THE EYES OF CHECHEN AUTHORITIES WILL NEVER LET THEM FORGET WHAT THEY HAVE DONE

by David Hanlon

A leading Russian human rights group has expressed “serious fears” that a gay pop star may have been killed in Chechnya’s crackdown on gay people. Zelimkhan Bakayev, 26, went missing in August when he left his home in Moscow to visit the capital, Grozny, for his sister’s wedding. “When a person disappears and the police force refuse to investigate his disappearance, we have serious fears for the life of that person,” Oleg Orlov, from Memorial, Russia’s oldest civil rights group, told AFP on Friday. Russian NGOs and media outlets have raised concerns about the fate of Bakayev and speculated that Chechen police may have abducted him due to his sexual orientation. —The Guardian, October 27, 2017. Photo: Some time before his disappearance,  Zelimkhan Bakaev (right) posed with Chechnya's leader Ramzan Kadyrov. —Facebook

Even when they squeeze
them shut,

they’ll bulge
like fat camera reels

turning, projecting
the images on the backs

of their eyelids –
flesh screens

a silent,
black-and-white

horror movie
stuck

on repeat.

David Hanlon is from Cardiff, Wales. He is sickened by these atrocities that are still ongoing. With a leader who claims 'no gay men exist in Chechnya,' how can gay men ever feel safe within the republic again? Outside authorities need to intervene & put a stop to this inhumanity now!

MOTHER TONGUE

by Mark Ward

Image source: The New Yorker, July 3, 2017: “The Gay Men Who Fled Chechnya’s Purge.” See also “How a Russian Journalist Exposed the Anti-Gay Crackdown in Chechnya,” The New Yorker, June 10, 2017.

Chechnya 2017

I say nothing. The police interrogate me,
start to break me with electricity. I scream but
say nothing. I will only live if I say nothing.
Each shock dissolves the words they speak,
the taunts they throw, they've always known,
my whole community responds with voltage.


I no longer understand their language.
I am a tourist mixed up in all of this
waiting for my embassy to free me
and be a near miss story I'll tell to the man
who loves me, who will never leave me
like this: eighteen, severed, unkissed. 


I'm put in with thirty others; battery hens,
nowhere to move but for our sins, held
together by tears, the persistence of skin
and a confirmation, unintended by them,
that there are more of us. We cannot sleep so
we speak our secrets since it can't get worse. 


I jolt awake to see the boy beside me staring.
He’s from a few villages over, yet we've never
met. The hand that woke me keeps contact, his lips
open slightly. I can't breathe looking at that. My first kiss
approaches. We're being watched. All I want is this
but I shake my head no; saying nothing, but living. 


I lose track of days, of beatings. The wounds
no longer heal, keep bleeding. I am so thirsty,
I am starving. I cannot concentrate. I hear them
laughing. Or is that me when they ask me
questions. I will not speak. I will not lessen.
I'm dehydrated and delirious. I imagine a life


where I grow up somewhere else and this
would be a conversation, a status update,
an aspect of me. The village boy is dead.
I no longer sleep. I am a corollary. I dream.
There are millions like me, sleeping tonight.
I say nothing but still lose the fight.

Mark Ward is a poet from Dublin, Ireland. With his own poems  featured in many journals and anthologies, Ward founded and edits Impossible Archetype: A Journal of LGBTQ+ Poetry. He has completed two books, a chap called Circumference and a full-length collection called How to Live When Life Subtracts. He has watched every episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race many, many times.

SOCHI'S CHOICE

by George Held

            "That old black [widow] has me in its spell . . . "

            “‘You carry enough stuff in your pocket to blow yourself  and everything within sixty yards of you to pieces.’”          —Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907)


Those young Moslem women terror-bent
from Dagestan and Chechnya now are sent
to Sochi with bombs embracing their bodies
like the arms of their dedicated husbands,
already blown to bits by suicide bombs
to earn their tickets to Paradise.

The young ladies now arm themselves
like Conrad’s Professor, “hand closed round”
the detonator in his pocket,
an armed flask bomb sitting
in another pocket like a sleeping
black Angel of Death.

Call these young women “black widows,”
conjure our primal fear of black spiders
with red hourglass shape on their abdomen,
who devour their mates for giving the gift
of fertilization. The old misogynist myth
is summoned again to feed nightmares

for the well-heeled with tickets to Sochi,
the Winter Olympics Paradise,
with palm trees, by the Black Sea,
while at its back, in the snow-clad Caucasus,
Moslem revolutionaries fight
for independence and send (black) widows

to detonate the fun and games.
Which is your choice: the curious
tourists who require armed security
to bolster Vladimir Putin’s coffers
or the widows dedicated to avenge
their husbands and help to liberate

their ancient/nascent nations
from Putin’s pitiless grip?
Let the games begin.

An occasional contributor to The New Verse News, George Held occasionally blogs at www.georgeheld.blogspot.com