Warm welcome for guest poet:Ann Christine Tabaka
Ann Christine Tabaka was nominated for the 2017 Pushcart Prize in Poetry, has been internationally published, and won poetry awards from numerous publications. She lives in Delaware, USA.  She loves gardening and cooking.  Chris lives with her husband and two cats. Her most recent credits are: Ethos Literary Journal, North of Oxford, Pomona Valley Review, Page & Spine, West Texas Literary Review, The Hungry Chimera, Sheila-Na-Gig, Synchronized Chaos, Pangolin Review, Foliate Oak Review, Better Than Starbucks!, The Write Launch, The Stray Branch, The McKinley Review, Fourth & Sycamore.

Limbo
The darkness of your soul
penetrates unknown depths of sin.
The glory of your light
rises above heights of love.
In between we meet
to consecrate our union,
where no human has gone
or returned from before.
Echoes of your laughter
and the shadow of your touch
reverberate throughout.
Steeped in the grayness
bound by dark and light,
we battle our frailties
as we struggle to connect.
 
Wasting Time
 So much to do,
the list is long,
yet I while away my time
on useless tasks. 
 
Piles upon piles
of undreamed dreams
lie wasting on the floor,
along with unread books.
 
Seven on eight,
and jack on queen,
cards tell a story of
idle hands and a lazy mind.
 
Fear of failure
drowns all hope,
which in turn
writes the excuse.
 
No carrot will lead
me to truth,
for I am master
of avoidance.
 
The list grows on
as I dawdle forth,
finding glitter trinkets
to fill my hours.
 
So it is,
and has always been,
while days vanish
in a wink.

​Warm welcome for a guest poet:Michael A. Griffith
Michael A. Griffith’s chapbooks Bloodline (The Blue Nib) and Exposed (Soma Publishing and Hidden Constellation Press) were released in fall 2018. He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize for poetry in October 2018. He lives near Princeton, NJ and teaches at Raritan Valley Community College. He is Poetry Editor (US/Canada) for The Blue Nib. 
  https://twitter.com/AuthorMGriffith
https://michaelgriffithwordpress.wordpress.com


Perhaps
 
fearless
except perhaps a fear to stop
named after a ghost or an ancestor
perhaps named for God's grace
perhaps she doesn't believe
in her own mortality
until she slows
to a
stop
 
 
Glass
 
Glass half full,
feel mostly empty.
Hollow victories and cold
failures fill
the glass.

Bitter liquids charge,
change.  Flow,
time flow.
Time to fly
on shaking glass wings.

​
 

​Warm welcome for a guest poet:​Alina Purcaru 
 ​Alina Purcaru (born in 1982) graduated from the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Bucharest and has published two volumes of poems: resistance (Cartea Românească, 2016) and Indigo (Tracus Arte, 2018). She is also the author of the picture book Catrina and The Great Mr. Sleep (Catrina şi Marele Domn Somn, Cartier, 2017), illustrated by Mihaela Paraschivu and co-author of the collective novel Rubik (Polirom, 2008). She is the coordinating editor of two anthologies: Stories about Women Writers and Motherhood (Poveşti cu scriitoare şi copii, Polirom, 2014) and 10.000 More Characters (Alte 10.000 de semen, 2017), a Spanish/Romanian collection of Romanian prose. She has published essays and poems in three collections You, above Everything: an anthology of love poems (Tu, înainte de toate – o antologie de poeme de dragoste, edited by Cosmin Perţa, Paralela 45, 2018), How Men Read Women’s Literature (Cum citesc bărbaţii cărţile femeilor, edited by Lia Faur and Şerban Axinte, Polirom, 2017) and Her. Feminist Perspectives on Romanian Society (Ea. Perspective feministe asupra societăţii româneşti, edited by Oana Zamfirache, Curte Veche Publishing, 2019).  Alina is a regular contributor to various cultural magazines, where she publishes book reviews, and she works in Bucharest as a literary journalist and coordinating editor for Cultural Observer, one of the leading cultural weekly magazines in Romania.

promises
 like luna-betiluna and dora-minodora
we keep going,
day after day,
we cut leaves for all the bugs of the earth.
 
we put all our strength in the scissors:
our effective chelicerae,
our eastern-girl
frowned eyebrows.
 
we’ve got used to rust,
in the mellow chilly hollow,
set on a black background.
 
we don’t give up on our anger.
 
(Translated by Alexandra Turcu)
 
   
Shadows
 
Let me
tell you
about the evening when I carried
two umbrellas,
on my way home.
 
I had corrected a text about a man
who uses  two pens:
one to write about himself,
the second one to write about others.
 
I could not change anything about the number.
 
my umbrellas bother me,
only one of them is of help,
the other just hangs in my bag
among personal belongings
and other objects
with little
defects.
 
none of them remind me of you,
maybe just this spare umbrella,
the second one – a knob stick
made of new, raw wood
so finely polished,
so that we could keep
our dignity
around the clock.
 
without a word,
I carried my fatigue, another man’s pens
a useless umbrella
in my old bag,
wet
like a new skin.
(Translated by Alina Purcaru)
 
 
 

​
​Warm welcome for a guest poet:Tara Skurtu

Tara Skurtu is an American poet, creative writing coach, and public speaker. A two-time U.S. Fulbright grantee and recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry, her poems are published internationally and translated into seven languages. Tara is the author of the chapbook Skurtu, Romania and the full poetry collection The Amoeba Game.
 Tara worked at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and taught at Boston University, where she was a lecturer in creative writing and taught composition to incarcerated students through BU’s Prison Education Program. At present, she lives in Bucharest and leads creativity seminars and writing workshops for individuals, small groups, and companies.

 MORNING LOVE POEM

 Dreamt last night I fed you, unknowingly,
something you were allergic to.
 
And you were gone, like that.
 
You don’t have even a single allergy,
but still. The dream cracked. Cars nose-dived
 
off snow banks into side streets. Sometimes
dreams slip poison, make the living
 
dead then alive again, twirling
in an unfamiliar room.
 
It’s hard to say I need you enough.
 
Today I did. Walked into your morning
shower fully clothed. All the moments
 
we stop ourselves just because we might
feel embarrassed or impractical, or get wet.
 
 
 
THE AMOEBA GAME
 
 
I stood at the stove holding
a wooden spoon in my right hand,
listening to butter sputtering against
the splattered circle of an egg. Perhaps
it was the flapping of the egg’s
wavy edges against the steel pan,
or the amorphousness of its innards
outside the carriage of its brown shell--
I remembered an odd game I played
in Brownies. The amoeba game.
In the front yard of the scout cabin,
one girl at a time would become
an amoeba and lead the rest.
We didn’t know what amoebas were,
only that they weren’t human or animal,
and moved like a thousand blind legs
treading through molasses.
So it was that our heads and arms
became legs and feet, undulating
wayward into dusk. Swaying our shoulders
left to right, we’d giggle through mouths
we weren’t supposed to have, pretending
we had no eyes and didn’t know where
we came from or where we were going.
 
​Poems from Tara Skurtu’s poetry collection The Amoeba Game

​

​

​Warm welcome for a guest poet: Fernando Rendon
 
 Fernando Rendon was born in Medellín (Colombia), in 1951. His debut work Contrahistoria, a visionary idea of the future in complete opposition to the realities of apocalyptic excess in his country, was published in the 1980s. He has also published several poetry books, among others: Contrahistoria, Bajo otros soles, Canción en los Campos de Marte, Los motivos del salmón, La cuestión radiante, La Rama Roja, El porvenir está escrito sobre la piedra antigua and En flotación. His poems have been translated into more of twenty idioms.
 
He has founded the poetry magazine Prometeo (1982), with 110 editions to date. Founder and director of The International Poetry Festival of Medellin (26 editions since 1991), Alternative Nobel Prize 2006, who received the “in recognition of its courage and hope in times of despair”, among 73 candidates of 40 nations, activists for truth, peace and social justice. This Festival regularly attracts crowds of over 160,000 and has become the biggest event of its kind in the world. So far more of 1500 poets from 167 countries all five continents have participated. He is cofounder and the General Coordinator of World Poetry Movement (WPM) –www.wpm2011.org-.
 
Fernando Rendón received the international poetry prize Poets Against War (2010, Los Angeles, USA), the Arabian Bahrahill Foundation Prize (Egypt, 2010) “by a high cultural achievement”, and Rafael Alberti Poetry Prize (Havanna, Cuba, 2010), the International Poetry Prize Mihai Eminescu (Craiova, Romania, 2012), Mkiva Humanitarian Award as the Foremost Cultural Icon (South Africa, 2013), Vietnam Literature Prize to foreign book (Hanói, 2019).

Tasks of Enkiddu
  
You, Cro-Magnon safely arrived at our desert ages, do not belong only in Hittite clay tablets. Live still in the spirits of vegetation.
 
In the cages today men and beasts swarm around. Dismantle, then, as before, the pieces of the traps. Fill in the ditches. Storm the huntsmen’s shelters to mix the dampness in their gunpowder and break their daggers’ blood-dyed blades.
 
Come drink with the herds and the birds, come repeat in the market squares and the fields the tune that reminds one of time’s root.
 
Be again irreducible among us, in a unique land without the oppression of Uruk. Leap over the boundaries, reflect in your gaze the fertile promise, the wild liberty, the full dominion of earthly vigor, of celestial vigor.

Convergence
 
 Lying like logs, our red bark wrinkled, we are as buffaloes who rotting melt on the green meadow.
 
But due to an inexplicable random act, lying like mushrooms on the grass, we explore all the millennia, flee from prehistoric beasts, fight all the wars, are millions of beings stretching under the arc of eternity, while dragon and yearning fight in the clouds.
 
The sun calls us and to hesitate is to die. Fly, fly, beauteous swan of desire, everything can be achieved.
 
Walking on the white dew, remove your shoes: the age of man is that of his gaze upon the legendary forest.
 
 
 

​Warm welcome for a guest poet:​Lloyd Schwartz
   Lloyd Schwartz is the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Boston. A Pulitzer Prize-winning arts critic, he is also a leading authority on the poet Elizabeth Bishop and has edited the Library of America Bishop: Poems, Prose, & Letters. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Poetry, Paris Review, and many other journals and have been selected for the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Poetry, and The Best of the Best American Poetry. He is the author of four poetry collections, the latest of which is Little Kisses (University of Chicago Press, 2017). He was recently appointed Poet Laureate of the city of Somerville, Massachusetts

CROSSWORD
 
                                              For David
  
You’re doing a crossword.
I’m working on a puzzle.
Do you love me enough?
What’s the missing word?
Do I love you enough?
Where’s the missing piece?
Yesterday I was cross with you.
You weren’t paying enough attention.
You were cross with me.
I wasn’t paying enough attention.
Our words crossed.
Where are the missing pieces?
What are the missing words?
Yet last night we fit together like words in a crossword.
Pieces of a puzzle.
 
 
 
SMALL AIRPORT IN BRAZIL
   
9:31 in the departure lounge, nearly
deserted. Monday night—everyone here
 
is a little too tired to be traveling
to another city. I search for an interesting face
 
behind the newspapers, and light on
a young man:
 
maybe 31?—slim and well-dressed (that is,
dressed with some thought): his tan
 
jacket and pressed gray pants in muted
harmony with a pale yellow shirt
 
open at the collar (no tie, though there may
have been one earlier).
 
They fit him elegantly, suit him, suit
his thin, sandy hair and pale,
 
fair skin. His rimless glasses suggest
seriousness not fashion: a tone
 
confirmed by the forward gaze behind them--
through them.
 
He wears a touchingly simple
gold band on his finger, another example
 
of natural elegance—his wife must
share his taste.
 
Is he on his way to her? Is she picking him up
at another small airport? Will they embrace
 
warmly, gracefully, when he arrives?
Or will she be up waiting for him at home, dinner
 
on the table? Or not—already asleep
when he finally gets in, after her own long day.
 
Or is he on his way to yet another hotel,
after a week of hotels?
 
—tired of hotels; while his attractive,
witty, attentive wife, with her eloquent cheekbones
 
and slightly sunken cheeks,
begins to show her own weariness of
 
spending so many nights alone.
 
They’ll cost something, these nights.
Everything costs something when you have to make
 
your way through the world--
even if you’re not new to the idea,
           
or just beginning
not to be new to it.
 
             Lloyd Schwartz, from Little Kisses (University of Chicago Press)

​

​Warm welcome for a guest poet:Claudia Serea
​
 Claudia Serea’s poems and translations have appeared in Field, New Letters, Gravel, Prairie Schooner, The Mahalat Review, Asymptote, RHINO, and elsewhere. She has published five poetry collections, most recently Twoxism, a poetry-photography collaboration with Maria Haro (8th House Publishing, 2018). Serea is a founding editor of National Translation Month and a co-host of The Williams Poetry Readings series in Rutherford, NJ. She writes and translates on her commute between New Jersey and New York.


Claudia Serea--2 New York City poems
 
 In the city with tired bones
 
With her long legs
and a short-short dress,
spring rushes on 33rd street.
 
She’s late.
She’s sorry she’s late--
sorry, not sorry, everyone knows.
 
In the city with tired winter bones,
with her messy hair
and mascara-streaked face,
spring trots down 33rd street
in ridiculous high heels,
looking for the wrong address.
 
From Penn Station to Manhattan Mall,
she dances with bald men.
You know I’m no good, she says.
 
With blazing yellow daffodils
and blasting fire truck sirens,
spring shows up on 33rd street
 
and brings me an email from Esmeralda,
the famous psychic and tarologist,
who promises me money and fortune,
money and fortune,
if I only click this link.
 
In the city with hacked bones,
with pigeons and trumpets,
and a Rangers parade,
 
springs leads her marching band on 33rd street
in this city of diamond bones,
and promises money and fortune,
money and fortune,
and fame, and good poems,
and blazing daffodils.
 
What about love? I ask.
What about it, she says.

 
Immigration samba
 
Tomorrow, I'm flying to New York City,
the red carnation that opens in imagination.
Tomorrow, I'll board a direct flight to JFK.
I got my two suitcases packed
and my one-way ticket.
Tomorrow, I'll say goodbye
to all of this, my previous life.
I'll walk through the check-in tomorrow.
The sun will be bright,
I'll look at my parents standing behind,
quiet and dignified. Tomorrow,
the officer will stamp my passport,
look at me knowingly, and nod.
And I'll look back,
trying to hide my emotions.
It will feel like wings closing
and opening again. Like wind,
like a hurricane. Tomorrow,
I'll join the immigrants' carnival
in the streets of New York City,
wearing only feathers and pain.
I'll laugh with one eye,
cry with the other.
Tomorrow I'll fly to New York,
too close to the sun.
I'll flap my wings and burn.
I'll wear my carnival mask
so no one can see my emotions.
Tomorrow, I'll fly tomorrow
I'll fly tomorrow I'll fly
forever in New York City sky,
the carnivorous carnation
in my imagination.
 
 ​

​Warm welcome for a guest poet:Patrick Scott Vickers
Patrick Scott Vickers, was a former online editor for Blackbird, online journal of literature and the arts. (2007 to 2015). During that same period, he was a technologist and instructor for Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of English and in the Media, Art, and Text Ph.D program. He graduated in spring 2006 with an MFA in poetry from the University of Alabama. His poetry and fiction have been published in Strange Horizons, Mid-American Review, Touchstone, and miraclemonocle.com. His Flash art has appeared in the online journal failbetter.com. 

Example : 20
 
Dante was of course quite the most famous of us by this time and his openings
had become events in and of themselves and of course Dante became far more
interested with the concept of the opening rather than the installation itself so
that he held his events in ever smaller venues with long hallways leading to
small doorways or giant halls that funneled individuals as at a security
checkpoint and he had gotten miles of the expandable black rope pole tapes and
created a variety of patterns from simple switchbacks to full mazes and he was
so popular for making people suffer in lines that the lines became longer and
Dante himself wandered the groups waiting to get into his shows not
talking not shaking hands not signing autographs because despite his fame he was one of
those lucky men whose faces was not recognizable and instead was forgettable to
the point of being the joke of the group where even in our annual photographs
his face was more of a blur than a face in particular more the concept of a face he
would say smiling and goddamn but I loved him for that smile and the way his
one eyebrow would crook up and there was a tiny scar on his left eyebrow that I
knew to look for because I had given the mark to him during a welding accident
and in crowds I looked not at faces or eyes but at eyebrows searching for that
mark so that I could find him and congratulate him on yet another amazing
turnout while he would quirk his smile at me and hop up and down a bit he was
so pleased because the more people of course of course the better as these days
the more the artier as each person stumbled exhausted into the room of the
installation itself where there were comfortable couches and tables with
lemonade Dante had spent the day making himself with the tartness measured
so that every thirsty person had the slightest twist to their lips that could be a
smile or a grimace but most often reminded one of arousal the red lips parted to
reveal the white teeth and the fine dress clothes and even the men wearing hair
products because Dante had let a rumor out that he preferred hair treatments
when of course he cared not a whit and each of the first ten or twenty five or
forty five or eight or six or eighteen people through the door would be handed a
white index card by a white gloved door man who was not Dante despite the
near impossible to quash rumor that it was Dante handing out the cards and on
each card would be instructions to the recipient of how to behave during the
installation perhaps suggesting the receiver act drunk despite the fact that there
was no alcohol allowed or to fall in love with the next person seen of whatever
gender age or attachments or to follow the first person seen wearing black which
was always a good one as black was of course the color to wear and Dante liked
giving out duplicates of that card and watching the room attempt to follow itself
and each card he dated and signed and so they were worth money these cards
they were selling at auction they were money and I told him he should be
arrested for counterfeiting and he said for which money or art while I held a card
myself from one of the earliest of these exhibits and though I was seen with it
and so I’ve been offered ludicrous sums of money that I could use I of course
can’t sell no matter what because as many of his cards are blank of instructions
while others only make sense outside of the exhibit such as the next time it rains
stand underneath until the water stops falling my card had its own exhortation
that I intend to keep so there’s no use offering because his card says keep this
card.

​Warm welcome for a guest poet:Clara Burghelea
Clara Burghelea is a recipient of the 2018 Robert Muroff Poetry Award. She is Editor at Large of Village of Crickets and got her MFA in Creative Writing from Adelphi University. Her poems, fiction and translations have been published in Full of Crow Press, Ambit Magazine, HeadStuff, Waxwing and elsewhere.

Hymn to Life
(after Nazim Hikmet)

To move wholly through
the hours, I’ve come to know a silence
of the heart, a flow of the blood
that is unhurried.
There is no stirring in me
as I cope with your absence, Mother,
simply a muteness
of the flesh,
neither loving nor unloving,
simply waiting.
To have my hand
resting again on your face
as trees whisper in the dark,
as moonlight tarnishes the hills
as night descends the arbor of our sky.
There is a tenderness in scars
yet no saying how to heal.
 
Blessings
(to my children, Sașa and Mihnea)
 
You happened to me
and I no longer drive a sad car
to an empty home.
Babies are drugs,
the color of their mama’s love,
catch one unawares,
a spell of endorphins
bursting inside the craving cells.
 
I put my nose into your skins,
sweaty and eager to claim
and I know. I’ll guard you well-
a girl’s left dimple, a boy’s fish allergy,
the crooked teeth, the giant dreams,
any vagaries of biology
that might make you think you are less
than kings, queens, kite runners.
 
When you lie asleep at night,
I know a body, a wrist, a mind
cannot open without violence.
Between my breasts, a threshold.
Inside, your massive breathing lungs,
singing.

​Warm welcome for a guest poet: Hina Ahmed 
Hina Ahmed is a writer based in Binghamton, New York. She has a BA in history from Binghamton University and an MA in education. She is an aspiring novelist, poet, and political essayist. She has had published work in Pipe Dream, Press and Sun-Bulletin, East Lit Literary Journal, Archer Magazine, FemAsia, Aftab Literary magazine, Adelaide, Sun Independent, among others. Her work explores themes pertinent to the South Asian Diaspora, Islam, identity, sexuality, race, and gender.
 
The lights are on: bright, magnifying
The room full of cluttered wooden chairs
One stacked next to the other
Making it inevitable
For hands to touch
And bodies to hold
The steel kettle whistles and blows
Silver metal spoons dip into the hot heat of murky waters
Where they stir
Quickly and clockwise
Into the hands of control
As salivating mouths devour
Morsels of sweetness
 
While a man sits within his clothes made of Earth
His body hunched, shivering
In hiding within itself
 
The doorbell rings: Ding Dong.
They arrive.
Looking for him.
 
The sound reverberates through a morning fog
Filled with silent shame
Knock. Knock. Demand the unwelcome knuckles of knocking
 
He pretends to be dead like a mortal
In the face of a devouring beast
Brought back to the memories of a past
He stands alive against hardened white walls
Unseen behind closed doors
 
But the sounds of their arrival call him
Day after day
Night after night
Whispering loudly
 
Like living ghosts
Dancing within dead bodies.
............................................................

​With you gone, the silent
Echoes of the walls collapse in on me
Moving me, like the high tides of a tumbling ocean
The house is decaying in its emptiness
Filled with the suffocating fumes of a man
Who is dying inside of himself
Trapped in a metal cage
Closing in on itself
He can no longer look up
His face shrouded in shame
Not a word spoken between us
Wanting nothing more than to abandon the space of silent witnessing
like a refugee in a death camp
I want to run to a world where you no longer exist
And yet, when I arrive, I realize you are right there living inside of me.
 

​​Warm welcome for a guest poet: Nina Buckless 
​
Nina Buckless is a fiction writer and poet. Her poetry or prose have appeared in Santa Monica Review, Tin House, Unsaid, Georgetown Review, Absent, Burrow Press Review, Big Muddy Review, Mid-Western Gothic, Fiction writers Review. Her short story 'Deer' was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Nina received her MFA from the Helen Zell Writers Program at University of Michigan and was the recipient of a Zell postgraduate Fellowship. Nina is a veteran of Jim Krusoe's creative writing workshop in Los Angeles, California. She received scholarships to attend The Community of Writers in 2010 and 2015. Nina was granted a Civitas Fellowship to teach poetry with InsideOut Detroit in Detroit Public Schools. Formerly, Nina taught creative writing and literature at University of Michigan and Washtenaw Community College. Currently, Nina is working on a new novel, Cave of Idols, a book of prose and poetry. She is of Irish, Turkish, Spanish and Eastern European descent.

​Proclamation of a Detested Daughter
 
These are the goodbyes and remembered
sparrows of sorrow. The knobs that turn.
The hinges that cry out. The names of girls
who opened that door a thousand years ago.
 
This is a hall of Ancient stories. Fountains
upon apparitions of folded oak leaves.
Rain talks at night. Needles hit the ground.
 
Silence is in the middle of the sky and lone bells
at midnight reflect repertories of water
while salmon swim upstream in the cold.
 
There is twilight and sand on the doorstep.
Because, the boatman is made of dusk. And
in the center of everything there is a fruit tree.
 
Somewhere in the fixed realm of orbits
damn dream rituals have gone bad by the wayside.
The player's code lights some old and perfect fire
left for dead poets. The blindness of statues
who hold riddles for fools. No matter.
 
There are wings of swans. Eyes of angels.
The skulls of Caesars and fallen stars, fingers
of arrows and almond trees.
 
Now, wipe the dust from the faces of Helios. Because,
in the end there is no longer the parade of bodies
abandoned on the mountainside of child brides.
In the end, there is a procession of women
Mourning Sappho with the gatekeeper.
 
So, fasten the latches. The locks. The barred entries
to eternity. For, there is a key hidden in the crone’s pocket.
And her cries are heard round’ throughout the Milky Way.
  
 
The Cedars of Lebanon Have Spoken.
 
Ask the foothills at the Forest of God
where a meteor shower once settled the battle
between The Epic of Gilgamesh and Golgotha.
 
Away Gahanna!
Abraham’s burial
bath and clean knife have left
Isaac in the late, late, quiet of the world.
 
And Syria, Heaven on Earth.
the holiness of the human heart leaves
orphans to beg at the entrances of shrines
singing for water and bread, alone.
Sisters to Fatima, sons of Sarah.
 
Infants and elders along the road
to Damascus offer milk and honey
to the world while manna falls from the tree
of life. Let not the prayers of holy men pass them by.
 
Somewhere in Lebanon a farmer with her face covered
has planted God in the ground. Somewhere else
the leaves of the cedars have turned to rust
and bullets have fallen on the melted snow.
 
And the spirits and the scribes write messages
with feathers on paper floating in the desert
winds. During the day the sun carries words
through the storms and on up to the sea-creatures
resting like monsoons inside the mouth of the Persian Gulf.
 
The river of reeds has been damned
by bombs and the bones of the people
have turned into boats of clay that never die.
They go sailing off into the Egyptian everglades
back to twenty-four-hundred-thousand-years ago.
 
In a war a pianist hears the great clamor
of languages in the sky. A whistle.
A harp. A linen pouch. The once painted
faces of Alexandrian gold gone.
 
So, sit down and stay a while.
Put some cumin in your coffee
And talk amongst yourselves like
flowers talking to rain beside the Tigris.
 

​​Editors Choice:Songul Eski
​Africa
 
Say
How many moments
I would ignore
Did you load on me
How many grey hair
How many lines
carve on my goose foot
 
How many suicide
Was disgraced me
How many cold winter night
 
If you did not go
We could be Africa
 
To be sad for you
Every morning
And even
My body burning on your body
 
Songul Eski
Translated by:EUROASIA TRANSLATION ACADEMY(E.T.A)

​

​​Editors Choice:Yiğit Kerim Arslan
The one that will come at the end of morning
What was I told behind the shivering water, I listened by escaping from myself. (But I don’t know, why that is. I commit suicide every morning for this) the moon is getting lazy every day. He had a neck ache by the time. My love will clean my child’s sweat. The child will get off the bike or fall from it.
I’ll die until then I’ll be bored and I’ll need to put a dot.
Not a triple dot only a dot. If somebody understood, I weared away on every breath.
Smile, star, sparking, frustrated, I sit down in front of it like the sourness of an old photo. It has no street. It killed me with the calmness of morning. I shut up! He had a charm on his neck. Sleeplessness of the day: The flower going to death before my eyes. First they cut her arms. It made me mad, that is what they said. The sun rise, the sadness of time. my vines shaking off, it was refreshed. The fall was just starting, just fall
Fall just fall! Cry! Cry. cry… He smashed my rose with a rock

Tranlated By: EUROASIA TRANSLATION ACADEMY(E.T.A)

​Editors Choice: Son Gemi
Identification Card:
Name:Son Gemi (Web-Magazine.)
Editor:Fatih Ayan
Place:Istanbul(web)
Since 2015 
Contents:Essays, stories, Book reviews, Translations,Poems,Literature News.
email: songemidergisi@gmail.com
​http://songemidergisi.com/
​

​Editors Choice: Tmolos Edebiyat 
Identification Card:
Name:Tmolos Edebiyat (Tmolos Liteature Magazine.)
Founder and Editor:Ömer AKŞAHAN
Place:ÖDEMİŞ/İZMİR(Turkey)
Delivery:Nationwide.Every two months
Since 2012 April
Contents:Essays, stories, Book reviews, Translations.
email: aksahan953@gmail.com tmolosedebiyat@gmail.com
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​

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​Editors Choice:Betül Tarıman 
She was born in 1962, in Edirne’s Keşan county, in Turkey. After completing her primary and secondary education in various cities throughout Anatolia, she entered Hacettepe University (Ankara), where she majored in history. She is now working as a history teacher in Antalya.
Her first poem was published in Kıyı in 1992. Her poems and articles have been published since then in various magazines, the main ones being the following: Varlık, Gösteri, Kitaplık, Sözcükler, Şiir Odası, E Edebiyat, İnsancıl, Damar, Düşlem, Edebiyat ve Eleştiri, Son Kişot, İnsan, Bahçe, Yasakmeyve, Yeni Biçem, Akatalpa, Adam Sanat, Şiir Ülkesi, Eski, Şiiri Özlüyorum, Amik, Mühür, Kavram Karmaşa, Le poete travaille, İmgelem, Öteki – Siz, Ada, Yom Sanat, Uc Nokta, Dize, Esmer, and Cumartesi. The prize-winning poet (she was awarded the prestigious Behçet Necatigil prize in 2005) has published the following volumes of poetry: Ay Soloları (1995),Üzgündü Kırlar (1996 ), Kardan Harfler (2000), Güle Gece Yorumlar (2002), Yol İnsanları (2004), Kar Merdiveni (2007), Elma Dersem Çık (2008), Ağır Tören (2009), Rüyaya Kaçan Kuşlar (2010), Elim Sende (2011), Gezgin Kaplumbağanın Düşleri (2011), Şiirli Takvimden Papaz Mektebine Kastamonu ( 2011), Melvin’e Giden Yol ( Hadde) + Toplu Şiirler ( 2012) Rüzgarın Azabı (YKY, 2015), Elma Ağacı Kasabası Sakinleri ( Uçan At Yay. 2018), Rıza Bıyık (YKY, 2018 Öykü,
She has ran a poetry workshop in Kastamonu with her students. She has arranged a workshop named “Kadınlar Edebiyatla Buluşuyor”, that encourages women to write poems and short stories. She initiated a poetry prize in memory of Rıfat Ilgaz and acted as arts adviser of Kastamonu Mahalle Evi, established under the auspices of World Academy for Local Democracy (WALD). Betül published a magazine named Toplu Fotoğraflar with her students. One of her documentaries named “An afternoon in Kastra Komnenus” was the prize-winner at theum 6th Festival of Documentaries at Safranbolu. The poet has helped for organizing a literary symposium on Oğuz Atay, Turkish short-story writer and novelist, and contributed towards the establishment of short story and novel prizes in his memory.  And also she hold an exhibition with four artist women named “Me The Women”.
 
NOTHINGNESS HE IS
 
torn; what was he to me
the man I meticulously raised
defeated and naive, as if in a prayer
 
the more I stitch up, the more the tent of tediousness expands
the surmise that I smeared on my hand
sweating like a horse running over hurdles
bad-tempered and too few
 
torn; the narrowness that upsets
it is me the woman who upsets me
i am paralyzed, I have no hands
what if I lean my forehead to my chest
 
 
dreams do not rain on the house of the poor
 
Translated: Osman Yener
 

​
Editors Choice:Mustafa Ziyalan
 He was born at the Black Sea coast of Turkey. He worked as a general practitioner and coroner in a rural Anatolian village. Now he lives and practices psychiatry in New York. He had psychoanalytical psychotherapy training. He did research on schizophrenia. He has worked with torture victims, prison inmates, children abusing volatile substances, pathological gamblers, and persons with HIV illness and cognitive disabilities.
His poetry, short fiction, essays and poetry translations have appeared in many literary journals, anthologies (including “New European Poets”) and in book form. Istanbul Noir, an anthology of short fiction he co-edited with Amy Spangler, came out from Akashic Books in 2008. His most recent work of poetry is Rüyacılar Kitabı (Book of Dreamers) that came out in 2012. His most recent book of prose is “Çuvallama Ustası” (Master of Failing), a collection of short fiction, that came out in 2014. His poetry was part of Letters to Distant Cities (New Amsterdam Records, 2011), a multi-media project featuring photography of Murat Eyüboğlu, spoken word and music by Shara Worden and Claire Manchon. “Alengirli Filmler” (Handsome Films), a collection of film writings, came out in 2012, “Manhattan'da Şiir Konuşmaları” (Poetry Talks in Manhattan), a collection of writings on poets and poetry, in 2009 and “Yakılacak
Kentlerden” (From Cities Slated to Burn), a collection of travel writing with original photography by Murat Eyüboğlu, in 2007.

The searcher

Oruçgazi Elementary School disperses
black uniforms, lunch boxes all over the streets

powdered chickpeas,
        dried oleaster berries on strings
a refrain looking for its song

bus ticket, disintegrating
you'll go looking for your uncle in Sirkeci

in one of those scary hotels, so much
a refrain looking for its song

your uncle, gaunt, bald, by himself
whispers: "brain cancer"

voiceless, tiny, like your tongue,
a refrain looking for its song

smiles, uncle-ly, gives you
candy out of his already immense jacket

decades, centuries later
his daughter comes looking for you
        while passing through New York

a refrain looking for its song



Children's Matinee
at Marmara Cinemas, Istanbul


I'm all waiting
Cybernetic Mother: either never was
101 Dalmatians: or long missing
The Red Balloon: at the wall
The White Mane: about to drown

I never catch

look and look and hear it has long drowned
dashed into yards full of monsters
has been a dog missing in Five Points
a fish it will become mixed in grief

a blindfolded balloon
                waiting for the slingshots

​Warm welcome for a guest poet: JASNA KOSANOVIC
She was born in Bijeljina where she finished elementary and high school. Graduated at Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad, Department od Journalism. Lives and works in Germany since 2005. Member of the Association ‘’Worker poet in a foreign land’’. Issued the independent collection of poems ‘’Touch of the soul’’. Represented in many common issues of Zwishen Zwei. The first in the world Anthology of the Facebook poets ‘’Semberia in verse and hearth’’. 2015 published the collection of poems ‘’Walk by my hearth’’

MOTHER
I’ve been praying God at the nights,
when the new moon
illuminates the path for me
to be reborn.
That me you mother
in your arms take.
To see again,
in your eye, clearness of the source.
Wisely, under Himalayas
whispered a pray
about a new birth,
to give you my love,
higher than the sand in the sea,
as you giving me that
the whole life.
Decorated by the beauty
of the soul you gave me
I become a man
with the victory toward life.
To through my eyes enter you
and not the world,
because You were all the beauty.
Mother, how I scream for your image
while tonight in the sky
looking for your star…

​Editors Choice: Salih Mercanoğlu

​Child and Sleep
 
She is sleeping cuddled with my photo
Maybe a dream in her arms
Maybe before the time
 
Shi is scared
Like once upon a time
She is hugging the photo tight.
 
O Jungle! Jungle of sleep!
Isn’t that silence
We carry in our arms crying out loud.
 
Do not cover!
Children would sleep with their heart open daddy.
 
Salih Mercanoğlu
 
Tranlated by: EUROASIA TRANSLATION ACADEMY(E.T.A)

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​
​Warm welcome for a guest poet Milica Jeftimijević Lilić
​
Milica Jeftimijević Lilić  has published many collections of poems, a collection of shorty stories, and a book of essyas on literature. Her poems have been translated into many languages, among which into Russian, Italian, English, Arabian, Hungarian, Turkish, Bulgarian, Romany, Slovakian etc.
She has won many literary awards both at home and abroad. She is a member of the Association of Writers of Serbia, a member of “Number seven” Association of Writers in Frankfurt.
She is an expert adviser to Italian International Council for Diplomacy and Justice.

THE WOMAN
 
I was a ray of whoever I met,
The light being born on their faces.
I was a life-supporting breeze
That calmed down the uproar of frowning neighbors.
I was the murmur in valleys
Measured by the depth of man's loneliness
I was a string in Your hands
When You decided to celebrate the Might
I used to compete in singing with birds
And in playing with lightnings
In the longing of the one waiting for me
I used to tread on the waves
To outsmart the destiny
I used to destroy darknesses to save him of sorrow.
I was an impetuous rain
Called on by droughts
In remote fields with no hope or life.
I was a doomsday to slanderers
The murmur to the mute, the unrepeatable truth,
But only the scream from my womb
Verified me as the woman.
 
 
YOU ARE BOTH FLAME AND FLOOD
 
Do come as long as I am more yours than mine
Ready to please you more than me
As long as I am the tempest raising you
 to the infinity you long for
As long as I am a wave hugging you,
Transforming you
As long as I am the spark enlightening you
Illuminating your being
Multiplying your Self
So that you blaze in your own multitude
Staring at your new faces
That yield abundance.
You are both flame and flood
imbued by my fires
You are supported by new forces
You are mightier than before
Enveloped by that love.
 
But do not give free rein to yourself
Deceived by that beauty
Do not be excessively proud
Do not measure my will
While I am still ready for anything.
 
Do not ask too much
In a trice you may be deprived
Of myself, of the Sun,
Of breath and hope
At the bottom of a dark abyss
With the dying love!
 
 Translated into English by
Lazar Macura   
 
 
 

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​Editors Choice: Tunca Çaylant
He was in born in 1983. He lived in Bandırma until university education. He graduated from Boğaziçi University, Management Information Systems department in 2005. His poems have appeared in Yüxexes-Karakalem, Karakalem, Penguen, Diri Ozanlar Derneği and Çevrimdışı İstanbul magazines and Black Poetry Anthology. In 80’lerde Çocuk Olmak, Tuhaf Alışkanlıklar Kitabı and Mutsuz Aşk Vardır, his stories were published. His first book of poetry, Araftar, was published by Yasakmeyve in 2015. He lives in Istanbul and works as a freelance editor and translator.

​I Came
 
For the longest time my hands have been full of life
If you see me on the street from a distance
You think I’m a shoe shine boy
My mothball smelling innocent years
Rested once in a box on which Mother was written
Jumped out suddenly
But not to make a rhyme
 
Now it walks arm in arm
with all my noble sins
Still I can’t hide myself from you
or you from time
which is cruel
You know
 
You, sea shore
Don’t be afraid
Your waiting as old as my absence is over
I came to bestow
a face to your wave
a name to your aim
on a cold March evening
I came

​
​Editors Choice: Gonca Özmen

Wound
 -cause love quieted down-
Lets go deep…deep into well…
It is dark there, silence and fear of water
And deepness that the word cannot reach
 
As if I split myself on canvas
And leaked through that sad symphony
Yet you’re a tired moaning in my voice
 
-cause dream dyed-
Let’s go afar… afar of love…
There ashes, memories and residue of death
And the mountains’ wild silence
 
Don't forget tough
Every well lives its own loneliness
Every bird
Welcomes the morn
by its own voice
 
Gonca Özmen
​Translated by: EUROASIA TRANSLATION ACADEMY(E.T.A)
 

​Warm Welcome for a guest poet:Renato Fiorito
Renato Fiorito has a degree in Economics and he was a manager of the Bank of Italy. Currently he is a president of the Premio Internazionale di Poesia Don Luigi Di Liegro”.
In 2008 he published a novel "Tradimenti" (Edizioni Zerounoundici) awarded with the third place at the IV Edition of the "Città di Recco" and with the third place at the XII Edition of the "Val di Vara" Prize. In 2010 he wrote a novel "Ombre", set in the world of clochard, ranked 2nd at the 12th edition of the "Mondolibro" Prize and 2nd at the "Via Francigena 2011" Prize.
He is the author of the book "Legàmi" published by Lepisma, with the preface by Dante Maffia, whose poems have received many prizes and awards including, in 2010, the 1st place at the IV Priamar Literary Prize and the 1st place at the "Di verso in verso" poetry competition 2011.
He also wrote in 2016 the poem "La terra contesa" on the Palestinian Israeli conflict and in 2017 "Andromeda", on the history of creation.
He directs the blog "La Bella Poesia" (www.labellapoesia.info - over 130.000 visits), in which are reported the most interesting collections of contemporary Italian poets.
 
The Snow

You came in silence
how snow comes,
and in the morning the heart was all white
and didn't know what to say.
You covered me
like the smallest of violets
and I felt the white breath
of the earth opening to me
at the song of the titmouse.
Like the apple tree I tremble
at your caress.]
How slight is the moon tonight.
Renato Fiorito, Italy

Translation Germain Droogenbroodt – Stanley H. Barley

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​Warm welcome for a guest poet:Carlos Vitale 

Carlos Vitale (Buenos Aires, 1953) has a Degree in Spanish literature and a Degree in Italian literature. Among other books, he has published Unidad de lugar (2004), Descortesía del suicida (2008), Cuaderno de l’Escala / Quadern de l’Escala (2014), Fuera de casa (2014), El poema más crítico y otros poetas italianos (2014) y Duermevela (2017).  Likewise, he has translated a great number of books by Italian and Catalan poets: Dino Campana (Translation Prize “Ultimo Novecento”, 1986), Eugenio Montale (Translation Prize “Ángel Crespo”, 2006), Giuseppe Ungaretti, Gerardo Vacana, Sergio Corazzini (Translation Prize of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2003), Amerigo Iannacone, Libero De Libero, Joan Vinyoli, Umberto Saba (Translation Prize “Val di Comino”, 2004), Giuseppe Napolitano, Joan Vinyoli, Antonia Pozzi, Mario Luzi, Sandro Penna, Antoni Clapés, Joan Brossa, Josep-Ramon Bach, Antònia Vicens, etc. He has taken part in festivals, readings and poetry meetings in Argentina, Spain, Venezuela, Armenia, Italy, Switzerland, Romania, Estonia, Greece, Bulgaria and France. In 2015 he got the VI José Luis Giménez-Frontín  Award for his contribution to the approach among different cultures. He lives in Barcelona since 1981.
 
DAY TRIP
 You, standing up, naked in the half-light.
Your back is the arch of knowledge.
From the bed, I observe and wait.
When you turn back, you will tell me whom I am.
Without further light than my desire. 

CROCODILE LAUGHS
 
Don’t fool yourself.
The one in the photo
so smiling
was already unhappy
(you know it,
of course you know it).
 
Watch it back there,
audience or puppet,
blurred
even in the foreground.
 
He is smiling
although he is dead.
 
If you ask him
to move forward,
he will not cast a shadow.
 
Coax yourself:
only shadows
cannot cast shadows
translator:​MONTSERRAT ALOY.

​Editors Choice:Cemal Cengiz Gürkan

How should I tell
 
When I woke up from within
One single the night
all declined calls will be crossed
the road by our laughs
 
Then
I will carry your secrets
Piled up under my tongue
 
A light breeze of rain
The flowers will blossom with a power
Of water
The letters of departed people I will leave
 
Now when all the death laying down
Behind the open door
Under the cover of fallen leafs
 
How should I tell
it to the remainders
We hugged the
Accepted darkness
​Translated by: EUROASIA TRANSLATION ACADEMY(E.T.A)

​Warm welcome for a guest poet:Marian Raméntol 
Marian Raméntol (Barcelona, 1966). Poet, translator and director of the cultural magazine “La Náusea”. Member of the musical group O.D.I with which she has edited video-books and various albums. She has worked with experimental musicians in multiple recitals and performances. She has translated contemporary Italian poets into Catalan and Spanish. She has published fourteen poetry`s books and has been included in fifteen anthologies. She has been awarded in several national and international competitions, and her work has been widely disseminated in specialized magazines where she has published poetry, essays and opinion articles. It has been translated into English, German, Italian, Romanian, Armenian, Portuguese, Bulgarian and Estonian, and has prefaced several books of poetry. His activity in the poetic field has led her to be part of festivals, exhibitions, recitals and different events sponsored by town halls, publishers and other cultural entities.
 
Blog personal: http://www.marianramentol.blogspot.com

I STAIN WITH SILENCES THE SUFFOCATION
 
I am betrayed by the scenery of my body
there is no antibiotic for these eyelids
which are rotting in the streets’ weeds,
like the obscenity of a peeping Tom’s mark
over the humming of seats and scaffolds,
which always leaves false watches on the table
and genuine scars on the gums.
 
But sometimes,
the vertigo of leaves arises,
over the books and coffee’s eco.
 
Then I imagine a cardboard horse
which gives its battles in salty surgery rooms,
one afternoon asking the fount
when it changed the water to wash glasses,
a pair of chests learning the dance steps
which the jelly offers when crossing
the trachea like milk,
and I see myself in a corner of the pentagram,
so absurd
like a little girl
throwing, on a moon with no windshield
tons of make-up and wrinkly cracks.
 
And I stain with silences the suffocation, the sorrow
and the wishes, like a tubercular saxophone.
 
Poema traducido al rumano y al inglés, publicado en la revista Orizont Literar. CONTEMPORARY HORIZON MAGAZINE - ISSUE NO. 1/JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2010.
Traducător: Ana Fărnoagă
Corector: Cristina Costin

​Warm welcome for a guest poet:NICULINA OPREA

Niculina OPREA is a Romanian poet, essayist, translator and literary critic (born March 5, 1957 Melinesthi, Dolj). Since 1977 she has been living with her family in Bucharest - Otopeni. With a degree in Law, she is a member of the Romanian Writers’ Union and, the Writers’ Society of Bucharest and Honorary Member P.E.N. Turkey. She has published over twenty books. Fragments of her poetry have been published on ten languages, English, French, German,Turkish, Spanish, Polish, Serbian, Arab, Chinese, Albanian and The Crimean - Tatar language.
 Literary activity
 Books :          
În apele Akheronului  ( In The Akheron’s Waters )- , 1994. Trecerea  ( The Passage), 1996.  Sub tirania tăcerii ( Under The Tiranny of the Silence), 2000.  Litanii la marginea memoriei ( Litanies At The Edge of the Memory), 2002. .... la vară, tot tu vei fi aceea  ( ...Next Summer You Will Be The Same, 2004. Aproape negru ( Almost Black), 2004 and 2017. Viețile noastre si vieţile altora ( The Lives of Ours and The Lives of Others), 2008 and 2017.  Rădăcini peste praguri ( Roots over Thresholds ) (poetic anthology) 2016.
Poetry books in foreign languages:
 Les Guérisons imaginaires, 2007, (the French version of the book Almost Black). Neredeyse Siyah, 2011 (the Turksh version by Ayten Mutlu of the book “Almost Black”). Bizim Yaşamlarımız ve Başkalarının Yaşamları, 2013 (the Turksh version by Mesut Şenol of the book “ The Live of Ours and The Live  of Others” ) . Med Cezir Arasında, 2016 (the Turksh version by Erkut Tokman).
Essay:
(Ipostaze ale Poeziei Românesti), vol. I/ Facets of Romanian Poetry. I, 2015.  Interviews:
Celebration / Celebration, 2011.   [edit] Translations into Romanian: Eufratul, taina destinului meu (The Story of my Destiny),  poems by Sherko Bekas, 2011. Ochii Istanbulului (The Eyes of Istanbul) , poems by Ayten Mutlu, 2012. Iniţiatoarea (The Initiating), short stories by Mustafa Balel, 2014. Strada care caută marea (The Street that seeks the Sea), poems by Hilal Karahan, 2014. Înserare pe Bosfor. Antologie de poezie contemporană turcă (Evening on the Bosphorus. Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry), 2015. Timp îngemănat (Half of the Time), poems by Enver Ercan, 2016 În așteptarea vântului ( Awaiting the Wind), poems by Mustfa Köz, 2017. Preludiu pentru o noapte la Kars (Prelude for one night at Kars ) poems by  Metin Cengiz.
Affiliations :
Member of the Writers' Union of Romania, The Writers’ Society of Bucharest. Honorary Member P.E.N. ClubTurkey. [edit] Dictionary : Dicționarul scriitorilor români(Dictionary of Romanian Writers), 2011. (Vlach Pages of Literary History Tomorrow), 2014 by Ion Pachia – Tatomirescu.  Awards :
‟ Prize, Poet/ Poetess of The Yearˮ, 2015. The award was given by  International Poets and Writers “Pegasi” Albania. Prize of Excellence for the translate the book " The Eyes of  Istanbul "  by Ayten Mutlu, 2012;    Poetry Prize, "Dioysios Solomos ", Larissa, Greece, 2011; "Honorary Diploma of the 1 st Mediterranean Poetry Festival and "Certificate of Merit", Larissa, Greece, 2011; Prize for creativity " Na‘man" (Liban), 2011; Prize "Ad-Visum" on 2005, for book "Almost Black”, 2006 .
Conference:
- NHKM (Nazim Hikmet Centre Cultural), Istanbul, Turkey, October 2010, upon the subject  Romanian Contemporary Literature.
Yunus Emre Turkish Cultural Centre in Bucharest, Aesthetic Poetry and its role in cultural approaches ", March 2013. Yunus Emre Turkish Cultural Centre in Bucharest, October 2014, Mustafa Balel and short stories - The Initiating.   - Romanian Cultural Institute in Istanbul, September 3, 2016, the lecture with title ,,Translating as a from of knowledge’’.
 
Communication:  niculinaoprea@gmail.com
           
 THE NIGHTINGALE`S NIGHT-HOLE
 
The spider
does pirouettes on the sleep`s shadows
Above it
Horizons interweave the spells.
 
Our shadows
projected on the clockwise top
are arching
towards the childhood edge.
 
The circle in which it got darker too soon
is the nightingale`s night-hole.
 
The passing of time
I`m following through the same sphere.
 
Life`s harmonies
are staring to escape from slowness.
 
The mornings ear drums
unravel the sounds
from the circle arces bend.
 
              © Niculina OPREA
                                  ©Translated by Lavinia Puflea
 
             

​Editors Choice:Narin Yükler
Narin Yükler was born in Viranşehir of Şanlıurfa in 1988. She greaduated from the Tourism and Hotel Management School of Gaziantep University and from the Faculty of Business Administration of Anadolu University. After graduation, she started to work as a hotel manager.  She got married in 2012 and had her daughter in 2014. During that time, she took part in the activities of various non-governmental and human rights organizations, especially women’s rights organizations. In 2011, she was sued by the government fort he reason that she participated in a press statement of Şanlıurfa Human Rights Association. In 2014, she was sentenced to 10,5 years of imprisonment due to that case, and that’s why she had to quit her work and flee to the cirty of Duhok in the Kurdistan Regional Government with her husband and 40-day-old newborn. Many of her stories and poems written about Middle Eastern, especially Kurdish/Ezidi, women were published in several newspapers and magazines in Iraq, Belgium, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey. She held meetings in refugee camps where she read her poems written in Kurdish and Turkish languages. She has written theatrical plays on the human and women’s rights, some of which were staged.
 Awards
Hüseyin Çelebi  Story Prize (2015)
Ali İsmail Korkmaz Poetry Prize (2016)
Golden Daphne  Award  For Young Poets of the Selection Committee (2016)
Arkadaş Zekai Özger Poetry Award (2017)
Arjen Arî Poetry Award (2017)
Sennur Sezer Poetry Award ( 2017)

 Abraham
 
I walked gently in the streets that ends up with the same road
Mountain said that she knows the secrets of trees
And she heard what is to be said for tomorrow
The stone was a language that still lives and I kept it fot myself
While the history was cleaning his own stains
 
İ have passed through tunnels forr reaching myself
And passed through gates which has reliefs
I knew villages thats names rewritten from their seasoning
And I thought that sharp smell of past would be on the road
Will not break my neck at the colonial altar
İ thought that İbrahim would split his humphback with his axe
 
​Translation by:Burak Erdoğdu 
 
         

Editors Choice:Necdet Arslan

​//* Neutral Time
.
A cliff
Or a narrow river passes by from beneath
Tiny
So it comes suddenly
Absolute Reality of possibilities
 
Maybe in an unexpected moment
Laying down snuggling with your bed
Drying your bread, leaving the table
Spilling the soup or food
Reunite when you are moaning
 
Short of mind like Atlantic Ocean
Those agitating waves
Captivity of shutter release
Power outage Electricity
Never ending Endorsement
Every time is early
Crying of uproar with sauce
Everybody is going to taste
Reality.
It makes you say come back tomorrow
And ends up with tears.
 
Necdet Arslan
Translated by: EUROASIA TRANSLATION ACADEMY(E.T.A)

Editors Choice:Hilal Karahan
 Turkish poetess, writer, translator, mother and medical doctor (1977, Gaziantep/Turkey).
 Her professional poems, stories, interviews, articles about poetry have been published in various national and international poetry-culture-literature magazines since 2000. She has joined to many collective books, bilingual poetry almanacs and found in organization committee of international poetry festivals. Her poems and selected poetry books were translated into many languages.
 She is recently a member of Turkish PEN, Turkey director of World Festival of Poetry (WFP) and Writers Capital Foundation (WCP) movements and Turkish ambassador of World Institute of Peace (WIP).
 Since 2017, she is a member of publishing council of international bilingual poetry magazines of Absent and Rosetta Word Literatura.
 She organizes Feminİstanbul Poetry Festival every year.
 Poem Books:
İç Sözlük-Bir Günün Özeti - Self Dictionary-Summary of One Day (2003)
Tepenin Önünde - In Front of The Hill (2003)
Giz ve Sis - Secret and Mist (2004): Found as “remarkable” in 2004 Yaşar Nabi Nayır Poem Election
Gecikmiş Mumya - Delayed Mummy (2010): Found as “successful” in 2010 Cemal Süreya Poem Election
Ateşi Bölen Gece - The Night Sundering Passion (2012): Given Burhan Günel Private Award in 2013 M. Sunullah Arısoy Poem Election
Denizi Arayan Sokak - Strada Care Cautẵ Marea (Selected Poems, Translated to Romanian by Niculina Oprea, 2014)
Denizi Arayan Sokak - La Rue Qui Cherce La Mer (Selected Poems, Translated to French by Mustafa Balel, 2016)
Ateş ve Gece Arasında - Between Night and Fire (Selected Poems, Translated to English by Hilal Karahan, 2017)
Kırk Yama Kırk Yara - Fourty Wounds Fourty Patchwork (May 2017)
Poems To The Shadows - قصائد للظّلال (Selected Poems, Translated to Arabic by Fethi Sassi, Battana Publishing House, Cairo, 2017)
 Essay Books:
Şiir ve Kuantum - Poem and Quantum (2012)
Dip Köşe Şiir Notları - Nook and Cranny Poem Notes (2014)
Garland Book:
Öteki Poetika: Bayrıl Şiiri Üzerine Yazılar - Other Poetic: Assays About Bayrıl Poem (2012)
Awards:
Secret and Mist: Found as “remarkable” in 2004 Yaşar Nabi Nayır Poem Election
Delayed Mummy: Found as “successful” in 2010 Cemal Süreya Poem Election
The Night Sundering Passion: Given Burhan Günel Private Award in 2013 M. Sunullah Arısoy Poem Election
2017 “World Icon of Peace” award from World Institute for Peace 
2017 Verbumlandi-art “Citta del Galateo” International Poetry Prize, First degree in English Poetry
Member of:
Turkish PEN Centre
Turkish Authors Association
Turkish Language Society
World Festival of Poetry (WFP- Intercontinental director)
Writers Capital Foundation (WCP-Turkey Director)
World Institute for Peace (WIP- Turkey Ambassador)
International Council for Diplomacy and Justice (ICDJ- Turkey member)
 Communication: 
hilalkarahan108@gmail.com
hilalkarahan@yahoo.com
www.hilalkarahan.com

(winer of 2017 Verbumlandi-art “Citta del Galateo”
International Poetry Prize )
  
EXDUHUL: DEATH ENTRANCE
1/

“Show me your pain.
The God won’t come again.”

If it was a cold sunday morning, what they look for
was a coffee smelling kitchen exactly.
The man was standing, drawing a dark,
muddy voice from its well hardly:

“Strange, people get used to pain, too.”
2/

A calm november was moving outside:
They were startled by noise of grass, awfully
scared if a tap dripped or a grasshopper slipped.
Hungry trees were cracking in the groin of the crazy wind.

She was impressed by his speech: He was speaking
as if dividing a loaf of hot bread into two:

“Can there be another life with old lovers?
Come on, withhold your anxiety and mislead me!”

She got used to fright so couldn’t turn back.

3/

She gathered her hair slowly:

“You were loved in your absence,
as long as duration of abstinence.
If you didn’t know, would you go?”

She walked around old cities of her face
and was curious:

“Were those years that we knew
beginnings from their results?
The balance was supposed to be a scale
of hands of the clock.”

Smiling vaguely, her childish teeth sparkled:

“I have learned MU, as I am going mad:
Time has loved the flip-flop
and pain was always heavier.”

 
4/

Sipping her coffee, she was uncomfortable
with posture of her wrists: She wrapped her fingers
to forehead ambitiously to feel safe again
and to have accommodation for dissociation:

“Where is love in a relation, MU?
Do perception rolling, sensitivity softening,
certainty sharpening occur suddenly or slowly?”

She pushed back that night
of coagulation in her blood:

“Darkness was walking in the roads
of a stammering town. You were afraid of the crowd...”

The man felt cold and sat down wearing a new
self-percipience:

“...and touched my arm.
We were supposed to walk side by side,
instead, you were silently buried inside.
It was a time I could rip off you from my heart,
but I was loving pain more than its space.”


5/

Putting down the cup very carefully
not to make any sound, she leaned back
with a sudden relief at the table:

“I didn’t complain about your sloughing off
or withdrawing inside so often:

The deepest loneliness grows
in the most passionate loves.

If you didn’t abandon me,
how could I learn MU,
a carved tree still lives
while the barked one dies.”

6/

The ledge has coughed severely three times.
Reduced cloud probably didn’t love the rain.

Recalling desires, the woman ogled
his muscles with her retina;
it was a bare rock to remember
his open, sucking and salty mouth:

Predicting pain was excruciating.
So, she took a familiar face from her pillion:

“I was wrong MU to assume to be seen.
No one can see through what is misunderstood.”

If the man stared at her, she would slimily cry.
She didn’t cry:

“If you loved me,
how strong I would be.”

7/

The man was building the cornerstone of a well:
He didn’t hear, as if far away from his words:

“You have saved and collected all things,
you have been hidden and accumulated;
who were you?”

Putting his feet on the legs of the chair,
he adducted his knees to be at home,
and leaned forward:

“Recognize me,
time is later than what it seems to be:
Anger has changed dimensions.”

8/

Anxiety was a mountain village under her eyelashes.
An ivy has covered mouth of the well with
its root and seeds. Yet her tongue and teeth
are a snapdragon during kissing.

He wanted to touch her cheek
with the magic of a wet sign;
heat of his hand turned to ice:

“Why do probabilities sting us, does anger sharpen
expectation? Is love a test for our spirits?”

He stared at her and then outside:

“How many worlds can be in an earth?
I always brought myself wherever I came.
Be disturbed by my presence.”

The tired wind has fallen down
along minced leaves. A death flesh
was being dragged by the ants.
The sky was going continuously.
A downpour would start.
The grass didn’t notice it.

Hilal Karahan
 

Warm welcome for a guest poet:​Flaminia Cruciani
Born in Rome, Flaminia Cruciani graduated from Rome’s Sapienza University with a thesis on “Archeology and History in the Ancient Near East” under the direction of Professor Mathhiae. Then ,she  went on to receive a Research Doctorate in “Oriental Archeology” from the same university, with her thesis on “The Iconography of the Gods in Paleo-Syrian Glyptics.”
Thereafter, Cruciani specialized with a 2nd Level Master course in “Architecture for Archeology – Archeology for Architecture”, whose aim is to valorize the cultural heritage. For many years she took part in the yearly digs conducted at Ebla, in Syria, as a member of the “Italian Archeological Mission at Ebla”.She went on to study for a second degree, this time in history of art.
Cruciani is an expert of glyptics and Visual Studies.At Rome’s Sapienza University, she holds annual courses on the relationship between iconography and the written text in the Mesopotamian tradition.She has authored scientific publications, and is a consultant in the framework of different archeological projects at Sapienza University and the town hall of Rome.She has also specialized in Analogical Disciplines through the study of Dynamic Hypnosis, non-Verbal Analogical Communication and Analogical Philosophy and is now a qualified Analogist. Her practice in this field is aimed to help individuals in reading and decoding deep emotional dynamics, which can promote a good level of communication between the logical-rational and the analogical-emotional spheres. This aids the individual in shedding disorders, overcoming relational difficulties, repetitive processes, and redirects their life towards a radically new state of well-being.Cruciani has in the past years become a certified operator of Psych-K. She has also invented “Noli me tangere®”, a help tool based on metaphor and on the evocative power of images, which can promote the process of personal individuation.In 2008 Cruciani published Sorso di Notte Potabile (A Sip of Night Water) with LietoColle. Lapidarium came in 2015 with Puntoacapo, and Semiotica del Male (The Semiotics of Evil) in 2016 with Ed. Campanotto. Her literary work has appeared in several Italian and foreign anthologies. She was selected among the young Italian contemporary poets for Bombardeo de Poemas sobre Milán, a work authored by the Chilean collective Casagrande. Cruciani joined the Mythomodernist movement, and is one of the creators and founders of Grand Tour Poetico (The Poetic Grand Tour) and the Freccia della Poesia (Poetry Arrow).


You don’t know how all wept quietly in Sparta
on the heap of Dorian ancestors
from the crowded sepulchres when
an inferior sky got married
the father was cursed along with his
gospel of oaths
cracked with use
swallowed into theological chaos
soiled by the equestrian circus.
The stopwatch started and we were already late
to train as warriors
the chains that had to be fixed with
hands stiffened by the cold
for us to taste the ruin of a miracle
to grow strong as an army
a woman strong as an army
one step from immortality
with a crushed orchid in her fist.
I asked for nuclear mercy,
to weep and cry “at ease!”
I would have wanted a raft of almonds
to shelter under a kiss.
But within the voice’s range I only
marched with silence, with head lowered
there was an enemy to be defeated,
it was me.
 

​Warm welcome for a guest poet:Claudia Piccinno 
Claudia Piccinno was born in Lecce in 1970, but she moved very young in the north of Italy where she currently lives and where she teaches in a primary school,  she is scholastic referent land for education at reading. Operating in more than seventy anthologies, she’s a former member of the jury in many national and international literary prizes.
She has published
“La sfinge e il pierrot”, Aletti Editore, 2011
“Potando l’euforbia” in Transiti Diversi, Rupe Mutevole Edizioni, 2012
“Il soffitto, cortometraggi d’altrove”, La Lettera Scarlatta Edizioni, 2013
With english version also “Il soffitto, cortometraggi d’altrove” La Lettera Scarlatta Edizioni maggio 2014
- in serbian “Tabahnha” ed.Majdah luglio 2014.
“Ragnatele Cremisi”- La Lettera Scarlatta Edizioni, settembre 2015.
Tavan Baska Yerlerdeki Kisa Filmier,Artshop, Istanbul 2016
Italian poet, she is author foreground with effect in June 2015 in the World Group Pentasi B, and In Oup archives international since May 2016, she works to promote poetry based on respect and appreciation of differences. She has received awards in major national and international competitions of poetry, including an honorable mention in the Paris 1st Word Literary Prize and a 3rd prize in Lugano, Switzerland, 3rd prize in Albania; She has been the first italian poetess to be awarded with The Stelae of Rosetta, World Literary Prize in Istanbul on November 2016.
She was conferred with the most prestigious award “World icon for peace” for Wip in Ondo city, Nigeria, on April 2017 .
 Her poem "In Blue" is played on a majolica stele posted on the seafront in Santa Caterina di Nardo (Le).
On June 2016, she was art director in an art & poetry international exhibition called June in Italy
She is italian editor for the international literary magazine Rosetta World Literatura in Turkey
and for  Atunis Magazine in Albania.
She has also written numerous reviews and critical essays or prefaces about other poets’books.
She has translated from English into italian language lots of authors.
http://www.realisticpoetry.com/poetry-blog/david-is-your-name-poem-dedicated-to-a-child-with-autism-by-claudia-piccinno
http://claudiapiccinno.weebly.com/estero.html
https://ourpoetryarchive.blogspot.it/2017/01/claudia-piccinno.html
http://verbumlandiart.com/dr-jernail-singh-anand-a-philosopher-of-language-life-and-literature-essay-of-italian-poetess-claudia-piccinno/
https://atunispoetry.com/2017/01/14/dr-jernail-singh-anand-a-philosopher-of-language-life-and-literature-essay-of-italian-poetess-claudia-piccinno/
​
Imaginative heir of Pythagoras
Life tattooed me with numbers
On the left side of the heart.
I will resume them to make pure singing
Which may delete the calculations of giving and having
And may cancel the divisions with the rest of three.
It was the three to be unharmed
By sums and subtractions.
Those three who did not want to
Grant equality
In the comparison of other opinions.
Aridity prevailed in counting
And the wrath of the multiplication sign
was kindled.
I am the multiplication sign
imaginative heir of Pythagoras,
I do not like the profits, nor the dividend,
I was patented to increase
Love multiples.
​
​

​​
​Warm welcome for a guest poet:Karen Villeda
Karen Villeda Villeda has published two children's books, Pelambres (Pearson, 2016) and Cuadrado de Cabeza. El mejor detective del mundo o eso cree él (Edebé, 2015); four collections of poetry: Dodo(Conaculta, 2013), Constantinopla (Posdata Ediciones, 2013), Babia (UNAM, 2011) and Tesauro(Conaculta, 2010), and one book of essays Tres (Cuadrivio Ediciones, 2016). She participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa during 2015. Villeda has been awarded with grants from the Open Society Foundations, Ragdale Foundation and Young Creators Program of the National Fund for Culture and Arts (FONCA). Villeda has won, among other literary awards, the "Clemencia Isaura" National Award of  Poetry in 2017, Youth Prize of Mexico City 2014, Fine Arts Prize for Children's Fiction, "Elías Nandino" National Award of Youth Poetry in 2013, First Prize of  Poetry "Punto de Partida" of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 2008 and IV National Award of Poetry for Children "Narciso Mendoza" in 2005. In her web POETronicA (www.poetronica.net), Villeda explores poetry and multimedia. Her interest in poetry and its relation with various technological resources began with LABO: laboratory of cyberpoetry (www.labo.com.mx). Part of her digital work is in the third volume of Electronic Literature Collection of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her poems have been translated into Arabic, French, English and Portuguese. She has also published her poems in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Spain, United States, Guatemala and Venezuela. She has translated John Keats' Lamia to Spanish. She collaborates in Letras Libres and Nexos. Nowadays, Villeda is the director of the Digital Literature Diplomate at Border Gallery in Mexico City.

VI. NATURAL HISTORY
 I wake up with a tug to the jaw. Some molars loosened. A few canines in distress. Our dream of fresh viscera. Six tongues call out to the Mongol. Mauritius does not give him back to us, our chanting tongues. One slap of wind, the echoes of empire.
 
Octopi carry off the sea in their tentacles. A pinnace forty-nine strokes away. Two rival arms are absent among us. One lullaby into the distance. The Mongol does not return to the bonfire. We call to the sludge. Six armpits influence the wind’s disposition.
 
The Mongol curled into a ball, a beach. We look around, one purple race. A punctured temple. The flies lay eggs in its graves. A skull like my love-sick lover. My beloved little son. Mauritius, you are so sly.
 
The Mongol face up in the sand. A clean peck through the skull. The Admiral pokes around. His slouched back. Forty-nine sacks remain, without a casket. Two silver rikksdaalders cover the eyelids. We jump on top.
 
Ninety-eight kilos and all his little bones eating away the six peeled backs. Twelve disjointed shoulders. The hard nipples are for The Admiral. We pray with more faith now than ever. We sink our teeth into it. We thrust a fist in the mouth. One less tongue.
 
There is nothing left to cast out to sea. The scorched bits win! White sequins on six, six swollen bellies. Gums covered with fuzz and intestines. A burping contest. Mauritius is the loser. The wind fine tunes “Pra lapra pran lapra lapra pra pran.”
 
We slowly lick the Admiral’s chest. He removes his wig of feathers. We sigh. My love-sick lover. “That one, that damn animal killed him.” My beloved little son. The beloved Mongol. “Dead as a dodo” says the Redhead, son of the bearded Englishman exiled to Amsterdam.
 
 from: collections of poetry: Dodo(Conaculta, 2013)
written by:Karen Villeda
Translation by Josh Rathcamp
 

​Editors Choice: Barış Erdoğan

Brick house
 
We’ve been living in a brick house
Since my dad died
I said our house would died too with our dad,it did not
Now it is has been a cold februarry on the walls
I curved my dad’s face on a rock, rock blood chute
My dad didn’t have a long life like rocks
I got it
 
 We’ve been living in a wooden house
Since she died
I said my dad would died with my mom, he lived much longer
Now seagull necrosis on the walls photo yelow
I carved your name on a rock, a rock bloomed a flower
My dad wasn’t as pale as pictures
I got  that too
 
Now who breaths in a brick house, who makes love
There is a moaning in the house of deaths, I never got that

​Translation: EUROASIA TRANSLATION ACADEMY(E.T.A)

​Warm welcome for a guest poet:Alan Sondheim
 Alan Sondheim is a city-based new media artist, musician,
writer, and performer concerned with issues of virtuality, and
the stake that the real world has in the virtual. He has worked
with his partner, Azure Carter and the musician-composer-
performer Luke Damrosch. Sondheim is interested in examining the
grounds of the virtual and how the body is inhabited. He
performs in virtual, real, and cross-over worlds; his virtual
work is known for its highly complex and mobile architectures.
He has used altered motion-capture technology extensively for
examining and creating new lexicons of behavior. His current
work is centered around notions of gamespace, 'edgespace' (the
border areas of gamespace) and 'blankness,' projections around
edgespace. His current music is based on the impossibility of
time reversal, on fast improvisation, and anti-gestural
approaches to playing. His most recent work is this short
biography.

​*/Submission/*
 
future anterior of the poem that would have been written
 
---
<
<  poem I as
< > among ourselves, among each other thereby cut through
< Hz those
< Oh for old dime's skew. Look, we're in noh be. titters!
< Oh for old timer's sake. Look, we're in hatters!
< ah c
< ant
< asked to write or submit you,
< brittle dress age of individuation.
< category where dynamic locations cut through the
< cut through into this plenum:
< divide
< duets. Or e
< dune locations cut through dye
< echoes which reversed, inhale time in
< gel individuation.
< go on, just like that, around the unrelieved U.S.A.
< gory n object new category where
< into this plenum:
< l, relent
< lie sound,
< long categories
< low
< madam
< mica brittle dress brittle dress
< nd it's thereby topic, the USA no longer release, relate
< nether st
< otters!
< ourselves, among echo thorough
< prows
< sync
< t, round un-relief unrelev
< tenor their
< this any other discussion. Big sweeps of to wives
< unrelated U.S.A.
< vex
< yes plural tions, we
>  poem I ws
> > among ourselves, among each other thereby cut throgh
> Oh for old time's sake. Look, we're in tatters!
> Oh for old time's ske. Look, we're in tOh ke. ttters!
> brittle dressage of individuation.
> category where dynamic locutions cut through the
> ch c
> cut throgh into this plenum:
> dgets. Or e
> dync
> dynmic locutions cut through dyn
> echoes which reversed, inhle time inh
> ge individution.
> go on, just like that, around the unrelevant U.S.A.
> individu
> into this plexum:
> l, relevnt
> le sound,
> lw
> mic brittle dressge individubrittle dress
> mndmnifold
> mong ctegories
> nd it's thereby topicl, the USA no longer relevl, relev
> nother st
> nt
> nz those
> ourselves, emong ech throgh
> rrows
> ssked to write or submit you,
> t, round unrelevround unrelev
> tegories their
> tegory n object new ctegory where
> this ny other discussion. Big sweeps of wto wves
> tters!
> unrelevnt U.S.A.
> ves
> ys plurl tions, we
>
.This is a poem I was asked to write or submit to you,
.and it's thereby topical, the USA is no longer relevant
.to this or any other discussion. Big sweeps of waves
.go on, just like that, around the unrelieved U.S.A.
.,
.And now there is room to fill another stanza as those
.waves sweep, bringing up the debris my life work's in,
.those echoes which reversed, inhale time and sound,
.almost to the point of reviving U.S.A.
,
,Oh for old timer's sake. Look, we're in hatters!
,
,Each category is an object in the new category where
,arrows are functors among old categories and their
,gadgets. Or each functor is an object in a new
,category where dynamic locations cut through the
,brittle dress age of individuation.
,
,For I am not an individual nor am I an other, but
,I am manifold and a manifold, a category of manifold
,transformations, where we are always plural and
,among ourselves, among each other thereby cut through
,into this plenum
,
<
cut through into this plenum
hom Given two modules M and N over a unit ring R, Hom_R(M,N)
denotes the set of all module homomorphisms from M to N.
mho Electricity. the standard unit of electrical conductance in
the International System of Units (SI), equal to the reciprocal
of the ohm and replacing the equivalent MKS unit (mho)
Mohs Soft - can be scratched by a fingernail, Mohs' 1-2;
Medium - can be scratched by a knife or nail, Mohs' 3-5;
Hard - cannot be scratched by a knife but can scratch glass,
Mohs' 6-9;
Diamond is the hardest known mineral, Mohs' 10.
ohm the SI unit of electrical resistance, expressing the
resistance in a circuit transmitting a current of one ampere
when subjected to a potential difference of one volt.
,
,*/I would have continued to discuss the isolation of an
extremely brutal regime in the U.S.A. as fallout continues
with an increasing isolation of a violent "president."
I would have been a contender. I would have killed myself.
I would have gone into hiding. I would have become a
refugee. I would have become a refusenik. I would have
killed others, many others. I would have been called
maverick. I would have been someone. I would have been
important. I would have been inconceivable. I would have
come out from hiding. I would have returned home. I would
have become a healer. I would have acquiesced. I would
have been inconsequential. I would have been no one. I
would have become a healer./*,

​Editors Choice:Nevin Koçoğlu
 Turkish poet , journalist , human rights and environmental activist. Lives in Ankara , the capital of Turkey. Graduated from Public administration. Currently studying Sociology , also the owner of the Vahittin Bozgeyik poems price. Owner of three books with poems translated in many languages. Took parts in international festivals and in poetry presentations. Poems has been published in international anthologies.
Books:
 Tanrının Vişne Bahçesi  (2013)
Bexçeye Wişneyan e Xweda  (2014)
Tuz ve Gece  (2015)
 
And I testify
 I
 
Whither away all the trees once they 'hibernate in water'
and your heart whither away,
the heartbeat pendent on the highest offshoot...
  
II
 
When the eyes of the skies fall into the water
I came to know that green is more akin to the pain than the black
and that unforgiveness was what was oozing out of that crock
I counted how many times the scorpion whirled towards tha ashes
inside the circle of scarlet flame
 
 
III
  
The golden daffodil under the naked tree
the purple hyacinth falling out of my hair,
the lace on the weaving loom,
would it know how hard it is to be cleansed from the scarlet?
while carrying the fire inside your palm...
 
 
IV
 
Here I am,
in the shadow of your countenance
in the silence of flowing nothingness
 
And I testify..
that the cracks of my walls
can only be plastered with solitude
 
 
V
 
And now-
one must die like a dead tree leaning on a river bank,
close to heavens, far away from you
 
One must die…
 Translation by:Hale koray
                                               
                                                         

​Warm welcome for a guest poet: Camila Charry Noriega
Camila Charry Noriega (Bogotá, Colombia, 1979) is a professor of Literary Studies and is working toward a degree in Aesthetics and Art History. She has published the books Detrás de la bruma; El día de hoy; Otros ojos; and El sol y la carne and Arde Babel. She has received the Tomás Vargas Osorio Poetry Prize, 2016; second place in the Ciro Mendía poetry competition, 2012 and 2015; and the Casa de poesía Silva National Prize for Poetry in 2016. She has participated in various poetry conferences in Colombia, Latin America, and Europe. Some of her poems have been translated to English, French, Romanian, Polish, Portuguese, and Italian. She works as a professor of literature, reading, and critical writing with a focus on art and literature.
 
 What burns and flows
 
 
In life we only love the beings passing by like messengers from another world.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
 
In the word
the river
courses uphill
restoring time,
life,
what’s torn down.
But life is a river circling back
and rubble,
the days’ violence
where god exists.
 
A dog waits for us
in the unthinkable depths that pierce the word,
lingers in the light
in life’s underside
and he’s wounded by his farness here
his song beneath the rain
his worn out flesh, soft tongue.
 
Poetry can’t put bones and teeth back together
and the dog eyes us from those unthinkable depths that are death;
still, his drive deems him cardinal.
 
Certain things
dwell in the force of the unnamed,
certain abysses in life
never touched by language,
things brightened only from inner
soft light
held back in their state of latency.
 
Every so often an outside thing sets them to burn;
poetry that in life is breath
sends us back to the opening
to a dissolved image of the signs they’re called;
the word from far off
loosens them from the past
uproots them from quiet nonbeing.
 
Yet in this room all things have a proper name;
a dog glimpses days he’s not a part of,
has a name,
since it’s a thing of life to name
all that flames and flows.
 
We know the past of those lonely things
looking out at us from impossibility,
its strength has singled us out. 
 
We pass among them mindful of the dust
we shake off each week,
they are life
and for them our name
is a fingerprint
or our turning them over so they’re out of the sun.
 
They keep on unscathed.
 
Unlike us,
they rejoice in a merciful god
who saves them from ruin.
 
 
THE DOG WILDLY SHOWS HIS TEETH
and runs gripping the prey in his mouth
plains within;
the exhaled breath is long for who is now a carcass
feast where hunger and instinct clash between bites.
The dog later crosses night,
darkness that for him becomes the human world.
Pants, licks his bruises from the days
                        knows, grasps
what solitude and exile are,
yet unaware of time’s purpose,
his task powerless to put off;
to make it all grow old, end it all.
Like the dog
my lips clash with life and guzzle light,
never quench their hunger,
now within light is a ray
and stretches out over the body’s entrails
also crossing night
bruised, lonely
aware it will become a carcass,
a feast for time;
the other dog
that plains within,
night within,
devours it all.
 

​Editors Choice:Cihan Oguz

​A clue about a love
 
I got how far I love you in the middle of the winter
The nights came narrow thousand witnesses for taking breath
I did not care even though the clue of death showed up
 
A doom day showed its face with sadness
A snake playing hide and seek in my heart kicked up a row
I was in wells like a Josef hiding his last words
 
I greeted a life inch by inch tough I did recognize a love
And what color I will splash on my face in the mornings
You are the vision of spoiled rain left over from the night
 
I did not get how far I loved you
I am showing off a broken stick and hiding my disappearing sides.
The birds sitting on my songs will fly away soon too. 

​Translation: EUROASIA TRANSLATION ACADEMY(E.T.A)

​Warm welcome for a guest poet:DAVID CRUZ
DAVID CRUZ
(San Jose, Costa Rica, 1982)
 Writer and journalist. Selected as one of the 40 best Hispanic poets "El Canón abierto, nuevos poetas en español" Visor Books in coordination with some of the most important universities in the world.
He has published the following books of poetry:
 -She likes to cry while listening to The Beatles (2016) edición bilingüe
(Valparaiso USA, 2016)
A ella le gusta llorar mientras escucha The Beatles (Valparaíso Ediciones, Granada, Spain, 2013 and 2017 second edition)
Trasatlántico (Editorial Cultura, Guatemala, 2011), Winner of the “Luis Cardoza y Aragón” Mesoamerican Poetry Prize, republished in Costa Rica in 2012.
Natación nocturna (Editorial Costa Rica, 2005),  Winner of the “Joven Creación” National Prize.
His work has been included in a variety of Costa Rican and Spanish American anthologies, among them: Región, an anthology of Latin American political short stories (Interzona, Buenos Aires, 2011); Antologia Della Poesia Costarricana (Italy, 2012); and Resistencia en la tierra, an anthology of social and political poetry by new Spanish and American poets (Ocean Sur, Santiago Chile, 2014). His poetry has been partially translated into Japanese, Portuguese, Italian and French.
 
TRACK 27
 On the radio they announced that it has started to flood.
A prisioner draws stars with chalk on the ceiling of his cell.
The supermarkets collapsed.
My neighbor is an optimist,
next door is the great National Library,
and there’s plenty of paper to wipe the floors.
The fishermen bait their hooks.
The desert prays for mercy for the hoarders.
A doctor wraps his degrees in plastic.
Someone hung themselves in a hotel room,
left a will in a dead language.
 
On the radio they announced that it has started to flood.
Lovers run to the courthouse to marry.
Families sit down to eat with the plastic floats
recommended by the last government broadcast.
An elderly man takes his savings from the bank
to buy a shortwave radio.
In hospitals, the lines are unending,
like in the houses of clandestine meetings.
A group of octopuses
is planning to storm Jerusalem.
A drunk leaves the cafeteria without a cent
and decides to build a church in his garage.
The bailiff fires three shots into the air to command order.
 
On the radio the announced that it has started to flood.
Poets try to memorize their books without success.
A geography professor guard his tools
for redefining maps.
Models getting on in years hide their grey hairs
and secretly inject themselves with Botox in their bathrooms.
In the aquarium, Children are thinking
that their favorite dolphin will soon be free.
She listens to Strawberry Fields.
Magnates consider their exotic islands in the Caribbean
a bad investment,
and decide to auction off Maya stelae in Paris.
A prophet masturbates while contemplating
engravings from the fifth century.
 
On the radio they announced that it has started to flood.
A psychic regrets not having foreseen it.
Traslated from spanish by Natasha Cline  (USA)
​

​Editors Choice: ALTAY ÖKTEM
He was born in Istanbul in 1964. He graduated from the Medical Faculty at Trakya University. He published AN OLD CHILD, his first volume of poetry in 1992. His other volumes of poetry, WATERFOWL (1992), THEY ACTUALLY KISSED ME WRONG (1993), MUDDY POETRY (1995), EVERYTHING: A ROOM, A WHIP AND A MIRROR (1998), THE STREETS ARE WEIRD NOW (2003), THE CLUSTER POETRY (2005), FOUR LOUSY OPERAS (2009) and OVERLY FIFTY (2016) were published one after another. In 2006, Everest Books has published a part of his whole poetry work under the title THEY ACTUALLY KISSED ME WRONG.
 Altay Öktem received several national prestigious poetry awards. To name a few: Ali Riza Ertan Award (1988), Yaşar Nabi Nayir Award (1995), Orhon Murat Ariburnu Award (1995) and Cemal Süreya Award (2000)
 Öktem also wrote some novels (BISHOPS GO DIAGONALLY, WHEN GOD WAS HUNGRY, NO ONE’S GONNA LEAVE THIS BOOK ALIVE and THAT MAN WAS MY FATHER), published his essays (LIFE IS SOMETIMES NOTCHY, I HAVE AN EMPTINESS SOMEWHERE IN ME and MY SCAR IS AT A WRONG PLACE) and wrote a volume of stories (HER HAIR WAS ACTUALLY BLACK).
 Altay Öktem wrote a book where he studied the fanzines as a means of communication on subcultures: THE SATANIC VESSELS (2000 – [2. edition at Everest Books in 2006]). He also prepared an exhibition of fanzines from all around Turkey titled “FROM MAIN CULTURE TO SUB-CULTURE” in Karg’art Gallery in Kadikoy, Istanbul. He edited a volume of poetry from the poems in fanzines under the title THE BAD KIDS IN THE CITY.
 He published a volume of essays (THE ATLAS OF MOST FREQUENT DISEASES) in 2007, another volume of stories (ENDLESS ANXIETY) and a children’s book (THE WORLD OF BUSHES) in 2010.
 He and Sabri Kaliç translated Tupac Shakur’s poems and published them under the title ‘The Rose Blossoms on Concrete’. In 2014 he and Zeynep Çolakoğlu translated the lyrics of Niklas Kvarforth, the lead singer of Shining, the Suicidial Black Metal band and published them under the title ‘When Prozac is Insufficient Anymore’.
 His most recent work was OVERLY FIFTY (2016).  
LONELINESS IS A MURDER
 
I'm looking for a secluded death for myself, only for myself
street cats’ eyes are entering my dreams, i'm fearing
a man who wraps his  neck around his wrist and is hung
and puts his blood into undiluted alcohol
street vendors know this loneliness is a murder
 
loneliness is a murder in all notes, in all languages
In all syllables, in "a" sound, in re minor, in Morse alphabet
loneliness is murder with its own saliva
and the wet bodies  are an old smell, only this
 
it’s the smell of a wet mop, it’s night purple
it’s a woman’s unmitigated fear, whose wrist is irritated
it’s a bird’s caught suddenly in a trap
is the delay of a train to the station loneliness is a murder
 
it’s a cramp while making love, it’s to jump suddenly
to another time, it’s a trembling hand
while holding a glass, it’s the hearing of a voice while being silent
it’s to love the knife stabbed to your belly, loneliness is a murder
 
it's insanity
 
i'm looking for a secluded death for myself you know that very well 
my dream is entering a crowded street, I'm fearing
as women who hang up their hair on their back
so go on and on over a hastily
accidentally, after an undiluted love-making
as a reverse burnt of the cigarette as me
soit's nonsense as my hands, as my body up, as my thoughts
as my secrets, as my escapes loneliness is a murder
 
it's paradise
 
I am looking for myself a secluded death you grudge it 
i burned all my evidence, i'm already away from the roads
which will take me to beyonds
a new delight to every woman, every woman
i was a newly established trap, i burned all my evidence
there's nothing of after it. after is the negative of a top-secret photo 
our face is black and meaningless, our outside is white and deep
though a dictator monument, a river of shed blood
though our untreated crimes is a murder it's loneliness
 
it's paradise
it'ss insanity
it's a murder.
 ALTAY ÖKTEM
Translated by Baki Yiğit

THE BENEFITS OF PLANTING AND GROWING TREES
 all children are doubted of their lives
we knock on doors  like a troubled sadness
who will open our inside is overcrowded, our outside certifiable
since a summer whose breast has a razor cut entered between us  
what is the meaning: a kind of love, we underrate
 
we ostentatiously live curved places
perhaps there will be no time to deaths until satiated
we always tell untouched lies to ourselves
 
we’re very ugly, darling; let’s plant trees incessantly
let’s say we’ve grown a sapling on our chest
let's say a bird landed on a very thin branch let’s say crack
a season was broken on its thinnest part
let's say a hand has touched, ensanguining love-making
a wind chopped nipples from plains to plains
let's say we perceive life as an unsetttled dice
 
what will happen to that sappling, we're dying little by little what will happen... 
 
all kids have doubt of their lives, is it in vain
think one time; pretend to love me so much against yourself
think one time; how can a bent twig green a love
we’re very ugly, darling, very; mostly towards the morning
 ALTAY ÖKTEM
Translated by Baki Yiğit

​Warm welcome for a guest poet: ​Aleqs Garrigóz
Aleqs Garrigóz was born in Puerto Vallarta, México in 1986. He is the autor of several poetry books including: Abyección (2003), La promesa de un poeta (2005) y Páginas que caen (2008, 2013). He has published poems in various print and electronic media trough out México and Latin America. His works are contained in a dozen anthologies. Some of his poems have been translated to English, Dutch, French and Italian. This year will be published a new book of him: Galería del sueño.

PRIMITIVE IMPULSES 1
The bull of desire fertilizes the earth
with its venerable semen:
it calls us for the immolation

We are already a mixture of mucus,
harmless if consumed, a gift to the palate;
flavor of mollusks in their shells,
a torrent of mud, drinking from the well.
2
Your waves penetrate the beaches of my skin,
a rite of water that purifies in sex.
And every tear contains
the omen of religiosity.
The night becomes bright
returning us to the forest, to the mangrove
where the real enigmas are kept.
3
My love is a feline: a constellation of eyes.
And when it walks regally,
the green gets muddy and it starts licking.

Blue vapors.  The vines are extensions
of our hungry touch.

Let us drive the canine tooth into the torn heart.
4
I discovered the fire in you.
My ax intimidates you.  I strike you.
Because your body is dough in my hands,
I will make you into a statue.  When this poem
and I have died, that’s how you’ll be remembered.      
​

​Warm welcome for a guest poet: Nélida Baigorria
She is Primary level teacher, Retired school director and a Technician in Hospital Statistics. She has a book called “ESCUCHA MI CORAZÓN" 2016
 Participation in:
   - "International Anthology CUPHI IV" 2016
 - Anthology 2017 "PoemaRes" of SEP (Society of Writers Province of Buenos Aires) - CEAL (Center of Argentine and Latin American writers)
 - International Anthology "Hermanando Palabras" Instituto Cultural Latinoamericano 2017
 - Virtual Anthology "Entre Velos" aBrace 2017
 - "ANTOLOGÍA 2017" Voices Oceánicas "by SADE ATLÁNTICA MdP (Argentinian Writers Society)
* "HONOR MENTION" in 55th International Poetry and Narrative Contest of the "Latin American Cultural Institute" in gender POETRY by two works: "Manos entrelazadas" and "Ojos Almendrados"
 * Participation in Cultural Mar del Plata
 - Book presentation "Listen to my heart"
- Recitation of poem "GRITO DE ESPERANZA"
- Participation in "Book Fair: Port of Reading" (Mar del Plata)
 * Meetings with primary school students in Buenos Aires - Argentina and Montevideo - Uruguay-
 * Literary Workshop with sixth grade students from Ciudadela (Bs. As.)
* Creative Workshop with seniors in Retired Centre "11 de Setiembre" Mar del Plata
 * Literary meetings with rounds of poetry in "Centro Cultural Soriano" Retired Centre "11 de Setiembre" (Mar del Plata)" House of reading "(Capital Federal)" Café Tortoni "(Capital Federal)" Mariano Moreno Library (Mar del Plata) Talking Library (Mar del Plata)
* Participation in Universal Congress of Hispanic American Poetry (CUPHI IV) Villa Giardino - Córdoba - Argentina. 2016
* Participation in "aBrace" International Congress in Montevideo Uruguay
. Plastic artist

“ RAIN”
 soft water falling over me
as transparent tears
wetting the cemented town
playing rounds of benches
forming hula-hula circles
shimmering pearls falling down these cheekbones
merging with my tears
sprouting like puzzles
lonely, sad, faithful
as salty as the sea
only eleven are left
I won’t cry no more
we’ll walk together, rain,
you will see me smile
you will trespass through my clothes
you will tickle in my soft skin
you will wet my whole body
with your life fluid
that makes me so happy.
 
​ 

Editors Choice:Cenk Gundogdu 
Cenk Gundogdu was born in 1976 in Ankara. He studied in business and fine art faculties. Has graduated from KOU University Faculty of Fine Arts in Dramatic Writing Master of Performing Arts. In 2011 he has translated with Engin Toprak a famous comedy of Aleksander Griboyedov, the “Woe from Wit” and also theatre act “Radyonun Icindekiler” written by his own. His poetry book “Issiz” (2012) has been awarded by poetry prize of “Arkadas Zeki Ozger” and “Metin Altiok Poetry Awards”. Was a co-writer of Alternative Poetry Almanac (2005-2014). His own play “Radyonun Icindekiler” was staged at Istanbul City Theatre (2016). His second poetry book “Harap” (2016) was awarded by “Daglarca Poetry Prize”. He made Poetry Anthology named “2000s”/ Cenk Gundogdu, since 2001 has been the editor of the literature magazine “Uc Nokta”, which was founded by him. He also published an anthology that includes assays about young Turkish poets and their poems (2016) 

​The dead evening
 I brought you a dead evening
with three faults that words diminish
the wind I didn't untie from my neck
is lost in longing for a distance
let my silent village friends
remain shot inside the time
 
let the pain of the ways remain
but deliver my heart
from this lake of papers
as ways wear you out while sinking
with the travellers' aching mouths
while I know how to carry
salt and wounds
 
had I opened myself to time
no defeat would be mine
nor begging the stone's children
on shores where the sun is drown
and the tongue wound by my pain
had I mentioned the kids' horses
and the rage enlivened by the dead
I wouldn't be dispersed in these waters
 
I brought you the voice of a mountain
and a dead evening
 
come, adorn me and bring me to a new love, dead!
translater: nicola verderame

the fire of the house
 the train passed and I remained
in the wagon waiting for its sleep in a thin distress
six photos, a crouching Friday
criminal and health records
a good news in my back pocket
I talked to the door disclosed on wonders
 
it was march or maybe an evening
we'd be broken on the wings of a kiss
and defeated by the ties to the world
our lips started from the sky
to talk until it was south,
with long white sounds
and old suns, ironed jackets
and wrinkle-free loose robes
we passed this rout by naked words
the tank is over, the bread is dry
a young Saturday
rained upon us
in two eyes flooded by passion
 
my beloved, my princess of a burnt palace
the sky I've taken from your mouth
is a time that doesn't end with your smile
my tongue touching your gaiety
is a blossoming morning
 
collect the weapons, hide the books
the wrong song is in the hands
whetting this absence
contagious is our cliff
look at the growing moon
as a bloodshot father
let us remove this distance
come, let's talk as a windy house
 
yet no one would see me being with myself
 
then a mountain passed, in its mouth the fire of the house
   translater: nicola verderame

 

Warm welcome for a guest poet:Ardita Jatru
Ardita Jatru is an Albanian poet. She was born in 1972 in Tiranë, Albania. Her passions include photography, writing, traveling and time with family and friends. Her poems have been published in these internacionals magazines: TowerJournal-winter2016 (UK), Knot Magazine (USA), Section 8 Magazine (USA), Dead Snake (CANADA), Madison Lake & Erotic Anthology Poetry (USA), 1947 Literary Journal (USA) and Duane’s PoeTree (USA). Her poems are also published in Poetix (Greece), Poiein (Greece), Maison de la Poesie Anthology (Belgium), Le capital des most (France), Haemus Review (Romania) and Les Folies- Erotique (France). She lives with her husband and two daughters in Thessaloniki, Greece. 

Her poems are translated in English by Laureta Petoshati.

It came a day
​
It came a day, when
we were told the greatest lie
we ate it with bread
and went to sleep hungry.
We created also a God
and my mother sold her blood,
three hundred grams a month for three bucks
and her morning kiss smelled lead
with the bottle of milk in her purse.
My young mother, anemic, looked old,
my father in prison,
my brothers grew up prematurely.
And then another day came
when we trampled underfoot our god with full enmity.
The court poets burned their poems.
Then we escaped without seeing the path
into the crossroad wondering,
we, the poor of the world.
It came today
when is sprouted the same old seed
and the seed became a sapling
and the sapling became a tree with strong roots.
From a point of earth
I’m following the way back across the sky.
By paper airplanes I’m sending to my mother my greetings.
 
 
Last song

Ana,
take care of me,
please brush my hair by your thin fingers
because for you I've created a canticle.
Come on, sponge me down for the last time
and forgive me darling as you forgive the rain
when it overturns the leaves on the ground, unwittingly.
Inside the drawer there is a Music Sheet,
open it to the last page and sing it without sound.
Receive it as a gift,
and then tell me,
if it lacks something to be perfect.
Ana,
an apple is waiting to be peeled. Peel it!
In the vase, the flower is eager for some water. Water it!
White scarf, which isn’t put on for two winters, put it on you!
And now, open the window darling
to enjoy the melody of the forest
as it is getting in the nude this season.
Oh, inside my head there is just silence.
Do you feel the trembling of air?
It’s the breath of God.
Your face is his imagery!
I was lost without you, Ana,
mooncalf as a blind, miserable as a deaf.
Ana,
the dog is whining,
it warns the pilgrimage of the soul.
What is beyond the forest, Ana...?
 

​
Editors Choice:Neda Olsoy

Poem
 
I could say more
But somebody in my dream
Dropped his hat
I would fit in the bags that I have lost
All this time I thought I would say more
They will write, they will talk
When I will leave, I will make peace with a purple lobster

​Translated by:EUROASIA TRANSLATION ACADEMY(E.T.A)
​

​Editors Choice: Ziya Boz

Scraped
 
I made a mistake
It wasn't me that I kissed
I bent down a high wall
I kissed it with my ears
 
I was deaf I couldn't see my foot steps
I refused all the stops
They tied me onto a rock
I hold myself, carved myself
 
I ran to bring a glass of water for myself
I got thirsty I smoked
I sneaked into the bosom of loneliness like a tame cat
I looked at you from dying eyes
 
The flesh of earth scraped over my palms.

Translated by:EUROASIA TRANSLATION ACADEMY(E.T.A)
​

​Editors Choice:Hanifi Yigittekin

​Bunnies
 
Do they look at their
Teeth when they brush them
Every night?
Do they have worries 
Like mine too?
Who can deny that they smoke
because they don’t
carry cigarette case?
What I have been through
because of the mirrors!...
 
Hanifi Yiğittekin
Translation: EUROASIA TRANSLATION ACADEMY(E.T.A)

​Editors Choice: Harun Atak

Harun Atak was born in Ankara in 1990. He didn’t compelete his education at Eskişehir Anatolian University, Department of Turkish Language and Literature. He studies History of Art at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. His poems, writings and interviews are being published in magaziens such as Varlık, Kitap-lık, Yasakmeyve, Şiirden, Sincan İstasyonu and Şiiri Özlüyorum. He published Spleen Fanzine. He is the editor in chief at Noktürn Publishing House which he founded in 2012. His poems are translated into English and Persian. His other published poetry books: Gecel, Yasakmeyve Publishing, second and third printings: Noktürn Publishing, 2013, 2015 (2009 Cemal Süreya Poetry Prize); Tekvin ve Hiçlik Kitabı ya da Ah, Varlık Publishing, 2012 (2012 Yaşar Nabi Nayır Poetry Prize), Gülde Kerem Yangını, Varlık Publishing, 2017.

THE BOOK OF LEAVE
 
They had carved me as an ache of myself
And then I blew the spleen to my secret
 
Curtains are startled that undress with desire
I felt filth as deity to myself and drunk the poison
 
I said: this is the first call of black
Alas! I always shut myself up to me.
 
The restless sobs of oleanders
Are echoes of fire in my memory
 
Stain and smut that breaks the white light beam
Darkens the silver of seed as it swarms
 
I said: take those warm, flat stones
And skip them on the still waters of your inside
 
To release tremors to the body of the snag, to the focus
Of the membrane that can be got down with a tear
 
I said: I erased my name out of the Book
Alas! Be aware of that I’m at leave with myself
Translated from Turkish by Volkan Hacıoğlu

THE LAST PSALM
 I’m the dream of broken meridian…
 
In spite of the sarcophagus that I carry
Within me, I shut myself in the temple
What is rose in desert I looked for it
In the reticent cold of ruins
 
I waited, let traces appear with the aura of moon
I waited, let the road unfold before me
 
I passed through the cracks that devour time
Through familiar tracks, and curves of rainbow
I stopped at the swirl of universe
 
I crouched on the floor with flaws
 
Often I faced flame gun and salt!
 
My voice is always lost in a well.
  
Translated from Turkish by Volkan Hacıoğlu

 

​Warm welcome for a guest poet:Mel Kenne

Mel Kenne is the author of six books of poetry. His most recent collection, Take, was published in 2012 by Muse-Pie Press. In 2010 Yapi Kredi Publishers in Istanbul published a bilingual collection of his poetry, Galata’dan / The View from Galata, in Turkish and English. His second book, South Wind, won the 1984 Austin Book Award. He has also translated or co-translated much Turkish, Spanish and French poetry and prose. In 2010 he was one of the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Award winners. He recently retired from the Kadir Has University Department of American Culture and Literature in Istanbul, Turkey, and now lives on the Aegean coast of Turkey in the ancient city of Phocaea, now called Eski Foça.

How Far Can You Fall?
Until you hit something
or until something strikes you.
Then we may say your fall is broken.
Or else we may say you’re broken by your fall.

How far you can fall
is a matter of weight and mass,
of how both may come all at once to matter,
and of your sense of gravitas and gravitation,
in determining where and when
you’ll finally come to rest.

For the rest is finally only speculation,
even if it seems, sometimes,
that that is all.

The Life of the One Who Lives Between the Lines
The traffic continues to pass as it did before.
The wind blows as before.
The roof squeaks. The windows rattle
with each new gust from the south.
All is as it was before.

Not I. For me, there is now
a before, whereas before there was none.
Now I am alone, waiting, like a shadow,
for my form, my new form, to come.

The hollowness of the house I am in
is like the dumb darkness of a cavern.
But no new voices arrive
to break through the walls of this soundlessness.

I wait. I wait, and nothing happens.
I must have the patience to wait
long enough, I tell myself, still speaking
with the voice of my last life.
​

​Editors Choice:Emel Irtem

Emel İrtem She was born in July, 25, 1969 in Eskişehir-­‐Seyitgazi. She graduated from Latin Language and Literature in Istanbul University, Faculty of Arts and Letters. In 1999, she was awarded with Orhon Murat Arıburnu Award with her file "Divaneliğe Dönen Pergel". This file was published with the same name that year from Hera Publishing.  She was featured in various journals and newspapers with her articles, short stories and poetry. In 2005, her children's book Seker Farenin Kitaplığı was published from Kare Publishing. In 2006, her poetry collection Zehirli Rüya was published from Yitik Ülke Publishing. In 2007, her poetry collection Marcus’un Lisan-­‐ı Kalbi was published from Artshop Publishing. In 2009 her poetry collection Zaviyesi Yıkık Gönye was published from the same publisher. She was awarded with Sevda Ergin Award in 2010 International Poetry Festival. İn 2013 her poetry collection “Sana Seviyem was published from İkaros Publishing, in 2016, her poetry collection “ Seçme Şiirler- Kağıttan Kapılar” was published form Artshop Publishing,  She works in the health industry and lives in Eskişehir.

time wears out
                                                   
old times, which you think wearisome
have ended inside me
while burning with summer sunshine
While you grew pale
the birds have become blind
I used to laugh et the labels on mannequins
what you think wearisome
hurts me so much
while thinking of old things
I understand that summer
is the shadow of a scarf
you knew the smell of deserted places
your father was there
he had given you his straight razor
and you had cut my throat with it
what you think wearisome
was a ridiculous summer
I too, I matured in the old times
now the summer is mossy
and my soul, while turning on
the lights of the sun
knows how painful it is to be delayed
who can know that once upon a time
summers were a flowery sea
I wish I could give up my love
but my soul has grown so weary
 
                                                    Translated by Tozan Alkan

​Warm welcome for a guest poet:Chad Norman
His poems have appeared for the past 35 years in literary publications across Canada, as well as a number of other countries around the world.
He hosts and organizes RiverWords: Poetry & Music festival each year in Truro, NS., held at Riverfront Park , the 2nd Saturday of each July.
In October 2016 he was invited by the Nordic Assn. for Canadian Studies to give talks on Canadian Poetry and read from his books at Borupgaard Gym in Copenhagen, and Risskov Gym in Aarhus, as well as other readings in both cities and Malmo, Sweden. Norman is currently working on a manuscript, Counting Coins In Denmark & Sweden.
His most recent book, Learning To Settle Down, came out 2015 , from Black Moss Press (University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada), and a new book, Selected & New Poems is due out April 2017 from Mosaic Press (Oakville, Ontario, Canada).
His love of walks is endless.

ROMERICA, THE STOWAWAY
for Michael M.
 
I study one of my sons while he sleeps
on a broken sofa his first night in Copenhagen,
a similar study undertaken 13 years ago
as a marriage formed a family under one roof,
I study him now that we are away,
the faint breaths make me think of decline,
how at home we both watch politicians
make their predictable decisions, amused
and saddened, both of us know, him
at his age, and me at mine, there may be
no escape, quite possibly even as an ocean
is between this country and that ill empire
we may have allowed to stowaway within us,
may have carried its crumbling through Customs,
that ill empire we hope hasn't come with us
and isn't spreading its illness outside
the window above a street full of cyclists,
full of what appears to be choices in favour
of a healthy air, a smaller car, a livable future,
what appears to be the window a few feet
away from him sleeping, perhaps dreaming
of a Denmark he believes we will soon see.
 
Casa Harris, Truro, NS
October 29, 2016
 
                     

​Editors Choice:Murat Nemet-NejatMurat Nemet-Nejat's recent publications include the poems The Spiritual Life of Replicants (Talisman House, 2011), Animals of Dawn (Talisman House, 2016); the translation from the Turkish poet Seyhan Erözçelik Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds (Talisman House, 2010) and the republication of the translation from the Turkish poet Ece Ayhan A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies (Green Integer Press, 2015); and the essays "Holiness and Jewish Rebellion: 'Questions of Accent' Twenty Years Afterward" (Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives (University of Michigan Press, 2016) and "Dear Charles, Letters from a Turk: Mayan Letters, Herman Melville and Eda" (Letters for Olson, gathered and edited by Benjamin Hollander (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016).
Nemet-Nejat is also the editor of the anthology Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry (Talisman House, 2014). He is presently writing Camels and Weasels, the sixth part in a seven-part serial poem The Structure of Escape.   "

Hummingbird   
 
Before we part  did                                    
A moment we share together 
you having placed a small nutrient vial of translucent liquid on your porch
and I, watching birds dipping into them
 
you away,
 
                 in instantaneous darts.
 
Does THAT have to exist? I can't remember. D I D.        
 
 
An instant on the threshold of not remembering, the change of time zones— erasure of
the table of memory—the humming bird approaches the moment of stasis—of jump.

 
The Girl      
 
The sleepy tree,
Among the vegetable life
of the garden, 
 
A mailbox,   
the sentry before the garden,
silent.
 
A caterpillar
lands on it,
 
green,
 
A disoriented, half-hearted fugitive
from the green
garden,
 
Framed by a window
a girl of eight,
bored by the whizzing
summer,
her eyelid twitches
 
as The Fly                    
on the window
Squeezes,
cleans its head.    

Jackson Pollock
 
Time—a spray of colors, there only when it’slookedat, following the rhythms of attentions,
the eye's recalcitrant incorrigible darts every instant a variant color, past,
present & future of a distant self-penetrating dream.
 
 
            a dream within a dream.
 
 
Like cockroaches, images (facts) hide into themselves
 
 
            only when a lightning's switched, to light the darkness.      

 
            bezel
 
dew is the tears of the dream
 
death is the ultimate moss                                 
growing, morning
after.  
 
bedecking dream in its             
shadows.
 
beelzebub  
          
 
            Lover               
 
Objects are          
algorthymic dreams, hebanonical fragments  lying there  in plain sight,
nibbling
my ear.     
 

 
through your transparent gown,                            
low light from a table lamp in the back room.  
your long legs                                                                       
were luminous in the door.
i moved fearlessly.             
guilt hung back
on the acacia trees
in the rain.
the church bells was calling folks                  
to prayer.
we spread a picnic blanket        
on the bed.
that's how everything happened first.
 
Poems from Murat Nemet-Nejat's Animals of Dawn
(Talisman House, Publishers:S Northfield, Massachusetts, 2016)

 Hamlet and Its Hidden Texts: Poems as Commentary, Film Lumière

Hamlet is the holy text that is at the heart of things, real or unreal, objects, living or un- living. Almost every piece in the poem is a commentary—a riff of thought, a speculative argument, a parallel alternative text, a counter argument or counter fact—turning around a specific word or phrase, a disjointed twisting of fact or a suggestive, elusive echo that occurs in the peripheries of the reader’s/listener’s mind—out of the focus of the linearity of the main action, the revenge, in the play.
    The paradigm of a text made completely of commentaries, like moths flying around a holy text with its own distinct linguistic identity, is The Talmud.18 Here is what I write about the nature of such a text in “Eleven Septembers Later: Readings of Benjamin Hollander’s Vigilance19:
                        Precedents of Prophecy (Film Lumière)
            The verbal precedent of a poem whose ideal condition is stasis is The Talmud. In it single words explode into commentaries. It can not be read but stopped at every word and riffed from; re-read continuously, super-imposed, blurred commentaries creating the Jewish consciousness of responsibility and guilt.... The visual precedent of Vigilance is photography... The space created by photography/film lumière has an unconscious, to its viewer reflecting, revealing the dreams, aspirations, fears of her teeming population. Superimpositions of different media—film, T.V., the web and words emanating from them—on photography, which film lumière is, creates a unified field/space which is prophetic.
    The perennial question on Hamlet is why Hamlet does not go from A to B in a linear line, “swift as the meditations of love” or, as Laertes does, “defying hell”; but meanders, mostly travels in a world of ideas, and arrives at his purposed destination, seemingly by default, exhausted, feeding on the immediate carnage around him. He does so because he exists in stasis, in “a ... field/space which is prophetic.” The sole action he can commit is death. It is the space where consciousness (the soul) is born. It has nothing to do with character or a character defect though Hamlet himself thinks so.20
    Hamlet’s is a language of the soul progressing towards dying.
    Hamlet’s language is not of acting, of showing; but of an “isness” outside “living” speech: “Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not seems... nor all the suspirations of breath... can denote me truly.” His focus is on a dissolution of the body towards the un- human and un-living: in essence the dissolution of a Wittgensteinian language of exchange and observable, speakable f(acts) towards silence. This dichotomy in the play is distilled in its concept of time as speed and slowness, their duality. Hamlet is aware and fatally wounded by what Claudius defends: speed, the imploding speed between the vigil of death and the merriment of marriage, warping time. Hamlet “meanders” outside speed in a state of stasis, though he himself sees it as paralysis. The two are irreconcilable. Though they point to the same facts, like convex and concave mirrors reflecting each other, the wall in between is unbreachable. That unbreachableness (the way the consciousness of the living, the real, the rational can not breach into the consciousness of the un-living, unreal) is at the heart of Hamlet’s mysterious power, what makes it a holy text.
    Ophelia occupies a space between the two. Her death, a union with water and plants, points to a moment when the focus of the conscious mind (consciousness itself) turns from life to another dimension (vigil) of lamentation and song: “... Her clothes spread wide/And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;/Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes,/ As one incapable of her own distress [italics my own].”
*
Laertes’ and Polonius’s warnings to Ophelia about the unreliability and lastingness of Hamlet’s love for her turn out to be true. Hamlet’s love turns into abuse and mockery, interspersed only with an unpleasantly perfunctory profession of love at her death. But, though the predicted result occurs, it has little to do with Polonius’s cynical view of young passion or Laertes’s decorous argument relating to the real politic involved in the marriage of a prince. The cause lies in another dimension, the space of the ghost.
    The a-causal, infinite space of Hamlet.

    (Or, from the space of an ideogram, a constellation of quantum jumps—sacred and rebellious—arising from the inherent nature of words.)
    Animals of Dawn (part of things, real or unreal, objects, living or un-living) is not a comparison, a metaphor; it is not like Hamlet. Rather, its Talmudic commentaries are against Hamlet, subverting and reconfirming its autonomic, ever elusive sanctity—its otherness. In a sense, in Animals of Dawn I try to transform Hamlet, at least for a single moment, into a plant, an animal, a speck of dust, a dew.
    Not a moment of understanding, but bee-ing.
December 29, 2015
©Murat Nemet-Nejat
 

​

​
​Editors Choice: Polat Onat
POLAT ONAT: Born in Istanbul in 1979, is a primary school teacher. Since 2000, his poems and essays on poetry have been published in many Turkish literary magazine including, Varlık, E, Heves, Başka, Kavram Karmaşa, Şiir Ülkesi, Sepya, Budala, Kuzey Yıldızı, İmlasız, Ağır Ol Bay Düzyazı, Daktilo, Ay, Akatalpa. His first book "The End" was published in 2009, followed by "The Old Man's Death" in 2011.
 
THE HUT
 
ink disperses as it touches paper
gloomy forests branch in moonlight
night’s other half hides in snow and blizzard
bitter and serene like the pleasures of our hut
I’m not hungry tea poems well-steeped time on my hands
fire crackles in the fireplace Mary my little angel with me
listen to me our dreams don’t need to be our consolations.

Translated by Nesrin Eruysal & Ken Fifer

THE ROAD
 
in the middle of real life in the black desert of the road
memories you cannot forget should I say things that never happened
our fate's to tire before the road ends
I readied myself for death like any clumsy poet
I heard the desolate wind with my eyes
I knew you never loved me not for one second
wash waving and my severed heart left out the dry.
 
Translated by: Nesrin Eruysal & Ken Fifer
  
poems are published at: http://polatonat.blogspot.com/search/label/Turkish%20Poetry%20Today

​

​​​​
​Warm welcome for a guest poet:Alisa Velaj

​Alisa Velaj was born in the southern port town of Vlora, Albania in 1982. Velaj has been shortlisted for the annual international Erbacce-Press Poetry Award in June 2014. Her works have appeared in over seventy print and online international magazines like: The Journal, Envoi Magazine, The Cannon’s Mouth, Erbacce, FourW twenty-five Anthology, The Dallas Review, The Linnet's Wings, Poetry Scotland, The Seventh Quarry and etc.

SALUTE TO DESPAIRS!
 1.
 A am afraid
Every time I see myself on the mirror as sky, fall season or sea,
For leaden clouds of despair suddenly unfold while despair I am not,
For my color pales while I crave life as much as the fir-trees in front of my stump do,
And, with no notice at all, I get discolored while my spirit breathes blueness.
I am afraid to be a fir-tree
While thoughts of the previous winter's timber pile up
Under a grey sky, under a grey sea...
For the only tree I loved!
 2.
 Light up a candle for me tonight!
Let it illumine the road for the demented traveler –
The one that holds in his hand an unlit candle and still
Begs the wind to not blow out its flame.
 
Burn a candle for me tonight!
Let it melt down in the embodiment of a fake snowman;
Illusions alike are fire and ice.
 
Pray for me tonight, in the name of Christ Jesus, please do!
A long while now, I've been looking for roads nowhere promised.
 
So I then begin to hold a grudge against the winds...
 
 3.
 If he wants the light, he will leave,
With his back turned to the nest
            where the eagle is bound to shackles.
He will return, if he needs the light,
With the idea to never again abandon himself
Amidst fields where breath bears white angels…
  
Translated from Albanian by Arben P. Latifi

​​Editors Choice:Metin Fındıkçı
Metin Fındıkçı was born December 1, 1961 in Mardin,Turkey. He was the first child of eight. Because his dad had said “My children should go to school”, they moved to Ankara after he finished Sakarya Elementary and Cumhuriyet middle school. Because he could not stand Ankara any more, he started to work as a clerk at an insurance company in a summer site called Side. He worked there until his manager of the site asked a gardener to kill his cat. He never could get over his cat being killed, so he quit his clerk job in 1994. He worked as an interpreter at an export company between 1994-1998.After 25 years, he has retired. He is writing poems, translating poems and he is currently living in Istanbul.
 
His poetry books:
Harabeler, Yazılı Günler 1992
Ve Kalbim Sular Altında, Yazılı Günler 1996
Karanfil Mesafesi, Avesta yay 2001
Unutulan, Yom Yay 2004
Çölden Hırka, ŞİİRden yay 2006
Katran, artsohp yay 2008
Sen İçerde Uyurken, artshop 2009
Sardunyanın Kehribar Zamanı, artshop yay. 2010
Gülün Koynuna Düşen, Serendip yay. 2013
Taşa Masal, artshop, 2016
 Some of his translation Works:
Three anthologies from collection of Arabic poems: Modern anthology of Arabic poetry, anthology of Arabic Woman and anthology of Arabic love poems. Some poets that he translated are Adonis, Mahmud Derviş, Nazik El Melaike, Nizar Kabbani, Muhammed Bennis, Fetva Tukan, Selim Berakat…
 
Forgetable
 
We had started with forgotten shadows
But loves don’t remain as they are, that if you open
The window on the backyard side
Neither the cat nor the child, even if you call
From a nearby ruin
 
We’ve forgotten within the forgotten shadows
On the mattress that we sat legs crossed
We dwindle away as far as we look into time
Opening to yard all day long.
 
Forgotten within the forgotten yard
Muddy flowers, beak of the birds
Bloody eyed pomegranate and me
In an ancient city
 
I don’t tidy up your forgotten nudity
From my kid bed anymore
                        Are you there?  
From the ruin standing within me,
Wish you call once again

In Memorial of An Old Used Death 
 Rosebay flavor left
I don’t know from which love it’s remained
You have taken the water which I wash my face
You sowed those wild weed
They strangle the rose in my heart.
 
While can’t get wind of wind in sweat
Sea left its last drop
In the front of the wall,
It has got pale
What it used to mean in the poem
That; has to be looked up again
 
 
Şiirler: Metin Fındıkçı
 Translated by Tuğrul Asi Balkar & O. Nuri Peşkircioğlu

​
​Warm welcome for a guest author:Vincent Czyz
Vincent Czyz received an MA in comparative literature from Columbia University, and an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University. He is the author of the collection Adrift in a Vanishing City, and is the recipient of the 1994 Faulkner-Wisdom Prize for Short Fiction and two fellowships from the NJ Council on the Arts. The 2011 Truman Capote Fellow at Rutgers University, his short stories and essays have appeared in Shenandoah, AGNI, TheMassachusetts Review, Tampa Review, Quiddity, Louisiana Literature, Logos Journal, New England Review,Boston Review, Sports Illustrated, Poets & Writers, and many other publications. Although he has traveled the world and spent some ten years in Istanbul, Turkey, he now lives and works in New Jersey with his wife, Neslihan.

MONET IN MOURNING
Vincent Czyz
               
   In love not with scenery but with distance, light is a stranger in this universe, a traveler passing through at 186,000 miles per second. On its way elsewhere, it flashes off the ruffled surfaces of lakes and the snow-settled slopes of mountains. It vaults in shards off the glassy highrises of cities and in handfuls off the windows of remote farmhouses. It retreats, at its absurd velocity, from the mirrored eyes of nocturnal animals back into night. Mostly, however, it hurtles by unobstructed and, even less fortunate than the shark, remains in motion forever. Unlike sound, it has no fear of the vacuum. Masquerading sometimes as a particle, sometimes as a wave, it passes through the void as if it were truly empty.

   It doesn’t occur to us, as we turn a page of the morning paper or smile across the room at one another or stop to admire the cut clarity of a diamond, that light’s foremost desire, from the instant of its creation—whether in the fused heart of a star, the sulfurous head of a match, or the glowing filament of a bulb—is to escape. While physicists preoccupy lifetimes mapping the details of its movement, measuring its various properties, and assigning it a place in their theories, its vanishing presence is perhaps most appreciated by painters who, over the centuries, have devoted themselves to reproducing its effects on canvas.

   Even before the sun has lifted into view, light begins to shift the mood and cast of a city. With the grit-black of the sky receding a grain at a time, this is the hour when a painter might be unpacking his brushes and setting up an easel on a riverbank. Each solid thing—the copper façade of the train station, the trees guarded by low iron fences, the fire escapes zigzagging across the faces of tenements, the tenements themselves—slides away from the placental dark in which each of them shares an unbroken existence. From dawn to midday to the onset of night again, nothing changes but the light and yet, as any painter can tell you, a hundred cities have flickered in and out of existence.

   This might also have been the hour of mourning in 1879 when, after an all-night vigil at the bedside of his wife, Claude Monet realized that not even Camille’s death could quell his obsession with light and its infinitely varying hues. Kneeling beside her body, he stared with burning eyes as sunlight found itself unwittingly caught in the trap of the bedroom. He watched Camille’s face assume unfamiliar and unforeseen aspects. His eye was entranced by her tragic temple as he would later refer to it, by the color degradation that death had just left on the motionless face, by the blues and grays that deepened like creeping shadows. 

   That, Monet concluded, is what I had come to. 
No better than a pendulum whose arc was determined by Newton’s laws, he was merely a collection of reflexes set in motion by the colors of his dead wife’s face. Appalled at himself, at how thoroughly he’d become rooted in pigment, in the smell of the oily paints and the coarse surface of the canvas, he likened himself to an animal turning round a millstone.

   Does it come as any surprise that he painted her on her deathbed? Although a bonnet covered her head, although she was bundled in bedding and veiled with a gossamer shroud, her husband insisted on cocooning her in color as well.  Sun enters his portrait from an unseen window on Camille’s left, flaring some of the bedding into yellow, while she herself, her eyebrows raised almost inquisitively, is submerged in the somber blues and grays that had taken hold of Monet’s retina. His vision is undistorted by the lensing effect of tears. Museum docents and art critics point to this portrait, Camille sur son lit de mort, and speak of it as another frame in Monet’s lifelong study of what lay between his eye and what he despaired of ever adequately rendering in paint. 

   Light and its shifts attracted Monet the way a magnetic field might draw an iron soul; light as tempered by degrees of shadow on a milieu of objects; light divided by time. Did it matter to Monet whether light was particle or wave? Did it matter to him that neither he nor anyone else ever actually saw an object, that the eye is capable only of gathering the light fleeing innumerable surfaces? The likely answer in both cases is no. Instinctively, however, Monet may have felt that the emptiness he struggled with every day—always there no matter how much paint he squeezed from tubes—would have been unbearable if it were not for the reliable visits of a radiant stranger.
 

​

​Editors Choice:İLHAN KEMAL
 (13 September 1968, Adana / Turkey), 
İlhan Kemal is a Turkish poet. He took place in many literary magazines, fanzines and poetry anthologies such as Akatalpa, Akköy, Aşkın E Hali, Bahçe, Budala, Dize, Eliz, Etken, Heves, İmgelem Çocukları, Kavram Karmaşa, Kurşunkalem, Kum, Lodos, Lül Sanat, Mühür, Mortaka, Patika, Papirüs, Şiiri Özlüyorum, Şiirsaati, Ücra, Varlık, Yeniyazı and Yom Sanat with his poems, literary analyses, essays, interviews and theoretical articles.
In addition, Poems are translated into English, published in many foreign magazines and has appeared in the anthology.
He has never been like those sitting and writing in their corners. He’s always been an activist figure. He organized poetry activities. He created plans for several organizations to take place and led many of them. His works have been mentioned in many literary analyses and literary criticism essays. He was suggested as one of the contemporary poets whose poetry will be carried into future by some literature circles. He published “Mağmum Poetry Manifest” which reflects his sense of poetry.
He participated in foundation and management of two literary magazines: Lül Sanat and Children of Imagination.
He still draws attention with his unique poetic style.
 Published Works:
  1- Mağmum (2006) – Kora Yayın
 2- Hiç, Kimsenin Bildiği (2007) – Başak Yayınları
 3- Ücra Söz (Ağustos 2009) – Hayal Yayınları
 4- Değişik (Haziran 2011) – Mühür Yayınları
 5-Yağmur Konalgası (Eylül 2012) – Kanguru Yayınları
 6-Beni Güzlerimden Öp (Mart 2014) – Mühür Yayınları
 7- Ağır Çıvgın (Mayıs 2016) – Mühür Yayınları

Moving Away / İlhan Kemal
 
the rose migrated from the house –host to loneliness
were the pictures taken down as well from the wall of the temple?
this is cuneiform utterance. pain of existence. a bleeding nail.
the world loses its half if the spirit of age is wounded
this is talk of frame stain. nightmare of thing. fear of matter
 
leave the baby shoe on the threshold, only one
perhaps it will be possible to grow for a return slowly
horse shoe and evil eye talisman on that door
no, they shall not be touched
beauties shall not wait in silence
like a distant love
dream pilgrim is tired during the life of the road
how rain-mannered is this nomadic essence
while rain drops are petting the voice of homeless childhood
his friends shall look after  his discarded bike
with the eyes of the ivy in the yard
 
being purled on a canvas of its own foreignness,
loneliness isn’t adapted but remains a foreigner
in a carnival of familiar strangers
something called return awaits right over our bedside
 
Translated From Turkish: Betül AKDAĞ
 
THE EDGE / İlhan Kemal
 
I’ve found a place. I’ve reached myself.
Earth is a shadow of an old olive tree
A bird’s salute, a francolin I suppose, perhaps a pigeon
It is two pieces of cloud passing over my chest necking each other
 
Getting wet to my marrow through whistle of a wind
Misting of a flower on my skin
Greetings of far slopes for no reason
When I say hush, a fiery river is
The flow of a delicacy straight into me, through my heart
 
On me the days cheer on this edge!
I know the life is a venue dropped in
Yet, if only death wouldn’t remember me, like a forgotten life of a gravel
I wish I could stay here, centenaries would chant to me.
 
Translated From Turkish: Betül AKDAĞ

​Editors Choice:Ulaş Başar Gezgin 
 Ulaş Başar Gezgin is a poet, writer, academic and translator who has so far published 14 books including an opera libretto. He is from Istanbul (date of birth: 1978) but works in Asia (since 2003: currently Vietnam, and in Thailand and Malaysia in the past) which are constant sources of inspiration for his poetry. He had experiences in New Zeland, Australia and Latin America which broadened his artistic and literary views. His works have been translated to a number of languages including English, Spanish, Italian, German, French, Russian, Georgian, Vietnamese, Thai and Azerbaijani. He pens literary works, journalistic pieces, academic papers and lyrics as well as translations to Turkish to promote non-Turkish poets to Turkish readers.
 He started to write at an early age and his first published poem appeared on Darüşşafaka literature magazine in 1993. His first books were a collection of his awarded stories and a translation of Octavio Paz’s poetry-in-prose work both of which were published in 2000. He strongly believes that poetry has had a permanent seat in his life since his childhood and he is more than happy to age with poetry.    
 For some of his books please check: https://www.amazon.com/
For his poetry in various languages and translations please check: http://gezginulas.blogspot.com/
For more information about his bio: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ulasbasargezgin 
E-mail: ulasbasar@gmail.com

For Those Who Will Sail Across the Oceans
 
A palm extends her neck towards the ocean
So that her shadow would fall on seaweeds, on fish.
The lands are narrow for her or
The ocean is immense, much more immense.
 
If the salty water won’t cool my branches,
Let my head touch the dunes and not the clouds.
Let my leaves fall on blue depths 
Rather than decaying in the soil.
 
Let a sailor disperse my seeds, at first
On the deck washed ceaselessly by salty water
Let him carry me to unexplored lands, never seen before
So that my shadow may cover all the oceans.
 
When one day, an ax of a human hand will slide 
Into my truck that was stretched due to my extending for a long time, 
Let my inside be comrade to the depths,
Out of me, a long, a long cooling.
 
You too extended your neck like that palm,
Even if your shadow fall on other lands, other people,
Your country will always welcome your roots,
Even if your blue voyage lasts for a millenium.
 
Ulas Basar Gezgin, HCMC, Vietnam, 15.03.2009
 
Soaking Wet
 
The air is dark, there is nothing in the sky resembling the stars.
I am soaking wet from head to toe.
Climbing the stairs slowly, while looking back.
I am soaking wet from head to toe.
 
I remember her call, not sure whether it was a dream or not.
It is raining crazy outside.
Letting my body free fall to the floor.
I am soaking wet from head to toe.
 
I knew it from the trembling of your hands.
The rain drops ooze through my clothes, not easing for a second.
Are those pouring out from your tongue also wet?
I am soaking wet from head to toe.
 
Leave me to the wind, leave me to the temporary vermilion of the horizon.
Dew too should be considered as rain.
Whichever direction you open your hands to, whichever face you shout to
I am soaking wet from head to toe.
 
From one ladder to another, this is life… In between we see the plains…
It is obvious that this coat is good-for-nothing.
Where do you find all these words one after the another?
I am soaking wet from head to toe.
 
They get on the bus, they walk… People who are tired of yesterday, from the day before
yesterday, from the previous week…
My forehead is once more wet … I got perspiration.
The caterpillars will make slapdash noises again.
I am soaking wet from head to toe.
 
Think of the children going to school… Everywhere is dark…
Think of how they will get dry, when, the books and notebooks soaked with the rain water.
It bends and curves in the fire, the rubber boots of the class.
I am soaking wet from head to toe.
 
Which side are you talking about, which side?.. I cannot find it where I put them.
To your wet eyelashes, to your protective eyebrows, to your hands rushing to the puddles
Is it because you, I and our hands are soaking wet
the entire universe is soaking wet?
 
Written by Ulaş Başar Gezgin (2005)
Translated into English by Ali Rıza Arıcan (6th September 2011)

​Warm Welcome For  A Guest Poet:Javier Alvarado 

​Javier Alvarado was born in Santiago de Veraguas, Panama in 1982.  His poetry appears in many Latino american Poetry Antologies: Vértigo de los Aires, Mexico 2007, Poésie Panaménne du XXe siécle, Ginebra, Switzerland,  Poesía Latinoamericana Hoy, Mexico 2011, Barcos sobre el agua natal, Spain-Mexico, 2012. He gave poetry readings at Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Mexico, England, Guatemala, El Salvador, Scotland, Colombia, Uruguay and Canada. In 2007 he went to the United Kingdom and gave the conference El Canal de Panama en la Literatura Panameña at Canning House and in 2009. He won a Literary Residence in Cove Park Foundation at Scotland, United Kingdom.  He won the National Young Poetry of Panama Gustavo Batista Cedeño in 2000, 2004 and 2007, the Pablo Neruda Prize in 2004 (he went to Chile to know the Pablo Neruda’s houses.)  In 2007 he won the Stella Sierra Poetry Prize, in 2010 he won the First Prize of the Juegos Florales de Leon, Nicaragua with the book Ojos parlantes para estaciones de ceguera and he won an Honor Mention in Casa de las Americas of Cuba in 2010 with the book Carta Natal al Pais de los Locos (Poeta en Escocia).   In 2011 he won the Premio Centroamericano de Literatura Rogelio Sinan with the book Balada sin ovejas para un pastor de huesos.  In 2011 he won the International Poetry Award Rubén Dario of Nicaragua, Prized Book: El mar que me habita. In 2012 he won the International Poetry Award Nicolás Guillén, Mexico-Cuba; Prized Book: Viaje Solar de un tren hacia la noche de Matachín .    He published:  Tiempos de Vida y Muerte (2001), Caminos Errabundos y otras Ciudades (2002); Poemas para caminar bajo un paraguas (2003) ; Aquí, todo tu cuerpo escrito; Por  ti no pasa nunca el Tiempo (y otros poemas al espejo) (2005); No me cubre de edad la Primavera, Soy mi Desconocido. (2008), Carta Natal al País de los Locos, México (2011), Ojos Parlantes para estaciones de ceguera, Nicaragua (2011),  Balada sin ovejas para un pastor de huesos, (2011).
 
EMILY WITH HER BEAUTIFUL FIRMAMENT
(translation by Margaret Randall)
 
 There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair...
Dickinson
 
 
Emily look at the patio garden beyond the walls
I want to take hold territory      where the pilgrim’s staff moves
where the shadow encounters its twin
and where it says:
 
Poet
 come into my garden, brother, where there is a beautiful firmament.
 
By day she picks up her sewing thread.
With each step she prunes the flower’s perfection
she plants a ballad
in every petal shed by bedrooms
where the mausoleum to beauty rises
in eyes where swallows of blood drink fire.
 
When she resists the ocean of souls
her father the reverend commends her
to the reverence of light
and the waters
of God’s flock,
like a healthy sheep
who departs its fields in love
to diminishing birds and bells 
it is the retelling of one story after another,
the wife in purple and white
where sun penetrates like a goat in a yawn
of the territorial suns of our lives and of all lives.
Planting a poem right there,
a pocket verse
the silver chronicle
where shadow encounters its twin
and where she says:
 
Poet
 
Come into my garden, brother, where there’s a beautiful firmament.
 
(translation by Margaret Randall)
 
 ​ 

​Editors Choice:Nihat Özdal
Born in 1984 Halfeti
Poet, museum curator and coach in his own surf academy.
He held installation exhibitions in Turkey and many cities of the world.He interrogated the time and hope notions through various objects.
His poems being published in domestic and overseas magazines from 2002. ''Google'dan Önce'' (Before Google) published in 2010. He rewarded in 2008 Memet Fuat Young Poem Awards and 2011 Homeros Poem Awards as praiseworthy.In september 2012 “Kanat İzleri” (Wing Traces) and in september 2015 “Düğmeler” (Buttons) published. In 2016 he won the '' Altın Defne Poem Award''.
His books translated to Russian, Italian, Kurdish, Arabic, Syriac, Serbian, Macedonian, Tatar, Crotian, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Ukrainian, Uzbek.

Google and Isaac
 
The astonishment in the farmer’s eyes turned into fear. He never thought
that Isaac could kill someone. What a horrible thing this was. The
excitement in his movements was approaching that fearsome end instead
of sending it away."
Onat Kutlar
 
/1/
I wanted them to know, Isaac:
The One who persists on being wet,
The One who huddles with
oneself,
If I get lost at the noon of anxious time,
If I take a few steps,
they find me.
 
/2/
I tossed the dice, Isaac;
My defeat is the roads I could not
take
 
/3/
When the sky is shot,
Olive posed from a dream.
I will become branches for you
you will make me fly.
Smile,
Isaac will be the bride of the
night.
 
/4/
Being the morning is
intrinsic to her,
Who come
late,
Who doesn’t come
I, me,
myself
 
/5/
I was cross.
I am not the last drop flooding from the
pot.
You asked;
morning cafes of Sivas, Isaac
that is me
who is a poet in the fire.
 
/6/
Draw
yourself.
The tip of your wing touched the
black.
 
/7/
Let there be new pages, Euphrates
willow, two steps after me,
Settle on the tip,
Don’t be
scared
They cannot shoot
you,
Shore, thickets, night,
blind,
fly from the tip
fly
Isaac.
Maybe they will
shoot

​

​Editors Choice:Neval Savak

She was born in İzmir,Turkey. She published her poetry book called “The Black Solace” in April 2016. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines such as Silgi, Şiiristan, Sakız Fanzin, Meyus, Sunak, Tmolos, Nif Sanat, Eliz, Dikili Ekin, Yaşam Sanat, Kirpi Edebiyat, Kültür Sanat, Kaybolan Defterler. She lives in İzmir.

You’ve no idea

an empty boat
at sea
or a swing
o your heart your heart
in the twilight of the sky
it’s history with hidden lines

your face is moon’s shame
beating on the blackness of lakes
making me die a thousand deaths
it’s lighthouse of my night

ah if i say ah
my wasting life’s
never knocked
door is your hands

me, i’m mad
you, you’ve no idea
 
 Neval Savak
English Translation by Erkan Karakiraz

the diary of a woman
 
-how sad must be those lakes-
 
perhaps a few leaves would be falling
out of our loneliness
perhaps our hands are like water lily
we greet each other in the autumn
while sensing the smell of departure
of those lakes of sadness
 
we would not hear anymore
the festivities of the bay windows
even we would be all ears
we tend to forget the existence
of the streaming rivers, shooting stars
the morning of the smell of soap
of the laundry with the smell of soap
 
we would be shot at our eyes
as we are plunging into the world saying it is a fate
 
we are outcast kid
of the rogue rains
our mind used to know the blue
and on top of that
that laughter with a smell of a rose
gently bending over the water
such kisses of the touch of a bird
just before there is a rupture
 
the diary of a woman
in it she holds her tongue
 
Neval Savak
English Translation by Mesut Şenol
​

​Warm Welcome For  A Guest Poet:Jacquelyn Pope
​ 
 Jacquelyn Pope is a writer and translator. Her book of poems, Watermark (2005), is published by Marsh Hawk Press.
 She is winner of Marsh Hawk Press’s First Annual Poetry Prize, 2004

Emphasis Mine
  
LOST declares the Highlander’s Land of Lincoln plate,
now canting from a single rusted bolt. This I know,
for this I am: fish out of water, ever out
of sorts, foreign-born and foreign-hearted.
Stuck now, in the here-and-now, as the world turns
and turns away. Marking time in the lowest
of these low lands, in lots drawn and Chemlawned,
where the world spreads sprawled and blind, gorges
on blacktop. Its houses settle cheek-by-jowl, secured
by Rustic Wood and Heritage Plastic, needled
by evergreens, the roofs strafed by wind and jet fuel.
Here in the grasp of its grid of days, in seasons
detailed by dammed ice or by peeling paint,
I go skidding past turns, out of true, tracked
through the muck of its weedrows and gumstick,
in the wrack of my failures of nerve.
 

Out of Bounds
 
Summer’s shadows start me
thinking blind: how blue
drags black behind it, dark
and ruined, rising like a bruise
played for time.
 
From the swing of summer
I wished for a door,
a trap, some plunge between
the endless brush of sea-
on-sky. I wished
for your old blue window
 
in its peeled black frame,
a passage to gentle you through.
I wished for the song
that would summon you
out of shadow, camphor, steam.
I wished on a trick for turning back
 
but of course it never came.
There was only everything
between us, stuck in the slur
of love and lost connection,
out in the blue, endlessly vanishing.

 published in -upstreet journal, Massachusetts. 
 

​Editors Choice: Salih Bolat
Salih Bolat was born in Adana in 1956 and completed his elementary through high school education there. He graduated from the Department of Social Politics at the University of Gazi (1980). He completed his doctorate at Hacettepe University. At some Universities, Depertment of Cinema-TV in İstanbul and Ankara  studied about scriptwriting, creative writing.  He was on the editorial board of the journals Koza, Petek, Yapıt and Yarın. He has published books of essays, poetry and criticism. His first literary work was his short story entitled Çöpçü/Garbage Man published in the newspaper Yeni Adana (1975). He has also been published in journals like Yeni Olgu, Türkiye Yazıları and Düşler. In his socially oriented poetry, he depicts the individual’s distress and pain, and the details of life. He has an imagist and lyrical style. His books of poetry: Yaşanan/What Is Lived (1983), Bir Afişin Önünde/In Front of a Poster (1986), Sınır ve Sonsuz/Limit and Infinity (1988), Karşılaşma/Encounter (1993), Uzak ve Eski/Distant and Old (1995), Gece Tanıklığı/Witness to the Night (1999), Açılmış Kanat/Spread Wings (2004) and Kanıt/Evidence (2006).

THE LAKE
 at night
feeling secure, we went off to our beds
but the lake stayed alone in darkness
ı wish she would talk with the summer grasses
and would listen to the song of hot herbs
ı wish falling stars would stop her worries
and she wouldn’t feel cold
at night
 we fell into a deep asleep
the mountains were covered with distances
 but the lake was still awake
she was wandering alone among the bulrushes
ı prepared a bed for her
ı wish she would come to us.
 (Translated by Tozan Alkan)

THE CHASE
every morning
a bullet wedges in my sleeplessness
i awaken a dead soldier in my bed
beard of blood wrapped around the wind
i get up to clean my shaving mirror
why this glassy stain of night?
i wipe it but it grows bigger
will my face fade in this dark?
Translated by Yusuf Eradam and Michael Gurian
http://salihbolat.com/
​ 

​A Warm Welcome For  A Guest Poet: Ndue Ukaj 
Ndue Ukaj (1977) is Albanian writer, publicist and literary critic. He was member of several editorials literary. He has also been editor of the magazine for art, culture and society "Identity" that was published in Pristina. Ukaj is included in several anthologies of poetry, in Albanian, and other languages. He has published five books, including “Godo is not coming”, which won the national award for best book of poetry published in 2010 in Kosovo. He has also won the award for best poems in the International Poetry Festival in Macedonia. Hi won also PRIZES 2013: The International Best Poets, Translators, Critics, and Poetry Magazines, Selections of Poems, IPTRC in Chines and Creativity prizes' in Naji Naaman's Literary Prizes 2016.
 His poems and texts are translated into English, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Finish, Swedish, Turkish, Chinese.
Ukaj is member of Swedish PEN.

Utopia  
Everything is different, in the horizon the Sun is crumbled
The crumbles remained on the earth’s heart like triumphant arrows.

We can’t recognize the colors through the wind caressing the memory
We do not read poetry in the universe of foolishness
Where relations between darkness and light
Appear just like relations between the wall and thought.

Behind is played the surprising game, just like before
Birds are falling in the ground, just like in times when hell was written,
Oh God, everything has changed,
At a time when a small fence is darkening our our big eyes.
 

The moon finds a path through mummy hands remaining like arrows
towards the sky
And the sun dissolving just like a candle through tired eyes
Who can’t see anything in the blue sky, except a small cloud
A cloud darkening everything

Therefore vision is coiled in space
Just like the wind creating its avalanche
Then many faces appear.
At a night, when everything is different,
Containing inside the borders within your head
When you feet walk through illusions
And squeeze their bad dreams
For the time that isn’t
For the time that wasn’t
For the time that will not come
For the time that goes with the wind.
Utopia struggling against reality
Her dreams hiding at the corner of secrets
Are swallowed
 
Noah’s Arc
Noah’s Arc was not emptied even when the rainbow scintillated over the
sea
Winds stopped and the sea slept.
She was not emptied, even when the white dove flew before her
And in narrow doors were appeared the passionate, to feel
All colors of brightness right away.
 
She fights while drunken with a storm,
The rain of life falling non stop
With evil men who have ruined the soil...
 
Since when drunken people were overwhelmed by the desire to grapple through the colors of rainbow,
Trust me, peace was not laid over us even a dove appeared in a blue sky
When desire engulfed you to become drunk in warm lips,
To die there and preserve the instant of drunkenness in eternity
 
Night fell again; rainbow disappeared in the orbit of darkness,
Just like an unknown after a great hill.
And darkness invaded our eyes, the same as Eve’s overwhelming desire
for the prohibited apple in the tree of wisdom,
Oh God,
Wouldn’t you think that taste is lost for lives’ fruit?
Since the fight between the arch and the storm
 (Translated from Albania by Peter Tase)
 "Poetry is a beautiful and a human calling, always clinking, with an upper language. It’s a pleasure every time I publish poetry, especially when they are dedicated to other cultures."Ndue Ukaj

Editors choice:​Metin Cengiz
Metin Cengiz: poet and writer (b. 3 May 1953, Göle). He attended to Göle primary School (1964), Kars Alparslan High School (1972) and graduated from Erzurum Atatürk University, Faculty of Basic Sciences and Foreign Languages, Department of French (1977). During his years at the university, he worked as a civil officer at the Turkish Statistical Institute for a short time (1973). Meanwhile, he completed his studies at Marmara University, Department of French. After working as a teacher in Muş, he resigned from his duty, returned back to İstanbul and began to work as a proofreader, editor and translator at publishing houses. He wrote particularly on the problems of poetry in the reviews Hurriyet Gösteri, Varlık and in various newspapers. He established the Şiirden Publishing House in 2005, in collaboration with his friends, to publish poems and essays concerning poetry theory. He won the Behçet Necatigil Poetry Award in 1966 with his book Şarkılar Kitabı (The Book of Songs), Melih Cevdet Anday Poetry Award in 2010 with his book Bütün Şiirleri 1 (Collected poems 1), Bütün Şiirleri 2 (collected poems 2) and Tudor Arghezi İnternational Poetry Award  in 2011 (Romanya). He is a member of Writers Syndicate of Turkey, the Association of Turkish PEN Writers and the Turkish Authors Association. His poems are translated into several languages such as French, English, German, Spanish, Italian, Bosnian, Russian, Romanian, Arabic, Hebrew, Azerbaijani, Serbian, and Kurdish. His selected poems are published in French with the title Apres le Tempete et Autres Poemes (2006, Harmattan). Levant Magazine published his eight poems along with their Turkish under the title “Divan” (2009). In Romania his poems are published in magazines Convorbiri Literare and Poesia (2011). He edited the Anthology titled Çağdaş 17 Türk Şairi is published by Harmattan Publishing (2009). He organized several international festivals in Yalova, Çanakkale and Nicosia. Now he has been advising Eskişehir International Poetry Festival. He attended numerous International festivals and symposiums. His poetry benefits from tradition by challenging it, reflects the realities of the modern world and tries to elaborate them in dept with the realities of life as reflected from his internal world. Being known with his articles on poetry in his early period, the poet has become one of the pioneers of the period after 1980, with his theoretical articles and discussions on poetry. Some of these articles were published in a book titled Şiirin Gücü (The Power of Poetry, 1993)  
POETRY: Bir Tufan Sonrası (After A Deluge, 1988), Büyük Sevişme (The Great Love, 1980), Zehirinde Açan Zambak (The Lilly that Bloom in its Poison, 1991), İpek’a (To İpek, 1993), Şarkılar Kitabı (The Books of Songs, 1995), Gençlik Çağı (Juvenille Years, 1998), Aşk İlahileri&Günümüze Hüzzamlar (Hymnes Of Love &The Hüzzam Compositions Today, 2005), Özgürlük Şiirleri (poems of freedom), Bütün Şiirleri 1 (Collected poems 1), Bütün Şiirleri 2 (Collected poems 2), İmgeler Benim Yurdum (2011) (Images are my home).

ESSAY-CRITICISM-STUDY: Şiirin Gücü (The Pover of Poetry, 1993; second edition 2006), 1923-1953 Toplumcu Gerçekçi Şiir (The Socialist-Realist Poetry between 1923-1953, 2000), Modernleşme ve Modern Şiirimiz (Modernism and Our Modern Poery, 2002), Şiir, Din ve Cinsellik (Poetry, Religion and Sexuality, 2005), Nâzım’dan 70’li Yıllara Türk Şiirine Eleştirel Bir Bakış (A Critical Essay on Turkish Poetry from Nâzım to 70’s, 2005), Şiir, Biçim, Biçem, Şiirin Teorik Sorunları (The Poetry, Forme, Style – Theoretical Problems of Poetry, 2005), Şiir, Dil, Şiir Dili ve Şiirsel Anlam (Poetry, Language, Language of Poetry and Poetic Meaning, 2006), Küreselleşme, Postmodernizm ve Edebiyat (Globalisation, Postmodernism and Literature, 2007), İmge Nedir? (What is image?), Kültür ve Şiir (Culture and poetry, 2010),Felsefe ve Şiir (Philosophy and poetry, 2010), Şiire ve Hayata Dair Denemeler (2011) (Essays on Poetry and Life), Cemal Sureya poetry (2012), Thought of poetry in Plato and Aristotle (2012).
INTERWIEW: Hayat, Edebiyat, Siyaset-Ahmet Oktay ile Dünden Bugüne (Life, Literature, Politics – with Ahmet Oktay from Yesterday to Today, 2005).  

AT TIMES
At times comes someone
Settles down into my heart
Surrounding my whole body
The iron protecting me melts

Utters words I’ve never heard
Telling me about myself
Whisks me far away
Upsetting my world

No, this is not the only thing i want to explain
This is someone else or you perhaps
But i understand in the end
I am the traveler of myself

Metin Cengiz
© Translated by Pınar Besen  

DESCRIPTION TO LOVE

How many ships I have seen in these lands sinking
Passangers lost their sea
And fishermen racing with fish
How many anguish and sorrow
The unlucky people grow up
Suckle with their blood hunger and thirst
Tired but happy like a child.

Spells have I seen stops desire
Spell that turns life car without brake
I have listened stories whose wind lean against bells
I never forget it seems a contagious illness anymore
And troublesome like the wars easily told.

But I have not seen something like love in these lands
It throws people into roads barefoot
It cripples

Metin Cengiz
© Translated by Müesser Yeniay  
poems are published at:(Mediterranean Poetry) 
http://www.odyssey.pm/?p=2669
​

A Warm Welcome For  A Guest Poet: Abhijit Bera 

Abhijit Bera has no introduction apart from his poetry. Just to mention that he is an Indian poet and writer. Two major poetry publications, “The Dead Funeral” (2012) and “Carnival Birds” (2016) both in Bengali.

Exile / Abhijit Bera
  
Give the deportation
till death.
 
Here, the gospel
Until the last breath
I won’t ask for a rain bath
And won’t ask for any night of storm
though in the Opening of windows
gust of wind struck
I’ll close my eyes and ears, a camel will sit down on the bed.
 
Now, take this dark well
Throw me in and remember
those compulsive gospels
"Till death” ...
 
Until the body turns blue
I don’t wish any life…
   
(From the Book “Carnival Birds” 2016)
 
 Beyond Silver Linings / Abhijit Bera
  
There is no room in this town to make love
We are beyond the boundaries of the city, across the Silver Lining
Sat down under a night...
Stars across the horizon dips
Blue Birds in the hollow of chilling silence.
We do not have a home
In this universe, night falling universe...
There is no word on the earth
We do not touch each other, neither moonstruck
We’re just sitting face to face without a blink
Our eyes are like a freezing death
Haven’t we died?
Aren’t we dying?
Won’t we die?
How long can we be baked in this cold night
in each other’s warmth?
And for how long our eyes be comforters to us?
How many times our shadows are born
How many times the moon set down
We didn’t account for any loss
Never count for any charity
Only in this vast wilderness of the night
as if two fascinating candle-
are melting in the heat of its own.
 
Came so far -
just
to make love.
  
(From the Book “Carnival Birds” 2016)
 
 ​About Turkish Literature and Art Magazine
“It is genuinely a great privilege for me to write here as your guest poet.
Poetry is the finest art of all. And running a poetry magazine is the most magical job. The magic of The Turkish Literature and Art Magazine has already crossed the horizon. Hope it’ll continue to make the world a better place through poetry across boundaries because only poetry has the universal appeal.”
 

​Editors Choice:Nazli Eray
Nazli Eray was born in Ankara, Turkey. After attending the English Girls Secondary School, İstanbul Arnavutköy American Girls College, and İstanbul University Faculty of Law, she worked as a translator in the Turkish Ministry of Tourism and Promotion. Her first story was entitled “Monsieur Hristo,” written when she was a secondary school student. Her stories started to get published in the review Entity one year later, and in important literary reviews such as Turkish Language, Constitution, Yazko Literature, Demonstration, and Essay starting in 1973. In 1975, her first book, entitled Ay Bayim Ah was published. In 1986, an anthology of her stories was published in Germany. Her stories, plays and novels have been translated into English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Czech, Urdu, Hindi, Swedish, and Arabic. Her novel Orpheus was published in the US in English in 2006. Her novels The Street of Different Dreams and Orpheus are being translated into Korean, and The Emperor Tea Garden is also currently being translated into English. Nazlı Eray is the founder of the (Turkish) Literary Association, a member of the Turkish Writers’ Union, an honorary faculty member at Iowa University, and a member of PEN International. She has been a columnist in the newspapers Gunes, Cumhuriyet, Radikal, and Aksam. The authors’ stories are included in the elementary school course books in Turkey.

The Map
    In one of Ankara’s forgotten streets, there is a narrow, dark bookstore.
​ I stop by there every now and then to look at the dusty old books. The moldy old books interest me; the smell of dust gets into the back of my throat there, I chat a little with the old bespectacled bookseller, who sits in a corner at a worm-eaten desk , then I go out into the sunny streets again and walk away.
    Late one afternoon I went into the bookstore, where the sun rarely penetrates and which has a kind of rich scent all of its own, and was absently looking through the shelves.
    The old bookseller, coughing lightly from where he sat, pointed out a bunch of rolled-up papers lying in a corner.
  “These just came in,” he said.
  I went over.
  “What are they?”
  “Old maps . . .” I leaned down, picked up one of them and unrolled it. It was a very old map. It showed the long-erased borders of the Ottoman Empire. There was Old Turkish written on it.
“Interesting,” I said.
I unrolled another map and looked at it with interest. Some very unusual islands . . . I couldn’t quite make out where it was.
   The bookseller said: “These are some old colonies . . .”
“God, what ocean are these colonies in? I’ve never heard their names before!”
   The bookseller said: “These maps are special, they’re interpretative.”
Now I was looking at another map; it was like something from another planet . . . There was Latin America, and Africa, and so forth, but there were several pieces of land I didn’t know. And the writing was very unusual.
“What’s this?”
“This,” said the bookseller, “it’s the world we live in, of course. But interpreted . . . You understand.”
“That they’re interpreted?”
“Yes, they’re specially annotated maps.”
“Really very interesting,” I said. “I’ve never heard of interpretative maps like these before. I wasn’t a great student of geography in school, but I’ve traveled around the world. And I’ve really never seen anything that looked like these pieces of land. I mean look, isn’t that America? But what is that over there, for God’s sake?”
...
Read more: http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/the-map#ixzz4JMGwQuBw
​
© Nazli Eray. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2011 by Robert P. Finn. All rights reserved.

​A Warm Welcome For  A Guest Poet: Fernando Carrera

Fernando Carrera was born in Guadalajara, México on 1983. He is the author of the poetry collections “Fire Expression” (Mantis Editors-Jalisco Culture Ministry, 2007) and “Where the touch is” (ICA-Conaculta, 2011; “Là où le toucher/ Donde el tacto” second bilingual edition, Mantis Editores-Écrits des Forges- Jalisco Culture Ministry, 2015). He received the National Prize of Literature for Young Writers on 2010. He received honorary mentions in the “Efraín Huerta” National Poetry Prize on 2006, and in the “Nicolás Guillén” International Poetry Prize in 2009. He had received twice the Grant of the Program for Encouragement for Creation and Artistic Development, of the Mexican National Council for Arts and Culture on the periods 2008-2009 and 2010-2011. Books and poems of his authorship have been translated to French, English, Turkish, Greek and Albanian. Poems from his books have been published in several national and international literary and specialized publications, printed and on-line.

Preceding Light
 
 In the water that becomes a shore
in the time that abides
where anxiety transforms itself into a kiss:
 
I am the still
who consumed the vegetables of dawn
who lies in the quiet structure of night
 
I am the wing
that covers the climbers of air
the moment that precedes another lightning
(the early vibration)
 
          Something in me within me claims
something made of clay and water with roots
a bit of dust and of the blood of dust
                 : occasionally air
                                         dying ash
 
 Come and sleep this night
woven in my hands not by my hands
Stare at this void and you shall see my father’s precocious sperm
previous to the first drink of milk
                                      the foremost galaxy
 
Stare a little longer
: you shall see death
  
From the book “Fire Expression” (2007)

Water Stairs
 
 I dwelt in the city, the thirst
of awakening the dreams
of what´s humid     Memory flows
 
towards its sun
Desire is
the source of desire
 
I dwelt in the body     The woman
self-made as light on the tip of the day
river that parted
the mountain in two possibilities
: dream
 
no longer the dream of the just
but that of water
since the freshness of the body
descends upon touch
 From the book “Where the touch is” (2011, second edition-2015)
 
 
 

​
​Editors Choice: Muesser Yeniay

MÜESSER YENİAY was born in İzmir, 1984; graduated from Ege University, with a degree in English Language and Literature. She has won several prizes in Turkey including Yunus Emre (2006), Homeros Attila İlhan (2007), Ali Riza Ertan (2009), Enver Gökçe (2013) poetry prizes. Her first book Dibine Düşüyor Karanlık da was published in 2009 and her second book Evimi Dağlara Kurdum is a collection of translation from world poetry. Her latest book Yeniden Çizdim Göğü was published in 2011. She has translated the poems of Persian poet Behruz Kia under the name of Lalelere Requiem. She has translated Selected Poems of Gerard Augustin together with Eray Canberk, Başak Aydınalp, Metin Cengiz (2011). She has also translated Personal Anthology of Michel Cassir together with Eray Canberk and Metin Cengiz (2011). Lately, she has published Contemporary Spanish Anthology with Metin Cengiz and Jaime B. Rosa. Her poems have been translated into English, French, Serbian, Arabic, Hebrew, Italian, Greek, Hindi, Spanish and Romanian. She participated in the poetry festivals in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Israel, Serbia, United States, France and India.

They Say

I ask, dashing into the crowds
“are you my mother?”
I ask a hole of a tree
the birds scattered on the sky
my eyes looking at high
bridges passes over my tongue
over my hands…
I am in a tale
my hair is made of tale

I grasp and press my chest cage
my manhood is melting in my eyes

I ask, dashing into the crowds
they say I must have a mother

like an orange peel
they say..
http://www.thebakerypoetry.com/tag/muesser-yeniay/

Flower Village  
I learnt how to stand put
from a flower
 
Saw no other sun
drank no other water
 
I recognized my roots as a village
my earth, the sky
 
Seasons passed above me
a nest of ants, bosom friends
 
I learnt how to be a flower
solely… solely standing put

https://poethead.wordpress.com/2014/07/12/three-poems-by-muesser-yeniay/

A Warm Welcome For  A Guest Poet: Niels Hav 

Niels Hav is a full time poet and short story writer living in Copenhagen with awards from The Danish Arts Council. In English he has We Are Here, published by Book Thug, and poetry and fiction in numerous magazines. In his native Danish the author of six collections of poetry and three books of short fiction. His books have been translated into several languages such as English, Arabic, Turkish, Dutch, Farsi and Chinese. Raised on a farm in western Denmark, Niels Hav today resides in the most colourful and multiethnic part of the capital. He has travelled widely in Europe, Asia, North and South America.
In an interview Niels Hav recently says: “I'm trapped in the Latin alphabet. Even if I communicate in English, I'm still isolated from half of the world. How many alphabets are there on our planet? Nobody knows for sure, but alone Chinese, Hindi, Bengali and other Asian alphabets are used by more than one third of the planet's population. And then there is the Arabic alphabet used by a billion. Many Arab and Chinese writers have the advantage over European colleagues, they are able to handle two alphabets. I wish my ignorance wasn't so extensive.”

“…Niels Hav's We Are Here, ... brings to us a selection from the works of one of Denmark's most talented living poets and is all the more welcome for that reason….” * Frank Hugus, The Literary Review

Anger

The dreadful music
in the wind-mantles around the churchyard
a raw night in December, the dead
leaping around screaming in the maltreated trees
with great lumps of anger. Something pent up
that needs to be delivered
to whom?

© Niels Hav Translation Martin Aitken

On the terrace

The old who are soon to die
grow transparent in deck chairs,
but still they listen for traffic.
Going nowhere anymore,
no need to remind me. The skin is dry,
something gnaws inside and wants out.
The heart stops / beats / stops
like a defective second-hand.
In reality, they have arrived now.
Their deceased stand calling
in the shade of the purple beech: My name
disappeared from the phone book.
Alternately, they counterfeit the morning
with dreams and nostalgia.
But still they listen for traffic.
The old who are soon to die
grow transparent in deck chairs.
Someone has put them here.

© Niels Hav
Translation Martin Aitken

"An honor to be your guest. TURKISH LITERATURE AND ART is already impressive, containing so many talented writers and good poems. To edit a magazine is to build a dream castle. I wish you luck in expanding the magazine to a solid platform for Turkish literature and art. We are surrounded by rubbish and empty talk; the task for poetry is to be a genuine defense against nonsense. "
Niels Hav​

​​

Editors choice:Zeynep Köylü

the dream of the ruins
 
                                               in the timelessness of the Gobi Desert
                                               for the ruins...
 
my face falls away from a far-off mirror
through a piece of the river I gazed at the sky
in the desert I grew larger. the weeds crept onto my hair
in the sleep of horses my shadow grew larger
here there’s no solitude
                               moments stolen from clocks
get buried in space through a stone’s bottom
 
my shell breaks. I’m awakened by a stare
the storm stretches out its hands
birds that shudder to have no ocean
turn, speaking of the earth’s cracking
voice underground
                                   with the tongueless moon
I ought to pass right through my body
 
the ant has taken flight. now it passes over the mountains
a window from you opens out—a rainwater well
makes the roads fit into the hedgehog’s vacant shell
with the earth’s eyes I looked
                                burned my wings
I should run off to the fields before the sun
 
now I’m a water slick on the roadside
before seeing words I saw pain
wind within bones
wanders behind the final prayers
red sand
                                  I bury my face
I listen to the sounds of your feet
 
the skylark stirs    —oh lama oh lama
I can’t open my eyes to the dark oh
in the desert I’m getting wet. I linger, a leaf
a map hidden by those who came back from the fire
opens out in my face
                                 the dream of the ruins
time fallen
 
Poem: Zeynep Köylü
Translated by Mel Kenne and İdil Karacadağ
 
the key Silent
 
grey door hugs an endless wall
shadow hides in the back garden Swallow
flies to all that is lonely Prayers
trading looks with christ Not forgetting
what’s in the back garden. Speaking
with her quiet inner self eleni
 
mirror’s neck broken for as long as you look
pain of writings past Sky
in a far-away sleep now Your eyes
moistening mihrimah Cracked
palms holding shameful sounds Your shoulder
with a wounded istanbul Remembering
her hair eleni
 
echoing in the stones farewell
eleni holding the key The world
it’s big enough to fit into On her face
a mirror spread She falls
down onto the naked laugh Kisses
the fear stopped at the door Softly
turns the key
 
the moon’s come closer eleni, the rain’s late
on the wall the birds left loneliness Just
starting to embrace god she got cold hands The rain
she was getting used to then shut her eyes The frog
hopped over the wall Almost mute
when she pushed down into her chest Deep
despondence it hurts
 
dropping her fingers she counts down
her prayers into infinity In the sun
the star that glows and bleeds The trees
that were buried by the ending To herself
she neared at the window Her mouth
possessed by shattered words A
stare that’s left Counting off
the doors
 
the key Silent
  
Poem: Zeynep Köylü
Translated by Mel Kenne and İdil Karacadağ
(The translations by Mel Kenne and İdil Karacadağ are published in Turkish Poetry Today. )


​

by:Umit Sener Ta

Editors choice:Nisa leyla
                   Nisa Leyla was born in Iskenderun, Hatay, Turkey in 1972. After completing primary and secondary education in Iskenderun, she graduated from Çukurova University, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences in Adana. Later, she held management positions for five years, and served as an English teacher for three years.
In her poetry, she focuses on social issues, inspired by real life. She also writes love poems, socialist and lyric poetries.
Her poems appear in all major magazines in Turkey such as: Varlık, Yasak Meyve, Sincan İstasyonu, Şiirden, Şiiri Özlüyorum, Mühür,  Papirüs, Deliler Teknesi, Ihlamur, Kuşak Edebiyat, Kurşun Kalem, Kurgan Edebiyat, Hürriyet Gösteri, Şiir, Yeni Adana, Yaşam Sanat, Patika, Yeni Dönem, Tay, Afrodisyas Sanat, Temrin, Ring Edebiyat, Ekin Sanat, Şiir Saati and more of the same. She also writes short stories and fairytales for children. Her poems have been taken place in: the anthology of Minimal Stories from 252 Authors by Remzi Karabulut, the book of The Gates of Poets by Adil Okay, the anthology of World Poetry Yearbook both in 2013 and 2014 in China, the anthology of Çukurova Poets by Mustafa Emre, the anthology of Literature Platform Yearbook by Turan Karataş, the anthology of Mühür Publishing Yearbook.
            In 1991, she has been the third best poet in the Poetry Contest held by Yeni Adana newspaper. One year later, in poetry contest of İskenderun Fest she has been the best poet of the year. Lastly she won the award of Mevlüt Kaplan Literature Contest 2015 .She is also a member of Writers Union of Turkey.
             Her books:Dar paçalı dizeler (VERSES WITH NARROW FLARES) (Yazılı Kağıt Publishing, 2014, Ankara) Yokoluş Bir Sözcükse () (Yasak Meyve Publishing, 2015, İstanbul) Sihirli Değnek (Magic Wand) (for children) (Mühür Publishing, 2015, İstanbul)  
            She has three for children and two for grown-ups poetry files, two files of stories for grown-ups and two fairytale files for children ready to be published.Now she is living in Antalya, Turkey and she is looking for the poetry in the life and the life in the poetry…
 
hunger
 the river you pour into my heart will not cure
nor the mountains you release promising eternity
i have nothing to say to your trees offering candy apples
yet the emptiness inside of me is not filled
a tunnel of sadness
 
the facts being on their feet the sounds rising
like a wall and i am where hop melts away
like a candle
 
the word life you knit and the god you drip
from honey will not cure me
 
the children of my desolate street
have been starving
 
​while trying to forget you

a little you and a little poetry
that's what I am working on
your picture and voice
have come into blossom
I take along your voice 

I consult my poetry 
what kind of me I should present 

really, what am I looking for 
beside you

I am kissing my smiling grief
on the forehead...


                 

​
​Editors choice:Dilek Değerli

The Pale Garden
 
The winter of garden falled on the ground
the broken leaves are on the carpet
steel beaks are on my cold skin.
Oh, are the cracklings in the wall
heard from the garden?
The wine is stil acrid.
 
The wind that hides in my hair
shaking out desert magic to the sleep
the night with winter fingers
walking around my narrow streets
ice nails of the night are broken
hitting stone angels.
 
Blind midwife of darkness is embracing
wooden legs of a scarecrow.
The screams of scarecrow are
in the throes of death.
The mirror is still dusty.
 
Under the curtain of ground
when two naked trees are making love
by their roots
fence of the garden is crying
on the dry sunflower’s neck.
The photographs are being pale
to touch into the distance.
 
 ESCAPING FROM THE PAST
 
Her ankles’ pain
is from thousands of well depth.
Bed disappears in the room.
Rain doesn’t mind cold,
it eats the talkative grasshoppers.
She becomes drunk, listens with her three ears
she looks out the world with her one eye.
She killes everything that used up,
pouring nitric acid to their hearts.
She wears her feathered helmet
and throws herself to emptiness.
She murmurs her song;
 
                      Angels, come out where you are
                      lightness, tulles, mist are here.
                      Time has burned and disappeared.
                      Take my soul from flames,
                      then evil can waste his time with my body.

Drawings by Dilek Değerli
​

Editors choice:Reha Yünlüel
​http://goo.gl/ksMPd7​
skygazing stop / göğe bakma durağı IV" by reha yünlüel, iç/in bachibouzouck, No: 076 [07.2016]

​

​ 
​Editors choice:HALİM YAZICI 

MY HEART, LISTEN TO THIS LINE 
 
make love to me
with your olive lifetime
leaking from your veins
 
somehow or other glass and iron
will melt in your eyes.
 
HALİM YAZICI (d./b. 1954)
Translated by Baki Yiğit
 
SONG
 
a rain song is sung
getting so wet
in the rain.
 
HALİM YAZICI (d./b. 1954)
Translated by Baki Yiğit

​​ 

​Editors choice:Efe Murad
Mega-Disasters / Rendering Subway Ads
 
hate the unseen because anal beads is white rice
sparks electrify your imagination
your specialty is clever solutions
danger third rail
ours is devising cleverly tailored protection
I like my men perfectly groomed
(seeking overweight men or women)
they don’t know what they do, I’m covered in
everything you need and nothing you don’t need
your specialty follows your dream
didn’t know they know what they do
your mental clarity focusing formula
compensation for up to everyone is the self.
  
 
Feathertops In the Cities
 
you can catch animals in space
eat them right away crushing their heads
everything is sentient and puffs like feathertops
little furry pieces glued to customized brains
hiding fuzzy animal-tits with razor slashing chests.
emanate all your darkness; you’re alone
gather your force and do it: broadcast everything!
show how you eat, how you fuck, and then piss blood
in the fecal mind of swipe machines.
 
  
 

​Editors choice:Veysel Çolak 

No Time Left

No time left. Don’t be late with the water
the geraniums will wilt the apples we stored
will rot if we don’t bite them soon.

It’s late. You are in a falling plane
it may not give birth to the incubating moment.
Let us undress and enter the dream we started
if we make love the icebergs will melt 
our job is to resist, come on, and quicken your heart.

No time left. May the day be plenty, your love a climber
hand in hand with the mountains may the young girls laugh.
The hand from Asia with a single carnation
a robust soil and the exile it leads.

Time is difficult. The shadow of bitterness on the window.
Let the waters gather us and collect us as sand
and later sweep us on a hidden path
as quarrelsome as love let it fall suddenly
from a waterfall increasing its flow
certainly it must have a meaning
in the mouth of a people tired of dreaming. 


June 2006, the World
Translated by: Koray Feyiz
​http://towerjournal.com/fall_2011/Feyiz_Colak.htm​

​Editors choice: küçük İskender

​Nicola

you decerebrate the rose. don’t do this.
verses, cannot find the poems they deserted
you become a humiliated evening
your hair wet to your waist
your eyes
turned away and fixed on a couple of cracked glasses
left on a claret, velvet coverlet
almost exploded. Soon to blow
before the storm
closely sheilding your face, poor and lonely child
storyless, bashful and amicable
you should have a macedonian name: nicola
I sat on your balcony, drank Choπcko beer,
over the way were
grand men wounded by the earth
grand women are sleeping
grand women wounded on account of grand men
​ turned into tramps by grand men
a pen knife, holds its blade inside like a secret
the pen knife I put on the table on leaving
a perfect portrayal
if it were nicola what would appear
if it were İskender what would appear
somehow, not far away
was a beautiful graveyard where songs are laid

poet: küçük İskender
translator: caroline stockford
​https://estoniacordfrock.wordpress.com/tag/turkish-poetry-in-translation/
picture:​küçük İskender

​Letters to Virginia Woolf/ umit sener ta
Translated by: Josef Kilciksiz
 Letters to Virginia Woolf/ umit sener ta
Translated by: Josef Kilciksiz
 
In fact, I started yesterday. I was calling the words brought by a hurricane. My soul was as empty as the wind-scoured streets. I do not know if you’ve ever been in such a frame of mind, as if you want to leave but you were unable . Your eyes are  always on the door, waiting  for someone to enter.
 
 
I’ve built thousands of palaces on tiny words
some broke with utterances, some with marble
I don’t have a slingshot to chase the birds, flying over me
Don’t unlock your inwardness Virginia
I sewed knots on myself and
the imagery of your Cossack
It is not easy to hit the sky
when one hooks onto your heart the hook of the ships
when I wander drop by drop in your damp geography
when your heart was open
Looking at the rooms, you were only you, staring back at you
 
The sourness of the pen is reflected  on paper
 The lake feels the pain of the submission of the swan whose shadow is broken
the self-lost dervish leaves his cardigan for someone else
I could not deliver you, a life
like the migration of ants, things deleted from my brain
It’s apparent, I could not look after the inner man through the words, while you are growing your inside
 
 
 
Listen Virginia
I'll tell you the chagrin of my inwardness
broken toy of a boy
racing cars, run close to me, uncathable
thickening time
While growing drops deepened seas
I was drowning on the shallow coast of homes
 
It was like the defeat of a powerless ember
the cloud I carried over me
the shiver of the rain were jackets, peeled out of me
before entering the bed
deceived mother was a scream in the bosom
like wearing a bracelet
I would gift to every new woman
Each diary
like a smile remained incomplete
of a past
despite persistent writing down
my rage is not over time
 
all the gathered letters are flying to their owner
don’t shout anymore, Virginia
 
 Special thanks to:
Josef Kılçıksız for translating my poem
Vincent Czyz aouthor of the books called "The Christos Mosaic" , "Adrift in a Vanishing City" for editing and his wife Neslihan and congrats.
Cem Duran for editing
Hale KorayMustafa ZiyalanUlas Basar Gezgin for reading and always supporting me.
 
 

 Editors choice: Yılmaz Güney
Yılmaz Güney (born Yılmaz Pütün, 1 April 1937 – 9 September 1984) was a Kurdish film director, scenarist, novelist, and actor ofZaza, Kurdish origin, who produced movies in Turkish.[1][2][3][4][4] He quickly rose to prominence in Turkish Film Industry. Many of his works were devoted to the plight of ordinary, working class people in Turkey. Yılmaz Güney won the Palme d'Or with the film Yol he co-produced with Şerif Gören at Cannes Film Festival in 1982. At odds with then Turkish Government he fled the country and later lost his citizenship.
Yılmaz Güney was born in 1937 in the Yenice county of Adana. His father was Zaza from Siverek and his mother was Kurd from Varto.[1][4] His parents migrated to Adana to work as cotton field laborers. As a result of his family background, young Yılmaz grew among the working class. This was a strong background for his future works which generally focused on a realistic portrayal of downtrodden and marginalized strata of the population in the country. Güney studied law and economics at the universities of Ankara andIstanbul, but by the age of 21 he found himself actively involved in film-making.As Yeşilçam, the Turkish studio system, a handful of directors, including Atıf Yılmaz, began to use cinema as a means of addressing the problems of the people. State-sanctioned melodramas, war films, and play adaptations had mostly previously been played in Turkish theaters. These new filmmakers began to shoot and screen more realistic pictures of Turkish/Kurdish life. Yılmaz Güney was one of the most popular names to emerge from this trend, a gruff-looking young actor who earned the moniker Çirkin Kral ("the Ugly King" in Turkish) or "paşay naşirîn" in Kurdish (Sorani dialect). After working as an apprentice screenwriter for and assistant to Atıf Yılmaz, Güney soon began appearing in as many as 20 films a year and became Turkey's one of the most popular actors. The early 1960s brought restricted freedom to Turkey, and Güney was imprisoned from 1960 to 1962. In prison he wrote what some labeled a "communist" novel, They Died with Their Heads Bowed.[5] The country's political situation and Güney's relationship with the authorities became even more tense in the ensuing years. Not content with his star status atop the Turkish film industry, Güney began directing his own pictures in 1965. By 1968 he had formed his own production company, Güney Filmcilik. Over the next few years, the titles of his films mirrored the feelings of the people of Turkey: Umut (Hope, 1970); Ağıt (Elegy, 1972); Acı (Pain, 1971); The Hopeless (1971). After 1972, however, Güney would spend most of his life in prison. Arrested for harboring anarchist students, Güney was jailed during preproduction of Zavallılar (The Miserable, 1975), and before completing Endişe (Worry, 1974), which was finished in 1974 by Güney's assistant, Şerif Gören. This was a role that Gören would repeat over the next dozen years, directing several scripts that Güney wrote in prison. Released from prison in 1974 as part of a general amnesty, Güney was re-arrested that same year for shooting Sefa Mutlu, the public prosecutor of Yumurtalık district in Adana Province, to death in a night club as a result of a drunken row[6] and given a prison sentence of 19 years. During this stretch of incarceration, his most successful screenplays were Sürü (The Herd, 1978) and Düşman (The Enemy, 1979), both directed by Zeki Ökten. Düşman won an Honourable Mention at the 30th Berlin International Film Festival in 1980.[7] After escaping from prison in 1981 and fleeing to France, Güney won the Palme d'Or at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival for his film Yol, whose director in the field was once again Şerif Gören. It was not until 1983 that Güney resumed directing, telling a brutal tale of imprisoned children in his final film, Duvar (The Wall, 1983), made in France with the cooperation of the French government. Meanwhile, Turkey's government revoked his citizenship and a court sentenced him to twenty-two extra years in jail.[5] Yılmaz Güney died of gastric cancer in 1984, in Paris, France.[5]   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C4%B1lmaz_G%C3%BCney

​
Editors choice:Levent Karatas

Of This Of That
 We are watching the air
Which the wolves would afraid of; that mud-covered, dark air
Standing still by the window
Comparing with the air of yesterday’s and the day before’s
Oh Lord! Sunlessness gives us so much pain sometimes
Sunlessness of our souls give pain too
 “That’s” we say, “devil’s shadow lover weather”
We think of ghosts getting wet under the rain
Passing through a parallel season while roaming country by country
We think of him as opening an umbrella, closing it
We speak about the weather
About the weepy weepy weepy weather
We believe into the flying planes
And into the non arival trains
We see the sea and starting to talk about the water       
Of this of that                                                                 
‘Oh’ we say, ‘I see the sea’. I wish I would lay here forever
We feel the rain goes down on the sea
That we are cold
That we tremble
As if the wind touches
We wake up with the water
We speak with the air
Like everyone else did
We speak of this of that.
 
Poet: Levent Karatas
Translator: Hande Dipligunes 
 
Hypnosis
 Who brought me here?
Last, I was in my toilet, I guess
I remember that
And who are those men taking all that files?
That cook
Or that cook
Or that cook
Are you the doctor?
Or is it my mother who wants me to wake up?
But it can be my father too
Are you the doctor?
Last I ordered a double raki
I’ll never be able to see that raki on my table, I guess
Are you the waiter?
I am sitting on a red armchair
I have even gone to the most dead-end streets
But this is bad
Ha ha ha!
I thought nightmen remained in my childhood
Is that the nightman’s whistle?
It can be a conductor too
But it’s bad this time
What did I promise myself
Ah, are you the doctor?
Ha ha ha!
Poet: Levent Karatas
Translator: Hande Dipligunes
 
 ​

​Editors choice:Rezonans

​"Rezonans received the 2nd prize with 90.56% points at the Cork International Fleischmann Trophy, which is one of the most prestigious choral festivals in Europe. (april 27-may2 , 2016)"

Rezonans was founded in 2010 by a young team with an  innovative and dynamic understanding of music. Having accomplished numerous international projects to date, Rezonans shares its repertoire that focuses on a capella music with music lovers all around Turkey.  

Finding the opportunity to work with world famous conductors including Simon Carrington, Volker Hempfling, Klaus-Jürgen Etzold, and Paulo Lourenço, Rezonans also performed with conductors such as Nigel Short, one of the founding members of the King’s Singers; Brady Allred, who gives master classes on choral conducting in various countries; and Jo-Michael Scheibe, the president of the American Choral Directors’ Association, as a part of its latest project focusing on the music of Grammy© winning choral conductor and composer Eric Whitacre. On November 8, 2015,  the choir presented an unforgettable music show under the baton of Eric Whitacre in Zorlu Performing Arts Center.

Alongside international projects, Rezonans also focuses on the works of 20th and 21st century Turkish composers. Having performed both the Turkish and world premieres of the works by Hasan Uçarsu, Özkan Manav, and Kâmran İnce, the choir aims at continuing to unearth new Turkish choral pieces in the future. 

Rezonans has represented Turkey at Europa Cantat XIX organized by the European Choral Association in Pécs, Hungary, in July 2015. The choir is getting ready to take part in international festivals and competitions throughout Europe.


​

http://www.rzns.org

Editors note:
Treasury
  She was born as a daughter of a family of Çarmışıh, Land of Poets, Hilal Nesin grew up with folk songs in a poetical atmosphere. She studied in İsmail Baha Sürarslan Conservatory of Antalya Metropolitan Municipality, and graduated from Department of Turkish Folk Music
She did 4 years Folk song program for Aydın TV station. She received theater education in Müjdat Gezen Art Center and continued her works uninterruptedly in other areas of arts.
 
Transferring women's issues to the stage, she was intended to take woman into social life. For this purpose, she founded the theater ensemble, ”Çeşnibahar Kadınlar Tiyatro Topluluğu” and she was art director of this ensemble for years. She’s first run is a Çeşnibahar musical "Çeşnibahar Müzikali”
She’s theater play "Koca Yasa", which was written and directed by her, describing woman’s problem, has been exhibited at home and abroad.
Other many theater plays like "Gıvır" ve Pembe Gözlük Mor Ayna" were also written and directed by her, in their content to observe an approach of not remaining silent on social issues.
She is also director of the oratorio named " Şeyh Bedrettin'den Bu Yana Can Yana", written by Cemal Canpolat, which aims to make heard the screams of peace of mothers.
She is also participating in social, cultural and art projects under umbrella of Antalya Muratpaşa municipality.
Hilal Nesin has also published many books like "Koca Yasa" "Şeyimin Derdi" "Gevşek Vidalar" "Kızınca Kıyamet" "Bir atımlık Sen" "Diren Muhtar"
 
She is continuing her own writing adventure with the books "Ademin Bademleri" "Hep Sonradan”, to be published in 2016
Marrying Ahmet Nesin, Hilal Nesin becomes daughter-in-law of Aziz Nesin
 

Editors choice:CİHAN KAR 
He was born in Antakya, in 1977. He finished high school in Antakya. In 1999, he received BA degree from University of Marmara Physics Education Teaching. In 2000, He fulfilled his military duty. Between 2000 and 2003 he taught physics as a teacher. Since 2003, he has been working in a private company as an engagement director. He is married and has two children.
Between the years 1995-1999, he successfully received a photography certificate from Marmara University Health, Social and Culture Department (New name: MÜSEM – Marmara University Continuous Education Center). He continued his photography education through private courses which are black-white photography classes taken from fashion and commercial photographer Şenel ALDI and Prof. Dr. Özer KANBUROGLU. He attended dark room workshops. His successful shots, which have mostly micro approach, testify the development of his hometown Antakya, published in local and national papers and magazines. He has so many successful works in photography.
He is also interested in high-speed and infrared photography. In his portfolio his pictures describe mostly facial expressions, holding human and human emotions in the foreground.
In 2001 he took place among the constituents of Antakya Photography Community (AFOT). He held personal also institutional exhibitions participating in AFOT exhibitions. In 2012 he founded Hatay Photographers and Filming Amateurs Institution (HAFSIAD) and became the executive board chairman. In 2014 he started to teach photography and to work on commercial photography in his private studio Fotofilm Hatay (www.fotofilmhatay.com). Cihan KAR is currently teacher in MEB (Ministry of National Education) Defne Halk Eğitim Merkezi (Public Training Center) and in some other educational institutions.


​

Editors Choice:Robin VAROL
(April 12, 1975) Bingöl. He completed primary and secondary education in Istanbul. He received art training in Moscow between 1996-2000. He was involved in Folk Dances, Music, Theater, and Painting. He taught Folk Dances after he received his teaching certificate from Turkish Folklore Institution. He was engaged in other forms of art in this period when he interrupted his focus on painting.
He opened his first solo painting exhibition at the age of 16 in Söğütlüçeşme High School in 1991. He resumed working on painting in later years. He opened his second solo exhibition in Halkalı Culture Art Center in February 2015 where he presented realistic dry paint portraits. His main style being realistic, Painter Robin Varol now reflects this style in his oil paintings. He defines his works as Emotional Realism.
In my works, I believe that painting has an emotion. I also want this emotion to appear in a realistic form. A painting should bear not only drawing but also emotion. This is how I see emotional realism.
​
 

Editors note:PEDAGOGICAL MUSIC
 
Optimistic Man
as a child he never plucked the wings off flies
he didn't tie tin cans to cats' tails
or lock beetles in matchboxes
or stomp anthills
he grew up
and all those things were done to him
I was at his bedside when he died
he said read me a poem
about the sun and the sea
about nuclear reactors and satellites
about the greatness of humanity
Nazim Hikmet                                                                           
 
When you want to live your life, you should hit every note. Fazıl say is one the great musicians  from Turkey who hit every note of his life.  He done so many things. I want to start with Nazim Hikmet’s poetry . " Fazıl Say Taking his inspiration from the poetry (and the biographies) of the writers Nâzım Hikmet and Metin Altıok, he composed works for soloists, chorus and orchestra which, especially in the case of the oratorio Nâzim, clearly take up the tradition of composers such as Carl Orff."*
When I was looking his face book page I read that he made a new album for children. In that album there are other great musicians such as, Ahmed Adnan Saygun, İlhan Baran, Muhiddin Dürrüoğlu. I was very excited to see his album because I believe in to make investments to our children. Because they our future.
Adding beauty and stories to children's fairytale world filled with music, his album becomes a phenomenon for children. Influences of our poets could vaccines to the children poetic sensitivity and literary consciousness. It is thinkable, that his inspiration resources giving him a political profile, but in fact it is about maintaining a legacy to developing an influential approach toward music education for children.
Say is about to formulate a concept that could be called ‘pedagogical music’, which was based on the unity of the arts symbolized by the reputed musicians, and involved tone, dance, poetry, image, design, and theatrical gesture…
*http://fazilsay.com


​

Editors choice:Ahmet Buke
Ahmet Büke was born in Gördes, Manisa in 1970. He graduated in 1997 from Izmir Dokuz Eylül University, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Department of Economics. Because it is a different educational domain compared to his beloved activity, he would say, “Only when I wrote, I get a feeling that I’m useful.” His short story “Kayıp Dua Kitabı” was awarded first place in the 2002 Xasiork Short Story Competition, held by “Ölümsüz Öyküler” publishing house, which has published mostly imaginary items. His short stories have been published in Literary journals such as E Edebiyat, Adam Öykü, Ünlem, Patika, İmge Öyküler, Eşik Cini, Notos and Özgür, and his numerous other articles have been published in magazines such as Yeni Aktüel, Virgül, Yelkovan and in the national newspaper Radikal. He has written for internet journals such as Derkenar, Sosyal Ayrıntılar Ansiklopedisi, Önce Ekmek, Gazetem.net, and continues to write in the zine Velâkin and in the blog Sessizkule. In September, 2004, his first book of short stories “İzmir Postasının Adamları” was published by Kanat Books. His two other books “Çiğdem Külahı” (A Cone of Sunflower Seeds) and “Alnı Mavide” (Brows in the Blue) were published by the same publisher in 2006 and 2008 respectively. The author was awarded the Oğuz Atay Short Story Prize in 2008 for his book “Alnı Mavide”, 2011 Sait Faik novel prize for his book, “Kumrunun Gördüğü”.  He is continuously writing as well as online. He is a writer of a web site called on8 and his page called “Sosyal Ayrıntılar Ansiklopedisi”, his selection of stories called Stories of Bedo of Izmir, turned into a novel called “Mevzumuz Derin”(2013, on8) and it has been given the prime novel of the year by association of youth and children . He also was rewarded by Dunya Kitap, the copy right book of the year for “İnsan Kendine De İyi Gelir”. (2015) Same year he published a book called “100 Tuhaf Kitap”, owing to his content, he was able to compile and promote old books with his own unique, unconventional style. His last book “Gizli Sevenler Cemiyeti (2016,on8) also is a selection from “Sosyal Ayrıntılar Ansiklopedisi” Buke is still writing on his blog and lives with his family in Izmir.

TIME DECAY 
 
Day by Day - © Nurdan Hatipoğlu
Translated from the Turkish by Kerim Biçer and İdil Aydoğan. 
Bump… I opened my eyes. My ears filled with the sound of a murmuring engine. Followed by shadows, and then light. Then again short and subtle shadows. I felt the breeze. Inhaled the smell of filthy leather. I wanted to reach out to the darkness covering my eyes. I couldn’t lift my arms. I felt them under my body. Pain ran down my shoulders. I couldn’t force them any further. I held my breath. And then let go. I tried to twitch my fingers. My right arm felt more comfortable. I touched my right wrist. Cold iron. Someone grabbed me by the shirt and pulled me up. The light was brighter now.
“You thirsty?”
I nodded.
“We’re almost there. You’re gonna have to wait.”
It felt as if my arms had been chopped off. Thousands of needles piercing my flesh. I wanted to rub my face against my arm.
“No. We can’t take your blindfold off.”
They must have opened the window. The cool pine air flowed in. I could hear cicadas droning. So it was almost evening?
“Where are we going?”
I could hear noises coming from up front.
“How much longer?”
I think it was the driver who answered.
“About a quarter of an hour.”
“We’re making good time.”
“Where are you taking me?”
The one sitting next to me placed his hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t worry. Ain’t no place you don’t know. We’re going back to your childhood.” 
I felt a slight sting in the back of my neck. I shuddered. Hundreds of tulle curtains descended upon me. My face slowly cooled off. A winged horse came and wrapped me up in its mane. The noise and the breeze gently swept over us. I sank into moist mud. *** Mina, I’m your brother, you know that, right?
You were a real brat. You’d always have dirt and mud stuck in your long blond hair. Boys would claw your face. But you’d never back down. You’d risk getting beaten up just to hang on to that little corner where you and your friends had drawn a hopscotch court with pieces of broken bricks, to keep from surrendering it to them and their football matches.
You’d cut your dolls’ tummies open with the silver scissors you’d snitch from our grandmother’s wedding chest. You’d stuff chickpeas inside them after pulling out all the cotton, and then you’d struggle to sew them back up. 
“They’re going to have babies. Chickpea children with no arms or legs,” you’d say. Do you remember, our grandmother, that Caucasian woman, was terrified of you. 
“Watch out for this girl,” she’d moan. “She’s going to bring this family nothing but trouble.”
You never went out to sickle tobacco. You never liked the soil. No matter how badly mother beat you. She dragged you by the hair out by the little pond in our backyard.
“No way I’m sending you to school! Forget the tobacco leaves, it’s your skin I’m gonna hang out to dry!”
Father would shout out from the only window in our jerry-built house.
“Oi, that’s enough!” Mina, I’m your big brother.
We went to İzmir together. To study. They put us in that aileevi1 in Karataş. Quite a spacious room. Two small spring mattress beds. A table. Stools.
You remember?
You remember that young fireman in the room next door who was studying for his exams? I used to go to his place and drink wine.
“Brother, you should concentrate on your studies. He’s nothing but a pig. Don’t go taking after that bastard,” you’d say.
Mina, that scoundrel gave me money. Found me a job. I quenched my thirst for women, thanks to him. What? My job?
Is there such a thing as an easy job in this world? And what if I had finished high school? What if I’d had to go back, back to the tobacco fields? Breaking leaves all night until dawn. Flies attracted by the light of the fluorescent lamp all going in your mouth. Stringing tobacco leaves under the arbour all night until you can barely sit upright. Fried courgettes for dinner, and warm water to drink.
Do you remember what grandmother used to say? “Go rinse your mouth. Courgettes is a dish fit for prophets.”
Mina, why on earth did you get involved in all this?
It’s all my fault. I neglected you. On that day when we went to bury mother, father entrusted you to me.
“Listen son! Your mother and your sister are both bad seed. Your mother drank tobacco pesticide. She died foaming at the mouth. Watch out for Mina. Trouble breeds trouble.”
What did I do? I went and took you to the dormitory myself. Just to get you away from that one bedroom home. So you’d stay away from me. I now carried cold iron in my belt. In my heart, a twelve bullet courage had settled. What? My job?
There’s no such thing as an easy job in this world, is there?
That night towards dawn, my hands were trembling as I took whiffs from the fat roll. Is there a job in this world which is not stained with blood? With me living in the guise of a man, walking up and down, let’s say, Konak Square, or rambling around Kemeraltı dirt-poor, and those tarts reluctantly spreading their legs as they lie in beds reeking of piss, dare anyone speak of conscience?
Who took notice of me?
Not even you took me for a man. That afternoon, following the radio announcement, we cut off the road. I ran up the street where the crowd had parted. You were leaning against a utility pole in the corner, trembling. Pulling at your hair I dragged you into a row of houses. I could have taken you away with me then. But you just stood there looking at me. And then you pushed me away. You walked all over me like I was a wad of tawny phlegm on the ground.
Mina, why?
Look, they brought you all the way up here. To the final destination of those who don’t speak. Here, the tick-tock stops. We end it. We take away the vigour of life and in its stead, we leave the coldness of disappearance. No, we won’t torment you any further. We possess the mortals on whom pain can no longer be inflicted.
We only ask the final question.
“Would you like us to erase all the faces you’ve ever seen, all the breezes you’ve ever felt, and all your moments of joy and sorrow?”
Mina, if you don’t speak now, you’ll be the end of me. They’ll have me pull the trigger.
But Mina, is there truly any job that’s good?
Is this world not made of decaying meat and shattered bones? *** They’re burying me where I thought they would. I know so. Above us will be cypress leaves. Towards evening, herds of goats will pass by the lower wall of the cemetery. A boy shall whistle them along, taking hesitant steps. The worst thing is they’ll lay me beside my mother.
And they’ll say, “She killed her mother slowly with grief.”
My brother takes the shovel now.
The worst thing is, my breasts will decay and fall to my mother’s side.
My brother shall live on like a blood drenched country. . 1. Aileevi: Also known as ‘kortejo’ (courtyard), are homes built by Sephardi Jews who settled in İzmir some 500 years ago. Jewish families lived a communal life in these buildings, where they shared common kitchens, bathrooms and living areas. Their only private space was their bedrooms. In time, as the Sephardi Jews began to move out, the buildings were occupied by other minorities. These were poor families of various different ethnic backgrounds who had newly immigrated to the city. Originally published in Turkish as: Zaman Çürüğü
As part of the collection: Alnı Mavide.
by Ahmet Büke. 
Published by Kanat.



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​Editors choice:Firuz Kutal
Born in Turkey, moved to Norway in 1985, got in Oslo State Art School MA degree as Graphic designer and illustrator. Freelancer since 1992. He made comics, book covers, 2d and 3d animations, political cartoons, banners, etc. He has some honarary mentions around the world and got first prize in Venice, Italia 2011 with his one minute animation about Peace and In December 2009 he won one of United Nation's RANAN LURIE POLITICAL CARTOON AWARD for ''Citation for Excellence.'' He is a regular cartoonist for a weekly news/periodical Ny Tid in Norway and produces daily cartoons for ortakhaber.com LAcibert Litature Magazine, etc in Turkey. Member of FECO-Norway and he is one of international Cartoonist for Peace group where Le Monde cartoonist Plantu is leader. Current residence in Norway. 

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​Editors choice:Volkan Hacioglu
Volkan Hacioglu was born in Istanbul, Turkey on 26 September 1977. He earned B.A. in 2000, and then M.A. in 2003 both at Istanbul University, Faculty of Economics. In 2006 he matriculated in the Ph.D. program in economics at State University of New York at Albany, College of Arts and Sciences. He received his Ph.D. in 2010. He lectured courses of Æsthetics at Nazim Hikmet Academy. Since 1997 his poems and poetry translations appeared in various journals and magazines. Hes has three books of poetry published. He is the-editor-in-chief of the international multilingual magazine Rosetta World Literatura.

Shelley's Heart 
Cor cordium

A great lighthouse still
On the horizon blazes
And dark storm will
Ruin the rough seas

My vision is of but thee
In the mirror drown’d thy soul
Of thee in lieu let I die
And be a ghost or a ghoul

Not the Gods can divide us
Thy dubber doppelgänger
Show of a pair of shadows
The Soul twin hereafter

Talk to me please
Shelley’s heart over
Set into fire at unease
Like a salamander

Tell me the truth Alastor
Of ‘The Spirit of Solitude’
All in all but love for
Kindle into a new prelude

The Hermit of Marlow
Then be dumb forever
Modern Prometheus
Frankenstein’s lover

“Nondum amabam
Et amare amabam
Quaerebam quid amarem
Amans amare”

The magical chiper of poetry
In thy heart breaking
“Night” is eyes’ alchemy
And the darkness everlasting

O what a grand core
To catch fire from sky
Let stars ignite more
Lest thy torch die! 

​Editors choice: Yusuf Eradam
Between 1988-89 with a British Council scholarship, he studied in Moray House College of Education, in Edinburgh, Scotland received his second MA in TESOL (teacher training in the Teaching of English to the Students of Other Languages) with his dissertation Literature in Language Teaching. 
He worked as an instructor of English at Hacettepe University (1977-85), at UNLV (University of Nevada Las Vegas,1994) and SVSU (Saginaw Valley State University of Michigan, 1999) to teach comparative literature and film and at the Department of American Culture & Literature of Ankara University, where he taught American literature for 20 years (1985-2004) and retired as the Chair. 
He is also known for his translations of two Paul Auster novels, Herman Melville’s masterpiece Bartleby, the Scrivener, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel poems and Gabards’ Psychiatry and the Cinema. He has edited and contributed to many international and Turkish anthologies. 
He has held five photography exhibitions, first in Michigan, USA. At present he lives and writes in Cihangir, Istanbul and he is teaching   literature, cinema, narratology as the Chair of the Department of English Language and Literature of Istanbul Kültür University.
Eradam, has received a scholarship from the Writers Union of Sweden in 2008 and represented Turkey in the first Waltic Congress with 600 other writers and translators from around the world. He made a speech titled “Labour, Vanity and Envy: Writer Translating, Translator Writing”.
In 2011, he won the best translation award presented by the Ankara Art Foundation for his translation of The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh, which is still on stage in Ankara. In 2012 he won an award for a story of his about human rights and architecture.
Eradam, with many awards in other creative activities of his, is the author of 13 books of his own, and 7 translations; and is working on a new book of stories, his autobiographical novel, a multi-authored book he will edit on real life stories of fraternity and goodness, a collection of essays on culture of obedience and his third book of poetry. 

SIBILANT LOVE
​Storks are migrating back
summer is at hand.
The deluge of longing for you
remains 'cause you stamped it
with your red-hot lips.
Written & translated & photo by Yusuf Eradam

​Editors choice:Filiz Asrak Ankaç

​Born 1963-İstanbul. She graduated from Mimar Sinan University Fine Arts Faculty, Painting Department Neşet Günal/Neşe Erdok Atelier (1987). She took her masters degree from the Plastic Arts Department of the Fine Arts and Design Faculty of Near East University (2012).

Individual Exhibitions
1989–Nicosia,FluxusArtGallery.
1994–Nicosia,HPGallery.
2012 – Famagusta, Eastern Mediterranean University, Art and Design Centre Exhibition Hall.
2014- Girne, Artrooms Galery
for mor info:http://www.filizankac.com/tr
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​​About Editor: Umit Sener Ta 

Sener Ta,was born in Netherlands.Grew up in Turkey and lives in USA,CA.He has one book, "Bocekciler Carsisi". He has so many translations and poems published in  several magazines in Turkey.

Editors choice:Kadir Okurer

05.05.1990 Born in Ankara. Started his ballet education in Hacettepe University Ankara State Conservatory in department of ballet in 2002. When he was continuing his education, he entered Ankara State Opera and Ballet as a soloist dancer. In 2010, when he was undergraduate student, he directly passed from 2nd class to 4thclass, due to his extraordinary success. He has worked with Irek Mukhamedov for a year in 2013.He is still working in Ankara State Opera and Ballet as a soloist dancer. In 2008, he took place in Opéra National de Bordeux as a soloist dancer for a season. He participated in many international ballet and dance competitions since 2006. In 2006, he won the 3rd prize in “International Varna Ballet Competition.” In 2008, he won the Grand Prix in “Istanbul International Ballet Competition.” In 2009, he won the 2nd prize in “Youth America Grand Prix” and he won the 2nd prize in “Premio Rome Ballet Competition”. In 2010, he won the Andante Magazine classical music awards " Male dancer of the year ". In 2010, he won 3rd prize in “Seoul International Dance Competition”. In 2014, he won 2nd prize in “Grand Prix of Siberia”. In addition he performed in various gala programs and dance festivals: Macedonia Gala (2008), Istanbul Golden Bridge Igor Zelensky & Farukh Ruzimatov Gala Program (2010), Hagen Ballet Gala (2011) ,Bodrum International Ballet Stars Festival (2008) Kyrgyz Bishkek Gala Program (2015) , Istanbul International Ballet Competition Gala (2010 - 2012).

Editors choice:Murat Altunoz
Murat Altunoz was born in Antakya in 1977. He has worked as a journalist in Istanbul,Ankara, Antakya and Middle East for many years. He has worked at local, national, international press agencies, newspapers and internet journalism department as editor, reporter, photojournalist for 20 years and has put signature to many news. He was in civil and military prisons for 6 years at certain periods because of his articles, news and politic thoughts. He has been tortured and has been treated for many years because of this torture. He had published the literature journals named Karalama, Amanos Yazilari and Dar Sokak with his friends in Turkey and his poems has been published in many literature journals regularly. Also he has a poem book named "Kirilgan Zamanlar" and this book has been translated to Arabic. Altunoz who has gained awards at his sector and is still working with some newspapers and news agencies has settled into Sweden 2 years ago by leaving his own country because of the cases about his news, articles and ethnic identity, death threats and being under pressure. Journalist Murat Altunoz has two books named "Uzak" and "Kayip Mektuplar" which are ready to be published.

Editors Choice:C. Hakkı Zariç
C. Hakkı Zariç was born in the Susuz district of Kars, Turkey, on the 5th of January 1972. He spent ten years in prison for his political views. He published the literary magazine ‘Ağır Ol Bay Düzyazı’ together with his friends. His essays and poems have been published in various literary magazines such as ‘Evrensel Kültür’, ‘İzlek’, ‘Öteki-siz’, ‘Rüzgâr’, ‘Bireylikler’, ‘Eliz Edebiyat’, ‘Erkekçe’. Currently he is the editor of ‘Evrensel Kültür’ and ‘Evrensel Basım Yayın’.
Books:
‘Ağzımızın Yanmışlığıyla’ [Once Bitten...] ‘Gerçek Sanat Yayınları’, May 1999.  ‘Keşke Hiç...’, [Only If…] ‘Hera Şiir Kitaplığı’ May 2001. ‘Şairlere Mektuplar',[Letters to the Poets] ‘Bizbize Yayınları’, October 2006. ‘Senli’ [With You],  ‘Bizbize Yayınları’, October 2006. ‘Sıfır’ [Zero], ‘Yasakmeyve Yayınları’, December 2014. ‘Utanç ve Onur, 1915-2015 Ermeni Soykırımı'nın 100. Yılı’ [Disgrace and Pride, 1915-2015, The 100th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide] (co-author with Aydın Çubukçu, Nevzat Onaran and Onur Öztürk ), ‘Evrensel Basım Yayın’, April 2015 Toz Kadınları, Notabene Yayınları, October 2015  
Awards:
- ‘Mısralık’ 2000 Youth Poetry Prize for his poem ‘Keşke Hiç... [Only If...]’
-  2008 ‘Behzat Ay’ Literature Prize for his short stories ‘Sedef Hanım’ [Miss Sedef], ‘Yaprak Hanım’ [Miss Yaprak] and ‘Nehir Hanım’ [Miss Nehir]
 
He, a member of the Writers Union of Turkey, served in the executive board during the 17th and the 18th terms.
He is a member of PEN (International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists)

Lastly, there were chrysanthemums on your face
And questions which reflected its meaning: your eyes
 
​IF ONLY...
 I was dry cold, less than whole... Without food
Within me, poems rushed for their turn
If only you hadn’t untimely knocked on my door
If only you hadn’t nailed down my days with your dark smile
If only you had never come
 
Night was mixing into the pitch
To go was an abyss, to return, the cry of not seeking
To give you up, regret
It was the dice throwing with the blind god of those who can’t see tomorrow
If only you had never come
 
Pale-faced poem sketches in fair winds
There were lovers unable to bleed during infertile times
I was passing through the autumn side of illusions
Deceitful were the dark touches, scenting murder
If only you had never come
 
Raindrops like splinters
That stabbed rug-patterned wounds on my skin
The rose which thrust its thorn into its pink scent
The ash which fell to my share of strange words
The sky which burst into laughter with its copper thunderbolts
They were the only things we shared
If only you had never come
 
Just a ragged word was fidelity, on sale
Flawless and shadow less grey was the taste of your absence
To forget was the most innocent shelter of our age
To be forgotten evoked suicide and nothingness
If only you had never come
 
Still, if only you hadn’t come once again
With my inner bleeding slightly smiling face
If only you hadn’t kept me waiting for the morning like sparrows
I was dry cold, without food… Less than whole...
If only you had never come
 
If only you hadn’t set your earth-tasting blue eyes on the galley-slave in my eyes
 
 If only you had never...!
 
Şiir: C. Hakkı Zariç
Türkçe aslından çeviri: Oya/ Gürgenç Korkmazel



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​Editors choice:Neşe Yaşın
Neşe Yaşın  was born in 1959 in Cyprus. She is well known and read on both sides of divided Cyprus. She studied Sociology at Middle East Technical University in Ankara.
She directed and presented a literary program called “41st Room” at CYBC  radio (1992-2007) and the program Peace Garden (2001-2003) at radio ASTRA.
She is currently teaching  language and literature at the Turkish Studies department of University of Cyprus, writing weekly columns for  Yenidüzen newspaper (Cyprus).
 She has published six volumes of poetry ‘Hyacinth and Narcissus’ (1979), ‚Tears of Wars’  (1980), Doors’ (1992),  ‚The Moon is Made of Love’ (2000),  ‘Chambers of Memory’ (2005 ) Selected poems (2008) one novel ‚Secret History of Sad Girls’ (2002) and a research book, Remembering through Poetry (2013). Her poetry has been translated to more than 40 languages, published in literary magazines and anthologies in several countries. She has participated in poetry festivals and readings around the world. Among others she has received the Anthias Pierides Award in 1998.
 


THE LIGHT RISING INSIDE ME
 
 
Who knows perhaps
while you shot from the barricades
that killed our house
I used to mellow into childish sadness
deaths passing through my deep sighs
 
I knew back then
one day you would steal my soul
 
While I ran off to the spaces between stairs
crying over family murders
it whispered dreams of the future
the light rising inside me
 
Three angels appeared
one brought a red poppy
the second a gentle kiss from you
the third was empty handed
embarrassed looked me in the face
 
And then the ghosts of martyrs
chased me in their blood soaked clothes
my history teacher
read out lies at the gates of Heaven
 
I waited for such a long long time for you
in desolate Babylon towers
 
Take off your soldier’s clothes
and come close to me
give me three babies from the souls of the dead
One to make me forget all pain
the other to console the earth
the third to wander the city in the night
and hold crying mothers by the hand
translated by: Mehmet Ali Aydin 

PENELOPE
 
The footprints of the visible
are traced in the gaze of others
from the gates of grief
to the eyes of time
 
In memory’s secret room
forbidden hours kiss the clouds
the early autumn of tiny pleasures
 
How tattered now
the words moaning in the well of the soul
 
However tight your embrace
so much it pinches the flesh
however far you burn
so much is the ash
however warm the room of love
so much the cold outside
 
There is no Ithaca
 don’t come back
 
The woman in waiting
vanished long ago
in the silence of other women
Translated by:Clifford Endres

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​
​Coeditor :Josef Kılçıksız
Kılçıksız Josef was born in Antioch, as the eldest male child of Greek-Orthodox family. Breathing liberal air of the city's cosmopolitan atmosphere Kılçıksız, found himself in high school and college years in the domain of the left tradition. Due religious, political and social pressures, thereof he and his family suffered, failed to complete his higher education in Turkey, except Philosophy at Hacettepe His higher education adventure has continued abroad of Turkey: Theology at Pontificia university of Rome Study in Human sciences, philosophy and German philology, at the Tampere (Finland) University. Currently he has been working as a doctoral student and deputy assistant at the same university. His doctoral study is based on a comprehensive social analysis of W. Koeppen’s trilogy. The focus of this work is mythical phenomena, broken out in post-war German society. After having completed a period of study in Paris, he leaved France for Finland, where he is living and working for years. Numerous articles with a cultural and social contents, which criticize political and social developments in Turkey, have been published in various Finnish newspapers. A study of poetry was published also in Finland under the name ’Hedelmät, jotka eivät tuoksu ruudille” (acrid smell of gunpowder in fruits of the languages) There is also a poetry book published in Turkey under the name ‘Bahar Kapımda’ (spring at my door) His language skills is wide, extending from Turkish and Arabic to İtalian, French, German, Finnish and English

Embers and ashes
 
I’ll bring you the words of silence, replete with lead;
hot in the mouth of a Beretta…
I want to begin a noisy suicide in this deafening silence.
Pulling the trigger,
maybe you make me owner a single word,
if some crumbs of sake remain…
September's languages are disentangling,
talking inside of me,
 in no time compile dispersed melodies of fall ,
maybe one day you gathered me spring’s songs from them…
Look,
stretching his arc,
hand in the string,
the seasons are waiting,
give me a sign,
I broke thrown arrow of the time,
which targeted our dreams…
 
With her lemon-yellow hair always,
there are infinite silence of September,
latent in you,
leaves her colors in to silver oyster;
to hide them in the blue bottom,
remains again
task of the sea of sadness…
 
The night is a owl deprived of his hunt,
snatched up of you the turtledove,
taken refuge under your wings…
and again
remains duty of wings of darkness,
to move away the secret…
 
Havens split us into two,
as extinguished and slipped stars,
we're suddenly shadowless in the vast atlas of the night…
A awesome fire broke out,
across all ports of darkness skies;
one of us remains in the side of ashes,
other in the side of embers of separation’s fire…
the wind couldn’t hurl ashes away,
which we couldn’t send them off
of our hearts…
 
Josef Kılçıksız 
Helsinki, 24.3.2016

JOSEF KILCIKSIZ

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Editors Choice: Mustafa Ziyalan

Mustafa Ziyalan was born at the Black Sea coast of Turkey. He worked as a general practitioner and coroner in a rural Anatolian village. Now he lives and practices psychiatry in New York. He had psychoanalytical psychotherapy training. He did research on schizophrenia. He has worked with torture victims, prison inmates, children abusing volatile substances, pathological gamblers, and persons with HIV illness and cognitive disabilities.
 
His poetry, short fiction, essays and poetry translations have appeared in many literary journals, anthologies (including “New European Poets”) and in book form. Istanbul Noir, an anthology of short fiction he co-edited with Amy Spangler, came out from Akashic Books in 2008. His most recent work of poetry is Rüyacılar Kitabı (Book of Dreamers) that came out in 2012. His most recent book of prose is “Çuvallama Ustası” (Master of Failing), a collection of short fiction, that came out in 2014.
 
His poetry was part of Letters to Distant Cities (New Amsterdam Records, 2011), a multi-media project featuring photography of Murat Eyüboğlu, spoken word and music by Shara Worden and Claire Manchon. “Alengirli Filmler” (Handsome Films), a collection of film writings, came out in 2012, “Manhattan'da Şiir Konuşmaları” (Poetry Talks in Manhattan), a collection of writings on poets and poetry, in 2009 and “Yakılacak Kentlerden” (From Cities Slated to Burn), a collection of travel writing with original photography by Murat Eyüboğlu, in 2007.



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poetry:Murat Ustubal

Editor's choice:Murat Ustubal
Book:Teknokriptler
Page numbers:47-48
publisher:Ve publishing








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​Editors choice: ​"Şiirden" magazine

Şiirden Publishing is founded in 2005. Its publishing policy mainly prioritizes works which focuses on theoretic issues concerning poetry. It has various trademarks such as, "Şiirden", "Şiirden Öykü" (Şiirden Short Story), "Digraf Şiir" (Digraf Poetry), Digraf Öykü" (Digraf Short Story), "Şiirden Cep" (Şiirden Pocket) and "series of thoughts". 
 Şiirden Publishing has published more than 180 books in four years and it also publishes bimonthly magazine titled “Şiirden Dergi”. Şiirden Publishing also giving a poetry award “Şiirden Şiir Ödülü” which aims to encourage young poets.
Web address: http://www.siirden.net/
Email address: siirdendergi@gmail.com
 
 

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