I sit down to remember myself Who and what I could’ve been Had I not fought countless wars in my head An arrow here and a canon there
I sit down to remember myself A master raconteur I could have been Seeking stories and spinning tales An anecdote here and a narrative there
I sit down to remember myself A gifted painter I could’ve been Colouring memories and sketching days An impasto here and a splattering there
I sit down to remember myself A talented musician I could have been Composing melodies and singing ballads An anthem here and a medley there
I sit down to remember myself The butcher I became Slaughtering thoughts, identity and experiences Into a stagnant river of nothing To be lost in a labyrinth of mayhem
Farah Sheikh is a freelance editor based in Bangkok, Thailand. After studying at Lady Shri Ram College and Jamia Millia Islamia, she worked with Dorling Kindersley Publishing and the Rekhta Foundation. She thrives on Urdu poetry and world cinema.
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Winter consumes the hungry and the poor, leaving them blind at the river’s edge. Police find them and bag them. Fathers and sons, names to be found later. In dark water too slow to swim. Brothers, sisters, in frozen graves.
Young men and women shrieking. Christ, it is cold. They limp sideways. The benches and faces like ice. Eyes raw unable to stare or blink in the snow.
Girls and boys, to the light they go when they are frozen in their tracks. A palm tree bends down just a little at Christmas of all days.
Beggars freeze. Birds freeze. Limbs freeze and even crutches freeze. In winter groins freeze. Poor men and women exposed to a harsh season.
Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozáballives in California, works in Los Angeles, and was born in Mexico. His poetry andillustrations have appeared in Black Petals, Borderless Journal, Blue Collar Review, KendraSteiner Editions, and Unlikely Stores. His latest poetry book, Make the Water Laugh, waspublished by Rogue Wolf Press.
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Danger! sinking mud will drag you down and as you frown it will perish you; but mud’s good for the skin, they say, so come what may I intend to dive straight in.
Why? A logical question that I can answer in a single session. Ready?
It’s because my skin is very wrinkled, and though my eyes are periwinkle blue, it’s true they don’t do much to take out the creases of my face, that façade on the hutch called my head where my brain dwells in isolated splendour.
Therefore it seems to achieve my fondest dream of a smoother brow I must plough a way through seas of sinking mud; for the aesthetic good of my appearance, I have validated clearance from stick in the mud officials.
Watch me as I bound along the beach while preaching the benefits of goo to you as I do; in I go, and so now there’s mud in your eye. Why? An inevitable result of the gloopy splash. I dashed, jumped high and came back down. Goodbye to my corrugated frown! Farewell to the ripples in your eyelids.
I wave at spectators, some well-wishers, others haters; a dozen intellectual debaters who wish to pursue the philosophy of my immersion into the liquid glue of fate. But it’s too late to prevent my slow descent.
What use is talk? Ideas are merely stalks without the flower. The power to cure my skin is right here; mud provides answers to ridged romancers, removes the erosion of years; that’s the proof of the squelchy sucking pudding.
And now I am deep under the beach; I can teach sedimentary schools how to churn out filthy fools with complexions smoother than soft centred confections that elephants have reclined on.
But who might hear me down here? Very few, if any, that’s clear, that’s true. I am isolated but beautiful in the face; mud has given me a graceful profile, good looks that will remain while I abide inside the sludge.
I am grateful but also a little bored. I wonder if I ought to climb up through the gunk, my mind chanting like a monk, emerging at last, a singing shore thing, ironed by pressure, troubled by enforced leisure, a sandy dandy with frictionless skin? Yes, I think I will, I certainly must; too much mud makes me ill.
I’m the colour of rust, but I trust you recognise me still? I’m the mud monster but I dream of soap suds.
Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.
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A grandfather with his young granddaughter boards the train. He pauses briefly in front of the reserved seats, then sits down. As the little girl tries to sit, he explains, "This seat is for grandpas and grandmas."
Beside the seats, there’s a small sign, showing a person with a cane, a person with a round belly, a person on crutches, a person holding a baby.
The subway clanks along, and the child stands in front of the reserved seat section, fiddling with a smartphone.
Sitting on a nearby seat, I almost say, “Sit next to your grandpa,” but hold back— It might sound like encouragement to break the rules. Children should learn to follow public etiquette.
She tries perching on an empty seat, but stands up quickly after a moment, still toying with her phone.
On this sunny spring afternoon, the grandfather, eyes gently closed, sits in the reserved seat, while the spring sunlight shines beside him.
His young granddaughter stands, swaying as she clutches the pole, clanking forward, toward tomorrow.
Ihlwha Choi is a South Korean poet. He has published multiple poetry collections, such as Until the Time When Our Love will Flourish, The Color of Time, His Song and The Last Rehearsal.
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Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author residing in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage. His work can be found both in print and online in such places as: Evergreen Review, The New York Quarterly, Borderless Journal, GloMag, Red Fez, and Lothlorien Poetry Journal.
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Seven, maybe eight, I remembered a windy day long ago; blue sea stretching forever to the sky. Seagulls wheeling, buckets and spades; and all our running in the sand. I remember remembering that.
Thirteen, maybe fourteen, I remembered when I heard the 'Beatles' 'Help'*, or maybe, nine or ten, for, I believe, the very first time. And how it sounded different then; How it sounds darker now.
Twenty-nine, maybe thirty, I remembered how life once seemed like an empty journal; all the pages still unwritten. Now it is full of words, scrawled in indelible ink.
Yesterday, it was, I remembered things I'd said and wished I hadn't; things I'd thought forgotten; quite a litany of regrets. I remember remembering that.
MY PAST LIFE
Having arrived at Heaven's gate I found a queue, so had to wait; a curious angel there enquired about my past life, not long expired. 'Had I enjoyed this life of mine?' 'It helped', said I, 'to pass the time'.
Beatles singing ‘Help’. The song was released in 1965
Stuart McFarlane is now semi-retired. He taught English for many years to asylum seekers in London. He has had poems published in a few online journals.
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Childhood is a perforated tamarind tongue: Through which drops a table in a lawn of green silk, Its spindly legs— the kind which made Victorians go heavy with lust—chase me. I break into a run. I have grown in caterpillar widths in all these years They web themselves around me, a breakfast of lettuce bloomed salmon flesh And papaya juice, the colour of a lime-yellow towel soaked in vacation days made of scraped knees and 300 languid liquid summer hours There, fathers striding through corridors and the deeper ends of pools Brown skin glistening, singing a cigarette laugh, while swaying with an awkward ease to Armstrong beats, evaporating with the sandcastle rook Someone blows loony moons through bulbous glasses My toes stretch, spilling red pulpy bits, having it appear amusing like a deconstructed omelet, on its white legs My memories, a mushy fishbone I hear the dead wear rings of cedar and wings of the sea at day break
GOD COMPLEXES
A feast of eternal sweet nothings by baby pink angels By the bubbly cobblestone alleyways hinged at 225 degrees, I swelled up. How the winglet of the winter night quivered, ready for a flight to snowless lands away The lady in the leopard print blew smoke morphing the mountains into giggly balloons I peered my head within and gave him a bellyful of rose rinsed stars Which fell, soft as a coo, for poets to grasp Humming of how the sane do not know the deliriums of longing and that of love Under the disco fresco we became a turquoise conference of peacocks An engineered eternity, held by giant fingers of bluish distillate.
NIGHTS OUT IN DHAKA
She scooped out sweetmeats and fed them to him. Outside Louis Khan’s sketch, a man with infinite ringlets on his chest Climbed out of a three wheeled vehicle with God’s blessings and Passed on the paper box to an instrument of delight, With a tucked in pink pocket; purrs of little deaths. Dainty fleets of laughter, sheens on cheap chiffon salwars*. A dappled moment of hunger, an affection barely imaginable. They floated on an amorous sea of saturated orange trucks.
*Salwars are South Asian harem pants
Jahanara Tariq is a writer based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She is currently serving as a lecturer at the Department of English and Humanities at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh and is also one of the founding editors atLittera, a literary magazine which she co-owns. Her essays and reviews have been published in The Daily Staramong other places.
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Fearless shadows weave through the transparent mirror’s unlabyrinth of easy glassless escape mopping up every bit of the neon epiphanies occurring
BUILT TO FEAR
A reverse luminescence. A flame etched into the sky to remind the crucified shoppers at the supermarket that nothing is sacred. That hope should be abandoned. That death loves to live in negative paragraphs.
The blade might be dull but it will get the job done.
IN MY HEAD
Dreams are made twisting through gray matter and brain sand of the spider’s cyst next to the plentiful pineal of my thinking machine unruffled by fluoride. My intuition will rise as my dreams will come True, having escaped through lost hair and continuous deep breathing.
One insane source of "sanity" doused with twelve years at the useful idiot factory, poisoned by Pavlovian conditioning, hammered into submission by authority, rote teaching, society's poisonous mirrorism, unliving their lives among the rusted shambles of shackles, of the tainted orthodoxies existing in a realm outside their ruinous rubbled and broken bubbled oblivion—
if one is not careful enough one just might end up a cop.
*Joost Abraham Maurits Meerloo (1903 – 1976), Dutch psychoanalyst
BULLET WITH A NAME
How many alarm clocks will it take to wake up the entire “woke” world? A drifter finds a home. It feels strange to him. I used purple wood to frame a picture of Gia herself smiling big bloomy blossoms.
I pasted a red parasol to my lamp to give it more heart.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is dead.
Leaves have begun to adorn and drown the ground. Don’t stomp or impose boundaries on the molten coating of your skull. I sit here, the world unfolds and unfurls, as I call your bluff!
Heath Brougher
Heath Brougher is the Editor-in-Chief of Concrete Mist Press. He received Taj Mahal Review’s 2018 Poet of the Year Award and is a multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. He has published 12 books and, the latest of which is “Beware the Bourgeois Doomsday Fantasy” (Sandy Press, 2024).
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I let her place her hand on mine. I let her rest it like a turquoise tailor bird. I could feel my burdens lift. We sat watching the kids in the monsoon park, Playing, climbing over the slide board And gliding down. The board was wet where it joined the earth. We didn’t need to speak. Speaking always led to differences. The marigolds had showered and withered Everywhere like tapestried carpet, I squeezed her hand gently, and she said, “Oh!” She got up and walked in the direction of the gate. The man at the gate roasting groundnuts and selling, Kept banging the skimmer On the wrought-iron sand-filled pan. It made a lot of noise.
A Peanut Seller. From Public Domain
Saranyan BV is poet and short-story writer, now based out of Bangalore. He came into the realm of literature by mistake, but he loves being there. His works have been published in many Indian and Asian journals. He loves the works of Raymond Carver.
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People creep along the street. I wonder what life once moved beneath their feet? It was there for billions of years, before roses bloomed and lilies grew here, observed by these same stars, which never grow old, but I still continue my work, because weeds never stop growing, and questions I can’t answer, disturb my weeding.
AFTER AN EVENING WALK
After a warm rain the grass stretches to the horizon, where it meets the infinite sky. The gardens are as brilliant as Persian carpets, but storm clouds like boulders gather in that sky. Turning away with eyes looking firmly ahead, I avoid a muddy weed bed, and the leaves which hang from sagging branches, like soggy lanterns, as they begin to fall on my hatless head.
George Freek’s poetry has recently appeared in The Ottawa Arts Review, Acumen, The Lake, The Whimsical Poet, Triggerfish and Torrid Literature.
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Borderless 