SALMAN

by Indran Amirthanayagam

Indran Amirthanayagam's newest book is Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks). Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Haitian Creole and has twenty poetry books as well as a music album Rankont Dout. He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

BREATHLESS

 by George Salamon

"Joe Biden must usher in a new era," —The Hill, January 20, 2021

"Not the least of the torments which plague our existence is the constant pressure of time, which never lets us so much as draw breath but pursues us all like a taskmaster with a whip." —Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World.

We can stop and draw our breath,

like we did as children, playing,

the flotsam of years is not gone,

the losses of just one year took

on such proportions that the days

grew dark, the stories in the papers

were too much to bear, we grew

hardened, now we can return to

the world of the visible, the world

of the reliable, return to hear the

rustle of the human and the animal,

see the reliable green of forests and

wilderness, touch the solid walls of

houses that did not crumble and be

touched by pictures of painters that

are art until we are ready for the  

journey inward to recover the light 

of logic we lost in a long and dark tunnel.

George Salamon not sure we are on the threshold of a "new era" yet, or are ready for it, but he hopes we will get there. In the meantime, he expects he'll keep contributing to The Asses of Parnassus, One Sentence Poems, Dissident Voice and The New Verse News from St.Louis.