Or Don’t Be Fooled By Her Self-Righteousness
After De lo eterno y lo lúdico by Cristina Francov
If you could only see her when she slips into her sleek pajamas
and
fights for hours with me, her alter ego, always dressed in
contrasting
colors from head to toe. She favors the coolness of
seashell
and ivory tones while my clothes are tainted with cravings,
the
shades of fire and blood. That’s why I can’t stand her political
correctness
though we’ve shared the same umbilical cord and most
of
the time coexist harmoniously. Or is it because I usually fade
within
her during the day, a replica she carries within, folded in
her
pocket like a cardboard silhouette?
Only
at night does she allow me to materialize and sit next to her.
Hours
long we ask each other the sempiternal question: Che vuoi?
Maybe
she yearns to accept me, the way a terminally ill patient
needs
a blood transfusion or autologous stem cells? We coexist
in
constant contradiction: one of us wants to swallow the whole
world,
get up at dawn and run barefoot on the beach to catch the
first
rays of sun while the other would rather lie down all day long
and watch the sun set.
First
published by Gargoyle
From
Or Did You Ever See The Other Side?(Press 53 2023)
De lo Eterno y lo Lúdico serie sembradores de estrellas by Cristina Francov
Or Have You Ever Noticed Erasure Patterns Within Fractals?
After
Generations Lost by Helen Zughaib
Scattered on a multi-faceted quilted pond, women’s faces emerge, each as though from the center of a lotus about to drown before sunset. Eyes lined with kohl look alike. Their unanswered quest blurs the lines on the receding oval faces. In the midst of that fractal fragmentation some hands stand out holding a blank sheet of paper, or were they once photographs of loved ones, so old the image was erased by indifference as life goes by with its dismembered seasons mixed pell-mell with gouache on that canvas like in a kaleidoscope constantly reshuffling its patterns, relying upon the onlooker to revisit the artist’s gaze over the drowning faces.
First published by About Place: Dignity as an Endangered Species in the 21st Century
From Or Did You Ever
See The Other Side? (Press 53 2023)
Generations
Lost by Helen Zughaib (USA b. Beirut, Lebanon)
https://dcarts.emuseum.com/objects/3602/generations-lost;jsessionid=5CC59D832D5F773251AAF17A4EFCE659?ctx=1c1266c63cb2c344f14cbb28d23840e6dae0f2a4&idx=0
The Upright Piano
After Piano on Fire: Mirror Maze by Andrew Ferez
I see myself out in the cold, draped in a silk nightgown,
seated
barefoot on a stool by that upright piano, you know, the
one my
mother bought when she thought I should take piano
lessons, while
others played during recess, oh, how I first struggled
striking notes
daily, practicing scales, then rehearsing Mozart’s “Rondo
alla Turca”
till I’d play it in my mind relentlessly, tan tan tan . .
. tan tan tan . . .
even when I knew I’d never learn another piece, and now,
half a
century later, I am drawing with memory’s wavering lines
that same
piano to make it the vessel of my heart’s message, of so
much left
unsaid buried in a bitter well turning into notes that
rise in tongues of
cold fire licking my insides with every key I touch,
unharmed, I feel
the piano ablaze under my fingertips, twisted candles
adorn its top
that grows into a tower and turrets spouting flames from
windows,
a menace to the adjacent branches, my fingers wildly
strike the
keyboard while the sky opens up like a stage filled with
shimmering
damask memories dancing to the melody like maddened fireflies.
First published by Knot
Magazine
From Under
Brushstrokes (Press 53 2015)
Piano on Fire:Mirror Maze by Andrew Ferez (Russian) 2011
Illustration for the book "Mirror
Maze" by Natalia Kalinina
https://elhurgador.blogspot.com/2012/12/andrew-ferez-ilustracion.html
On the Sargasso Sea
After Bishop of Sargasso
Sea by Yacek Yerka
Think of a houseboat floating over a sea of foaming moss
so thick
it seems anchored in green dunes despite its full-blown
drift though
it’s only a contrivance and whoever lives in it is
obsessed with the
passing of time: an alarm clock by the bed, a cuckoo at
the entrance,
a sundial at the threshold, a timer by the stove, a
wooden clock on
the dining table, an hourglass cresting the wall, a bell
by the water
clock, and let us not forget the telescope placed between
the bottle
of wine and the grapes, stalking the movement of stars.
Grains of sand fall, a rhythm espousing the ticking of
clocks: chimes
and bells oscillate, muffled by surrounding haze, and
there’s no room
for fantasy: its dweller watches coffee drip drop by
drop, is aware
how long it takes to read each line on a page, successive
seconds
pervade his sleep, even his daydreams, nothing’s left to
chance, only
he knows deep inside he has become a clock within a
clock, afraid
of losing track; lost in that sea of moss, he’d still
feel the thump of
his own heartbeat.
First published by Poet
Lore
From Under
Brushstrokes (Press 53 2015)
Bishop of Sargasso Sea by Yacek Yerka (Polish) 1996
https://www.instagram.com/p/CVN7-zaoWWt/
Hedy Habra is a poet, artist, and essayist. Her latest poetry collection, Or Did You Ever See The Other Side?, won the International Poetry Book Awards and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer and USA Best Book Awards. The Taste of the Earth won the Silver Nautilus Book Award and Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Tea in Heliopolis won the Best Book Award, and Under Brushstrokes was a finalist for the International Book Award. Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the Arab American Book Award’s Honorable Mention and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Her book of criticism is Mundos alternos y artísticos en Vargas Llosa. She is a twenty-five-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and a recipient of the Nazim Hikmet Award. https://www.hedyhabra.com/
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