh. It was evening and the sun was setting the color of the fruit I bore in my hand. I meandered towards Jemaa el Fna, the main central square of the city.
What awaited me was a fantastic multisensory delight; a core pulp of sights, sounds and odors encircled by the amber rind of a souk. I finished peeling my orange and began to squeeze the last of the fruit’s wedges in my mouth, when the colorful stalls of the souk opened up to a large outdoor space crowded with local denizens and tourists.
It was a circus of sorts, with canvass tented booths arranged about the center, housing stands of food venders hawking a range of comestibles from fruits and olives to conical spires of spices. Other spaces were occupied by open cafes offering a myriad of drink and food. A heavy mist of smoke hung over the tents, rising from a multitude of camel and goat meat turning on spits or sizzling upon steel mesh grates. Tunic clothed men busily fanned wood coals with one hand, while tending to pieces of flesh cooking atop halved metal barrels gerry rigged into BBQ pits. The smell of roasted meat permeated the air, along with wafts of spices used to marinate the various parts of animal carcass.
The buildings encircling the area, held aloft two and three story restaurants with bright neon and incandescent lights, visually blaring their presence, and beckoning all to come. I slowly strolled through it all, not wanting to miss any aspect of the show before me.
Turban topped buskers plied their trade around the outer edges of the large plaza. I passed snake charmers, mesmerizing Cobras with the sway of their flute. Men with playful, teasing monkeys on their shoulders offered to show me the tricks of their trade. Groups of old men in soiled and worn kaftans crouched on the pavement, intently pondering their next move in a game of Manqala. There were musicians whining out siren like Arabic sounds on Kinura, Chatzozerah and Chalil, backed by the droning beat of a Bodhran. Along with the music, Kocek danced about like harem concubines, inviting tourists to join them in celebration.
Throngs of people milled about, sometimes requiring me to edge my way around, or squeeze my way through as they stood transfixed at a particular sight before them. The din of the crowd, the lilting music, and the rising smoke contributed to an aura of other worldliness unlike anything I had ever encountered. Jamaa el Fna was indeed a unique phantasmagoria of activity, all set about to entice, to lure, to mesmerize the wary traveler, and pull them into the dreamworld that is Marrakesh at night.
Doris Day, “The Very Thought of You” from Young Man with a Horn (1950)
The film Young Man with a Horn often showed on TV when I was a kid. I think the first time I saw it, or part of it, my mother was sitting on the couch in the foyer, which rhymes with lawyer (the living room was rarely used, and it didn’t have a TV), watching it (maybe on “The Early Show,” maybe on “The Million Dollar Movie” ) on our RCA console. “What are you watching?” I asked her.
“Young Man with a Horn,” she said. “It’s based on Bix Beiderbecke.”
I hadn’t yet heard of Bix Beiderbecke, so I thought she said, “It’s based on Big Spider Back.”
I knew Doris Day was a singer because my brother Bart had all her albums. But I knew her mainly from those romantic comedies with Rock Hudson and Tony Randall. I don’t know if I had yet heard the schoolyard rumors that Rock Hudson was gay, but I remember thinking that Tony Randall was probably gay, though this may have been a tad before the word “gay” had gained any currency.
I probably started paying more attention to the film when I was a teenager and had started seriously listening to jazz. In it Kirk Douglas plays a “tormented” trumpet player based, yes, on Bix Beiderbecke as fictionalized by Dorothy Baker in her novel of the same name; just as when he played a boxer in Champion the year before, he gets to grit his teeth and growl a bunch. The brilliant actor Juano Hernandez plays trumpeter Art Hazzard, likely based on King Oliver, the young man’s mentor. Hoagy Carmichael, who was part of Bix Beiderbecke’s crowd, plays piano and pal, and Doris Day, who may not yet have achieved full virginity, is the love interest.
Besides Douglas’ scenery-chewing descent into alcoholism, the thing I always remembered most was Doris Day singing “The Very Thought of You.” It was the first time I really listened to her singing, and it was beautiful, so smooth and natural, sexy at a simmer. Behind the scenes, the ghost trumpet for Kirk Douglas was Harry James, whom I remember doing commercials for Kleenex Man-Size Tissues, where he’d put a tissue at on the bell of his horn, blow a high note, and miracle of miracles, the tissue wouldn’t break.
I fell in love with the 1950 version of Doris Day and I fell in love with the song. A great melody, and a great lyric, written in the 1930s by the British bandleader Ray Noble. “The mere idea of you, the longing here for you…”—that’s what I call a lyric. “Mere idea”: Don’t you just love it when two words that were meant for each other meet like that?
Joe Cuba Sextet, “Bang Bang” (1966)
I remember incinerators. Until I was a teenager, we threw all our garbage down the incinerator chute. All our garbage. Food scraps, papers, tin cans, dead turtles, broken radios and alarm clocks. There was no recycling in the sixties, and it was not until around 1970 and the advent of the Clean Air Act, the Resource Recovery Act, and the EPA that compactors replaced incinerators. So every afternoon, or every other afternoon, I can’t remember, all that trash would go up in flames, with ominous black smoke billowing from the chimneys of the apartment buildings, a choking smell in the air, and cinders raining down on us, sometimes charred scraps of paper large enough to still make out some of the type. I associate the burning trash with warm weather, I suppose because that’s when we’d have been outdoors in the late afternoon, playing punch ball or shooting the shit.
I associate Joe Cuba’s record “Bang Bang” with warm weather and burning trash, though I don’t think it was even a summer hit. But it feels like one. In my mind I hear it blaring, tinny and distorted, from a small transistor radio for all the assembled kids to hear, “beep beep, ahh beep beep,” a quintessential sixties city summer song, an open-the-fire-hydrants song, a real New York sound, where even if you didn’t live among Latinos there was always Latin music in the air.
I also remember fireflies on Brooklyn summer nights, and trying to capture them in glass jars.
Spelling a Caste
fecal matter
emulates the interior
graffiti: thoughtful legacy passions
the gravestone shake-up delicto
ballerinas terrycloth frame-ups
triplicate facts
irritate the implicit tenant
turrmeric snatchers gone dental
( )
one-liner survivors
their cathodes gatepost noon
to stingray mourners
castle poultry tremor
vertigo seminars deluxe
varied its lemon returns
plastered
before backdrop vernaculars
lotion diction
implanting a bellicose wok
an impetigo classic
( )
limbic nettlefest
stammering tremolo playpens
darkening theoreticians
stabs forward
art fully under
auctioneer pity
affects their style velocity
to indenture divorcees
( )
the opal toecap
exhales its duct tape feeders
nearby threadbare
valuable plagiarism (audio
too scantily sorceress phonic)
tributary betrothals
pressed handicrafts
repute strata borne (hypno
sonic)
poacher tremolos
in delicto passion
roughened noon’s horn to renewal
At the End of the End of Days
pyrrhic lumber left burning
sutures shifting for the lonely
casing new murder charged in stairwell
irritation brackets wilt insignia leaks
the roaring remedies measured pine
capsules for somatic coffee brackets
or for columnar socket blades
where reactor seekers last charged
disfigured tantra tracking in retreat
buried the remedies backward
as the corporeal circus games
dull massages filter grim retribution
basket threading reduced pleasure
to a fixable granite platelet flourish
no weather security packaging
socket banter breached arrears
extreme position dismembered
remnant amenity glimmer blades
tore through the loose coma pouch
luminous grades suspected traction
impaneled scrotal parlor forays
as privileged inflation disasters
fruition stalls reply nostalgia riffs
mount a laughable tenth catalogue
with harried impertinence rehearsed
a long and clever compendia rapture
Meating at the Market
produce caught placenta
near the deadening cadavers
readjustments
travesty a cereal pedant
bracketing rotisserie voyeurs
to potential
*
ratio jackdaw boogie bang
handrails starch appraisal
crossword rendered facet
a signage assault
emptied an emulsion clerk
scaling slow rancor
cliches fodder the medically impaled
*
peacock testimonies
quilted brimming
yelp and braids
applicable implosions
keening geothermal chants
on elite
finalists
weird attributes
momentary gloating
velcro to pleasured settlers
embodies rotisserie leg when heel
archly lathered
abundant garret valedictions
over
flipped steak
Glandular Potential
testicular headrests
wrench storekeeper cans
across liniment coves
a charlatan mélange
straining
renewal geeks
gladiatorial emulsifiers
abdominal bigamists
asset ogre credits looming at birthplaces
*
a thug tympani
appealed to retired diameters
no polysyllable due
its rambler hostel
for a marshmallow enema
the mad lender boldly detonates
the hospital
divorce usher used
a synthetic seeding
for tragic panorama
suburban primers
sneezing petrochemical thoroughfares
*
a shattering
polysyllable
opalescent
tragicomedies dazzle beyond downturn
flamingo documentaries
polymer reptile cans
used malingerers
backward idyll
transforming
transit risings
rumors instance
Payback in the Works
packaging as market bait
the gondola switched a rife glade’s
lively blades rowing them away
from a pomegranate vacuum
thrust among the blockage pills
left to filter the coma gray
as though roaming impertinence
didn’t wilt before lions tore
the colosseum to rapture
the heavenly void capsules
on sale forays ventured affable
in a laughable remix tantra
no fixable position left unturned
or tuned to low vibrato brackets
in the carry-on seizure pouch
aligned the deathly software
carpet no match for the reply
to optimal regeneration totem
requests for privileged infection
prior fillers mount to story board
the suspected plenary crawl
toward scrotal insignia pablum
breached where mounting flourish
stalls the backward crawlspace
remedies burning socket mantras
measured use of cynical bursts
jangling medicinal ganglia rifts
left charged for empty retribution
BIO: Vernon Frazer’s newest poetry collection is Gravity Darkening.
Four PoemsWritten by Chinese Poet Yuan Hongri
Translated by Yuanbing Zhang
The Sea of The Golden Palace
Happiness is the memory of heaven
And the soul is as sweet as the sun.
On the canvas of the death
you daub a smile from the gods.
Oh, that is the light! The light of honey.
If you can hear the heavenly hymns
that is the sea from that golden palace
lapping sapphire over eternal universe.
黄金的宫殿之海
快乐是天堂的记忆
而灵魂是甜美的太阳
在死亡的画布之上
你涂抹诸神的笑容
哦 那是光 光之蜜
如果你听见了天国的乐曲
那是黄金的宫殿之海
在蓝宝石的太空之上
2016.7.30
The Wine of The Soul
I pick up a smiling flower from the future city
To light up your black iron dreams
The new book of the world delivers by the holy lightning
The giant’s body rotates the transparent picture of the faraway stars-cape
The light emanates from the gods
Let you see yourself without any sorrow
The body is high and translucent, each cells are as sweet as the wine of the souls.
灵魂之酒
我摘取一朵未来之城的笑容之花
照亮你的黑铁之梦
天国的闪电送来新的世界之书
巨人的体内旋转透明的星云之图
那来自诸神的光芒
让你看到那个不知忧愁的自己
身体巨大透明 每一颗细胞甜美如灵魂之酒
2015.3.16
The City of The Angel's Smile
The white and silvery words of the moon kingdom
shone in the dream last night
The king of giants
in the massive cities of ancient times
presented me the gem book of the soul
I will build a garden in the desert
fill the jade vase with the holy spring
Let the rivers and lakes shine
a city of the angels' smile
天使的微笑之城
月亮之国的银白词语
在昨夜的梦境闪烁
那位巨人的王
在史前的巨城
赠我宝石的灵魂之书
我将在沙漠上建造花园
用一只玉瓶盛来天国之甘泉
让河流和湖泊映照
一座天使的微笑之城
2016.5.7
The Interstellar Kingdom
Sometimes I see the sky smiling at me
The limpidity spirit and flower clouds
such as the old soul of mine
watch my shadow on the earth
The ground beneath my feet like a colossal ship
toward the Interstellar Kingdom
Those cities where giants dwell
blossom on the dustless Milky Way.
Translator Yuanbing Zhang
Bio:Yuan Hongri (born 1962) is a renowned Chinese mystic, poet, and philosopher. His work has been published in the UK, USA, India, New Zealand, Canada, and Nigeria; his poems have appeared in Poet’s Espresso Review, Orbis, Tipton Poetry Journal, Harbinger Asylum, The Stray Branch, Pinyon Review, Taj Mahal Review, Madswirl, Shot Glass Journal, Amethyst Review, The Poetry Village, and other e-zines, anthologies, and journals. His best known works are Platinum City and Golden Giant. His works explore themes of prehistoric and future civilization.
Yuanbing Zhang (b. 1974), is Mr. Yuan Hongri’s assistant and translator. He himself is a Chinese poet and translator, and works in a Middle School, Yanzhou District, Jining City, Shandong Province China. He can be contacted through his email, 3112362909@qq.com.
Web
Extraterrestrial spider,
Invisible; they say...
Spins a web of deception,
That is growing every day.
Possessing insatiable hunger,
A master of deceit,
Its web a snare for humans,
Who become a prey at its feet.
The web is becoming stronger,
Tightening every day,
And the spider is wiser than humans,
Determined to have its way.
first published in UFO Gigolo
The Scourge
We all can see that
It is here...
We can run,
Or hide,
Or just choose
Not to see...
We can join,
Or fight,
Or watch...
And understand.
There is no place
To run to,
There is no place
To hide.
What you choose
Not to see
Will find you,
Even if you
Are blind.
And when you face
What you are blind to,
It will not be kind.
Circle
The lesser stars have yielded,
Another Sun is near,
But every star that fled the sky
Will surely reappear.
The darkness nearly ended,
Dawn will bring the light,
The daystar will appear,
Banishing the night.
My name is Doniyor. My neighbor Abdullah and I have become close friends. One day we couldn’t find any any way to have fun. We had no goal. We didn’t know what to do. When we were making something from a piece of wood, my father suddenly woke up. His eyes were half open when he said:
“ Hey, thieves of time! Are you wasting your time?”
I didn’t understand the meaning of my father’s “time thieves” at all. I wanted to ask, but he fell asleep.
My friend Abdullah also asked “Are we thieves?”
When daylight came, he went into his house. I also fell asleep from exhaustion. But I remembered that I was late for school, so I quickly washed my face and drank tea in a hurry. I do not remember what I ate. .. I thought I would be late for school, but class had not yet begun. As soon as I arrived, the teacher came in. We all greeted the teacher with respect
“ My dear students! I am overjoyed to see you. My joy is boundless.“
Just as our teacher was explaining the subject to us, one of my classmates came in and said,”Teacher, I’m sorry I’m late today.”
“Doniyor, don’t be late anymore., the teacher said.“This time I forgive you, but next time I will punish you.”
“Dear students,” the teacher said, “you must build a new Uzbekistan, and at the same time justify the trust of your parents, ready to give their lives for you. If you become famous, I will be proud to say on the street that I taught this student, “ she said.
These words of my teacher had a special effect on me and increased my self-confidence. Various whispers began in the classroom.
“Will you come to my birthday tomorrow?” I heard also those words. It was clear that our teacher also heard these words.
“Time thieves,” said the teacher. Her sharp gaze at the students was marked by regret. “Thieves of time”.
I had heard these words from my father while I was playing with my friend. That’s why I was not surprised to hear them. My classmates were stunned.
Doniyor, trembled with fear, as if I, his friend Abdullah, ,had committed a crime.
“Doniyor, why are you trembling?” the teacher asked.
“You called us thieves, didn’t you? After all, aren’t those who steal punished?“
“Time thieves are punished by time itself. By doing so, you are hurting yourself. “ the teacher said.
“Teacher, I do not understand the meaning of this sentence at all. Please tell us about the theft of time.”
“Usually, those who steal are punished,” said the teacher. “Time thieves are no exception. True, the thief of time is not punished. He is not even accountable before the law. But wasting your time now is tantamount to stealing your time, your future. If you spend all your time in science, you will save time and become a mature person in the future.
Ohh, my friend Abdullah and I are the thieves of our future. Doniyor thought. These words of the teacher inspired Doniyorm andat that moment, he realized what a “time thief” was.
He even came to our house in a hurry: “Anvar, are you there? Starting today, I can say that I understand the value of time.
“Yes, Abdullah, you understand, now we are not stealing our time, we are just following the path of knowledge. In the future, we will be among the mature people mentioned by my teacher. I agree with you. Don’t waste your time! I will always remember that it is a trophy!
Author: Abdumominov Abdulloh
Pupil of school No. 102, Shayhantahur district, Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
