THE SAGA OF AN ABANDONED PUNJABI BRIDE

by Vivek Sharma

They Married for a Life Abroad. But They Never Saw Their Husbands Again. —The New York Times, June 14, 2023.

 

Thousands of brides in India are being abandoned by their British Indian husbands after they are married. Despite this, there is evidence to suggest that Indian women are continuing to fall for British suitors. —BBC News, November 23, 2009.

In Candana, England, called Vilayat,
      My husband abides alone,
                   or with another,
he visits me sometimes in winter,
       some years, not at all,
                   and I live with his mother.

I am a middle-aged Punjabi dreamer,
      I practice English at home,
                tears smudge my notebook.
He promised me a visa and visits,
      but what if they were gambits
                 to freehire a family cook?

Jede Chadd ke chal gaye ne,                                       
         Mawan, dhiyan, khetran, gawan nu,                     
Undi raah kyun takdi aye,                                              
kyun aaun ge o tainu le jawan nu?                              

 

Those who have abandoned mothers,
         fields, daughters, villages, and gone,
Why do you wait for their return?
        Why would they take you along?

Occasionally, he calls from Vilayat,
       sweet-talker, whiskey breath,
                  I crave his love and sweat,
I rage, and he lends me an ear,
      tells me he hates it there,
                but says he hasn't made it yet,
I feel fallow, tell tales to my buffalo,
     she moos at my discontent
              and the choleric of my kith and kin,
prevents me from calling him a rogue,
     though he has left me to wither here,
             though he has left me alone.

Jede Chadd ke chal gaye ne…                                       
        Those who have abandoned us and gone…

Throughout Punjab, we are scattered,
        throughout Punjab, we are alone,
        why did you wed us?
        Why did you leave our home?
What good is the foreign penny,
       slavery of foreign tarts and pimps?
       Come back, o black-hearted,
       Come back to our sweet home.

Jede Chadd ke chal gaye ne,                                       
         Mawan, dhiyan, khetran, gawan nu,                     
Undi raah kyun takdi aye,                                              
kyun aaun ge o tainu le jawan nu?                               

Those who have abandoned mothers,
         fields, daughters, villages, and gone,
Why do you wait for them?
        Why would they return to take you along?

Your forefathers fought invaders,
       never quit, never let their land go,
kept heads high in proud turbans,
       never balked or gave their women woe.
“O Ranjheya, your banter: how do you translate it?
      Your Punjabi heart-to-heart: how do you communicate it?
Are you legally there? Are you really there?
      We are aging. We'll die. When will you ever make it?”

Jede Chadd ke chal gaye ne…        

                             Those who have abandoned us and gone…

But what can I say, had you stayed back,
       I would have urged you to leave,
when destiny calls with dollar bills,
       staying back for mud-dung is grief.
But I was wrong, marjaaniyan
      how I wish he were never gone,
I know he must be more miserable,
      at least I am in my home,

What pagli is this 'lady',
      lives in a world of make-belief,
if the bride was ever worthy,
     why would the groom ever leave,
But tell me what I must do,
     but tell me where I can go,
In this dust, I must live and die,
    maybe after death, reunite in a Canadian home.

Jede Chadd ke chal gaye ne...                                       

Those who have abandoned us and gone…

Vivek Sharma's first book of verse, Saga of a Crumpled Piece of Paper (Writers Workshop, Calcutta, 2009), was shortlisted for Muse India Young Writer Award 2011. His work in English appears in Atlanta Review, Bateau, Poetry, The Cortland Review, and Muse India, among others while his Hindi articles and verses appear in Divya Himachal (Hindi newspaper, India), Himachal Mitra, and Argala. Vivek grew up in Himachal Pradesh (Himalayas, India), and moved to the United States in 2001. Vivek is a Pushcart-nominated poet, is published as a scientist, and he lives and teaches chemical engineering in Chicago.

SMILE

by William Marr

Smile coach Keiko Kawano teaches students at a smile training course at Sokei Art School in Tokyo, Japan, May 30, 2023. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon

trapped in masks for three long years

many people

can't remember how to smile anymore

 

should eyes be opened or closed 

how about the mouth 

and should the eyebrows and mouth corners 

be lifted up

or pulled down

 

there’s really no need to spend money 

to find a smile consultant

just go outdoors

and look at the flowers

blooming with innocent smiles

from the ground that was once covered 

with heavy snow and ice

William Marr, a Chinese American scientist/poet/artist, has published over 30 collections of poetry and several translations. His poetry has been translated into more than ten languages and is included in high school and college textbooks in Taiwan, China Mainland, England, and Germany. A former president of the Illinois State Poetry Society, he now lives in Chicago.

BLINKEN IN BEIJING: DATA CALL

by Indran Amirthanayagam

Antony Blinken was greeted by China’s top diplomat on Monday, and will perhaps meet its president, on the final day of a rare visit aimed at trying to resurrect relations between Washington and Beijing from historic lows. —The Guardian, June 18, 2023

Semiconductors
Formosa…Taiwan…
Uigur burial practices
Tesla
Ships passing in the South China Sea
Warships frigates destroyers
Balloon looking down on the American continent
SHOT
Spy station on the island of Cuba
Confucius Institutes everywhere
in the developing world
Plastics, christmas trees, clothes
A massive relationship, two 
superpowers yet distant neighbors  
coming together on climate 
change policies but staying apart 
on so many hot buttons 
including the rights of Man and Woman
Five and a half hours meeting
(extended by an hour)
American and Chinese teams
then strolling
before a working dinner for two hours
Foreign Minister and Secretary of State
Hard at work making   peace.
eating thousand-year-old eggs.

Indran Amirthanayagam is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is the newest collection of Indran's own poems. 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 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.

THE ROLE OF THE POET

by Bonnie Naradzay

Israeli soldiers will not face criminal prosecution for the death of an elderly Palestinian-American man who was stopped at a checkpoint, dragged from a car, bound and blindfolded and then left unresponsive on the ground overnight after apparently suffering a heart attack due to his rough treatment. —AlJazeera, June 14, 2023. Photo: Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank village of Qafin on May 30, 2023 [File: Majdi Mohammed/AP via AlJazeera]

I am thinking of the role of the poet

is it to read through the morning news

and try on the horrors of people’s lives

like today reading again about 

the 78year old American stopped 

by IDF soldiers in the West Bank at night

during a “routine incursion” in the village

of Jiljilya since after the man was dragged

from his car for 200 meters he was gagged 

his wrists bound was left face down for hours

in a cold warehouse with others called 

“detainees” by the news report that said

after hours like that he was found dead 

but his death could not be determined 

to be caused “specifically” by anything

the soldiers had done after leaving him 

which was their routine since he was also 

Palestinian and so the case was closed 

or is the job of the poet to imagine being 

forced to cross the border into Belarus 

or Mexico at gunpoint or watch again 

the video of the Greek Coast Guard

rounding up asylum seekers, including

young children, then taking them to sea,

abandoning them on a raft.  Or is the poet

called on to describe the patterns of leaves 

as someone suggested to me without irony.

Bonnie Naradzay’s poems haver appeared in AGNI, New Letters, RHINO, Kenyon Review, Tampa Review, EPOCH, and many other sites. She was awarded the New Orleans MFA’s poetry prize:  a month’s stay in the castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary.  For many years, Bonnie has led regular poetry sessions at shelters for the homeless and at a retirement center, all in Washington, D.C.

WHILE STILL I STAY IN WONDERLAND

by Royal Rhodes

Companies Agree to Pay $19B in Opioid Settlement.

           —BioSpace, June 12, 2023

One pill

makes me lighter—

ether from Elysium—

seeing the world in pixels.

One pill

makes me forget.

Did I take this pill

already and even yesterday?

One pill

lets me blink

and conjure unicorns,
feeling sweat on my hide.

One pill

when I awake

projects old photos

of poets stifling words.

One pill

lifts me, another

drags me headlong.

Fear makes my mouth dry.

One pill,

the last, bestows

on me all I desire

most: a glimpse of nothingness.

Royal Rhodes is a retired educator. His poems have appeared in Ekstasis Poetry, Ekphrastic Poetry Challenge, Foreshadow Poetry, and other literary journals.

DANIEL

by Jeremy Nathan Marks

Daniel Ellsberg, Whistleblower Who Exposed Top-Secret History of the Vietnam War, Dies at 92 —Slate, June 16, 2023. Photo: Dr. Daniel Ellsberg speaks to reporters Dec. 22, 2011, at Fort Meade, Maryland. PAUL J. RICHARDS/Getty Images via Slate.

I believe that to be a proper critic 
you need to lead a platoon through 
the shit 
 
and sit on every side 
of the table 
read the cables 
from embassies and fire 
bases 
compose a dissertation
on aptly named Decision 
Theory 
 
then join a think tank that took 
its name from something as light 
as Research and Development. 
 
Nor would it hurt to graduate 
from Harvard 
and possess an IQ north 
of the notes a Stradivarius 
hits in the hands of prodigious 
digits that can clean an M1 
beneath a blindfold 
like Jim Brown’s men 
aboard the U.S.S. Tigerfish
in one of those Cold War consensus 
flicks.
 
Daniel had it all 
Ooh Rah 
entering the Corps 
because he was no paper 
lion but under General Lansdale 
read every last word emitted by the Pentagon 
and courted charges under the Espionage Act 
from men who believed the original sin 
of American freedom was journalism.
 
But before people say 
he was just another Eastern
Establishment Jew like Kristol 
Bell Glazer or Chomsky 
bear in mind Harvard had quotas 
 
and Daniel grew up in Detroit 
the same city where Philip Levine 
discovered Garcia Lorca 
who spoke of what was inside 
forgotten little animals 
 
when he lived in Gotham 
 
but that could have been Hanoi 
Hue or the Iron Triangle where Annam 
Chorus Frogs warned peasants by their silence 
 
Daniel defoliated the pretensions 
of National Security 
and for interests of state 
we cannot now forget to say 
 
Requiescat in pace
or better yet 

hold for him a Minyan.

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in the Great Lakes Region of Canada. Recent work appears/will appear in Rattle, Terrain.org, Belt Magazine, and Poetica Review among other places. 

POET LAUREATE ADA LIMON CREATES A POEM TO BE ENGRAVED ON A SPACESHIP

Others invited to include our own names on a chip

by Alice Campbell Romano

https://europa.nasa.gov/message-in-a-bottle/sign-on/

Years ago I bought you a star.
The framed certificate turns up 
now and then
when I sift a desk, weed a bookshelf.
An undistinguished star 
somewhere 
with your name.
You would better have appreciated
my renaming Mars for you, 
red combatant. 

Earth registers stars 
from Earth’s point of view,
assigns coordinates,
sells naming rights.
Maybe only Earth has this compulsion
to brand the infinite.

Our ambition sends craft 
to search out life
on Jupiter’s moon Europa.
We shall leave Earth’s mark— 
in—be astonished—

a poem 
about Earth. Poets ache.

I am tempted without reason
to piggyback, to add me, 
on a microchip
to Europa. 

You didn’t care when I bought you
a star. I will escape for a billion miles,
to the edge of the infinite, in my 
name alone. 

Alice Campbell Romano lived a dozen years in Italy where she adapted Italian movie scripts into English, married a dashing Italian movie-maker, made children, and moved with the family to the U.S., where they built, she wrote, and the children grew. Her poems have appeared in—among other venues—Prometheus Dreaming, Persimmon Tree, Pink Panther Magazine, Orchards Poetry, New Croton Review; Beyond Words, Writing in a Woman's Voice, Quartet Journal, Instant Noodles Devil's Press, Moon Shadow Sanctuary Press. In January, she was awarded HONORABLE MENTION in The Comstock Review's 2022 Chapbook contest, "...not an award that we give every year, but an honor set aside for a few manuscripts." Alice swooned. 

THE WRONG HOUSE

by Thomas R. Smith

dedicated to Ralph Yarl and Kaylin Gillis

“Wrong House” by Tala Madani (2014)

Say it’s the city, late evening, dark.
You’ve stopped to pick up your brothers,
thought you had the right address,
but now you’re unsure, seeing the pale
man the other side of the glass door.
Something in his hand, something shiny
in his trembling hand. Raises it,
a flash, the sound of glass
breaking, you breaking.

Say you’re in the country. It’s easy
to get lost on those dirt back roads.
Your car pulls into a driveway, but
the number is wrong. Turn back out.
From a nest of darkness
in the trees, bullets spit, one
catches you where you sit. Your
friends get you to a hospital, 
too late.  You’re gone.

Say you’re a country. Thought you knew
the Address, confident in your way
around the shining city. What brought you
here to the door of this horror movie?
Who armed the frightened old man,
the violent sociopath? Why has your
heart taken so much lead? Are you
wounded but alive, or dead? Why do you
keep showing up at the wrong house?

Thomas R. Smith is a poet, essayist, and teacher living in western Wisconsin. His most recent books are a poetry collection Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications) and a prose work Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival (Red Dragonfly Press).

LIKE GOLD

by Karen Olshansky

This image, contained in the indictment against former President Donald Trump, shows boxes of records on Dec. 7, 2021, in a storage room at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., that had fallen over with contents spilling onto the floor. Justice Department/AP via TIME.

In front of deep yellow drapes

on the stage of the gilded ballroom

stacked in haphazard rows

in the marbled powder room

under the crystal chandelier

behind the commode

piled high like cardboard towers

in a storage closet near clothing 

wrapped in cleaner’s plastic

spilled like a garbage can ransacked 

by raccoons in cartons overturned

with scattered yellowed 

newspapers and photos:

precious papers,

secrets that protect, that keep 

us safe, that the braggadocio

hordes for his own pleasure and profit,

a man protected by

slavish minions

and deplorable citizens 

in thrall to an UnAmerica.

Karen Olshansky lives in Marin County, California with her husband and a well fed Koi named Pickle Face. She writes poetry in order to maintain her sanity. Her work has appeared in The Literary Nest, Tuck magazine, The News Verse News and the anthologies Lingering in the Margins, Unsealing Our Secrets, and Unspoken.

BIRDS IN WILDFIRE SEASON

by Cecil Morris

Gary Robertson/Flickr Creative Commons

“Birds shouldn’t go outside at all when it's smoky.” 

—NPR, June 8, 2023

1

Birds themselves are particulate matter, visible smudges

clouding blue skies and dangerous if carelessly inhaled,

if respirators are not fitted right—over mouth

and nose—and well sealed against avian infection.

Birds should not be inside at all, smoky or warbling

and tuneful or decorative splashes of color for

monochrome rooms. Birds and their mites and germs and

influenzas should be kept out at all costs. Use bars

and screens and N95 masks cinched tight to guard against

feather lung with its symptoms of chirping and flightiness,

erosion of marrow—so called hollow-bone syndrome

(HBS)—and often fatal light-headedness.

Do not wait for the Surgeon General or CDC

to issue official warnings or for Congress to mandate

cautionary labels on all birds. Birds can kill.

2

Wait. Birds live outside. Birds are outside always,

those complaining jays and crows, the warbling

passerines, the finches, sparrows, the larks.

Birds are the outside—along with round trees

and arrow trees and pollen-spewing weeds.

I mean, they’re nature and nature’s outside.

Are we supposed to bring them inside now?

Can they be quarantined? Locked in their nests

until tongues of flame kiss them into smoke?

Will their tiny bird brains tell them to come

inside, to seek an air-filtered shelter,

to take wing and flee fiery holocaust?

 

Cecil Morris retired after 37 years of teaching high school English and now has turned to writing what he used to teach students to understand and (he hopes) enjoy. He has had a handful of poems published in The Cimarron Review, The Ekphrastic Review, English Journal, Hole in the Head Review, The Midwest Quarterly, The New Verse News, Talking River Review, and other literary magazines.