One Poem by Hedy Habra

 

Raoucheh,                             

Thirty-five years later, Beirut’s Pigeons’ Rock

                        forever mute witness of the civil war

 

a huge rock erect

   where purple evenings

conjure Phoenician sails,

a backdrop to tales heard

   as a child, of lovers hiding,

often drowning in its grotto's

emerald tears. 

   I used to imagine

how the Champollion,

a ship venturing too close,

   lay trapped for years

in blue mist,

her insides

torn apart by this Giant's

   unclenched fist,

stopped in slow motion,

in an idle attempt to rise,

petrified by salt spray,

  her remains buried

in quicksand

in the midst of the Bay.

 

A fallen Olympian,

   forever flanked

by dancing waves,

its ire, our inner

   obscure well, as if

casting a black

cloud over the former

brightness of sails,

   rustling canopies,

over our steps along

the Promenade des Français,

 

breeze flowing

through my curls, gusts

   of wind sculpting

our bodies, redesigning

silhouettes,

erasing footsteps,

   echoes of laughter,

muffled sighs,

all the people

long gone.

 

Some, as pawns

   on a map, glided to

another turquoise Bay,

in Jounieh,

along the wavering coastline,

      an ersatz, surviving its artifice...

There, people of the same faith

pull on the narguilehs

in the cafés,

play dice and backgammon,

 

   women of the same clan

stretch their smooth,

lustrous bodies

   under the midday sun

deserting Raoucheh's corniche

its rocky shores now crowded

   only by male bathers

and fishermen,

 

while the imposing stone horseshoe

clamped in indigo

   is no longer a good omen

after so many years

of fallen,

dismantled bodies

   blown up theatres,

casinos, snipers’ crossfire

from deserted terraces,

   the air still remembers

the smell of fear

and gunpowder,

 

its acrid taste unmasked

   by the unrelenting fumes

of daily exhausts. 

In every corner,

   next to a restored building,

an old house stands, scarred,

windowless,

phantomlike,

   awaiting mouth agape

the miraculous facelift.

The burning sun tires

   of recycling endless debris                          

left over by thousands,

the waste of hatred,

   and time, once a healer

broods despair.

 

Some far away will dream

  a laced balcony,

delicate mosaics, unfaded,

   patina adding its final touch

to pink façades, sepia walls

faceted stones,

   deeply engraved in the retina

unfolding in the mirrors

of our minds.

 

I recall how wafts of orange blossoms

mixed with effluvia

of salty breeze,

   once whispering under pillars

and arcades, would reach us

as we rested under a Jacaranda’s

   trembling blue shade.

 

I often gazed through thick glass,

   at the delicate displays of vials and flasks

rescued from the depths

of Tyre and Sidon

gilded by time,

   marvelled at the fluidity of erosion

over blown glass

and burnished metals,

all pearl-like treasures forever gone,

 

   like so many of us,

the lucky ones

fading away in distant lands

   dreaming new dreams,

our children unaware

of what is no longer there,

   unable to hear the voices

we cannot silence

 

the song of the orphans

the song of the fishermen's nets

the song of the abandoned house

the song of the goat living in a palace

the song of the refugees milking a goat over Persian carpets

the song of the windshields constellated with stars of death

the song of the driver forced to leave his car at an intersection

the song of an entire school bus emasculated because they were Maronites

the song of mothers and children blown up because they were not Maronites

the song of a town torn apart, its children hanging like heavy fruits from olive

   and almond-trees, nipples and testicles dripping with blood on the lower branches

the song still heard through murmuring leaves, cacti and pine needles, as the roots remember

the song of Beirut burning us safe watching the flames from a hill,

   waiting for the madness to reach the mountains

the song of the man who never returned home, his head rolling behind his car

the song of a fool who crossed the green line to meet his Muslim lover,

   only to be found the next day in a small bag under the infamous bridge

the song of the silent ride over the bridge of death, the only way to the airport. 

I ran to have a passport picture taken with the two of you,

   tried to comb your hair as best as I could.

Your hair so fine, it curled around my fingers.

 

 

First published by Mizna Literary Journal

From Tea in Heliopolis (Press 53 2013)

Hedy Habra is a poet, artist and essayist. She is the author of three poetry collections from Press 53, most recently, The Taste of the Earth (2019), Winner of the Silver Nautilus Book Award and Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award; Tea in Heliopolis Winner of the Best Book Award and Under Brushstrokes, which was a Finalist for the Best Book Award and the International Book Award. Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the Arab American Book Award’s Honorable Mention and was Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. A seventeen-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the net, and recipient of the Nazim Hikmet Award, her multilingual work appears in numerous journals and anthologies. https://www.hedyhabra.com/

 

 

Four Poems by Nathan Anderson

 

Multi - (lift lift) 

 

terrestrial reforming

a matter

of

religion

 

                          coming after in the

 

note the flag is waving 

 

the fruit has

shed

and casts

a rhythm 

 

tickticktickticktickticktickticktick

tickticktickticktickticktickticktick

tickticktickticktickticktickticktick

tickticktickticktickticktickticktick 

 

=return as message=

Inhale (exhale) Inhale 

 

c  l  o  c  k           on

             

                           (in) 

 

'it's a long way to...' 

 

row                     row

row                     row

row                     row

row                     row

row                     row

row                     row 

 

a headache without

procession

progression

selection

transgression 

 

(there's smoke if you see (to) it)

Going in Time 

 

inside                /          and         /              out

 

its

                     own

 

the steeple chase is a 

 

                                       the mountain is

 

                       /aflame/ 

 

not that it was ever

the cube is degrading into

planetary vicissitudes 

 

/how/they/wail/at/the/sunrise

 

/how/they/wail/at/the/sunrise

 

/how/they/wail/at/the/sunrise

 

/how/they/wail/at/the/sunrise 

 

Extraction (bass note) 

 

wallowing as the

flower

flower 

 

                  a beacon to the left step 

 

the plus               (+)

is

over

over 

 

                                the hat fell from the

                                head and made the

                                sound the

                             sound the

                          sound the

                       sound 

 

terrible how the time splits and mirrors the

solicitude gone waking through the older

spread and sounding how the horn does

sound what else to wake for what else to

dream for

a city

with

a split

lip 

 

and some oil

Nathan Anderson is a poet from Mongarlowe, Australia. His books can be purchased in print or downloaded as free pdfs from nathanandersonwriting.home.blog. He can also be found on Twitter @NJApoetry.

Five Poems by Elena Malec

 

distant town

your eyes cling on fences like morning glory
wide open, blink rapidly
you imagine magnificent birds and a rare emotion visits you
when in a distant town
police officers beat the hell
out of a Black teenager.

hollow

when evening comes
you take off your shirt
remove your skin
remove the cork from your chest
and let the air into the hollow
I inspect for a moment its darkness
I would give everything to enter like a ladybug,
a butterfly, a bud into the hollow of your chest
without fear that my dream gets
fossilized

subsistence

I had a long, sharp stick,
I walked in the parks piercing poems
which I piled in a plastic bag
till there was no more room
then I was waiting for clients on WhatsApp

idol

It was late when you told Dali
to leave his moustache alone,
you had a huge, melted apple project
who would have thought that you were secretly
telling the fortune from apple seeds
when with melting hands the alarm clock
was stealing my metrical foot

collage

you leaned over the railing to make sure he was there
then you ran up the stairs
leaning against the red brick wall
a naked woman was squatting
in a black and white poster
you wiped away her tears
you dried with your sleeve your wet eyelashes
behind a sculpture of a man
Giacometti ventured a smile
copyrighted by Getty images

 

 

Elena Malec is a philologist by trade, poet and artist by choice. She has published literary criticism, prose, poetry, essays, haiku, books of gourmet cooking, ikebana, morimono, and art. She lives with her husband in Southern California where she dedicates to painting, writing, making rag dolls, ikebana and haiku. Her books can be found on Amazon. Her haiku and senryu is published in many online journals.

 

Four Poems by Adam Chabot

 

His Favourite Animal

 

My four-year-old son flutters his wrists,

dainty and light, skips from one kitchen

 

floor tile to the next, “they’re petals, Dad!”

he squeals balancing on one socked foot, a

 

butterfly paper cut-out he had clearly cut and

coloured in Crayola-crafted scribblings of oranges

 

yellows, and reds, clutched in a sweaty grip

like the flaccid rope alongside a swinging

 

bridge: monarchs, viceroys, admirals, he tells

me everything he learned at day care

 

including the “proboscis” demonstrated by

tongue flailing and giggles, but everything

 

is transitory; butterflies live for four weeks,

and during a recent cleaning purge,

 

the crumpled cut-out found a black

contractor bag, a choice my son made in spite

 

of my crisis of time’s passing. He moves on,

discovers value in the ever-evolving present

 

like the legacy of old things my mother gives

me at the conclusion of each visit: a tattered copy

 

of The Old Curiosity Shop, worthless. “Look

inside,” she said. “At the inscription, you see?”

 

“To Evie—Merry Christmas, 1922” in careful

longhand. I worry about her, want to proclaim

 

the obvious without insult. I tell her

that’s not me. She smiles and explains that

 

it was someone, and for an iron-mouthed

moment, my son floats backwards as if tethered,

 

and folds back into a cocoon to relive

everything again, like a God.

Natural World

 

The neighbour is out mowing again,

a throbbing, rhythmic rumble

 

like the hum of a chest freezer.

Crabgrass has invaded the sandbox,

 

germinated from beneath its surface

perhaps from a dog turd or crushed

 

blueberry dropped from my three-year-old

son’s fingers. Someday, I think,

 

the wasps will return

on instinct like salmon looking

 

to mate, an instinct, a rite of passage.

Maybe—they could complete

 

their nest, perhaps the one inside

the outlet cover, or the one we uncovered

 

in the woodshed. I remember—with

gloved hands I sprayed a foamy chemical

 

into its bulbous cylindrical hole like

an insemination, an explosion

 

of panic, static buzzing, a tardy

alarm for a tornado in the night.

 

Eventually, black bodies oozed out,

tumbling and caked in whiteness

 

like shaving cream: threat neutralized in

the springtime rains, snowmelt,

 

the waterpark of our sloped driveway

home to wriggling worms like

 

a minefield. I tell my son “the floor

is lava” and he freezes then hopscotches

 

from empty space to empty space

as drizzle tickles his blue slicker.

 

It’s a familiar game but each step

crushes life and his ignorance

 

shields him from all of that. All of this

is for him. Who cares about

 

dandelions when real things can

get you? The mowing stops. The job

 

is done. The sun—there’s a tick

crawling on my leg.

 

 

Summoning Spirits

 

Dilapidated worlds, abandoned

houses mimic life as interim holiday

mausolea, tenebrous symbols

of the day in which all us kids

wanted was to be someone or

something else for a couple

of hours. But on this night

among water damage and

derelict crows’ nests, a shredded

corpse of a mouse, colourless, faded

7UP cans tumbling from an overturned

plastic trash barrel, oscillations of

occasional sunlight and persistent

neglect, these homes aren’t haunted,

they’re just sad, ghosts of themselves.

In our paltry séance, we hold hands

in a circle and, if it’s only me, I pray

someone can make amends

for this. 

 

 

Tonight

 

or his neck hunched

over his phone,

looming and weighty

like a sad, inebriated

expectation… I am

begging him

as his friend

to stop the meatless

actions. “It doesn’t

matter,” I say. “Nothing

we can solve tonight,”

but a yelping dog

on a frigid, forgotten

back porch barks

until it can’t

any longer because

at some point,

that screen door

opens again, no

matter what

anyone says.

Adam Chabot is the English Department Chair at Kents Hill School, a private, independent high school located in central Maine. His other poetry has been recently featured in rough diamond poetry, Magpie Lit, and Selcouth Station, among others. He can be found on Twitter @adam_chabot.