Sheikha A. is from Pakistan and United Arab Emirates. With her poetry published in over 60 literary venues so far, along with several anthologies, she continues to seek more venues to reach out to wider audiences. Mostly disinclined to talking about herself, she prefers her poetry fill all the gaps instead. In her free time, she's either reading or writing poetry, musing over myths and watching cartoons. Her poetry has been recited at two separate poetry reading events held in Greece. She edits poetry for eFiction India. 
 

                              What about the sea
 
(after reading Oscar Wilde’s The Fisherman And His Soul)
 
 
What about the sea haven’t I said
that flows in your eyes like a morning
 
breeze that whimpers in a conch, if there was
a way easy to the path of your pearly world,
 
(like the man who wanted to give up his soul)
 
like a flower growing from the roots 
of the underground sea, I’d bloom 
to the surface as a lotus
 
and give many wanders for sea merchants
to puzzle on, there still wouldn’t be enough
 
number of times the defiance of my words
would send shivers of allure down the bones
 
of your desires, and the stories I would tell
you about how my fins expand like the wings
 
of a bird in free flight, how my arms
have been bound by the blood in your veins;
 
and then your eyes would promise me
its flickers of life, that like a flame leaps
of undeterred determination
 
and on a day of sunrise when the moon would
be conjunct with the sun, to watch me surface,
 
I’d pull you into the depths of the sea
and show you how, in my world,
humans are loved.
 
 
 
                           Will these mountains
 
Will these mountains fall on my back – 
they have begun to crack in rocks – 
as my rough wood canoe pushes across
by a stick of branch I use as an oar;
the light has receded into the clefts
of their shadows, and my body is lone
in the songs of the aged water 
that sits like a brewing drink in a glass
of permissible sweetness; my ears are
filled with whorls of your twittering 
when early autumn in my parts, I found
you in the sky of a different world
far from mine; when the season moved
I come, now, through these taper water-
paths, my swimming skills weak
against the unknowing deepness
of the deep looking for your song,
afraid to drown and die in irony. 
 
 
 
                                  still arriving 
 
walking on a bridge of nets to a land of lights
a thousand moons ago, I had arrived to a shore
the gulls slept, resting wings on sun-fried sand
 
as the ships I counted became fewer by the tide,
the sails flurried the winds buried the eyes cried
walking on a bridge of nets to a land of lights
 
I remember the tree that had offered us coconuts
hanging half-finished like a painting on a stand
the gulls slept, resting wings on sun-fried sand
 
how the fire beneath the waters rocked our boat
how our eyes had set on splintered crags of gold
walking on a bridge of nets to a land of lights
 
I remember my mother’s back matched the sky
pale clouds, yellow birds, wet rivers, hands dried
the gulls slept, resting wings on sun-fried sand
 
at night, I would  sit up to hear the fishes sing
the scent of dreams, new land, a perfumed lore
walking on a bridge of nets to a land of lights
a thousand moons ago, I had arrived to a shore
 
 
 
                    The hour of night walked over
 
The hour of night walked over the ledge
strolling on the edge of the roof’s, counting
 
its steps as it walked one foot afore the other,
like the night had arrived to its fate, vacant blue
 
held the mist in a jealous lover’s embrace,
petite was the stone on which the stars rested
 
their heads; the dreams of the roving grooved
into the walls like rings fallen off the sun’s
 
outer rim, the night shone within like a bulb
with the brightest yellow hues, un-exhaustive
 
like an eternal supply of continuity enclosed
around the universe’s brim; the night climbed
 
down the pipe with the stealth of a pubescent girl 
returning home at the hour of dawn, her cheeks
 
visible on the rising sky, her love, though a flame
showing like the rare golden on a dying night.

​Robin Wyatt Dunn writes and teaches in Los Angeles.

- ​- -

​When I will live. When I will die. When I will live again. I drive back to Jerusalem. The guards don’t even blink now at my Israeli passport. The borders have become porous.
This woman. Sheep woman. Her teeth fleece, cheeks jewels, hair bordered in silver, her cluster of camphor. Thy dove’s eyes.
Black dove.
Dear black dove, fly with me, and take me away from this world, and all of its works, so I might be free. So I might never need do anything again.
The beams of our house are cedar, and our rafters fir. Our bed is green.
Black dove, be with my tonight, and tomorrow,
fly

​- ​- -
 
The dove Columbiforme. Named so for its diving. So too was Columbus a diver, off the deep end, into new worlds.
Dive with me, black dove, off of the edge over the bridge, and see the world.

- ​- -

​You are black but comely as the tents of Kedar. Black as our curtains. The bundle of myrrh between your breasts. Between your legs.
Feed among lillies and let me die. I will feed them too.

---

​Black dove, come with me. No matter where, but away. Take off your gauntlets and let go your fine steed, and remove the jewels from your hair.
The house of cedar and fir is pulled down, and set fire. Your hair is shaven. The smoke and the dust have blown over us, staining our clothes and our skin.
But you are black as a dove and drive on through any storm, hearing my heart.
Come through this storm with me and I promise you, by my troth, and my balls, by my hair, and my eyes, that I will comfort thee on the other side, and on the mountain after that, when we will see the whole world we have made, never to pass again, but still here, for us, for some moments, to stain your face with the sun, and the light of your laugh shall rain on me for days and weeks after, years after, even when I am alone.
“Rachel?”
“What is it?”
“I’m coming home.”
“Well, hurry up. I have things to do.”

Alan Haider is an American poet whose work has appeared in print publications including The Main Street Rag, Sierra Nevada Review, & Petrichor Machine. He also self publishes daily poetry on Instagram @alanhaiderpoetry, & Twitter @poetAlanHaider.

                ASPERGER’S LIFE 

Kill a daughter
kill a son over 
principle Titus
Andronicus is a 
cold individual

           CRYING AS A SLIDE RACKS 

​Hot brass ejected is an
accurate metaphor for a
suicide note written in 
psychotic episodic mode
where a television is a 
ghoul vis-à-vis dynamic
obsolescence cold truth 
the most upsetting part
is inherent flaws makes 
the TV a metaphor I see
fit for me failures due 
to wiring that’s faulty 

              PUNISH THE BEATLES 

​Who made Manson go
helter skelter see 
we forgave Paul he
married an amputee
Ringo had no brain
& suffered no pain
George was a voice
we stole his lungs
Catcher in the Rye
killed John Lennon 

                    An Asp Greedily Lusts

 
 
Falls smells buried far beneath a cooling sun.
Crisp air surfs along merrily on the wave of fallen red leaves.
The crest waves fond farewells.
Trees once fulsome, weep with impending sleep.
 
They gather at the dance, brushed and content in their own hokum
To revel in the gift of a cool, early morning tryst
Arms uplifted in a Freitag stretch.
The desire for toothpaste at the local CVS
And morning headlines, Chiron streamed on Fox,
Shouting of fiscal cliff to spring from and Isis Caliphates slithering saturnine sand castles--
Beckons them.
 
Muffled screams,
Somewhere a mother dies alone
Bloody spatters like her hair splayed on her morning pillow--
Cacophony of brooding silence follows.
 
Intent,
He meets the crisp morning as well,
Mother’s ruby luscious lips on his mind.
He an asp in a frozen garden sibilates a silent message,
Runs his tongue over his sandpaper teeth and spits at the world.
 
A loudspeaker slices glaciated, silent halls.
A Gorgon-headed storm, she assuages.
Shoos the insistent boogieman --
That conjoined them in its inferno.
 


                       Bubbling Cauldron in Four Scenes

 
Scene I
Three serene hags, contemplate the bubbling cauldron.
They fabricate unbridled brews made of dark dreams--
add thimbles-full crammed with pricked pinches of this and that,
newts' eyes and raven feathers,  and
a bucking-bronco pate for them to ingest.
 
Scene II
Brutish darkness floats suspended in the mixture--
moving pictures of angry apes flinging feces at their jailors,
trembling behind Beelzebub's lava-laved dreams and
steeds whinny fiery admonitions,
feet clopping the ground with earth-trembling synergy.
 
Scene III
Starry-night stars smear a blackened sky,
hag-nurtured, seeds, chew at will through intended hearts.
They find there fractious disintegration.
 
Scene IV
Crimson rivers, hoodoos drifting among the inchoate.
They scream caveats to the recently erect,
now downtrodden bipedal, genome-sequenced beings, 
brew-infused, bare-knuckle walkers yee and haw
there to stampede through sandstone canyons.
 
Finis
Ambition roars a tempestuous howl.
The pot boils over them.
 


                            Endless Chatter
 
Carillions peel
half hour-
hour-
reminders
they fill in the rest with their palaver
hodgepodge of vacuity
in a smokeless room
their sounds echo--
reecho—-
lasting reminders of their existence
in the vast cells they traverse.
 
they dance through their dance cards
walker
and slick-headed
grim reapers of the silence
caned and canoodled purveyors of the lost
last valiant efforts
to be a part
apart from the meaninglessness of it all
 
they assuage their loneliness
with purports of their being
add for the inanities
volcanic ash from dusty mouths
and the hearers vacuous looks
responders to the murderers aired
ad infinitum in all the corners
 
and the carillons peel
on the half
the hour
and their endless chatter voids the silence
 
the endless chatter
voiced in the darkness of their moth-like temporality
ended in a pfffith of electric air
singed wings and the fall into a momentary silence
 

Ken Allan Dronsfield is a Published Poet and Author originally from New Hampshire, now residing in Oklahoma. He enjoys the outdoors, playing guitar and spending time with his cats Merlin and Willa. He is the Co-Editor of the new Poetry Anthology titled, "Moonlight Dreamers of Yellow Haze" available at Amazon.com. His published work can be found in Journals, Magazines and Blogs throughout the Web including:
 
Indiana Voice Journal, Belle Reve Journal, Scarlet Leaf Review, Peeking Cat Magazine, Dead Snakes, Bewildering Stories and many others
 

​                  Good Day Bucharest
 
Inhale Romania
sun tea warming
onions caress water
tepid potato stew
long bread lines
soup now boils
wall fly pouts
I smile.
 
 
 

                  Committed Rev 2
 
I laughed in their faces
as I committed to flight
within the dimmed night
of a vast swirling haze
sprinkled with delights.
Awaken a spirited grin
from a darkling gaze;
a chalice of warm gin
and unicorns danced.
We all recited a ditty,
"Race your dragonfly;
Grasp a shooting star;
Whisper to the Moon;
Dance with the Fairy."
Your Devil warms up
on the Summer's grill.
I forgot the bugle call
whilst dipping my quill
as I committed to flight;
a soulless zombie bite,
in the eve of a raucous,
contemptuous icy night.

​                          A Violet Sheen
 
A thrill for sure, to dance upon the Moors;
during the Spring moon on a May twilight.
Smells found there waft about the breeze;
green pine needles and shimmering trees.
The gentle brook serenades a sweet view;
winding through grasses as trout dine upon
the masses of golden mayflies, as if on cue.
A peaceful radiance through a violet sheen.
A shy deer sneaks a peek from the forest,
within the marsh, rabbits spar with the fox.
Winner shall reap life's illustrious conquest,
another day gone upon this new equinox.
Of a mountain high; brilliant changing sky,
listening to the geese upon a final glide.
a kingfisher hovers in air; diving to a dare,
into the pond a striped minnow he's eyed.
 

​                       Whispered
 
Whisper softly in my ear
share your dreams of a
beautiful coolish spring
where worms run in fear
of Robins upon the lawn.
Come to me in the scent
of lovely lilacs and roses,
musty leaves, newish dirt,
and fresh blue skies with
pink marshmallow clouds.
Ride a lovely unicorn into
the glorious sunset upon
reddish twilight shadows.
Whisper softly in my ear;
I am yours, forevermore.
 

​                           Winged Allure
 
A piece of sky,
palette of blues.
lonely are clouds;
form-shaded hues.
a temptation to fly,
birds do it with ease
Icarus tried with wax,
Dedalus displeased
spells of teary eyes
await those in flight
Orville rode the skies,
a feather not in sight.
race us to the moon,
never to know why
I guess just to do it,
insanity wants to fly.
sit me in the old bus;
smells make me frown
a bit slower, I trust,
but not so far down.
 

John Sweet continues to send his cryptic missives from the rural wasteland of upstate New York. He is a firm believer in writing as catharsis, and in the need to continuously search for an unattainable and constantly evolving absolute truth.  His latest collection is APPROXIMATE WILDERNESS (2016 Flutter Press).
 

​                 the gift of failure, which is not for everyone
 
 
rain and then no rain and then
rain again
 
white sun in a silver haze on a
sunday afternoon and the smell of dogwood
 
the past
repeated endlessly
 
fear of life and the fear of
death and the point where they meet
like a target laid over your heart
 
birdsong and the
screams of crows
 
the sound of my children
laughing at the forest’s edge
 
at some point in their lives they will
prove that i can’t protect them
forever, and then what?
 
every last hope is
nailed to the wall
 
escape is only temporary
 
i keep running towards the sun, but
all it ever does in this town is rain
 

​                 through the forest of broken stars
 
 
finger comes away wet with blood on
the morning the next great
war is invented
 
man calls to tell me picasso is dead
 
feels like i should care but
the car needs new brakes and my
youngest son has another ear infection
 
feels like all truths are so much
less important than the
lies i’ve spent my entire life inventing
 
like god is just one more
disease waiting for a cure
 
you cut out the poisoned part of
the soul and what’s left has
no choice but to shine
with the undying light of hope

​                     small grace in the age of ruin
 
 
and it’s not that i wish you dead,
but sometimes all i’m
left with is the truth
 
sometimes the trees can do nothing
to hold back the sun,
and we stand in their shadows
and cast none of our own
 
we speak of belief with
our broken hands
 
hold each other blindly in
curtained rooms
 
wait for the future like the
ghosts of
so many slaughtered children
 
 
 
 

​                   too high, too long
                                
 
25 years burned down in a town where
all streets circle back on themselves where
                          all houses cast only the
                          palest of shadows in late march sunlight
                          all back yards stripped won to bone
                   small tornadoes of brittle leaves and the
                   wind with a sound like
                   christ on the cross
 
              all wires wrapped tight, bind the
baby’s ankles & wrists, the child chained
to the closet floor and the teenage
girls with their suicide drugs
 
                                           taste of creosote and of
                rust and skin like silk like sugar painted
                                            delicate shades of blue
 
                                            sing happy birthday
 
                                            sing eleanor rigby
 
                                            try to think of a
                                            death that will matter
                                            more to you than your own
 

Sudeep Adhikari, from Kathmandu Nepal, is professionally a PhD in Structural-Engineering. He lives in Kathmandu with his wife and family and works as an Engineering-Consultant.  His poetry has found place in many online literary journals/magazines, the recent beingKyoto (Japan), Oddball (USA) and Red Fez (USA). 

​

​                           Ice and Soul
 
On a mystic flight to cold unknown
I am the sacred will
of the creatrix’s vow
when Soul–delight
is the calligraphy
of ancient myths.
And I feel the lust
of a schizophrenic psyche-nctist
for territories
within and without
I seek unbounded boundaries
I seek something
 of Nothing.
 
At the moment
when there is no moment
I am the unconscious
of Sat-Chit-Ananda
I am the oblivion
of drunken dakinis
dancing on corpses ashes
I am time itself
timeless in time.
 
I am the formless form
of the celestial mist
constructs an arabesque
of stellar woes
pain and pleasure
basked in perfumed vase
of crystal quartz ice.
The heart is
the cosmos within
don’t cry please!
over the tessellated stars
dangling earrings
of Elysium enchantress.
 
Feel one, one and one
dream multiplicities
 multitudes and many
as I traverse the canopy
of glistening silver-blues                                            
drizzle shiver dews
like a heart-smitten
shooting star
I miss my mother infinity
I kiss void immensity;
And there you burned me deep
with your roses coal
In return
I felt you
with my thousand hearts.

​                          The Bones of Wood
 
The breathing 
of your Elysian quiet
is not the dreamscape 
of that somnambulist nymph
coloring myriad archetypes
of the most ancient soul? 
and I feel kissing you 
in between
my calcium voids.
 
As I stood at your center 
excentric and eccentric
watching the
 headless centaurs 
as they marched
along those fractal kinks 
drawn across
 the canopy of dread
colored crimson, colored blue 
all cursed by a fiery hue
and my burnt-out vesper
sculptured by
the jagged edges
of the amphitheater 
of your greenest doom. 
 
Thou !..Sibilant reptiles!
my conscious slapdashes 
of lust to be
and to belong,
they worth no shit 
when you are breathing 
the snowflakes of voids
onto my naked self
and I was crammed
in your heart
with the loneliness
 of first man
that ever walked on earth. 
 
Your loneliest green,
brushes the twilights of pain
your scalpels of fire
how they engrave the sins 
ahh! are the purest nothings
Unborn, all-abiding
Thinking man 
Oh!.. You poor kid!
you must die,
to read the poetry 
of the gaps between the lines. 
 
 

                              Holy Nothingness
 
Solitude meditates in your wilderness;
A grotesque paint of confused beams
love-struck pollens meet the stellar dust  
somehow simulate
the Brownian motion of my neurotic soul.
You are the astral trance
of the holy One.
 
A part of you, an archaic tree
speaks in whispers, whispers the silence
and stands tall
with one hand in subterranean inconscience
while the other slowly architects
the curvature of fiery arch.
A tree never dies,
So don’t you.
 
You are a malt, yeah I saw
the drunken roses
bewitched of you ;
Oh lord! they want me
to drink today
and watch the river flow
and do nothing.
A man who simply watches
is just like a river; A walking poem
an erasure of its own absence
a suchness, an ever presence.
A river never sleeps
but we always do.
 
Your life is the life of life
where death stands not a mere antithesis
but an organic whole of infinitesimal deaths
that soaks the soul of very atom of life;
Just like Escher's absurd paintings
form and background, melt together
in a dream-like swoon
reciprocating the all-encompassing
all-devouring void.
Strange! You don’t
What you do;
You dwell in One, but I abide in two.

​                             Dream is a Hyper-Space
 
Amidst the stillness
 distilled out of all quiets
you flow with guile
 through the deepest of canyons
queen of occult alchemies!
as you dally amorously
with intimidating bounds
sing the hymns of unknown to me
when mist of mysteries
permeates my space
in the timeless of times.
 
And a solitary soul
soul-witnesses the dreams
of a bewitching enchantress
enamored, enraptured.
 
The super-sea
as it surges in ecstasy
speaks the language
of your distant world
and subdues the malice
of titans from inferno
and as you evoke your axioms
arthopoid beasts flee
towards glistening brook
when the fire of gold
oozes from abysmal hell
ignites unconscient
 contours of silt 
breaks the crust
and kisses supernal height.
 
Ohh, sweet thing!
silver of my radiant moon
a lonely sleep-walker
 through primeval turfs
 the sole executioner
of unwritten rules
 mandala of dreams
 you architect with your coils
you decipher
the kabbalah of gods.
Flux of rapture
as it emanates
you remain the one
the non-categoric bliss.
 
An untouchable shape
drawn from  the fibers of trance
a purest of patterns
 carelessly fluid
Ohh..I can’t behold
 with my thought
dissolves and crumbles
 to pieces,
as it is stained
when my love-struck
 thought tries to think
an unthinkable
unthought you.
 
A single super-soul we are
a unitary life-force
A seamless continuum
 of dreamer and dream
And there I am again,
an ideation-freak
ageold blasphemy of
 thought I cannot help
and the chasm is created
 out of lust
a  fracture
in the primordial mound.
 
Not motility
nor are you stupor
not dynamics
neither you an inertia
neither you the matter
 nor the spirit
an absolute void
sans schizoid thoughts
an objectless bliss.
A stainless canvass
of pure rapture
just one, only one
benediction of  pure “Nothingness”
you are.

​                             The Sound of the Sacred
 
The evenings make me
go soft on the entire Universe
it is exactly this
 lousy sense of stupor,
remixed with the gentle hums
of my machines
that goes into making the sound
 of the underground.
and how beautifully
it means nothing !
At times, my mind loves 
to paints the walls
with these yellow photons
 of non-thought.
 
I never looked for Gods,
My mother complained 
but I never told her
I always live among the Buddhas.
I don't meditate,
I don't cultivate kindness
and I know shit about Life,
Love and God.  
the very act of looking
stains the hyper-reality
of this immediate now
you don't look for truth,
you are the truth .
 
This blank of the moment,
vibrates with the protean null
and this is all I have,
my most beautiful sacred.
the moment you start looking,
you slay the Christ within.
 

​Laban Carrick Hill is the author of more than 40 books for children, young adults and adults. His children’s picture book When the Beat Was Born: DJ Kool Herc (Roaring Brook 2014) recently won the 2016 Texas Bluebonnet Book Award. My children’s picture book Dave the Potter: Artist Poet Slave (Little, Brown 2010) earned a Caldecott Honor and a Coretta Scott King Award and was a New York Times bestseller. My cultural history Harlem Stomp! A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance (Little Brown 2004) was a National Book Award Finalist, a New York Times bestseller and honored with more than 25 awards. Hill currently lives in Vermont where he teaches high school English and is working on a novel and a book of poems.

​                     Silencing Prettyboy Et Al.

 
Songbirds never
sing in fall, their
 
voices mute after
mating work is done.
 
Plump and heavy,
they wing their way,
 
drunken bikers
lurching from branch
 
to branch to branch
as autumn rushes through
 
sugar and red maples,
ash and dogwoods,
 
and finally stubborn oaks,
always the last to drop
 
their leaves, curled and rotting
like the fists of the dead.
 
No more prettyboy, menotyou, queedle.
No more trees uttering copious leaves.
 
This is the time
for turning inward, holding
 
onto what you’ve got, and
hunkering down in dense cedars
 
with all you can gather so as not
to die before the January thaw.
 

                         Squirrel at the Feeder
                                                                      for Frank O’Hara

 
Vladimir Putin invades the Ukraine!
I am sitting at the window watching
the red, red cardinal hog the feeder
so drunk on seeds he couldn’t be
bothered to crack them open, singing
prettygirlprettygirlprettygirl,
the frenzied squirrel below skitters
the hard-pack like a Jesus
Christ lizard sprinting across pond scum,
Yanukovych believes menotyou
menotyoumenotyou will stop them, the blue
jay muscles the cardinal, the
goldfinches clothed in winter
flora camo anticipate in the dense
cedar hedge until these
super powers become bored or
drain the feeder, below the
squirrel claws at the siding
to gain height, the blue jay goes
queedlequeedlequeedlequeedle
too large to actually feed from the trough
but uninterested in relinquishing
his perch, no sleight of wing even
imagined, the carcass of Hugo
Chavez rots somewhere in
Venezuela, the squirrel finds his
launch on the silver vent cap,
slate colored juncos, purple finches, tufted tit-
mice, Turchynov yells goawaygoa
waygoawaygoaway, Ban Ki-moon
gravelyconcerned, the goldfinches
are greener and greener,
the squirrel has it all figured out.
 

 

​                              Landscape #1: Bluff

 
Your elbow juts
about my ribcage
boney flesh to cardigan
you say I want to
touch you crumpled paper
anodized aluminum my
body defies your ribbing
my chest retards
the onslaught just
partially collapsed
or so it seems I
exhale my belt
acts as ramparts for
my buttocks I inhale
my skin realigns
itself you say we
are only touching
I feign soil erosion
and sight the bluffs
of Idaho the water
table shrinking
the dry unceasing summers
against a backdrop of
sky something must
be done I cite
my faulty ribs my heart’s
escarpments
 
 
 
 

Alisa Velaj (born 1982, Vlorë, Albania) is an Abanian poet whose work has appeared in a number of print and online international magazines, including Blue Lyra Review, One title reviews, The Cannon’s Mouth (UK),The missing slate (UK), The Midnight Diner (USA), Poetica (USA), Time of Singing (USA), Canto (USA), Enhance (USA), Ann Arbor Review (USA)The French Literary Review (UK), SpeedPoets (Brisbane, Queensland, Australia), LUMMOX Poetry Anthology 3 (USA), Erbacce (UK), FourW twenty-five Anthology (Booranga Writers' Centre, Australia), Poetry Super Highway (USA) and Knot Magazine (USA). She has also works in forthcoming issues of Poetica, Otter, The Journal, Reunion: The Dallas Review (USA), The Brighter Light Poetry Anthology (USA), Phenomenal Literature (New Delhi, India), The Atherton Review (USA) and in theAnthology by Mago Books. Alisa Velaj has been shortlisted for the annual international erbacce-press poetry award in June 2014. She was also shortlisted for the Aquillrelle Publishing Contest 3 in January 2015. 

                                  The Man’s Flood
 
That day was another threshold
A stranger stole from him his mother’s lap and his sister’s affectionate eyes
Blind with sadness he stood as before a lifeless thing
When at midnight his love’s shelter appeared in front of him
He was in the grip of the man’s flood…
 


                                        Threshold
                                              To Mario
 
The child builds a house inside the house
A small hut of bed pillows
A little lamp lights the tiny shelter
The child reads about midgets with his mouth open
And feels happy to have a tiny house like theirs
Whereas Cinderella sings songs
And prepares sweets for the child and his friends coming from the fairytale
Outside a stormy rain falls the last leaves of trees
And the wind howls like a crazy bitch with no reason at all
Sometimes his mother sings to deceive the stormy rain
With melodies sweeter than all the songs
Ever heard going on between Scylla and Charybdis
Tonight Odysseus will certainly invent an Ithaca in Orpheus’ arms
Sleepy though…
 
 
                               Five Views of Mists
 
1
The blind sees
With the eyes of mists
2
Even trees hide their greenery
In mists
3
The sun buried in mists
Looks like a pale moon
And the river’s memory is
The bluish green oblivion of pearls
4
Cities and mists write
The chronicles of the sun’s solitude
5
Mists even without solitude inside
Count almost nothing…
 
 
 
                                 Waiting for the Winter
 
Waiting for the winter
I feel the breath of the lands that have caught cold
Just because of thinking that cold weather will soon launch the assault
Just because of thinking that frost is on its way to them
The anxiety of leaves saddens me as well
(My loves rustle with anxiety)
But why should loves and lands blame us
For their making haste to reach solitude
Holding torches in their hands?
Why should our vague memory that fails to remember
When the first sunset hit it
Throw blame on us
 


                               Curiosity Under A Naked Moon
 
Naked songs
Under a naked moon
My curiosity defeats paleness
And tries to keep quiet as long as possible
Look at the boreal nights for a short while, darling
Something worthier than nothingness
Must necessarily be hiding
Beyond my curiosity and the lethargic mornings
The frightened sparrows of your breath
Are the first accords of the guitar lost
Somewhere under the snow or amidst the moon’s bones
No one knows
Where other accords and other solitudes
Come from or go to
Come into being, die again, and live three other lives, honey
Just to bring curiosity back to life for a short while…
 


                                           She


She is calmer than her songs
She falls asleep watching the twisted veins of trees
She is luckier than night and darkness
Blood capillaries will set fire to her moon
And night and darkness will run on all fours fearing her and her moon.
 

​
Translated from Albanian language into English by Ukë Zenel Buçpapaj.
These poems are included in Velaj’s poetry book “A Gospel of Light” published by Aquillrellle.

    Jeff's poetry has been published in The Glass Coin and DM du Jour. Other short works have appeared in markets such as The Brooklyn Voice, eFantasy, Quail Bell Magazine, and others. He is a Language Educator at St. John’s University, New York City

​                        The Face of Spring
 
In breath of Spring renew the sense of life
Such thoughts exist a world away from mine
A day of any steps to seconds past
A cool afternoon routine I set to task
 
Amongst the faces typically seen a new
Appears In shades, in light, in essence green
Her hair to waist in eyes I see, the lush
Of walnut flowing curly, wild, pristine
 
Her skin to chest the ivory of clouds
A tint of nature perfect beauty bound
Inside a breeze, a warmth unknown for
Many phases fills me fresh yet teased
 
Again I breathe, renewed, aware, alive,
The face of coming seasons, Spring had arrived