the rulers of time must be blindfolded
they invent voidless words, old eager hands
in this time without dimensions
in this space devoid of meaning
they delete their mothers from themselves
the warmth of bodies is imprisoned in anguish
the body invades the mind, and the mind replies,
it invades the body, an impossible conversation
thoughts are transitional landscapes
but thinking might rebell and fragment into a standstill
time filled my mind and stuffed my throat
to tighten the unthinkable pain
on days with thick blood and stagnant winds
no words to fill the void, the unbearable hopelessness
the letters got destroyed by the gastric acid
and so I became... the reflux of pain

worlds are collapsing, rising; dictators exhale,
entangle the veins of the world
some ideas preserve salty streets like janitors of the dark
summer keeps the score of perfumed nights
I indulge in the womb of heat
wounds are retreating in sequestered spaces -
the seeds of the future.
there is a chill in the air, dread strikes near and far
light flows like the dance stuck in my bones
everywhere the pulse of time, dreaming

those days - each a capsule
a miniature of an idea
or an emptied truth
your soft lips postponed
bitter fingers knock
on unheard doors
my blood unfolds myself
with wonder

I can't drag the shadow of
the afternoon light back
into its nest
into the bud of silence -
back to its muse

my dreams have caught
*time fever

In my arms - thought - my words
you are malleable wax, a diamond
that reveals itself. Light of the tunnel, you!
The pyramid catches hold of our hands.
We become transparent, we become translucent.
Alone. I come near you ascending from time's
shadow. Free, free from everything and alone.
Above the city - fiery halo -
bodies float void of fear. The future
becomes present, the present, hope.

Liviu Antonesei
translated by Adam J. Sorkin and Ioana Ieronim

pain loves the present tense
it loves gravity so that the clouds
are turned into geological strata
sometimes I use my hands like an anaesthetic
between right and wrong the pain dillema:
to feel or not to feel (the unknown)
we discover clever remedies or illusions
quiet cannery in the storehouse of flesh

it comes in circles mixtures all kind of names
it has rythm texture electric blackness
each unshed tear an orb of contraction
compulsive excavation of the void inside
sometimes I feel I have canyons of salt in my heart
on the edges of safety so much to learn about terror

this pain is a blind Robinson on Hope island
(with his bare hands he sets pyres in his heart)
was it pain that invented this language, these holy wars?
love you, hate you, nonsense, can't stand it anymore
I know my father lied to me that he doesn't feel pain

bodies in pain can't dream the water slide of life
that might take us further away into the night of day
time to say thank you, say farewell,
love everything that simply is
it is time to

"Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as an escape."*

I feel like loving you today
like the wind through the willow trees
like broken pieces love their design
I would wear my glance
light as a feather
I would lean against the past
as a girl asking petals on her nails
"now he loves me,  now he loves me not"

I wonder how your love looks
when I'm boring
crazy with seriousness
or amnesic
of the burden of words

Today I feel like loving you
in the scent of freshly made
cherry jelly.
Do you know how to whisper
bedtime stories on my skin?

I think it was yesterday
I saw a beautiful man
on his way to freeing time
letting it roam
on forgotten paths of wonder
as if promising to make the most of himself
that very moment when it's time
to lose yourself

I feel like loving you today
like a mother forgetting her sorrow
like a spare lover
offering a shoulder as a butterfly nest
for your laughter
while you are dreaming yourself
in these words

today is a bitter day
words are broken windows
poetry refuses itself

people turn their faces from each other
no crossroads for the wounded
looking for their bodies full of warmth
I am alone with my fragile heart
too many objects of perpendicular desire
and no purpose intrinsic to our birth

it's a normal day
some are sharpening their minds
dress up their desire
to use me

today is just another day
the world is devouring its fragments
in the quietness
of hearts

I am ashamed that I am Spanish because of Franco
I am ashamed that I am French because of Algeria
I am ashamed that I am Algerian because of France
I am ashamed that I am American because of Bush, Iraq
and the bloodshed once among brothers
I am ashamed that I am Russian because of Stalin, Gulag
and recently of this and that
I am ashamed that I am German because of ******, clearly
(Pol *** appears more and more seldom in the lists, but one is horrified, humanly ashamed, remembering)
I am ashamed that I am English because of football etc
I am ashamed that I am Polish — only when I am not proud
I am ashamed that I am Turkish, but then there are Kurds...
I am ashamed that I am Czech and allowed myself to be stifled

(I am just as ashamed myself — some say, who feel
shame in its extremity and hide weapons in pantries, waiting for that moment
in which they wash away their shame with the blood of traditional enemies)
I am ashamed that I am Orthodox or Catholic and I wedge and split
the mountain on which Jesus bled — before others made even smaller
pieces out of his Golgotha below
I am ashamed that I am Indian because... well, it’s no matter
I am ashamed that being Macedonian I let the Greeks be even more
I am ashamed that I am Korean and one of Kim Ir Sen’s
I am ashamed that I am Korean no matter where, as long as
Kim Ir Sen’s Koreans remain
I am ashamed that I am Serbian, but... let me think
I am ashamed that I am Chinese because: ‘You’re Chinese?’
I am ashamed that I am Romanian because of Ceausescu, Dracula of course

and now, God, all these Romanians all over the world...
I am ashamed of my nation even when I am not ashamed
— but each of us seeks to forget something
I am ashamed because .......... [Everyone: fill in the blanks, write yours here!]

but you, but you — you, only you
you, whose nation filled the desolate earth with life and kindness
you are the man who begins the new day
today
with your first step

*Ioana Ieronim

" My grief says that I dared to love, that I allowed another to enter the very core of my being and find a home in my heart. Grief is akin to praise; it is how the soul recounts the depth to which someone has touched our lives. To love is to accept the rites of grief."
— Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

while fishing the stars
in your window
caught my skin eavesdropping
these rhythms: it must be some truth
I came along ahead the cortege of my selves
straight from
the blues of morning

tonight is simply beautiful,
I'm just saying,
heaven & hell
one metaphor away

I can feel you at the end of thoughts  tonight
as I dance the forgotten rituals of touch
I  wanna be your perfect stranger till
the trance of darkness flickers
in your bottomless eyes

so much silence in the promise of a new
green and the heart of the city is waltzing
with never the same sun and I wear
my skin tinged with the impossible words you never speak
with the thoughts that run away from you towards
an unseen horizon; when you are not careful something
moves up and down drawing an infinity column (the infinite is just the super flow of everything into everything else inventing space and time)
when you are not careful your smile is beautiful
I want you to plant your soul in the soil of
my palms, my feet, into the earth of my bones,
into the hearing of my heart
light is a journey, darkness a story to tell

She sits there
expert in silence
She listens
to my oceans
She unknots
daily tribulations
practice the art of patience
in undisguised grace
worded and unworded

She's the forgiver of darkness
simple in compassion
hearted in experience of
giving, waiting, wondering,
musing and learning
side by side

And I just love
her trainers
by the willow trees
the blue T-shirts
the yellow smile
matching the light
in her eyes

I love her like a mother
like a brother
like another human being
I just love
who she is.

no air in some dreams no naivities in my nails
there is space in my shade for all of you

my eyes bear spirals of tremors
I regain my trajectory, I feel like saying
the ink of childhood held in small bottles
my heart a bird on wire sometimes
I wear eau de merveilles for the wind
the essence of weeping beheld by
deep eyes raging to the open sea

I open my window to a door
a door to an oasis of bones that
sing lullabies to unborn mornings

passion is the mother of invention

I am sitting everywhere like a stone
struck by lightning
my nerves spinning their electricity
in new revolves
this vibration is transformation

of of of of
something into anything else
syntax into the golden ratio
fingerprints into enlightened wax
lungs into vertical love
craving into silence
desire into root
immanence into
transcendence and
the other way round
projection into
introspection
nihilism into redeeemed
despair
music into a theorem
of sunrise
hatred into pain
pain into
violet mourning
bread into singing
oxes' thirst into the art
of the earth
secrets into tangible
translucent pictures
rivers into the dreams
of the sky

I into the other I
in you and him
and them
in the mycellium
of syntaxes, synapses
enchanted
ephiteliums
into a choir of selves
in love's eyes

rainy days like these
I fill them up with
tenderness,
visions of the unknown
like lymphatic vessels
roaming the world
just to keep myself
from not knowing
that even the gods are weeping
or hidding their cries
in unwritten stories
when the pain is so
so so so so so
alive

what a blessing
what a chance
what an accident
a wonder:
the horizon itself is in
transition
to something other
than the blue speed
of the earth

Oh Lord, nourish me not with love but with the desire
for love. IBN ‘ARABÎ

Not only the thirsty seek the water,
the water as well seeks the thirsty. RÛMÎ

Ecstasy is a flame which springs up in the secret heart,
and appears out of longing. PAUL NWYIA

Open your hidden eyes and return to the root of the root
of your own self. RÛMÎ

The inner truth of desire is that it is a restive motion in
the heart in search of God. AL-QUSHAYRÎ

excerpts from "Travelling the Path Of Love  Sayings of Sufi Masters"

I
Again the larkspur,
Heavenly blue in my garden.
They, at least, unchanged.

II
How have I hurt you?
You look at me with pale eyes,
But these are my tears.

III
Morning and evening--
Yet for us once long ago
Was no division.

IV
I hear many words.
Set an hour when I may come
Or remain silent.

V
In the ghostly dawn
I write new words for your ears--
Even now you sleep.

VI
This then is morning.
Have you no comfort for me
Cold-colored flowers?

VII
My eyes are weary
Following you everywhere.
Short, oh short, the days!

VIII
When the flower falls
The leaf is no more cherished.
Every day I fear.

IX
Even when you smile
Sorrow is behind your eyes.
Pity me, therefore.

X
Laugh--it is nothing.
To others you may seem gay,
I watch with grieved eyes.

XI
Take it, this white rose.
Stems of roses do not bleed;
Your fingers are safe.

XII
As a river-wind
Hurling clouds at a bright moon,
So am I to you.

XIII
Watching the iris,
The faint and fragile petals--
How am I worthy?

XIV
Down a red river
I drift in a broken skiff.
Are you then so brave?

XV
Night lies beside me
Chaste and cold as a sharp sword.
It and I alone.

XVI
Last night it rained.
Now, in the desolate dawn,
Crying of blue jays.

XVII
Foolish so to grieve,
Autumn has its colored leaves--
But before they turn?

XVIII
Afterwards I think:
Poppies bloom when it thunders.
Is this not enough?

XIX
Love is a game--yes?
I think it is a drowning:
Black willows and stars.

**
When the aster fades
The creeper flaunts in crimson.
Always another!

XXI
Turning from the page,
Blind with a night of labor,
I hear morning crows.

XXII
A cloud of lilies,
Or else you walk before me.
Who could see clearly?

XXIII
Sweet smell of wet flowers
Over an evening garden.
Your portrait, perhaps?

XXIV
Staying in my room,
I thought of the new Spring leaves.
That day was happy.

There flows between us on the terrace
an underwater light that distorts
the profile of the hills and even your face.
Every gesture of yours, cut from you,
looms on an elusive background; enters without wake,
and vanishes, in the midst of what drowns
every furrow, and closes over your passage:
you here, with me, in this air that descends
to seal
the torpor of boulders.
And I flow
into the power that weighs around me,
into the spell of no longer recognising
anything of myself beyond myself; if I only
raise my arm, I perform the action
otherwise, a crystal is shattered there,
its memory pallid forgotten, and already
the gesture no longer belongs to me;
if I speak, I hear this voice astonished,
descend to its remotest scale,
or die in the unsupportive air.

In such moments that resist to the last
dissolution of day
bewilderment endures: then a gust
rouses the valleys in frenetic
motion, draws from the leaves a ringing
sound that disperses
through fleeting smoke, and first light
outlines the dockyards.

…words
fall weightless between us. I look at you
in the soft reverberation. I do not know
if I know you; I know I was never as divided
from you as now in this late
return. A few moments have consumed
us whole: except two faces, two
strained masks, etched
in a smile.

**Eugenio Montale

your eyes hot like a bullet
mine engulfed by the equinox &
the silences I walked away from
we are two or more
two people who shout at each other letters
that have never touched any alphabet
who throw beautiful ideas to be caught by twilight
the hour is always unknown
as if we watch each other's destiny
what comes next only the oracle of Delphi knows
or the roots of entropy maybe
I keep some thoughts in the straitjacket

we guard bridges, ancient castles in the sky
we guard the world not to turn into a casket without music
who invented this question mark
that we owe each other happiness
I wonder if the trees have unspoken meanings
do they turn overnight into telescopes to quest
the loneliness of stars, as we do

I might turn into a shadow
blinded by darkness
we draw uncanny shapes,
everything a circle can endure
with our mouths full of pebbles

you wear my skin as a coat
in the morning light
storehouses of tears
bridge my thoughts
of you
what is this je ne sais pas
biology, art artefact,
genocide of reason?
politics of satisfaction?
yes and no and maybe:
life playing a vitality game
with itself

there is a cosmic spin for
unborn thoughts, gestures,
meanings.
a house full of empty things,
the past. for non-believers.
****** traces on my skin
left by the wind, the sea, the fields
a tapestry of dread cause silence
was a cathartic violence

sit next to me and we'll watch
the elusive rhythm of gravity
pulling our cells in the same direction
to a new species of desire
unabridged

My curves are not mad.
Henri Matisse, *Jazz

when silence gives away its name
birds become electric
darkness is no more a story
in their wooden beaks
I stay at the beginning of thought,
decelerate reality
again and again
bread, pain, blindness
truth visits me in my dreams
sometimes
between desire & dying
shortcuts, blind alleys
Shangri-La and Valhalla
Nirvana & the hunting ground
Guadalupe
untitled self-portraits
fast heights
blinds & shutters
Spinoza's abyss
the chasm of reason
Kant's please mind the gap
pits of harmony
barren grounds
Prigogine's broken circle
lost aesthetic qualities
and the bit moves on

when silence is an unfinished canvas
waters, faces make an offering
and their names grow
when I am confused with the possibility
of the sea level
then I know where
my love
is

splitting every single second
is beauty
unadorned
could I remove the decimal point
from my dying breath
?

this endless procession of luminous shapes of darknes,
of blindind lights full of dark stories passing through
everything my mind can envision
thoughts slowly growing like trees with imaginary roots
to dygest to recycle the unbearably bearable
a true psychic cosmology cause life creates
by destroying, destroys by creating
I need to examine my dreams, not the alphabet of dreaming
-symbolic transformation, not equation-
the terror to be so alive in an unresponsive world
it is pain that turns my thoughts into wax figures
I want to deny that words have a heart of stone cause they might deny their nature
in the beginning was the word, or the emotional field, the primeval soup of vibrations
you are not what you know, you are not what you perceive, you are the one to be felt and let go of
we are all that is unbearably bearable

"Here comes the shame."

don't bury me inside your distorted womb
don't leave me outside
to watch the ebb and flood of it
they've stolen everything for me
I was there first, your womb is mine
I dare face the sludgy mornings as you like it
I'm on this vigil: seize the women-wombs
maybe some day I'll be able to honestly
forgive my grunge fists
push, smash, kick the terrible fortress
each of them: you've expunged me
I had to **** the dawn for me
to keep you alive
keep smiling obliterating
the fresh growling
keep myself busy with fear
for you to have clean sheets
in the long winter nights
I'll take it down on you:
look at these secret men

what I cannot feel doesn't exist
they don't exist when I frown my lips
your fat womb doesn't exist
when I grind my teeth

only her can send you under
way behind you
naked

"Daddy! Look at me! Grrr!"
I'll get even
look at them:
unrecognized cocoon-women

only them can pull you under
far behind the level of the seed

it is still tomorrow
make more room for the  past
into the future
the rhythm of our time is in
the narrative perhaps

I was too often said to be
crazy like one grandma
not odd enough I’ve always felt
like being born out of  my papa -
two knives in the same sheath
cause papa Zeus was devouring his child

so one day came when
I was drowning  in my blood
-confessing can be hard and bitter-
crooked with incessant need to love
I let each morning scream
acts of imagination and lonesome tears were
craving for some tender understanding
terror instead of midnight dreams
I was a beggar  burdened with awe

(all I ever wanted was You – mother,
you-father,
you-brother,
you-lover,
you-friend&foe;
you-the Other)

now if you think words are just words
you’re sooooo mistaken
living creatures they are
breeding selfhood
torching the shadows cast by feelings
in intensity

thus I took refuge in the future
-the deserted island of our best illusions-
enclosed myself in a dream
against the movements of pain
dismantling, maddening

it's only now that I can speak about myself
in the third person
"wo Es war, soll Ich werden"
so let the light explode in the windshield
it doesn’t matter where I’m heading
as long as I’m a lullaby
and You’re singing with me

don't ask how I am
I might confess with riven words
I am trying out dances for
one thousand and one nights
like a Scheherazade of unforseen
whispers

the breath of history in unknown bodies
intoxicate my sight I might say
it chokes me with a mystified light
I have to learn how to breath my own life
it's easy to confuse the absent with the real
the incorporation of dread, hidden feelings
and unspoken truths a subtle tyranny
no body carried my body in a mind

I want to spend my life writing love stories I will
forget by midnight and rewrite with laughter

between generations a subtle struggle cause there isn't still
enough space inside for the life of one's boundaries
it's either you or me to suffer but everybody is OK
we smile at each other, we appreciate each other

unbearable life colonizes the body with unbearable silence, signs without symbols but symptoms, drives and confiscated stories
unreachable bodies woven together by force in the fabric of illusion
cast a dimming shadow like the melancholy of an echo heard
by no body

longing creates canyons
a row of well behaved days
a new physiognomy for metaphors
the night has paused
no semiotic skin between me and my lover
ecoutez-moi
listen to the spaceless desire
this woman lost in me
my womb chimes, utopia
Unlimited

unseen the trees capture the clouds
moss captures the fog of oceans
roots store the sky deep into the earth
even dreams have their cycle
words capture unseen chemicals
is it in my eyes or in your eyes
the rain that grows discourses
of fire?

spring will come
when the wind is young
and the harvest of hopes
still awaits for the unspoken

i am sitting at the funeral of my heart
while it is so busy to bloom
into the silence of stones

what dares disturb the illusion of hours without strife,
without venom, without height
the air is full of anice, things ocupy their prescribed places
in this compulsory life
when I was falling they said it wouldn't hurt
but my dreams were forbidden summers,
my hands were cracked by smiling
the energy of the verb to be intense while
I fell into this dialect of silence,
me and the  ghostly caress of a lonely woman

You-the night-the day
she-the day-the night,
or just the fair pulse
somewhere in the air the hollow howl

She feels it in her bones. Yes. She feels
whatever shall be: a blinding ambiguity
The morning recycles dreams.
laundry crushed on the river stones
women are crying and washing
Oh, she wishes to air the night of your body,
to pull you out of your death.

The shadowy flowing of now
pierces her eyelids with your cellophane smile
her cells rustling: you-you-you
even screaming like a yo-yo
to be heard backwards
till the Big Bang

a wheat field
love
even death
one cannot speak about
without enormous risks

and yet about freedom
freedom -

save our souls!

Mariana Codrut
translated by Adam J. Sorkin  and Radu Andriescu

the walls have ears, they used to say
these walls are full of screams of declamation
of a burning stream of bodies with parfumed names
love confused diffused in this internal flight
being chased while chasing unrecognizable the face of truth for now
the warmness the softness of bodies so promising so alluring
the illusion, a fleeting connection so powerful that there is no one
to guard the depth of this edge, me and the anti-me
this disconnection sings lullabies to my zest for life
the right vision comes to those who wait
it is unbearable at first, cause you are not used to your
eyes seeing through the water, let alone the abyssal depth of blood

this could be a poem I could have written if I were you but
the most strange of it all is that I am this you and the other you
luckily the light is untraslatable and you can see it too

the dawn collapses sometimes under its own weight while
worlds of gestures are well preserved under the eyelids,
hardly random grammars, addiction to illusions,
the space of grace, the space for violence misued
muted tempos in the fragility of thoughts
we know many words but not the right language to talk to each other,
the vocabulary of hurt exploded inside narrow spaces,  the temple of skin empty
recycle bins full of our selves
we confuse the world with the contours of our pain

untitled the day sometimes
when love has left behind the birth of language

ask your blood
your limbs, your breathing feet
what Poetry is -
a phylogenetic anomaly
in light’s discontinuity

or just…
the strange yearning of hematopoiesis

ask the silence in your lungs
the bursting DNA, reinterpreted
how it allures memory inside your bones
how it treads conventions of sleep
with the weight of a sigh

if you ask me
what Poetry is
I’d say: breath calligraphy
a winged dream of depth
on enchanted retina
the bitter-sweet art of airy harmony

ask your hands
what Poetry is
perhaps they’ll take a moment
to bloom

He offered me a leaf like a hand with fingers.
I offered him a hand like a leaf with teeth.
He offered me a branch like an arm.
I offered him my arm like a branch.
He tipped his trunk towards me
like a shoulder.
I tipped my shoulder to him
like a knotted trunk.
I could hear his sap quicken, beating
like blood.
He could hear my blood slacken like rising sap.
I passed through him.
He passed through me.
I remained a solitary tree.
He
a solitary man.

*Nichita Stanescu

as I am trying to learn as much as I can
from the self of trees, wind, of bees and birds
of the unlanguaged child I still am, from
wise men and women through the arch of time
I am well aware that we can keep each other captive
inside the machinery of make-believe that makes lonely
bodies & sunsets bearable
I can't help feeling I am just this,
a vagabond in such a deep mystery

feelings
like lizards

like she-wolves
with their eyes of ember
in the dark

motion arrested
waiting for the mind to reach
its hypnotic body

**Ioana Ieronim

wait

wait
you say
don’t late this day
let it early
away

never

when all my roads
are closing down
you take me to this
never
town

open

you kicked a door open
in my mind
before
your
more

soul

soul is a ball of fire
enclosing memories
which do not
want
to lose the body
they hire

hug

this tired day
at the corner of age
hugging your words
floating in that air
that mediterranean
that balcony over the waves
that
you

Lidia Vianu**, from *My Cup of Light

a ***** war between language and forgetting

Gulag,  Holocaust, Holodomor, Maafa
Operation Condor,  Shock and Awe
red famine, potato famine
the kurdish, uyghur, rohingya, Isaaq genocide
Bengal, Rwanda, Armenia, Ukraine, Palestine,
Burundi, Nigeria, Zimbabwe
encompassing the geography of cruelty
someone humane did
actually write a book of inhumanity
560000 people killed on every page
1500 people killed at every word

still can't decipher the blood as if it's a hieroglyph
insatiable the history of pain

some are in the mood for war, for triumph
our eyes are swallowed by a verticalless convulsion
the cyclopic mind is doomed to fail
it's impossible to bury this time
in a hacked sky over a fragile earth

warehouse of time never complete
never emptied
this wave reached me again
this drilling pain around the navel
i don't recognized anything
my nails  my cries my falling into despair
nevertheless it is my flesh - this warehouse
everything comes together  fused
in the flow of the unknown or unthought known
wavelengths chasing each other
the revenge of forgetting or the impossibility of space
something emanates slips away
when there is not enough body of the mind
which is always the case cause gods get tired
is it the heart that is touched first, I don't know
this energy of mystery
it creates new figments of twilight
new shades of falling
if i let it be it tells me this story
tear down the invisible sites of hurt
for the impossibility of touch of sight of speak
the solution is always poetic,
take shelter it says
inside someone's heart eye
inside fluid worlds of wonder

what if
the warehouse of time
is full of weeping eyes
of buried hearts

A drop of water fell on my hand,
drawn from the Ganges and the Nile,

from hoarfrost ascended to heaven off a seal's whiskers,
from jugs broken in the cities of Ys and Tyre.

On my index finger
the Caspian Sea isn't landlocked,

and the Pacific is the Rudawa's meek tributary,
the same stream that floated in a little cloud over Paris

in the year seven hundred and sixty-four
on the seventh of May at three a. m.

There are not enough mouths to utter
all your fleeting names, O water.

I would have to name you in every tongue,
pronouncing all the vowels at once

while also keeping silent — for the sake of the lake
that still goes unnamed

and doesn't exist on this earth, just as the star
reflected in it is not in the sky.

Someone was drowning, someone dying was
calling out for you. Long ago, yesterday.

You have saved houses from fire, you have carried off
houses and trees, forests and towns alike.

You've been in christening fonts and courtesans' baths.
In coffins and kisses.

Gnawing at stone, feeding rainbows.
In the sweat and the dew of pyramids and lilacs.

How light the raindrop's contents are.
How gently the world touches me.

Whenever wherever whatever has happened
is written on waters of Babel

By Wisława Szymborska

were we looking
for the feminine
of our soft hands
no questioning
the nature of daylight
is wonder, we feel it
in our touch
we know the ancient art of
cartography: love memory
death quivers deltas of tears
we taste the starvation of breath
the magnitude of gratitude

we kept the drum of hearts
alight to catch the waves of time
Anna's drum summoned Shiva,
the master of shiver
the god of blood
carrying sage scent in our hair
forgotten paths in our shapes
pink lotus flowers in our wombs
bold desires in our feet
tales of flames in each scar

we recognise each other
greet with a soul reverence
across time across space
we forgive ouselves
our betrayals violations
of a feminine truth
we wait for the men we love
we set ourselves free
from the spinning wheel of pain

we receive
we keep
what is alive
what is dead
still not born
in refused bodies:
the possibility of
kindness

we are women
we are dancers
we sing fiercely,
gently from the
chest of the moon

we are the stories between the armpit
and the hand
between the whisper and the sigh
forged by galaxies of wounds
in the fragility of light
of spaces crushed
by the acceleration of time
our irises boundless
sometimes

we are the stories that tell
our soles when to stop
our bones when to sing
that put sunflowers
in our haze
cranberries in our waitings
delight in our might
skyscrappers of thought in our deeds
promises in our hands full of mud
over caskets

we are the stories of love's failure
(aren't we asking too much from love?)
of decay of pretend of parasitic laughter
of the violence of bodies without minds
without singing in the hearts
stories of fists strife and toil,
the boredom of dawn
repetition of self-deception
circles not round
triangles full of hurt
of the rigidity of one plus one
equals two
the rest is wonder

so many stories exchanging nouns, verbs
attributes just to capture
what is forever escaping alluding flowing
naturally undisturbed in the exchange of
vowels
like dark matter that escapes iself
only in dreams

was it the awe of vowels that invented the world?

incessantly on the edge
of chaos of blindness of knowing
of loss of void of grief & joy
of floating to the unknown
or pausing into certainty
hard working minds and eager souls
errect citadels of meaning
in dialogue sometimes
or as oppressive as
the denial of slippery roads
of sad guitars or
maddening violins

our shadows sit closely next to us
precisely when
we're stepping into the light

Steeped in history, building a shadowy bouquet,
Unable to reassemble ourselves as grapes,
We are wound into a richness we cannot undo.
Beautiful still, and with a destiny that is vaguely related to vines—
We still know water and wind.
We know the stories of the keepers of the casks,
We know versions of civilizations that sing.
There is goodness.
A look to a future of solutions is a potion table of bubbling mysteries,
Soaked in folded learnings, lost threads, unseen outcomes.
We are not
And yet
We are grapes always

by Nora Bateson

we knock on the doors for them to open, to
let us out, but those on the other side don't hear us and
they too knock on the doors for us to open and let them out
and when they open it's ourselves we bump into
but we don't pay attention to ourselves and we say we want out
and they say we want in, don't take the door away with you,
we wouldn't have anything to open on the way out,
there would remain a blank spot in the wall,
we won't find any way to get out.

Ioan Es. Pop**, from *the livid worlds

we knock on the doors for them to open, to
let us out, but those on the other side don't hear us and
they too knock on the doors for us to open and let them out
and when they open it's ourselves we bump into
but we don't pay attention to ourselves and we say we want out
and they say we want in, don't take the door away with you,
we wouldn't have anything to open on the way out,
there would remain a blank spot in the wall,
we won't find any way to get out.

Ioan Es. Pop** from *The Livid Worlds

We were losing along the way
our desire to break free.
Among the chains,
the pleasure of the flesh was
primal.

The microscope
turned against ourselves,
and we laughed like madmen.
Then we began to torture
ourselves
to tear the truth from within.

Come, tell me everything, and so,
we sank into shadows.
Living for an instant was enough -
the rest of life was just recounting it.

And those who couldn't
keep their eyes shut
tore them out
just so they wouldn't see.

by Miguel Oscar Menassa

nobody tells me what to do with longing
unquantifiable as only the sand is
exulted light dives in my hair
my shoulders are amazed like a cactus flower
your blood self-absorbed rehearses abysmal cascades
tigers are still asleep in your dreams
will you chase the moon on my surface, will you, tell me,
leave your silence on a chair
what if love is this cypher for the mystery of time
what if the pulse is a form of photosynthesis
we have to stay away from any fire since
we would exhaust its thirst
a step into a surreal second that augments me
second after second  the one who loves
disturbes time in its mazing grace
the sky this gestational field
the space between each word a cosmos
a white truth will repeat itself
again and again bearing witness to
life hand in hand with death