City as replica

subjective stabilization
mirrors archeology
 
an ecosystem in the fur
and stomach a hypothesis
 
non-narrative pavements
resurface as ghostly blueprints
 
coordination scaled down to trivial
tho delineations never existed
 
zero marks the obelisks imagined
featured integrated hung from subfloor.




The green ruins aesthetically pleasing

Using materials anachronistic
though talking pyramidal shape
in various contexts risks
and a permanent fixture conflicts
but reflects priorities damp and cool
proved fertile yet theoretical
like fauna inhabiting buildings.






Ranging dope fence beard

Flicker vacuum punch
          this bowl
          shifts released
          fighting stomp
          differed a mile.

Shrimp
coat of arms
               best vest
               inflicted mania
                        dirt
                               no sense.




Open strategies

dispossessed as past
in particular
subtleties 
meditate
variegated
horizons

centers produce
rural forging
finding effective
authorized
passages an ever-
receding relevance

formal alien fast
dissolves pre-
history.



materials size device astronomers

snivel less an art
aforementioned encore avenue
city sweeps certain roast

covered in juice
squeeze portrait
grasshopper brow

eye gauges sneeze guard
once membrane vest

cloth
broth
sauce

gangly grizzly grimace
buzzword picked
to bits
drowned
soap dish

coming from wheat engineer
tools for transportation flicker
lighter fluid scrapbook promenade

weapons civil
as a planned computation
against ascertained scope

The Gallery Group

I feel like I’m in the “Gallery Group,”
ex-officio; for those who don’t know,
the participants are Democrats who
shared the January 6th experience
secreted in the space for the public 
and the press to observe 
the proceedings of Congress.
Surrounded by marble relief
sculptures, the likes of
Hammurabi, Suleiman, 
Simon de Montfort, Napoleon,
visages in this place
identifying that begun
long before the founding fathers,  
these men and women, white,
black, and brown, enduring a
nightmare in daylight
while the mob marauded. 
For an hour of horror 
before the hallway  
cleared by Capitol Police 
allowing an escape, 
a former Army Ranger, 
a Marine who fought
in Iraq, a prior UNICEF
employee, a previous
CIA operations officer, 
one who had been a labor organizer
whose immigrant father was
a farm worker and immigrant
mother, a nursing home laundress,
U.S. Representatives all, they spent
this time of terror hunkered down, 
pleading in prayer that went viral,
afraid of what would become of
them and America. I feel much 
the same, one year after.
A member of the Gallery 
Group happened to be
carrying a scarf that day,
bearing the Returns of Qualified
Voters and Reconstruction Oath 
of her great-great-great-grandfather
granting him the right to vote after being 
freed from slavery. He could not write 
his name, so he signed with an ‘X.’


Afterword—Lisa Blunt Rochester, U.S. Representative from Delaware in remarks made in Congress to commemorate January 6th recalls her great-great-great-grandfather, a freed slave and those who came before her: “I have continued to hope even when I feel hopeless – my ancestors wouldn’t have it any other way...”


News source: “Trauma in House gallery bonds members of Congress even a year later”



Howard Richard Debs is a recipient of the 2015 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Awards. His essays, fiction, and poetry appear internationally in numerous publications. His book Gallery: A Collection of Pictures and Words (Scarlet Leaf Publishing), is the recipient of a 2017 Best Book Award and 2018 Book Excellence Award. His book Political (Cyberwit Press) is the 2021 American Writing Awards winner in poetry. He is co-editor of New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust, forthcoming from Vallentine Mitchell of London, publisher of the first English language edition of Anne Frank's diary. He is listed in the Poets & Writers Directory.

Four Poems

Written by Chinese Poet Yuan Hongri

Translated by Yuanbing Zhang


 

God is Ourselves after Waking up

 

You can’t catch every worldly thing like you can’t retain the days.

You can’t see the truth of all things on earth like you can’t see your own soul.

Happiness and tribulation may not exist as if there is no night

and daylight in the Kingdom of Heaven,

And the universe is merely the phantom of the light of our soul,

and God is ourselves after waking up.

 

上帝是梦醒之后的自己

 

你抓不住世间的一切犹如留不住时光

你看不见万物的真相犹如看不见自己的灵魂

幸福和苦难也许并不存在犹如在天国没有黑夜与白昼

而宇宙只是自己的灵魂之光的幻影而上帝是梦醒之后的自己

 

City of Dreamland

 

You walk in the city of dreamland but forget that you are the unique creator.

For your soul is the unique God that lives in the Kingdom of Heaven;

And you believe the riot of colours in a dream–

the pulsating of life and the blight of death;

And the muse of love makes you look like butterfly that hovered lightly in the garden

and forgot that your name is Zhuangzi.

 

梦境之城

 

你走在梦境之城却忘了自己是唯一的创造者

而灵魂是唯一的上帝而且居住于不可回忆之天国

而你相信了梦中的赤橙兰绿那生之绚烂与死之枯萎

而爱情之蜜酒让你如同花园里翩跹飞舞的蝴蝶而忘了自己名曰庄子

 

Universe is the Heavenly Garden of The Stars

 

Emptiness-nothingness will save you and wipe away all of the worldly scars,

Until you are fresh as the beginning and as fragrant – beauty as another spring.

The world will never fade because the universe is the heavenly garden of the stars.

The other you is that giant who is arriving in a huge spaceship

from another city of the sun.

 

宇宙是天国的星辰花园

 

空无会拯救你且抹去世上的一切伤痕

直到你鲜艳如初芳美若又一个春日甘醇之大明烝烝

世界永不会凋谢因为宇宙是天国的星辰花园

明天的你那乘坐星际巨舰的巨人正在另一个太阳之城驶来

 

King of the Universe

 

Seek thyself and seek your soul which is a lifetime mission.

The soul is both in your body and the Kingdom of Heaven,

Because the eyes always deceive you, thus you are lost in the illusion of the world.

You will be the king of the universe when you find yourself or else you have nothing.

 

宇宙之王

 

寻找自己寻找自己的灵魂这是终生的使命

灵魂在你的体内也在遥远的天国

因为眼晴总在把你欺骗而让你迷失于世界的幻象

当你找到了自己甚至一无所有也将成为宇宙之王

 

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.

 

Email:3112362909@qq.com Hongri Yuan Phone:+86 15263747339

Address:No.18 middle school Yanzhou District ,Jining City, Shandong Province, China

 

 

GROWING UP

Linda Hibbard

              It is the autumn of my 7th grade at school.  The first year at Frick Junior High.

            The school is large and dirty and very impersonal.  Perhaps it is the first year of my life that feelings seem to have any importance.  I think I am lost, lost in a large world of uncaring people. It is as if I turned around and found myself in something I couldn’t understand and most of all didn’t want to understand.

            I wonder what am I doing here and why?  Why am I sentenced to this setting.  Last year I didn’t seem to feel much of anything.  I was a child that was taken care of and I want to go back, but I know I can’t.  Now I’m something that is not a child, but what am I?

We’re told to go to period 1, that is P.E., so I go.  The teacher always looks so strange. Her legs are thick and bulky and she wears short socks and heavy white shoes.  Her face is like stone, no emotion, she acts like something of a man and woman combined.  I am scared.  We dress in a cold room, it is always cold in that room.  We dress in queer looking blue shorts with elastic in the legs and snaps on the side.  The shirt is blue all blue with snaps in the front.  Everybody looks alike, we are now going to play tetherball, and we do.  Then the loud whistle brows, it blows in my ear and I can hear the ringing for the next ten minutes.  The game is finally over, nobody seems to know who won or lost and nobody cares.

Next we shower in dirty stalls and hear laughing, giggling and yelling.  My hair is a mess and the day has just began.  I wonder will I get through Period 2.     

Lily and Reed

My mossy pad touching your mighty waist
melancholizes my petals. You play
the flute as if it were a lissom sword.
I love your Creole voice, twigs of raucous
French marinated and casseroled with
African leaves. A rich spinster reading
the soul of the perfect, poor man makes her
richer. I will give my horizontal
to your vertical. Give me not curved moons
that belongs to primitive people; give
me a rusty sickle that I may reap
you for myself. I cannot wait for you
to call yourself mine. Time, our breath, is but
a flower jealously jailed by its bud.
You are egoless; I want to live and
end on your reedbed, not in this soggy
palace. I want to call you, your voice mine.


Fatherly Forms

When I feel down, like a small bulb dying
among a crowd of condescending moons,
my guilty eyes see only one martyr.

He is a devoted, withering trunk
holding countless boughs, twigs, leaves, flowers, fruits.
Unmoved by his perpetual pain, like
greedy worms we feasted on his glory.
We picked up huge stones to stone him, sometimes.

Each dewy morning, the massive mountain
is losing his soil to the angry waves.
He walks around leaning against the walls
of the house he built but can no more own.
Like a scarecrow he kept us safe and fed

our fields, but since the avalanche of white
hair, he is toothless and frightens no birds.

And, when I spend the afternoon over
the bridge watching the fragile fish carry
their blissful bodies down the river, I
feel his youth in the rhythmic ripples and
know he would lie about his evening grief.


Self-Isolation & Shakespeare

A nameless day, I see myself leaning
on a Malboro backstage, my green tongue
in love with borrowed smoke. I talk of
dreams; I am the musical Mercutio.
Stickmen on fire queue up for my concerts.

A blank night, I find myself in seiza
at a shrine, gargling with sweet, warm water.
An Asian Orsino, I chew music;
I am the scarecrow stuffed with red hay,
whose harmonium goes wild and mild.

A dateless noon I see myself digging
into an oyster; I am Bassanio,
the gambler. I rejoice in the absence
of the sun, trying to lure a mermaid into
the spirited marrow of my drained skeleton.

I have no regret as my beard falls on
the cracked window sill. On the old table,
fresh newspaper. Covid count. Coldest rain.
To be Romeo, or not to be Romeo?
Back to my boulder, I am the snowman
cheating invisible death, in his blindness.

Amit Parmessur, 38, a private tutor, is a two-time Pushcart Prize and two-time Best of the Web nominee. His poems have appeared in over 165 magazines, namely WINK, The Rye Whiskey Review, Night Garden Journal, Hobo Camp Review, Ann Arbor Review and Ethos Literary Journal.  He lives in Quatre-Bornes, Mauritius, where he spent his adolescence hating poetry.

gree--------N

gob
lint




ammo/nia nile

nihil
N.O.




wal-

	ker
	lace
        let
        mart
	nut
	rus
	ter
	ton




cylindricalifornia

mistaken for old john coltrane
buttery sky oh




warm germ

petrie
petri
	peachtree




bio/graf

J. D. Nelson (b. 1971) experiments with words in his subterranean laboratory. His poetry has appeared in many small press publications, worldwide, since 2002. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Cinderella City (The Red Ceilings Press, 2012). His poem, “to mask a little bird” was nominated for Best of the Net in 2021. Visit http://MadVerse.com for more information and links to his published work. Nelson lives in Colorado.

	         CIVIL WAR:  ACT 2 

		Three hundred years ago,
		Europe wasn’t white.
		Men were French, Polish, Italian, Greek,
		Swiss, Danish, Ukranian, Turk,
		Finns, Spanish, Austrian, Swedes,
		Dutch, Irish, German, Serbs.
		Not white.

		Three hundred years ago,
		Africa had no blacks.
		They were Maasai, Himba, Zulu, San,
		Dogon, Yoruba, Berber, Bantu,
		Kikuyu, Ndebele, Ashanti, Hausa,
		Fulani, Samburu, Hadzabe, Igbo.
		Not black. 

		Then slave traders came with guns and ropes,
		buying and selling.
		Captured Africans filled boats
                stacked like cordwood.
		Now they were black.
		Auctioned off to customers
		who matched every shade on the gray scale,
		but had the power to be white.

		Opposites.  Duality.
		Authority vs. slavery.
		Slavery endorsed by church-going whites.
		After all, black property wasn’t Christian.
		Nor truly human. 
		When the world is black and white,
		individuality is erased.

		Only poles remain,
		like goalposts in a football game.
		Immigrants jockey for a place on the yard line.
		But the poles are not equal.
		The balance is off,
		and imaginary goalposts
		flash like ghosts.



		Tremors of change shake the field,
		and those who own nothing but whiteness
		lash out, 
		afraid they will lose their grip.
		Those whose blackness is matched
		by talent and ambition
		see a new day on the horizon. 

		But many hang on to the old days,
		days when Jim Crow kept order,
		kept the lowest white 
		a degree above the highest black.
		Along comes a TV name with a slogan:
		Make America great (white) again. 
		The second Civil War begins.
		
		Shots ring out.
		Hate crimes multiply—
		against Muslims, Asians, Jews, Hispanics, Blacks…
		The first skirmishes in a war we thought was over.
		Democracy dies first. 
		A foot on the neck, until life is snuffed out.
		We should have seen this coming.