BASHAR’S BOUDOIR

by Salma Amrou

Physicists are born when bombs fall 

on heads like apples. According to the law of inertia,

once a dictator falls he never stops falling

flat on his face in Homs and Aleppo and Damascus

and Deraa, on graffitied walls invoking broken Hippocratic oaths

and stripped bare down to his underwear in a leaked

boudoir shoot and photos by the pool, 

skin draped taut across collar bones like tent poles,

albums showing all the skin where the sun never shone:

girls raped and children raised in prison cells

and corpses crushed between metal, dead rose

pressed between the pages of a ledger, each pose

for the camera a little sassier than the other. In the second law

of motion, the greater the suffering, the greater

the force needed to suppress it. Sednaya’s red wing walls 

varnished in the most sensual shade of blood

a shrine where the mouths of praying prisoners

are forced to swallow his name in place of God’s. Starving 

for some form of salvation, a country cannibalizes itself,

a dietary regimen to sate the appetite of the regime: detainees

swallowed and digested in the guts beneath ground.

In the third law of motion, revolt is regurgitation, 

bowels of bloodlust rising in an upchuck reflex, 

streaked across his tongue like the sweet nothings 

and the blush in his wedding pictures, too shy to look his bride 

or his people in the eye, fleeing from the gravity of his vows,

from the fact that he’s been falling 

and falling–

One of the photos of Bashar Assad discovered by rebels and posted on social media.

Editor's note: You can help the White Helmets rebuild lives and hope in Syria.

Salma Amrou is a former Youth Poet Laureate of Southeastern Virginia and an undergraduate student at the College of William & Mary. An Egyptian-American poet and aspiring novelist, her work explores themes of identity, belonging, and the experiences of the Arab and Muslim diaspora. Her work will be featured in the forthcoming issue of Zhagaram Literary.

GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE

by Chris O’Carroll

Confronted with new evidence of torture and mass hangings in one of his military prisons, Syrian President Bashar Assad said in an exclusive interview February 10, 2017 with Yahoo News that the allegations were the product of a “fake news era” and charged that a human rights group, Amnesty International, had fabricated evidence to discredit his embattled government.

Our prez now finds a brand new soulmate;
Putin’s not his only bro.
Assad, fellow fan of torture,
Learns to whine that news is faux.

Chris O’Carroll has published unfair attacks on the president in dishonest journals on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s disgusting the stuff he gets away with. 

POKÉMON GO TO SYRIA

by Bruce Dale Wise

After more than five years of war, Syrians appear to be using the wildly popular Pokémon Go in a desperate effort to draw attention to their country’s conflict. . . . They’re holding paper signs with pictures of Pokemon characters, and calling on people to save them. “I am in Kafr Nabl on the outskirts of Idlib, come and save me,” one sign says, echoing phrases on a handful of others. It’s unclear who, or what group, was behind the images. But they bear the logo of the RFS, which is self-described online as the Revolutionary Forces of Syria Media Office that “reports on the Syrian revolution professionally and objectively,” according to its Twitter account. It appears to be affiliated with the Syrian opposition. The images were also circulated by other accounts affiliated with the opposition, which has been fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his regime since 2011. “I never imagined we would like to become a game in order to gain the world’s attention,” a Twitter account called Children of Syria posted on Wednesday, with the pictures of the children. —Vocative.com, July 21, 2016

"I am from Kafr Nabl in Idlib," the placard said.

"Come save me from the horror of the Syrian Bomb Squad."

For more than five long years the war in Syria has gone.

"O, come and help us if you can. Come save us, Pokémon."

"Let us be free from misery and all this violence—

Bashar Assad, Islamic State, and deadly Nusra Front."

But there beside the bombed out building boarded up with boards,

a boy sits by a Pokémon with tears as large as gourds.

It's but a picture in a picture—worth a thousand words;

and overhead the barrel bombs fly with the thunderbirds.

Bruce Dale Wise is a poet and essayist who writes under various charichords (anagrammatic heteronyms). The creator of new poetic forms, like the tennos (10 lines of iambic heptametre), his publication credits include magazines and ezines under his own name and various pseudonyms. This tennos is an example of his docupoetry.