My tamarisk tree

My body and wine

My fruit and my seed

I give you my heart

My barley and wheat

I yield my bed

Succumb to your arms

I give you my throat

My Damascene gold

Where you lead

I will follow

I give you my water

I give you my earth.

Taklimakan

Do not tempt me

Beloved One

To the scented pleasure

Of your tent tonight.

I do not thirst

For the spill of apricot upon your tongue

The qawwali of your arms

In perfumed gardens of delight.

I seek instead your other paradise

The toxic sands and unforgiving dunes

Of your Taklimakan Shamo bed

That waterless and fatal place

Where those who enter

Never return.

Russell Streur is a born-again dissident residing in Johns Creek, Georgia.  His work has been published in Europe, certain islands and the United States.  He operates the world’s original on-line poetry bar, The Camel Saloon, catering to dromedaries, malcontents and jewels of the world at http://thecamelsaloon.blogspot.com/; and the curator of The Bactrian Room, a journal for bactrians, ghosts and travelers on the Long Silk Road with a story to tell at http://bactrianroom.blogspot.com/.  He cofounded Poets Democracy in 2010 with Christi Kochifos Caceres and is the author of The Muse of Many Names, The Petition to Free Zhu Yufu, and other works.

Come on the star

Come on the tide

With the sea in your breath

And the moon on your tongue

Come on the wind

With owls in your hair

Come tonight

Your face unveiled

Your robe untied

Into my arms

As once before you came to me

Into my heart

With Saracen flame.

Russell Streur is a born-again dissident residing in Johns Creek, Georgia.  His work has been published in Europe, certain islands and the United States.  He operates the world’s original on-line poetry bar, The Camel Saloon, catering to dromedaries, malcontents and jewels of the world at http://thecamelsaloon.blogspot.com/; and the curator of The Bactrian Room, a journal for bactrians, ghosts and travelers on the Long Silk Road with a story to tell at http://bactrianroom.blogspot.com/.  He cofounded Poets Democracy in 2010 with Christi Kochifos Caceres and is the author of The Muse of Many Names, The Petition to Free Zhu Yufu, and other works.

Create the perfect cup, then nick the glaze

somewhere, a tiny notch along the rim

or just above the base, where it will show

itself to practiced artisans, who look

more carefully than others, those who know

the processes involved in making slim

cup walls stay round when fired. Place the sprays

of hyacinths offcenter in bouquets,

leave one unsanded corner underneath

your finished tabletop. There must be more

always: nothing is done. Say you mistook

a carving mark for grain figure before

the vernissage began, and after each

slow flowing stroke the flaw revealed new

and subtle fascinations. Misconstrue

your own intentions: honor, charity,

but notice, always, others’ artifice:

the way she placed her pin obliquely, shook

enameled bangles, offsetting her wrist’s

slight curve with circles, and recall how she

angled her face each time she met your gaze.

- – -

Ghazal of the Saki

Your lips, red crystal rose, say I should drink,

the wine, uniting us, all I could drink.

From water lilies, silk robes wet, you rise,

holding the cup from which my soul would drink.

Incense around your arms intoxicates,

its smoke almost a liquid rosewood drink.

We might be one commingled reverence

if I from your divine womanhood drink.

Honey or wine within your cup transformed,

our interwoven hands conjure good drink.

William, the jeweled cup illuminates!

Renounce those times you, fearful, withstood drink!

- – -

Ghazal of the Seven Valleys

We heard songs of a captive nightingale

and quested for a native nightingale.

Patient, we walked the valley. From its dust

we heard the distant furtive nightingale.

Drawn into candles, lured toward smoke

we fled to a seductive nightingale.

We scaled walls, and found an unlit lamp

and learned from a perceptive nightingale.

The mirrored sun through crystal colors rose

in songs of an attentive nightingale.

We drank delight and rapture in red wine

and listened to a restive nightingale.

Blinded and silenced by a whirlwind

we dreamt of a creative nightingale.

We left our lamps behind, and lost our robes

while hearing a disruptive nightingale.

Abandon all, William, renounce your gift

and sing hymns to the votive nightingale.

- – -

W.F. Lantry, a native of San Diego, received his Maîtrise from L’Université de Nice and holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. His poetry collections are The Structure of Desire (Little Red Tree 2012) and a chapbook, The Language of Birds (Finishing Line Pres 2011). Recent honors include the National Hackney Literary Award in Poetry, CutBank Patricia Goedicke Prize, Lindberg Foundation International Poetry for Peace Prize (in Israel), and in 2012 the Old Red Kimono and Potomac Review Poetry Prizes. His work has appeared in Asian Cha, Descant and Aesthetica. He currently works in Washington, DC, and is a contributing editor of Umbrella: A Journal of Poetry & Kindred Prose. His website is: http://wflantry.com.

I’m used to open spaces: desert plains

where each uncertain step leads to a new

pathway across the emptiness, a dry

red sandstone dust rising along the way

until untaken trails multiply

behind me, forking backwards out of view,

unmarked, untraceable, forever lost.

But here, among these woods, the streambed’s crossed

in just one place: a fallen sycamore

becomes the only bridge. Someone has tied

a rope across the branches’ disarray,

crafting an easy path to the north side-

almost an invitation to explore

the shadowed unfamiliar wilderness.

Still, crossing in this spot, I acquiesce

to crossing back in this same place. The stream

is far too deep to ford and sometimes flows

more swiftly in the afternoon, its spray

crafting a prism green branches enclose,

restricting other paths until I seem

constrained to choose the one path that remains.

- – -

Lamed-Vav Qasida

“Goddess, I have no arguments for you:

outside more trees are cut, bulldozers turn

topsoil under, carving roads to stores

where people crave cold fruit of factories:

the automatic rifles meant for wars

are found in houses where old hatreds burn

like stacked cordwood, consuming every soul.

And as without, within: the sacred scroll

you ordered me to fill with songs remains

still mostly blank, as empty as my heart,

although you grant renewed discoveries

each second step- visions to ripen art-

my languid spirit, half-bewildered, strains

to write even the smallest lyric down.

And yet, consider this: her evening gown

falls to the floor when she unties the strings,

and as she moves beside me, her caress

refigures mine, meant simply to please

both her and you. If you, in wisdom, bless

these motions and the jouissance she sings,

then spare the earth from which those motions grew.”

- – -

W.F. Lantry, a native of San Diego, received his Maîtrise from L’Université de Nice and holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. His poetry collections are The Structure of Desire (Little Red Tree 2012) and a chapbook, The Language of Birds (Finishing Line Pres 2011). Recent honors include the National Hackney Literary Award in Poetry, CutBank Patricia Goedicke Prize, Lindberg Foundation International Poetry for Peace Prize (in Israel), and in 2012 the Old Red Kimono and Potomac Review Poetry Prizes. His work has appeared in Asian Cha, Descant and Aesthetica. He currently works in Washington, DC, and is a contributing editor of Umbrella: A Journal of Poetry & Kindred Prose. His website is: http://wflantry.com.

TARIK NAYMAN: In 2003 you penned your first novel Arabian Jazz, which went on to win the Oregon Book Award and was a finalist for the National PEN/Hemingway Award. How have you grown as a writer since Arabian Jazz?

DIANA ABU JABER: With my first novel, I was in my mid-twenties, writing in a state of uncertainty. I didn’t know if I even really knew how to build a novel; I was learning on the job. Everything was an act of discovery. The novel’s humorous tone, while organic to the story, was also an expression of that uncertainty. I’d never read any novels about Arabs or Arab-Americans before that point; the only things I’d read about the community were negative and political, not at all reflective of my own experiences. So I think humor grew out of the story as a natural way of trying to reach and speak to an uninitiated American audience.

Since then, my range has grown in style, tone, subject matter. I no longer feel anxious about ranging beyond personal experience. And the elements of writing and reading that engage me have changed over the years as well: I’m less fascinated by prose and style than I am by story and research. I suppose it’s only natural that a writer will want to paint on as broad a canvas as possible.

TARIK NAYMAN: In 2003 you penned Crescent and in 2005 your memoir The Language of Baklava, and your newest book Birds of Paradise came out last fall. Food plays an important role in each of these novels. Do you use food as a type of symbolism or metaphor in your works?

DIANA ABU JABER: I do think that food is such a fascinating metaphor: it has layers, it has intense personal and political significance, it reveals inner lives on many levels, it helps build and develop families and communities. I’d never intended to have such a strong food element in my writing, but it seems to pop up quite a bit. In Crescent, the Lebanese restaurant was a way of talking about the recreation of home—the way that restaurants can give immigrants a new gathering place. For The Language of Baklava, I found that I wanted to extend the theme from Crescent, to see how it had played out in my own family.

Birds of Paradise is a slightly different animal than those earlier books—in my most recent novel, there’s a wider, more dispassionate exploration of food—specifically sugar—as a metaphor for the schisms in relationships, between the mind and body, between people and the environment. The mother in that novel is a pastry chef while her son owns an organic grocery store and they wage their private battles through their different beliefs and approaches to food. It was a lot of fun to play with that.

TARIK NAYMAN: Birds of Paradise chronicles the life of teenage runaway Felice. There are undeniable similarities between your leaving your Jordanian family and Felice’s search for independence. How much of Felice is Diana Abu-Jaber?

DIANA ABU JABER: In many ways, Felice and I were your basic American kids, just trying to figure out how to cobble our way in the world. Felice, however, was raised almost without limits or boundaries,. Her parents were distracted by work and by their own agendas—they didn’t connect with their daughter on a pretty fundamental level.

My father, on the other hand, was very strict, very traditional. It made him nervous that his kids were growing up in America (never mind the fact that my mother is an American) and so he clamped down on us. In either case, the outcome is the same, Felice and I both left home at an early age—she ran away, I went to college—trying to get what we needed.

TARIK NAYMAN: Finally, KNOT MAGAZINE’s goal is to promote peace by celebrating and preserving Middle Eastern literature. How have your Jordanian roots hindered or helped you in your career? How do you identify with your culture living in America during a time of racial profiling?

DIANA ABU JABER: I don’t think my ancestry has had a clearly quantifiable impact on my writing career in either direction. When I first started writing, back in the late eighties and early nineties, it wasn’t so “cool” to be multicultural. Now you can find hummus in every supermarket, but there is still anti-Muslim rhetoric in our mainstream discourse. I’m primarily interested in telling the truest stories I’m capable of—the cultural and political backgrounds are almost beside the point.

photograph by Scott Eason

Diana Abu-Jaber is most recently the author of Birds of Paradise, an Indie Books Pick, as well as of the award winning memoir, The Language of Baklava, the best-selling novels Origin and Crescent, which was awarded the 2004 PEN Center USA Award for Literary Fiction and the American Book Award. Her first novel Arabian Jazz won the 1994 Oregon Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award.

A frequent contributor to NPR, she teaches at Portland State University and divides her time between Portland and Miami.

*from Diana Abu-Jaber’s official website:

Tarik Nayman is Managing Editor for KNOT MAGAZINE, a successful Editor and translator from Izmir, Türkiye. He has edited journals, newspaper, and online publications in Türkiye, Azerbaijan, and Georgia.

Nayman is currently under contract for his first book, Afiyet Olsun due in spring 2013.

TARIK NAYMAN: Let us begin by discussing your unique gift of blending poetry with your artwork, and also how you began to form and shape your poems into works of art?

LEILA A. FORTIER: That is an interesting question. For many years I handwrote my poems then progressed to typing and saving them in word doc. format. I think it was in 2006 that something happened spontaneously, and people started commenting in forums that my poems were beginning to take shape. This was nothing intentional at its inception. Yet upon recognizing it…it became the way that I moved within a poem. It became my signature so-to-speak. I would shift the lines as I felt them. It is a difficult thing to explain. I have seen a few poets who have applied visual formats to their work in form of concrete images, i.e., a heart, a tree, or a fish, perhaps. I seem to lack that kind of premeditation. The visual aesthetics of my work are as abstract as emotion itself. It is something I feel my way through, and the shapes tend to assume and reflect the tone emotion of the words themselves. Over the years, I have developed a system for polishing these forms. I have my own set of rules that I feel make the poem flow with a sense of visual and linguistic harmony. But the initial implementation is perhaps my way of sculpting what I feel on the page.

TARIK NAYMAN: You have traveled India and been involved in this exotic culture in your past. How has Indian culture shaped your work? Both artistically and in your writing?

LEILA A. FORTIER: Actually, that is an interesting question, because India came to me before I came to India. Unexplainably so; out of nowhere and for no reason, I found myself being drawn to Eastern influences, symbols, allegory, and ideologies. I began writing with this sense of devotional rapture. I have always been drawn to different cultures, but something was different about this.

In 2007 I was meditating when I experienced the most profound vision and message. There emerged all these intricate patterns and shapes that were spinning and opening themselves, much like a mandala and lotus patterns, though I knew not what a mandala was at that time, nor the cultural significance of the lotus. As the patterns transformed, they seemed to shed themselves until all that remained was a pair of hands, and as the hands opened there sat in the palm a tiny embryo curled with light surrounding it. I realized that the embryo was supposed to be me; a rebirth of sorts. Then came the climactic and resounding message: I was to go to India.

I think at that moment I thought I had gone mad. I really did not know anything about India, I had never thought to go before. I knew not what I would do there, nor did I have the financial resources at the time to do this. But I was filled with such a certainty and conviction of this revelation, that I began telling people I was going. At that point, I think everyone who knew me thought I had gone mad. But I was filled with an unexplainable light. It was approximately one month later, that I was offered a full sponsorship for my son (then 11 years old) and I to travel to India for three months and assist the women and children in the slum villages.

It was one of the most remarkable periods of my life. India is a great melting pot of deeply rooted faith. I worked, traveled, and communed with people of Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, and Jain decent. I spent time with their families, visited their temples, mosques, gurudwaras, and refugee camps. I opened my heart to hearing all their beliefs and participated in their rituals. Even the air was infused with devotion as much as chaos. I had been broken open into a thousand layers of understanding which undoubtedly affected my work.

Long story short, and back to the beginning of this question; India came to me before I came to India. Its voice, its essence of devotional agony and ecstasy rooted itself within me, and in a sense, was like an invocation- almost spell-like that summoned me to go. Eastern culture and the experience of India in all its diversity affected and sculpted the spiritual voice of my work, while it summoned my hands toward being of service to humanity.

NAYMAN: Speaking of culture, you currently live in Okinawa, Japan. How has Japan helped to inspire your personal being, your artwork, and your poetry?

FORTIER: What is curious about how Japan has inspired my work is quite a contrast from my experience with India. Japan is much more modern and westernized than India and the Middle East. I arrived to Japan with this strange notion (and confessed excitement) that the people would all be wearing kimonos, kneeling on tatami mats and sipping green tea from little cups in the company and delight of doll-like geishas. It was a humbling eye opener to realize that I had stereotyped what I thought I would experience. I think I was a bit disappointed that most of the symbols, rituals, and cultural contrast are reserved for living history museums and festivals.

FORTIER: I think that what makes travel so exotic and magical is our diversity. When everything becomes so modernized that everything looks like a slight variation of another America- I am concerned what our incentive will be to travel. On another note, I think it is also a reflection of how as a global society, we really are more alike than we are different, and this is also positive. I have to remember that it would be absurd for people from the East to travel to America and expect to see us donning pilgrim hats and buckle shoes, riding in horse drawn wagons. We all grow, evolve, and change…into one world, one nation.

But it should be emphasized that I absolutely love living on this little island. It is among the most stunning of all natural habitats I have ever seen. The ocean is like a jewel, the vegetation is saturated with color and vibrancy. The vistas are so rich that I feel as though I live on a post card. We are blessed. It is quiet here; peaceful beyond imagination. The people are kind, soft, and gentle. I can run along the skirts of the East China Sea, and sit on a beach without a person in sight…or a lone fisherman. Okinawa has influenced my art in writing in respects that it has gifted me the peace, solitude, and meditation…the quiet harmony to be able to concentrate my efforts into my creativity.

NAYMAN: You have been widely published in several literary journals and have had the opportunity to share your work in a variety of mediums. Please discuss your journey to publication and any obstacles that you faced on your path to success.

FORTIER: I am fortunate to have been featured in over one hundred publications globally, both in print and online. This has not been an easy ride. I am merely insatiably persistent. One of the greatest challenges in this process for me is that my work goes against the grain; against formality and structure. Most poetry published in today’s prestigious literary journals is formatted by standard flush to the left. I was once told by an editor that by not flushing my lines and stanzas to the left- I may appear amateur. I was so stung by this critique that I actually researched the etymology of the word, amateur which is as follows at its earliest inception:
Amateur: From French amateur, from Latin amātōrem (“lover”), from amāre (“to love”). A lover of something.
From that moment on, I was no longer hurt or stung by that perception, as I would not want to be known as anything less than a lover when it comes to my art and writing. I would be proud to be coined it again.

Besides, who determines that a poem flushed to the left is what gives it merit as if it is some scholarly seal of approval? My husband coins it best of me when he says “Leila, you are both ahead and behind your time.” He is correct.
Poetry being sculpted into visual design is not something I invented. In fact, it was being done in the Middle East thousands of years ago. My writing is often lost in a sense of devotional rapture, which in Hindu is known as Bhakti. This is also nothing new. I am influenced by the greats such as Rumi, Tagore, Kabir, Hafiz, Omar, Gibran, and Mirabai to name a few.

I am not so avant-garde as I am often perceived. But the tone of today’s writing does not often identify with spiritual rapture. The West in particular does not identify readily with this concept. Often (not always), Western culture and religion teaches discipline and formality…structure within devotion (much like how the West treats writing). A lot of times, when I submit my work to spiritual publications (because my work is spiritual), I will receive feedback that it is perceived to be too romantic or perhaps, inappropriately passionate? It is as if God is someone we read about rather than something we experience. Likewise, when I submit my work to publications that still value a sense of romance and passion in literature (few and far between) then I receive feedback that my work is to spiritual. So you see my dilemma.

Much of today’s writing is earth based; material, concrete, and absolute. My writing is more abstract, emotional, ethereal, and transcendent. These expressions stimulate me, for there is no limitation to where I can go.

Interpretation is both formless as it is endless. I do not condemn the current trends or expressions of our generation. Who am I to judge art and literature in any form? All these forms exist to speak to different people in different ways. It is one more extraordinary aspects of being human, is our diversity in all things.

NAYMAN: KNOT’S focus is promoting peace through the celebration and preservation of Middle Eastern literature. How do you view Middle Eastern culture in regards to artistic expression? How do you think artists and writers can be heard in a world of such biased views and promotion of media turmoil? Where does the artist fit in global political and social circles?

FORTIER: Middle Eastern culture has influenced and lent its gifts of art and literature throughout the ages. Such glorious and exotic expressions that are intoxicants at first glimpse, first read. What separates us from Eastern cultures, or any culture- in my opinion, is not the people, but politics. All religions when looked at closely, have very little separation between them. All teach love, unity, and tolerance. All teach compassion and charity.

While each religion has doctrines and holy texts that support the unity and love of people and nations, we can also find fallacy and violence in each. It is my belief- that all things associated with love are from God (in whichever form you believe and celebrate) and all things of separation, intolerance, hate, and violence come from humans and twisted political agendas. I believe that if God made us all with different color skin, hair, eyes, height, weight, talents, and abilities- and that if we were made to be in His image…that this is a magnificent display of his omnipresence, limitlessness and diversity. Why not, then would He also give us many different religions and practices of which we might find and commune with him in all these forms? It is really that simple.

My time in India reminded me of this. I was working with a group of women for weeks, when I discovered to my surprise that half the women were Hindu and the other half were Muslim. In the same group! Sitting together! The Muslim women were wearing the same clothes as the Hindu women, so I did not recognize the difference. I was astonished. I asked the translator to explain, as I was led to believe that the Hindus and Muslims hated each other. The women laughed at my naivety. They all loved each other deeply as one family. All of the division I had heard of was in the headlines, not the homes; political propaganda, not humanity.

I visited the famous Taj Mahal which was created by Muslims, and walked beside Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus who came to partake in the unfathomable art and creation of this monument.

I visited the Golden Temple of the Sikhs which is adorned by four doors facing the four directions. Each door is symbolic of each faith: Sikh, Christian, Muslim, Hindu- as a symbol of unity for all people of all faiths.

It is important in this day and age, especially with our access to the internet to understand and embrace our likenesses and respect our differences. Art and literature has the potential to be one of the greatest influence and bridge to uniting humanity in understanding.

One of the ways I have tried to give back and contribute to this growth, is to find other poets and artists of whom to collaborate with poetically in translation. I write a poem in my interpretation of the metaphorical flavor of a particular culture. Find a poet who can translate that poem into their native language, and then create a spoken word performance of the poem in both languages. I was blessed that my first experience in this experimentation was collaborating with my dear friend, Imene Benanni of Tunisia. She was able to so tenderly articulate my poetic work into Arabic, and when I heard it for the first time, I was blown away by how much more beautiful my poem sounded in Arabic than it did in English! The other most significant observation, was that when the poem is listened to in a foreign language…even if you do not know that language- one somehow experiences the ultimate tone and message despite our linguistic barriers. How amazing is that, and what does it lend to our ability to truly understand one another as a people regardless of our divisions- there is always the marrow of likeness and understanding.

NAYMAN: Finally, tell us about your plans for the future. Where do you see Leila A. Fortier in five years?

FORTIER: This question is almost ironic, as my life has always evolved so spontaneously in directions I never would have imagined or planned on my own. It has been the wildest of journeys I never could have anticipated, and I await like an eager and hungry child of delight for whatever direction and adventure I am to explore and experience next.
Over the next five years I will continue to create. My writing, art, photography and advocacy will always be a part of me no matter my direction. I have a few manuscripts on the table for complete books that I hope to see published in that time, but much remains a mystery.

Yet, all my childlike wonder and abstraction aside, I have made the most recent and spontaneous decision to return to school full time to pursue my BFA/MFA in Creative Writing. I have mixed feelings about this, as I have always been a self-taught eccentric that cringes to the confines and constructs of formality. However, I do love to learn, so for this I am excited. It is my hope, that by putting my time in to adhere to these structures and principles that there will eventually be a greater openness and acceptance to the rules I inevitably and already break. Perhaps this is part of my own culture that I need to embrace and understand- not that I have to be conformed or changed by it…but that I acknowledge and accept it, so that academia can then perhaps sigh, throw their hands up, and accept me with new merit as well.

Then perhaps…if I am not on a magic carpet to some other distant land…I may by that time, five years from now become a professor of Creative Writing myself if only so that I can set fire to the texts and hand everyone a blank page.

Leila A. Fortier is a writer, artist, poet, and photographer currently residing on the remote island of Okinawa Japan. Her poetry is known to be a unique hybrid form in which her words are specially crafted into abstract visual designs, often accompanied by her own multi-medium forms of art, photography, and spoken performance. Much of her work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, German, Hindi and Japanese in a rapidly growing project to raise global unity and understanding through the cultural diversity of poetry and literature.

Her work in all its mediums has been published in a vast array of literary magazines, journals, and reviews both in print and online. She has appeared in several books, anthologies, and freelance publications. In 2007’ she initiated the anthology A World of Love: Voices for Carmen as a benefit against domestic violence and in 2010’ composed a photo book entitled Pappankalan, India: Through the Eyes of Children to benefit the education of impoverished Indian children. She is also the author of Metanoia’s Revelation through iUniverse.
A complete listing of her published works can be found at: http://www.leilafortier.com

Tarik Nayman is Managing Editor for KNOT MAGAZINE, a successful Editor and translator from Izmir, Türkiye. He has edited journals, newspaper, and online publications in Türkiye, Azerbaijan, and Georgia.

Nayman is currently under contract for his first book, Afiyet Olsun due in spring 2013.

Eyelashes and neck
Eyelashes cockeyed and neck skew-whiffed
Crooked into your shoulder-nooks
That seem like children’s doodle-drawn homes
My head is craned down to your cranny bone
We are stood two crazed souls in each other
Stood neck to neck
Shoulder to shudder

Eyelashes and neck just there
Craned round again in the whorl of hot bone
And your eyes that kissing-kissed wet my lips
And your eyes that wet the kisses of my other lip
Your eye that plunges its furrow until we can’t see
Fused in the voice and rapture of it

Come, come if you take the pink slowly from here
Love is this lemon colour that oh lemon-limps bitter
then leaps to the tangerine womb

Ziba Karbassi was born in Tabriz, northwestern Iran.She had to leave her country with her mother in the mid-1980s when she was a young teenager and for most of the time since then she has lived in London. She has published ten books of poetry in Persian, She also writes poetry in Turkish. Two books of her poems are translated and published in the U.K, Italy, and in English and Italian. Karbassi is widely regarded as the most accomplished Persian poet of her generation. Her dense and revolutionary lyrical poetry achieves an intensity and balance that is rare in contemporary poetry. She has read widely across Europe and America. She was chairperson of the Iranian Writers Association (in exile) from 2002 to 2004 and editor of Asar.name and one of the editors in Exiled Ink literature magazines in London.

Last year she won the Golden Apple Poetry Price for Azerbaijan. Her poems have appeared in many languages throughout Europe, the UK and US. Translations by Stephen Watts have appeared in such journals as Poetry Review and Modern Poetry Translation.

How are you that you are so suddenly pulling my legs down
from dancing in the air close up my lips with your smile &
opening from my navel how you fly out & away my little dove
how you’re tearing that eagle to pieces to again make a mirror
from my knee-shine without me & the water & the mirror what
are you doing if you come into the lip-laugh between my thighs
how are you going to cry out while we laugh-cry each other

How are you that you are not cheek-to-cheek with me yet you
are closer than my two cheeks and me not there at all how you
are that you are a fire that blossoms out of my hand from the
whole of me a fire that’s trotted off that you’ve tethered your
horse to to a horse that is floating like a wave from burgundy
silk that’s pulped to a pomegranate picking a garden of pome-
granates & pocketing them how naked you’re leaving me now
without horse wave or red fruit without coming you’ve come
already walking into my valleys from far off

Turning my grandmother’s wine back to grapes again you put
them on a silver salver on the table for me so that I’d never now
drink wine or sadness sadness that is greater even than all this
where shall I put you you putting me that’s you putting me off
from yourself and where might that be

When you are coming so late how are you going to interpret me
to my dreams how are you that you are

Ziba Karbassi was born in Tabriz, northwestern Iran.She had to leave her country with her mother in the mid-1980s when she was a young teenager and for most of the time since then she has lived in London. She has published ten books of poetry in Persian, She also writes poetry in Turkish. Two books of her poems are translated and published in the U.K, Italy, and in English and Italian. Karbassi is widely regarded as the most accomplished Persian poet of her generation. Her dense and revolutionary lyrical poetry achieves an intensity and balance that is rare in contemporary poetry. She has read widely across Europe and America. She was chairperson of the Iranian Writers Association (in exile) from 2002 to 2004 and editor of Asar.name and one of the editors in Exiled Inkliterature magazines in London.

Last year she won the Golden Apple Poetry Price for Azerbaijan. Her poems have appeared in many languages throughout Europe, the UK and US. Translations by Stephen Watts have appeared in such journals as Poetry Review and Modern Poetry Translation.

I

Those who have known
holocaust children
cannot forget them.

Hunched as though
a kick were coming,
haunted of eye,
head ever turning,
their gait an almost
shuffle, and ever
like a cat
prepared to flee,
a silent scream
not to touch
with hand or word.

II

Israel’s leaders,
they of all folk
prison-like
have fenced in Gaza
bid generals
hurl their bombs,
their shells and rockets
from air and sea
and rolling tanks,
hurl clinging fire
scarring children
who survive,
as those of over
sixty years ago.

Murray Alfredson is a prize winning poet with one Pushcart nomination. He has worked as a librarian, lecturer and in Buddhist chaplaincy. He has published essays and poems in journals and anthologies Australia, UK and USA, and a collection: ‘Nectar and light’, in Friendly Street new poets, 12, Adelaide, Friendly Street Poets and Wakefield Press, 2007. He lives on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia.

Fawzia Alwi is a writer, professor of literature, poet, and critic from Kasserine, Tunisia. Alwi has published a combination of seven books of poetry and novels. Fawzia became well-known for her support of the revolution in January 2012. Alwi resides on the west side of Kasserine.