I can see it in her stride
as she walks down the alley
that connects her street to my own
where we meet mid-way, then head west
down Stanley, past my front yard
where the garden’s looking tired

but the porch still invites a quiet chat
a segue to her current status
she tells me she’s feeling off-centre
floundering in her late-60s, retired, bored
looking for options, so why not speak
about life – its ending and our grief

we pass 1, 2, 3, 4, churches
as we turn onto Locke and head north
we’ve both entered 3 of the 4 houses of worship —
yoga, reiki, concerts, holiday bazaars,
occasionally to hear the choir at St. Jo’s
but never to worship

the streets and alleys of our neighbourhood
have always been our go-to place
our comfort in hard times and good
we walk, we talk, we rant, we cry
at the top of our lungs we’ve even sung
unabashedly in the presence of trees

oddly enough, a death café hosted
at the local donut shop, where choice abounds
empty centre, cream or jelly filled, old-fashion or fritter
on the corner at Charlton where I sometimes stand alone
watch the pigeons swoop and circle, swoop
and circle high above the parish rooftops

makes me spin and whirl within
suddenly I am pollen hanging in the air
confetti drifting from great heights
non-local, intangible, transparent
genius loci of my neighbourhood
anchoring me here    temporarily
at the crosswalk
wondering which direction
the wind will
         carry me next

Lisa Borkovich

Welcome to Las Vegas: a black hole bolted to a canopy of breathing stars. A key synchronised to fit a failing lock. Its hostile terrain is smothered by a sleek illusion as props emerge, transform and define like a cabinet of artefacts, windowless and sealed – My cathedral. Its false paths spool like tape; its walls of sound cling like syrup: their base drone breathing out a spectrum of luminous vapours that glow like an ember cupped in the hands of an invisible god. The physics of its equilibrium is arranged in lustrous codes, with quarks and neutrons pirouetting in an electrified field of angry dream psalms: sodium beating out the black, burning holes into the night – I made this happen. I will make it happen again.

Felons, in a stone-eyed search for prey, fusing like spores to the side alleys with the stillness of basking butterflies. Their restless guns record the exact number of murders per square inch. Traffic channels through shards of neon: graphs manifesting synthesised treasure in concise formulations of insect scribble – Buy/ Prophet/ Sell/ Profit/. Tourists scroll along endless mazes of etched concrete, boiled pink, swarming like clouds of gas through a chaotic tableau of warm plasma, where the least curious perspire the most, splashed back against their cooling shadows – Vectors for disease. Ants. Purge.

Observing it all with utter detachment: Howard Hughes, the Great Illusionist, fathomless and mercurial; saddened with the luggage of archetype, archived to the easy chair – I built the illusion and now I am trapped by it. Using his familiarity with scale, he seeks solace in the linear progress along closed horizons; eyes knitted to terrestrial ghost fodder; comforted by the soothing placebo of chemical detachment – Morphine is love, is Ava Gardner, is Jean Harlow, is Katherine Hep my mother. Money shapes his chromosomes, the blunted tools of pre-birth vectors, fizzing with the slow ionisation of nerve-endings, like a singular creature in the thralls of metamorphosis – I am vibrating at the frequency of a collapsing star. Stained pink, his exterior pigments diffuse like petal gradients, dispersing to an unworldly place. His sublimated shell, entropic and sexless, bolted to an opaque Nevada tower: its masonry striates, secret and transformative, roots lengthening into a carpet of still chambers, their geometry tethered to the alien cold of ether and plague pit energies – Did I build this place, or was it always here?

For him, the act of seeing is a cage, a preserved arc of myths; sublime, infinite and hermetic, expurgated by a looped vortex of soft scoop and celluloid: its negative print etched into the skull of tectonic plates – Ice Station Zebra/ eye-stained cerebra/ switch on/ off switch.  His brain is an emulsion of poisonous urges; a roman candle of ferocity fanned by the models of suspicion, like a seed trapped in a bone vessel under layers of silt, incubated by the metaphors of a paranoid language. Sublime dramas enacted with conjecture, prophetic and manifold, in a fusion of impulse motors – I am safe? No. Never. The doubtful corneas, melted by ghost acids, oscillating with prescribed brilliance and the encroaching relics of opposition: blank cyphers to be scrutinised with a forensic eye – Closer. Ever closer.  The notation of obsessive impulse; the totemic stagger from suspension to event and the torment of purification by the machines of insanity in an endless cycle of warm oxygen and cold matter monologues – Big Oil. Small people. Playthings. Am I in a womb?

Other-controlled by a chain of sentinels, under contract, shimmering with greed and soft scriptural overtones that shine, fever-bright, as they pick at the Sunday pamphlets: spoiled parables purified like a ghost thought remembered through wraiths – Not servants: vultures. Textbook puritans, stiff with guilt; pale faces absorbing dark synthetics. Cautious disciples with a slow plan of dexterous butchery, scrubbing the meat off him in delicate layers, like rice paper, as they wait for the rational to reconnect with a crucifix and a contract – Is this a baptism? Does God like the smell of lint and rubbing alcohol? I was a God. I was Godlike.

A tapestry of scrabbling insects in the depths of his treacherous blood; the random fluctuations of compound chemistry; the cones of decaying matter; open sores and connective tissues oozing like mercury pulled through an ever-widening crack. A deathbed witness with divinity bleeding out and hands unmade with acquired stigmata, as the heavens close in like a black velvet bible – How banal. How utterly disappointing. No heroic test-pilot fireball for him, just a heart, corroded to static in a discord of impenetrable stutters – the effect almost magical – as spoors bloom and fluids become vapours under the assumed delicacy of death: the transformer transformed by the details of decay – The fear of death derives from the fear of life and I am scared.

The sharklike forces of his sterile audience, burying their annihilating fists into his affairs with an unknown velocity; an ellipse of pink hands, merged in prayer. Sermons, litanies, and the algebraic calculations in the workings of it, mapping the endless streams of money. His communion, contained in the details of a forged will, like the weightless hieroglyphs of a hymn book – You. Get. Nothing. You fucki…. The bird-eyed surveyors of detachment, making a sequence of incisions under the polythene, looking for signs of fire in the cooling momentum. A concise opera of glacial monologues charting the distilled murk of entropy and natural conspiracies: his fingerprints proving it. The erratic trellis of blood; the slow menace of the spilt brain, forming the illusion of constructed mythology – I sculpted the shape of my fear into a counterfeit halo.

1976. Exit.

John Harrison

Nida Sajid

I

Women breaking under
kilos of tomatoes stop,
shake their heads
            Que gordo! they gasp

at your fat cheeks
at the shine of your fine tail!
Vendors boast your size
their catcalls through the alleys
            Que grande! Que masivo!

You on your bed
of chipped ice
your olive eyes lost
in the murkiness of your face
the cavern of your mouth
guarded by tusk-like teeth

Maria’s lover wipes a
knife against his apron,
scatters chunks of
lemon and tomato,
lets stems of parsley rain
around you like a wreath
Behind you crates of
prawn and mussel
pile high
from your mouth’s reach;
their black-beaked
blush-backed shells
rattle like a tin-can-chorus
as they are whooped
in handfuls for a quick sale

You rest easy
figurehead to shoals
of pink and blue-hued scales -

II

Yesterday
you skirted the ocean floor -
junk skin like an unwashed table
Your seawalk unearthing
archaeology lost to
mud and sand
The ambush of your slurp
as you gorged on mollusk
crab claw and lobster,
your mouth sucking them in
behind rows of teeth
The turbine of your jagged barb
twisting
cracking
shell and bone

Up above
where shapeless light exists,
a trawler carves forward
its skipper (oil-skin arms
legs soaked with backwash)
wipes his salt-weather cheek,
counts the nights
fed to wind and rain,
rubs the clefts in his hands,
watches the wake of
nets that trawl the seabed

A sudden jolt and you
swooped upwards to the light!
Small fish slap
against your sides,
gulls snap
at the flax
as you launch from oceanfloor
The skipper smiles as
your fins flap like swallow wings,
your body balloons
with a shock of air
Mud and seaweed drench
from your skin
You pulse in the skipper’s hands,
his hold fast,
your full size
the prize for a week’s work -

III

In the market,
men sip Manzanilla
on high stools
at the corner bar
Their faces crease as tongues
search for husks of
roasted almonds caught
between blackened teeth
The low roll of their voices scorched
with salt air and tobacco,
leathered hands tell
of harder living -
Above their heads
a ceiling fan twirls
The barman raises
heavy eyes
and hopes there’s
one more summer left in it
Mi suegra!
one man shouts and nods
in your direction -
Market vendors,
Manzanilla men, the
barman wiping
down his counter,
tomato-laden women,
and Maria’s lover
laugh and shake their heads
while you return their stare

Your open smile
trying to catch the joke.

Their laughter ripples
through the markethall
and if you were still happening
you might feel its insult
no trace of midnight
blue or silver-shimmer skin
But you lie there
gaping mouth
as though you
had something left to say -

The barman pulls
his shutter down
and the Manzanilla men
shuffle home with
tomato-lugging women
(the clic clac of their tacones echo through narrow streets)
Maria’s lover slides his blade
beneath your speckled skin
to scalp you
Quick!
Unzip your meaty flesh
of bridal white,
your greatness filleted
tail cheeks and all
to be enjoyed by
those who can
afford your sweetness
over chilled glasses of Rioja
while others inherit your
bones to boil for broth

and look you in the eye as
they return you to water -

Beth Corcoran

Energy drink cans
Cigarette stubs
Disposable vapes
Tall coffee cups
Fast-food containers
Chocolate bar wraps
A losing scratch-card
Drug blister packs

And so a forget-me-not flower
A single one
Exquisite
There blooming
Amid our filth and blight
Feels like a gift
The purest speck of light

A pale blue dot
That neither you nor I deserve

James Gilbert

Concrete bollards foundationed
to protect against trucks, rough sleepers,
and those rickshaws for the damn tourists.

It rumbles up inside of us all,
a tube approaching out of the tunnel.
Lessons in etiquette, no politeness -

“Stand to the right.”
“Let me off before you barge on”
“Can you move down inside!”

Hostile environments and their hostile humans.

Bríd Ryan

I beg to differ, despite this being literature & me a character,
            my long-dead friend Ron, too, pumping his piston legs
along Powderhouse, floppy bowl-cut flopping more as we herky-

            jerked across Alewife Brook Parkway’s torrent of cars & up
the Wallace short-cut to the train, thrusting a joint back & forth,
            Oil Can Boyd no doubt already gabbing Gedman’s ear off

in the bullpen, Fenway’s grilled sausages not for years yet a cliché,
            Ron & I having gulped lifelong in a dreamland soda fountain
of post-shift euchre & pierogi picnics what a poem I just read calls

            ”the vanilla malt of white privilege.” We nevertheless not only
dug (yes, dug) without self-consciousness Son House, Albert Ayler
            & Parliament Funkadelic, but also revered Forbes Field visions

of Big Bob Veale & the sublime Clemente. The word cowardice festers,
            Ron going fast, then gone & me so free to keep his suffering
far away & then grief or what passed for it stabbed & cloaked

            as I strolled, loitered, shuffled, strutted & strode all over
the city because I still had springy legs & lungs & enough leisure
            to savor a cheese danish outside the gutted caboose

where they fried the glorious chimichangas I’d bear through
            the steamy night home. I felt free to ignore what I wished
without knowing I wished it. No, it’s murkier than that, more

            tangled & rank. Cognition evades. Abstractions never
walked nor lost all will to walk. Really? Wow, that’s deep!
            Maybe not deep as the cave—OK, the labyrinth—

gusting reek & roar nonstop, but deep as grief & gratitude go.

John Repp

Dawn with her golden fingers of french fries
Launched the lord of lies to the white palace
Riven with despotic Zeus’s thunderbolt.
Now the great trickster disguised as a beggar
Clutches his stub at the red plastic booth.
Tears his gaze from the Helen beside him.
She might be a goddess in human guise.
Certainly there are immortals afoot.
Hermes darts between the chromed chariots,
Divining wants.  Hephaestus works the grill.
Arachne with fingers of spinnerets
Weaves the plump viands with all the fixings.
They feed the deathless cravings of LA.

When the gaslighter with the silver tongue
Approached these fragrant shores, he meant to praise.
“Here I find such ravishing temptation
As did poor Eurolychus, the one man
Who dodged the fate of turning into swine
(On the enchanted isle known as Holy Wood).
- Only to succumb to hunger, and feast
On the forbidden herd of Helios.
Straightaway shipwrecked by psychotic Zeus
Along with all the crew; I alone lived.
Here is the ambrosia of browning beef
Bourne on the peppery fumes of onions.
Good goddess or mortal, sate my hunger.”

Nobody blinked at such a strange outburst,
Of high-flown words mouthed by the ragged man.
They’ve seen and heard it all.  This is LA.
The only sin is holding up the line
At Philippe’s, Pink’s, or this temple of Zeus.
The chameleon-like stranger read the room.
“Make that a Double-Double, extra spread.”

2.  Dance of the Phaeacian Youths

Now Sirens sing out the glad guest numbers
And Angelenos dance to their music.
Raptly birthing burgers, swift-limbed youths
Radiant with workplace smiles, shape-shift
Like Athena as they trade tasks, now ladling
Hephaestus’s craft into savory buns,
Now chopping, trimming, wrapping, bagging
Never flagging in the crush of white hats.
This broke something inside the nameless man.
Not since the crews swarmed the masts and oarbanks
To sail for Troy, had he seen such prowess.
A phalanx of food soldiers: unwilled tears
Coursed down the cheeks of the homesick nomad.

He hearkened back to the halcyon times
Before the bloodbath of the ten years’ war.
And the cursed, demon-haunted, long way back
That after ten more lost years, nears its end.
When his house was not despoiled by suitors
Who dared pursue his queen, Penelope.
He despaired of his plundered herds and wealth
And trust of his wife; he saw no way home.

3.  Demodocus, or The Blind Lebowski

A shaggy voice cut through the riot of tongues
From the Valley by way of Venice Beach.
The seer had wild leonine locks, and robes
More fitting for the bath than for the feast.
If he was not blind, thick shades made him so.
A sure freak in any city but this.
So the stranger took in each gnomic word.

“Hey!  Hey!  Careful, man, there’s a beverage here.
The lightning of the dirty dog Zeus
Hangs on this burger joint like all things.
No other way to say it, he’s a dick.
He’ll pee on your rug, and total your car.
But look around you, no nihilists here.
Just kids and gods dishing up the victuals.

“Now dig this drifter, who’s seen better days.
And needs a shower and clean clothes pronto#
If my nose tells me what my eyes cannot.
He’s crying, man, like they killed his old dog.
For my money, he was once somebody.
And will be again once he kicks some ass
From here in Van Nuys clear to Topanga.

“So, stranger, don’t bullshit or stonewall us.
Say your real name and the place you come from,
Even if it’s bumfuck Buttonwillow.”

And the complete unknown was confounded.
A sightless man just saw right through him.
With nothing to lose, he at last came clean.
“I am Odysseus, son of Laertes . . .”

But his voice was eclipsed by Athena’s.
“Guest number 90!” – his very ticket.
His hunger muzzled his baring of self.
And he wolfed down the immortal morsel
Washed down with frozen milk, sweeter than wine.
Like a thousand sails drink in the Zephyr
That floats an army to its destiny,
Flush with the gods’ own cheap eats, he was primed
For catharsis ages in the making.

4.  Ithaca, by way of Topanga

Hung over Dawn with fingers of The Dude
Two knuckles deep, bowls Odysseus home.
Suitors fly like tenpins in a thunderclap.
The sarsparilla of vengeance goes down smooth.

Hermes lands a gig as a stunt double.
Hephaestus scores a full ride at Cal Tech.
Zeus finally gets hauled in for abuse,
And the kids at In-N-Out are all right.

Three thousand years the Homeric ending
Prefigured the Hollywood version.
Nigh-invincible villains bite the dust
While dudes and dudettes of this world abide.

Craig Constantine

The other is more minute,
somewhere higher up
moving faster or maybe
it’s just further away.
I’m no good with physics.
Their slow and unsteady
triple wave matches pace
with the rainbow windmills
in the nursery school’s garden.

As I round the corner
of the primary school gates
and the grass grows deep
into ‘habitat kept for bees’
I am closer to my mummy’s
and another grows into view.
Small and speedy and greyed
in the thick of cloud halfway up
Divis and Black Mountain.

The other two are singular pegs
rising and falling in solo sweeps
over the estate’s horizon, now.
It would put you in mind of someone
standing behind a half wall of brick
and pretending they are walking
down pantomimed stairs.
It’s spitting now, lashing nearly.
I might have been home and dry
if only I’d've walked quicker.

Amy O’Brien

Some people are born in cities;
I was born in layers of time.

In Damascus you do not walk upon the earth, you walk upon centuries.
Every stone is older than your memory,
and every alley has been crossed
by an army, a poet, or a lover.

As a child I played in its streets
and lived in one of its suburbs,
not knowing that my small feet
were walking over a city
that had once been a capital of the world.

I grew a little,
entered its university,
and thought I was studying like any young man.
Then I discovered that Damascus itself was the university.

I learned from its libraries,
its theatres,
and its cultural evenings.

I read thousands of pages,
turned the leaves of manuscripts centuries old, and covered festivals, seminars, and plays.

I thought I was working as a cultural journalist.
Only later did I understand:
I was not writing about a city;
I was writing from inside its memory.

I sat in its cafés taking notes
and walked the streets once walked
by poets, jurists, soldiers, pilgrims, and lovers.

Religions and empires passed through this city, prayers, bells, and calls to prayer, and Damascus kept walking with them all.

Then came the revolution.

The roads I knew changed:
Al-Hajar al-Aswad,
Ghouta,
Darayya,
Jobar,
Harasta,
Yarmouk,
and Tadamon.

Some of the road became rubble,
and some of memory became a pit.

They tried to turn the capital of history into breaking news, into dust without a trace.
But they understood nothing:

a house can be demolished,
a street can be destroyed,
but how do you bury a city
that has survived all these centuries?

I left Damascus,
but discovered that I had never entirely left it.

I still walk through it,
even when I walk through other cities.

I carry its alleys in my steps,
its cafés in my memory,
its libraries in my words,
and the voices of its dead and its living with me.

That is why I write.

I am not defending stones,
or a government,
or a map.

I am carrying a city.

Whoever is born in Damascus
carries it within forever.

Perhaps that is why,
wherever I walk today,
I feel beneath my feet
seven thousand years of memory.

Mohamad Zaal Alsalloum

المشي فوق قرون — دمشق

ولدتُ في دمشق،
ولهذا لم أولد خفيفًا.

بعض الناس يولدون في مدن؛
أما أنا فولدتُ في طبقاتٍ من الزمن.

في دمشق لا تمشي على الأرض،
بل تمشي فوق قرون.
كل حجرٍ هناك أقدم من ذاكرتك،
وكل زقاقٍ مرّ منه
جيشٌ أو شاعرٌ أو عاشق.

كنت طفلًا ألعب في حاراتها
وأسكن إحدى ضواحيها،
ولم أكن أعلم أن قدميّ الصغيرتين
تمشيان فوق مدينة
كانت يومًا عاصمة الدنيا.

كبرتُ قليلًا،
دخلت جامعتها،
وظننت أنني أدرس مثل أي شاب.
ثم اكتشفت أن دمشق نفسها كانت الجامعة.

تعلمتُ من مكتباتها،
ومن مسارحها،
ومن أمسياتها الثقافية.
قرأت آلاف الصفحات،
وقلّبت مخطوطاتٍ عمرها قرون،
وغطّيت مهرجاناتٍ وندواتٍ ومسرحيات.

ظننت أنني أعمل صحفيًا ثقافيًا.
ثم فهمت متأخرًا:
لم أكن أكتب عن مدينة؛
كنت أكتب من داخل ذاكرتها.

جلست في مقاهيها أدوّن ملاحظاتي،
ومشيت في شوارع سار فيها قبلي
شعراء وفقهاء وجنود وحجاج وعشاق.

مرّت بهذه المدينة أديان وإمبراطوريات،
وصلوات وأجراس وأذان،
وظلّت دمشق تمشي معهم جميعًا.

ثم جاءت الثورة.

تغيّرت الطرق التي عرفتها:
الحجر الأسود،
الغوطة،
داريا،
جوبر،
حرستا،
اليرموك،
والتضامن.

صار بعض الطريق ركامًا،
وصار بعض الذاكرة حفرةً.

حاولوا أن يحوّلوا عاصمة التاريخ
إلى خبر عاجل،
إلى غبار بلا أثر.

لكنهم لم يفهموا شيئًا:

يمكن أن يُهدم بيت،
ويمكن أن يُدمّر شارع،
لكن كيف تدفن مدينة
نجت من كل هذه القرون؟

غادرت دمشق،
لكنني اكتشفت أنني لم أغادرها تمامًا.

ما زلت أمشي فيها،
حتى وأنا أمشي في مدن أخرى.

أحمل حاراتها في خطواتي،
ومقاهيها في ذاكرتي،
ومكتباتها في كلماتي،
وأصوات موتاها وأحيائها معي.

لهذا أكتب.

أنا لا أدافع عن حجارة،
ولا عن حكومة،
ولا عن خريطة.

أنا أحمل مدينة.

من يولد في دمشق
يحملها داخله إلى الأبد.

ربما لهذا،
أينما مشيت اليوم،
أشعر تحت قدميّ
بسبعة آلاف عام من الذاكرة.

محمد زعل السلوم
فرنسا