Greek Sense
Incendiary imagination
Innocent itch
Love starved luster
Maelstrom magnet
Eros’s day off of erratic erections
Plantar fasciitis gingivitis
Malevolent incline
Surreptitiously dipped
Spear-minted Troy-umphant
Achilles’s day off his feet
Solidarity in confinement woes
Cold imprisonment
Jubilant jailbreak
Sun-crazed fanatic
Icarus’s day off in the shade
Sailing toward an identity crisis
Epic maritime tourist traps
Calypsonian lover’s toll
Penelopean couch-surfer
Odysseus’s day off from travel
Stillborn Prairie
Jim never plowed
Before he went off to college
He got a job in the city
She was a stillborn prairie
His ww1 to end all ww2 forms
A rebirth into his childhood
Distilled clear body
Pure, hard, Hera dancing
Aged, built into beauty
Long-grain yellow Van Gogh depression
Foreign bodies waving in still air
Pulling sands down
Into obscurity
As sound, like death, comes
After
Scorched providence windowpane, glazing
Dust bowl iron ox
Fragments of sun-down shadows
Immense slow motion
Plough waving gently
Her lips, his dreams
In water, in brush, her lips
Those lips in brush strokes
Hot yellow water spinning
Pagoda of goldenrod, sensual and saintly
Night turning light down
A porch swing night
Childhood destiny left behind
Left waving,
Alone
— by Cherene Burdett
Copyright ©2023, by Cherene Burdett.…
The Last Pomegranate Tree, by the acclaimed Kurdish writer, Bachtyar Ali, is a magical, moving story of war, its volatile aftermath, and the search for a long-lost son who becomes two, then three. Translated from the Kurdish by Kareem Abdulrahman, this fascinating novel mixes allegory, magical realism, and mystical flights to tell the story of Muzafar-i Subhdam, a Peshmerga fighter released from prison after 21 years in the desert. Muzafar soon embarks on a journey of discovery, hoping to find his son, Saryas, born just days before he was captured and thrown into prison.…