by Amera Elwesef

I am writing to you now without putting my right hand on my chest, quivering from cold and grief. I don't cry any more, Mom, just hide under our destroyed table, count my breath, a very long time holding my dirty cotton doll, watching the footsteps of the hurry passengers on our crowded road. As usual, I am putting my mad eyes into the wide openings of our ragged tent, waiting to catch someone's eyes, perhaps seeing those eyes convincing me I am still alive. 
 
I am still your sweet daughter, your lovely baby, the crawler on the sharp platforms every midnight. I am still your patience girl walking after your shadow, looking for the warmth of your heart and the smell of your face. Last night I dreamed about you. I was showering under the honey down, and you were in front of me and tried your best to touch my little belly with your warm fingers. In my dream, I was the baby girl with wavy hair and you were my immortal mother still moving her big fingers under her baby’s belly to make her laughing, but in spite of her great job, her baby still crying. I am writing to you with a flushed dirty face and also a delicious confusion which make me whisper through the long hours of the day and night like an immigrant bird.
 
It is my dearest confusion of my whole life as a woman who decided to write with her foot. Everybody here in my world still wondering how could a woman dare to write with her foot? Everybody here in my world whispers from the first light on down until the last light of twilight, my people want seriously to catch my inner secret, they addicted to asking each other about my upturned situation.
 
"Writing with your foot, how dare you?!" they cry in front of my face and behind my back. They never stop asking and asking and asking, and I conceal my heart very well because in the case of they saw it, they will discover immediately my secret, they will know the only answer of "how a woman dare writing with her foot?"
 
If you are a writer, there will be a weird rumor, never leave you, based upon some upper stories such as you use the stars as punctuation, and the blue of skies is your immortal ink that never runs dry, and you have a deal with angels and devils, also you spy on every insect crawled on the earth. If you are a writer, you may see the shadow of William Shakespeare every midnight above your head, explain to you how to eat the time, how to dissolve yourself between letters, he will explain to you how to put your heart on the paper without pretending.
 
As a woman decided to write with her foot, I just asked how to think differently, how to play with your imagination ball like a professional player. My name is Baraka, one of those homeless women who spent their spring age on the cold sidewalks, eating nothing, feeling nothing, tried their best to tame neediness. I have no idea about the rosy dreams and all I know is scratching the trash cans every night. And about my pillow, it is not surprising to be a haystack. When the honey down, watered my hair, I figured out that I am in the middle of nowhere. When the headlights blocked my sight, I touched my darkness.
 
I am a very patient crawler on the rough edges of life, I am a naked woman because of the conspiracy of poverty, lean body stretched along with the torn papers which covered the pavement.
 
I am here writing in my mind, in my blood, create my own imaginary world which doesn’t seem similar to my harsh fate. All my whole life, I have been covered with an ecstasy of writing. I gorge my poor flesh with clay and this weird stuff, not my choice at all. Dear and poor Eve, I am dissolving under the furious sky, need your help to clean my dirty body. I am here in one of the street corners recalling your great spirit against the boys who chased me by throwing clay which forced me to run away, in fact, I couldn't escape away from their harsh beats, but really I do it, I ran away here in my imaginary world. I have shed tears here under the elder tree, touching my ribs during that much time. I am not blind, I am just half-educated woman who lives in a separate tent on one side of our hungry street, a half-educated woman who still desperately dream to finish her education, but how an orphaned female in the third world dares to demand to achieve any dream except getting married?
 
I was crawling on the floor, trying to count my breath slowly and hurry. It is my exclusive moment where I stitch my poetry piece. The very last time when I contemplate myself as a baby with a wide mouth and curious eyes. And the hours pass heavily, my poor heart couldn’t bear any more. Yes, it is me the funniest creature you see ever, the ocean which walks on two feet, and that idiot elephant which bitterly wish to fit the crazy fashion. There is a mysterious voice escaping away from the ticking of my watch, the voice haunted me, but my soul with a harsh weapon, here in the heart of my ears all these secrets which nights hide them very well, every secret scream in the silence of space Who am I? and I join in their mourning now with nonstop of repeating Who am I?

AUTHOR
Amera Elwesef is a freelance writer, poet, and novelist. With five books written in Arabic and many English works have been published in various cultural magazines in many international literary and cultural magazines around the globe.  With 2 published books in English, a collection of poetry "for those who don't know chocolate" and a children's book "the cocoa boy and other stories". Her literary creative works have been translated into Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, and Kurdish.
 

by Mandeep Kaur

A splash of blitheness
Clad in softer shade causing
Shrieks in red petals
With glide so gentle
Letting the pieces fall
Painting colors in his thumping heart

How beautiful and rare she was
And how special to him!
Inching closer to her in enraptured fancy
Sinking in her thoughts while she indwells
That un-dwelt space of heart where no one else has ever been
The innocent glee in her eyes
Giving him million thinks
So filled of her, every inch of him
And the resultant radiant glow beams.

That maddening passion
Soaking the soft moonlight
Not letting the feelings fade
Not Certain
The heart beating for her or he is beating for the heart
To hug the one, he was always thinking of perhaps!
 
Can’t grasp the world anymore
As her thoughts walk wild on his numb brain  

Spreading his waiting arms
Dying to catch her while the dew rides the pink petals
Sheer magic oozing out of her full moist lips
His heart enmeshed in her thoughts in the quick passing soft hours
Sighing for that hold so rapturous

Holding  the stars in her smile
Gleaming in glow with the blush so rare
Apple-kissed creamy cheeks
Waiting for his panting rhythms of love

Everything he craved for rests in her eyes
Where love runs untamed, he dreams
Million ways he would touch her
Sinking in her bottomless inner chambers

Here dawns that night
Flowing beyond measures
Her heart laid bare
His wandering lips
Sneaking into her tender inner recesses
Their bodies lay entwined with curved elegance
Strokes of passionate affection
Trickling the petals of her soul into his being
Their one world and the beatific moonlight
Even the stars envied
Their bond strong.

AUTHOR
Kaur is working as an Assistant Professor. She teaches courses on Victorian literature, African literature, British Drama, genetics in literature and film, and contemporary American literature at the graduate and post graduate level. With her vivid academic interests, she wants to explore everything and anything that stimulates her intellect. Her research work is mostly in the form of papers, poetry and articles published in multiple journals.

by Linda Wisniewski

Our busload of senior citizens came to a stop on a dirt road in New Mexico, unsure of what to expect. After the balloon fiesta in Albuquerque, and a couple of days in Santa Fe, we were bound for lunch in Tesuque pueblo, at the home of Louie Pena, a Native American conservationist and river guide.   

One of New Mexico’s smallest pueblos, with a population of about 400, Tesuque has been in its present location in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains for over 800 years. Louie would meet us in the road, because the bus was too big to travel down his street. No photos were permitted, a tribal decision. We would see the place framed only by our preconceptions, and I knew I had a few of those.

My Polish grandparents came to North America in the 1890s, welcomed for their labor if not for their ethnicity. They were, in fact, recruited to work in rug, broom and glove factories. Louie’s people have been here much longer. We stood on what is left of their land, most of it taken from them by white settlers before my own people arrived. An oblivious little white girl, I watched Tonto and the Lone Ranger on a black and white TV. I didn’t learn about the genocide of Native peoples – not at school, at home, at church, or in the news. Not anywhere. But I know about it now. History is being rewritten to include the uncomfortable truth, and I knew it as I stood on that dirt road in Tesuque, squarely between an ancient unfamiliar culture and the dominant one I know so well.

Standing tall in the bright October sunshine, Louie described the traditional feast his wife had prepared, then led us down a path through a small field. We walked over a dry ditch on a makeshift bridge of boards, passing an old TV tube and other unrecognizable-to-me appliance parts in the weeds. The neighborhood lacked the type of landscaping my friends and I spend bundles of money on each spring and fall. We passed no ornamental plants in pots, no hanging baskets on porches. Dogs who might be German shepherds sniffed our legs and hands, tails wagging. No leashes, no barking. Though people give them names, Louie said, and feed and pet them, they stay outside. We filed past a trampoline and a toddler’s plastic riding toy in the yard, and Louie joked the toys were “not for me, for my grandkids.” 

Native art adorned the walls inside his home – baskets, paintings, rattles and feathers - and Native objects – dolls, pots, and dishes - filled a glass curio cabinet in a corner near the TV. Louie said he liked to watch the Boston Red Sox, and we all relaxed a little.     

An enormous bear head looked down from the living room wall. Louie told us how he killed that bear as it stalked the village when he was only 14, while we devoured forkfuls of shredded chicken, potato salad and a hot corn dish I wish I had the recipe for. As he talked, his wife Serena served the food with quiet grace. Two of her thirteen grandchildren, a boy and a girl, moved expertly and quietly around the large open kitchen, emptying pots and filling serving bowls.   

We sat on picnic benches in rapt attention as Louie passed around jars of dried herbs, his medicine. He talked about his classes in sustainable living, encouraging us to love our “Earth Mom.” I’ve forgotten most of what he said, but I remember the sense of comfort he and his family created. I didn’t want to leave. 

Before meeting Louie’s family, I believed indigenous Americans lived sad and poor lives, confined to reservations. I thought they were mostly alcoholic, starving, and ineffective protestors against oil and gas pipelines. But in the pueblo, I saw self-confident people promoting a healthy future while teaching their children to have pride in their culture. Louie and his family take tourists on Feast and Float rafting trips, teaching about ecology and serving natural Native foods. I thought of them later as I made my own soup and sorted laundry at home, doing the little things that make up my comfortable life. 

I live as an elder Anglo woman in an increasingly diverse country, and I am determined to stay awake and aware. I want to know more. On the internet, I read about the tension between the Natives and Anglos over a plan to build a casino near the Santa Fe Opera, and about Indians charging access fees to Anglo people with homes on Native land. I read about the protests at the Santa Fe Plaza where I posed for a photo, and where the Spanish conquest of the Indians is celebrated every year. 

Louie and all the tribal people we met in New Mexico called themselves Indians, but I wanted to distance myself from the Cowboys and Indians ethos of my youth, when we thought we knew who the bad guys were: not us. I continued to use the term I believed to be politically correct: Native Americans. 

Back home, I discovered that the U.S. government coined the term in the late 20th century and that 50% of tribal people in the American West call themselves Indians. Many prefer the name of their particular tribe: Pueblo, Navaho, Ute, Zuni, Apache, Comanche. Louie Pena is Tewa.
Like many others, I often feel compelled to form a strong opinion about matters I don’t fully understand. I don’t know how Louie and his family feel about the protests or the casinos or the access fees. Or why they don’t care about landscaping their neighborhood. I don’t know how much I have assumed about them. I only know my visit to Tesuque changed my perception of tribal peoples and reminded me, at my advanced age, to listen and learn and prepare to be surprised. Now to sign up for that rafting trip…  

AUTHOR
​Linda C. Wisniewski lives and writes in Bucks County, PA, where she volunteers at the historic home of author Pearl S. Buck. Her work has been published in newspapers, literary magazines and anthologies, both print and online. Her memoir, Off Kilter, has been published by Pearlsong Press. Linda's first novel,  Where the Stork Flies, is forthcoming from Sand Hill Review Press. Visit her blog at www.lindawis.com.

​

by Carla Durbach

there are claws shredding through silk as you 
tiptoe into the dark, cringing in whispers of 
daylight, walking on razor blades and shards 
of glass, when all you want is to pull the trigger
 
and I bet that when he put that ring on your finger 
you shuddered to think of retreat, lay down in ritual 
urgency of mangled lines with bones digging
 and just nodded your head

AUTHOR
Carla 's research has been published in psychology journals but she is tentatively branching out into the world of poetry after an absence of many years.

by Susanna Saracco

Here she is
The person you have known
Here she is 
The person who believed
Here she is
The person who was faithful
Here she is
The emotional person
Here she is
The person who flew
Here she is
The person who wakes up at dawn smiling
Here she is 
The generous person
Here she is
The person who believes
Here she is
She sits alone in the train
She is choosing a gift for herself
Now she sees

AUTHOR
Susanna Saracco got an MA in ancient philosophy from the University of Turin, Italy. She studied in Vancouver, Canada and got a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Sydney, Australia. As an academic author she has published the book Plato and Intellectual Development: A New Theoretical Framework Emphasising the Higher-Order Pedagogy of the Platonic Dialogues, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017 and several articles. This is her first work in poetry.

by Bradley Bazzle

Recently I was in Oxford for four months, living in an apartment without internet access. Living in Oxford was interesting, but living without home internet was perhaps even more interesting. Many of the effects were positive. Not being bombarded by the news, for instance, helped me concentrate on my writing. And the absence of social media helped me pretend I wasn’t missing out on anything. Other effects were less predictable, however. 
​
After about two months, I realized I hadn’t listened to music—I mean deliberately listened to it, as opposed to heardit in a grocery store or wherever—since leaving home. And on the few occasions I did listen to music, I was powerfully affected by it. One afternoon, while trying to work at an empty bar called the Jericho Tavern, I found myself unduly distracted by the music they were playing, and then, after listening closely, a little moved by it. And this wasn’t music I would have listened to on purpose, like the Pointer Sisters. The singer sounded more like the UK version of Jason Mraz, only with electronic beeps and whirrs that I supposed had become de rigueurin the two months since I listened to music. 

Another side-effect of living without music was that songs never got stuck in my head. Before, I would get songs stuck in my head for days, even weeks. Onetime I had “Neutron Dance” by the Pointer Sisters stuck in my head for over a month. The song colors my memory of that entire period of my life, which included a breakup and its grizzly aftermath. It started (the “Neutron Dance” period, I mean) because I was listening to the song on Youtube deliberately, though it’s hard to imagine that now. I believed it was an among the greatest songs ever recorded, even better than “He’s So Shy.” How wrong I was. By the end, I would have paid hundreds of dollars to replace it in my head with “He’s So Shy” or even “Betcha Got a Chick on the Side.” 

Another interesting thing about Oxford is that people there aren’t into the Pointer Sisters. One evening, while I was trying to make friends at the same bar, a well-dressed man sat down on the barstool next to mine. He was older than I, which was unusual in that neighborhood. After a polite interval, he asked what I was thinking about.

“Pardon?” I said.

“You look pensive,” he said.

“Well, honestly, I’m listening closely to the music.” I explained my situation: how I was living without the internet and found myself affected more powerfully by music for that reason, even music I didn’t particularly like.

“What music do you like?” he asked.

“The Pointer Sisters,” I said.

He smiled, which in retrospect I interpret as surprise—he probably hadn’t thought about the Pointer Sisters since their peak in 1984 with “Automatic” and “Jump (for My Love)”—but at the time I took the smile to mean that he too liked the Pointer Sisters. So I asked him who was his favorite Pointer Sister, and what did he think of The Pointer Sisters Live in Billings? Live in Billingswas the first album to feature Issa, who was, as Ruth’s daughter, the first second-generation Pointer Sister and not actually a sister. Later, Sadako, a third-generation Pointer Sister, would be added to the lineup. I was explaining all this when I saw that the man’s eyes had wandered. In desperation, I began to offer the names of other bands, hoping to re-spark his interest.

“Do you like Sister Sledge?” I asked. “What about Chic? DeBarge? The Staple Singers?”
But the man was gone.

For a time—before getting perspective, months later, by writing this—I thought the man had detected the inauthenticity with which I offered those other names and been repulsed by it, or at least had thought me a low character who would say anything to prop up conversation. Sister Sledge was great, don’t get me wrong, but they didn’t write their own music and were hemmed in by their tiresome “nice girl” act. The Pointer Sisters weren’tnice girls. Really, they weren’t even girls. Ruth was thirty-two when their breakout single, a cover of the Bruce Springsteen song “Fire,” hit the charts in 1978. Ten years later, in their classic rendition of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” for the Very Special Christmas charity album, all three sisters sound a few egg nogs deep into their evening. One always gets the sense from the Sisters, even during their most insouciant songs like “Slow Hand,” that their soulful voices and not-so-young bodies have history. The Pointer Sisters are women. Confident women. And if the English don’t understand that, what can I say?

That my own favorite sister is June, may she rest in peace, should come as no surprise. One of the joys of the Pointer Sisters is that there’s a Sister for everyone. Yes, it was Ruth who sang their best songs, in that deep sultry voice of hers, and who of course donned their most iconic outfit, the fabulous oversized white skirt-suit from the “Automatic” video. And it was Anita, the prettiest, who sang their early hits and penned their first, the country song (!) “Fairytale.” But it was skinny, seemingly carefree June who won my heart: “That sweet little boy who caught my eye—he’s so shy!”

For some, knowing that June’s bubbly exterior disguised addiction, even anguish, adds a tinge of sadness to her exuberant singing. Not for me. When I hear June today I sense more than ever that she sings to me directly, and from an abyss even lonelier than any I can imagine. 


AUTHOR:
Bradley Bazzle’s first novel, Trash Mountain, won the Red Hen Press Fiction Award, judged by Steve Almond. His short stories can be found in The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, New England Review, Epoch, Third Coast, Web Conjunctions, Bad Penny Review (as Dirk Morgus), and online at bradleybazzle.com. He lives in Athens, Georgia, with his wife and daughter.