Nazar Look 2012-06

ISSN 2069-4784

TOMRÎĞA KÎRÎM TATARLARÎÑ TURUŞ-MAMURIYET MEĞMUWASÎ ATTITUDE AND CULTURE MAGAZINE OF DOBRUDJA’S CRIMEAN TATARS

Tom Sheehan

Haziran/June 2012 Sene/Year: 2 Sayî/Issue: 18 6/2012

about Native Americans reclaiming their own country:

“Two of my eBooks concern Native Americans.

Such is my stand.”

2 - rabindranath tagore Kapalî ízlek 3 - aşîk úmer Ilk baár kúnlerídír 4 - taner murat Kókten sesler - Temúçin (VI) 6 - valentina cano Interview In a Kingdom Sacred Ground A Bargain Daydream Eurydice in the Morning 10 - alison shuman Tales from Tatarstan 11 - jack peachum Blue Horse Muckwa & Animal Rescue 12 - kalvala suguna prasad Concrete Forest Love and Live 14 - tom sheehan Interview Leaving for Viviers

18 - william butler yeats No Second Troy 19 - nazim hikmet Our Eyes 20 - jason graff Down from Stockholm 25 - nicholas damion alexander Troy Grey Monotone Old Paradox, New Verse 28 - melina papadopoulos Mermaid

30 - mike berger Good Books Space Thing Creature from the Putrid Bog 33 - john m. marshall Dirge for Neda 34 - andy flatt My Little Piece of Spring 35 - jenean mcbrearty Interview Another Historical Tragedy 38 - edmund spencer Travels in Circassia, Krim Tartary, &c. (I) 40 - aziz amet (ametov) Photoshop - Djurdjur Waterfall, Crimea

ÍŞÍNDEKÍLER CONTENTS 2 rabindranath tagore Kapalî ízlek

3 aşîk úmer Ilk baár kúnlerídír

4 taner murat scythia minor Kókten sesler - Temúçin (VI)

6 BAŞ KABÎMÎZDA ON THE COVER Tom Sheehan Photo: Rich Garabedian

valentina cano florida, usa Interview In a Kingdom Sacred Ground A Bargain Daydream Eurydice in the Morning

10 NAZAR LOOK Attitude and culture magazine of Dobrudja’s Crimean Tatars Tomrîğa Kîrîm Tatarlarîñ turuşmamuriyet meğmuwasî ISSN: 2069-4784 www.nazar-look.com nazar.look@mail.com Constanta, Romania FOUNDER & EDITOR-IN-CHIEF BAŞ-NAŞIR Taner Murat EDITORS NAŞIRLER Emine Ómer Uyar Polat COMPUTER GRAPHICS SAYAR SÎZGAĞÎSÎ Elif Abdul Hakaan Kalila (Hakan Calila) CREATIVE CONSULTANTS ESER KEÑEŞÇÍSÍ Sariy Duran

Copyright reverts back to contributors upon publication.

The full issue is available for viewing online from the Nazar - Look website.

For submission guidelines and further information, please stop by www.nazar-look.com

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alison shuman new york, usa Tales from Tatarstan

11 jack peachum virginia, usa Blue Horse Muckwa & Animal Rescue

28 melina papadopoulos ohio, usa Mermaid

30 mike berger utah, usa Good Books Space Thing Creature from the Putrid Bog

33 john m. marshall north carolina, usa Dirge for Neda

34 andy flatt kent, united kingdom My Little Piece of Spring

35 jenean mcbrearty kentucky, usa Interview Another Historical Tragedy

38 edmund spencer Travels in Circassia, Krim Tartary, &c. (I)

40 aziz amet (ametov) crimea (ukraine) Photoshop - Djurdjur Waterfall, Crimea

12 kalvala suguna prasad andhra pradesh, india Concrete Forest Love and Live

14 tom sheehan massachusetts, usa Interview Leaving for Viviers

18 william butler yeats No Second Troy

19 nazim hikmet Our Eyes

20 jason graff new jersey, usa Down from Stockholm

25 nicholas damion alexander jamaica Troy Grey Monotone Old Paradox, New Verse

CONTRIBUTORS MEMBALAR Nicholas Damion Alexander Aziz Amet (Ametov) Mike Berger Valentina Cano Victoria Cano Andy Flatt Rich Garabedian Jason Graff Laura Graff Pepper Jones John M. Marshall Jenean McBrearty Jack Peachum Jamie Sheehan Tom Sheehan Alison Shuman Alexandria Papadopoulos Melina Papadopoulos Kalvala Suguna Prasad QHA

Nazar Look 1

rabindranath tagore

Kapalî ízlek Zannettím ke ğolîm soñîna kadar keldím, kuwetímíñ soñ kenarîna, ke aldîmdakî ízlek kapalî, ke şokraklarîm pítíp-túkeníp sessíz bír karañgîlîkka taldalanmam keregír.

Lákin úyrendím ke seníñ ístegíñ mením íşímde akîr tanîmaz.

Hem eskí sózler tíl ústúnde ólíp ketkende, góñílden ğap-ğañî dúrkúler şîkmaga başlar; Hem eskí ízlekler ğoytîlîp kayîplarga karîşkanda, muğizesí men barabar ğañî bír dúniya ortaga şîgar.

(Terğúmesí Taner Murat)

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aşîk úmer Ilk baár kúnlerídír Kîş geşíp yaz kelmekte, bo ilk baár kúnlerídír, Lále, súmbúl, gúl aşîlgan, temaşa kúnlerídír.

Aşap-íşíp, úriyler men oynaşîp ğúrmek úşún, Suw kenarî bakşalarda zewuk-sefa kúnlerídír, Ğúregíñ aşk man tolîp kaynap ğoşsa kerek Tamşîlar deryaga íríşír, tolîp taşsa kerek.

Aşîk-sewda bolganlar el daklarga túşse kerek Dúnyalîk úşún kîzganlarga káar-fayda kúnlerídír.

Herkez algan súygenín, yalîñîz kaldîm gene, Itibar bolmaz kaárípke, şúndí ragbet zengínge.

Bo aşkîñ gemísín şímdí saldîm deryadeñízge, Ğaldadî şîktî bír kenarga-ruzgár kúnlerídír. Íster iseñ, dertí men meftún Úmer sóylesín, Gene şo mením divane góñlím turmay íñlesín.

Bo aşîklîgîñ soñî yoktîr bo dertten bazgeşsín Dúlberlík tuwul, altînga meftúnlík kúnlerídír.

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Nazar Look 3

taner murat

scythia minor

www.tanermurat.com

Kókten sesler - Temúçin (VI) Kesím 19 Tawkîya yîl, kuş taşîmasî Tîpkî kîşnîñ bírden başlaganî gibí, baár de hep şonday kele túştí. Baár kelgende maymun yîlî pítíp tawkîya yîlîna baya kírílgen edí.

Bírden-bírge ğerníñ buzlarî, karlarî íríp, kókyúzí bulutlanîp túştí, şo tawkîya senesí. Túrlí renklí bulutlar, kúlrengísí de bar, sarîsî da bar, agî da bar, karasî da bar lákin eñ kop koyî yeşíl bulutlar bar edí. De aşaga túşúp, de yokarga míníp, kókyúzún boran gibí kelíp kapatîp, kúndúz aydînlîgîn sóyín karañgîlîgîna awuştura ğíbere edí.

Fîsîrtî man kelgen şuwuldagan bulutlar.

Sañkem ğolîndan adaştîrîp Kuday bútún ağunnuñ kuşlarîn toplap dúniyanîñ ústúne atkan. Kóklerden kuğurlî, bek kuğurlî, bír kuş túşúwí, bír kuş selí keldí, şo senesí.

Toktamay, hesapsîz-sayîsîz kuş aga tura edí.

Tekmíl yerlerge konîp, konağak gibí yer kalmadî. Alay yer kuşka toldî, ğerler, terekler, kîrlar, kóller. Algan túklerín, túylerín, hawada ğel karday uşurtup oynata edí. İnsannîñ kózíne, murununa, awuzuna kíre, insan esín al-almay, zorlana edí. Túk ğuta-ğuta buwula edí. Şuwuldawundan, kîywaldawundan insan insannîñ aytkanîn eşítmiy, añlamay kala edí.

Kúnlerğe nege ogîraganîna añlamay kalîp, herkez úyúne kapanîp, úyúnden başîn şîgarmay turdî. Amma başlarîna kelgen eñ şegílmiyğek şiy, kabír azabî şektírgen, şo bulutlar man barabar esken hawa, şo nálet kokîsî edí. Şo kokî sebebínden aşîn aşay almay, aşaganî da bírtamam-kusa ğíbere edí.

Kuş taşîganday boldî Órdek, kaz, kuş taşîdî Her dalnî kokîttîlar Her yerge konîp Boklap-zîñklap Sasîtîp şîktîlar.

Konmak, yuwalamak yer tapmay, kuş bulutlarnîñ kóbí sîrtka uşup kayîp boldî.

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Artta sáde ğerler, terekler, kóller alganî kadar kaldî. Bír-ekí ayga barganşîk, kokîsî da.

Túlkúler, kaşkîrlar, ayuwlar kuşka bír oñîp kalgan edí.

Onan Múren şayîrîn aşasînda, Baljun Aralnîñ betlerínde, eñ bek yeşílbaş badiyler bar edí, yeşílbaş órdekke oñgan edí şo yaklarî.

Bodonğar da kartşagayîn alîp, órdek awuna başladî. Kiyípí, kesík zamannîñ íşínde, yeríne keldí. Órdek mol-mol, kartşagayî aw awlamaga alîşkan. Kartşagayîn attîrîp uşkan yeşílbaş órdeklerní ayîrîp alîp, sîpîrasîn totîra edí. Artkanîndan da, tuzlap, kurutup, ya dumanga tutup órdek kóñgşílemelí yasap, keleğek kúnlerín talday.

Kesím 20 Onekí órdek Kuş bollîknîñ píteğek kózí yokta, awlagan awî arta beríp, Bodonğar da ózín ziyade sîkmay bardî. "Awur bír dawam bolmalî ke sabadan turayîm" diy edí. Kúneş yokarga şîgîp ortalîknî bír kademege kadar kîzdîrgan soñ awga ketetan, úyle awmaga başlaganda, eñ keş ekíndí máálínde, awdan kaytatan edí. Şonday etíp, bírgún, kartşagayîn bírkaş sáát attîrîp onekí órdek awlap şîkkan soñ, ekíndílerde, şonlarnî yegerníñ aldîna tagîp, úyúne kaytayatîr. Túñgelík Kurakannîñ yokarsîndan aşasîna ketiyatîrganda, kulagîna, Túyren Kambîrlarî yagîndan, kîz sesí, ğîrlay-ğîrlay kelgendiy boldî. "Ne eken?" dep, toktap sesledí: Onekí órdek arasînda Tanîr mîsîñ atasîn? Ózíñ ğígít şakîrasîñ Ózíñ ğatîp yuklaysîñ.

Lay lili lililam lay lili lililam Lay lay lili lililam.

"Ka-te, şo, terakay barîp karasam? Ne ziyanî bar? Bírew men konîşmaganîm kayda kaldî?" dep atîn Túyren Kambîrlarîna dogrîltîp kettí, yawaş-yawaş. Bír mesafe

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taner murat

scythia minor

www.tanermurat.com bargan soñ, bírtaa toktap kulak saldî.

Hakkîykatîn kîz sesí kele, kîrlî ekenler, ortakşa ğîrlaylar: Keşe geştím karaldîñdan Gemane men dare men Ána, búgún, ána, yarîn Alîrman dep ğúremen.

Ah, diy, vah, diy, dep ğúrsem de Dúşmanîma bíldírmem Senden başka kímselerge Kózyaşîmnî síldírmem.

Ay búlbúlúm, ay búlbúlúm Kayda kaldîñ súygúlúm?

Bír kaberíñ al-almayman Otîra da ğîlayman.

Uşkan kuştan, karîlgaştan, Men yáremní sorayman Bír kaberíñ al-almayman Otîra da ğîlayman.

Yakînlaşîp barganda, Túñgelík Kurakannîñ kîyuwunda onbeş-yígírím tane ğap-ğaş kîz, sawut-mawut ğuwup şîkkanlar, ózílerí şalîp ózílerí oynaylar. Ánaw yakta taban, otlakta îrknîñ şadîrlarî kurulgan.

Baya kalabalîk bír îrk. Ğañî kelgenlerdír.

Yok edíler, bo yerí boş edí.

- Ğúmleñízge kún kayîrlayman! Kaşan keldíñíz? - dep soradî, o.

- Bo keşe, bo keşe! - dep şakîrdî bírkaş tanesí.

- Barlar mî? Sápír alalar mî? - sorap turdî, awul betke kósteríp.

- Barlar, bar bírtakîmî! Ána, ánaw şadîrdalar! Ğúr, ğúr! - dedí bír kîz, uzatkan kolî man barîlağak ğónín kósteríp.

Bodonğar aytîp kósterílgen şadîr betíne kettí. Artînda, kîzlar kúlúşúp alalar.

Başîn kaytarîp, soradî: - Şalîp oynaganîñîzga ne diyler?

- Onekí órdek! - dep bakîrîştî kîzlar, bírtaa kúlúşúp.

"Ka-típ tutturgan ekenler? Sañkem awumnî sayganlar!" dep taağúplendí Bodonğar.

(dewamî keleğekke)

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Nazar Look 5

valentina cano

florida, usa

http://carabosseslibrary.blogspot.com

Interview TM: You write poems and book reviews; why are you a writer, Valentina?

Valentina Cano: I write because there’s no way I can function acceptably in society without it. I write poetry for myself, as exorcism, and then fling the poems into the world to sever their hold on me. It’s a wonderful way of bleeding yourself of toxins.

TM: Describe poetry in three words.

Valentina Cano: Cleansing. Draining. Pulsing.

TM: What book are you reading now?

Valentina Cano is a student of classical singing who spends whatever free time either writing or reading.

Her works have appeared in Exercise Bowler, Blinking Cursor, Theory Train, Cartier Street Press, Berg Gasse 19, Precious Metals, A Handful of Dust, The Scarlet Sound, The Adroit Journal, Perceptions Literary Magazine, Welcome to Wherever, The Corner Club Press, Death Rattle, Danse Macabre, Subliminal Interiors, Generations Literary Journal, Super Poetry Highway, Stream Press, Stone Telling, Popshot, Golden Sparrow Literary Review, Rem Magazine, Structo, The 22 Magazine, The Black Fox Literary Magazine, Niteblade, Tuck Magazine, Ontologica, Congruent Spaces Magazine, Pipe Dream, Decades Review, Anatomy, Lowestof Chronicle, Muddy River Poetry Review, Lady Ink Magazine, White Masquerade Anthology and Perhaps I'm Wrong About the World.

6 Nazar Look

Valentina Cano: I’m rereading Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. She’s such a clever author, and I love unreliable narrators. There’s nothing better than being manipulated by fiction.

TM: Could you tell us some more about your passion for music? When did you first realize you are an artist?

Valentina Cano: Music is my first love. It’s chased me through life, the need to sing and perform, to express myself in that manner. Music and singing in particular, have a way of soothing me. Music tames beasts, people say, and it certainly tames the ones in my head.

I think if you are an artist, you don’t really have a moment where you say, “Okay, yes, I’m an artist,” I think it’s something so tightly sewn to who you are that there is no question about it.

You know you are one, and you’ve always known it.

TM: What is the best part of being a musician?

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valentina cano

florida, usa

http://carabosseslibrary.blogspot.com Valentina Cano: Being a musician is so removed from writing. As a singer, you are an interpreter.

You take someone else’s masterpiece and find out how to sing it or play it in a way that no one has done it before. It’s a bit of a puzzle. It also reveals a lot about your own self. You have to sit there and think, okay, how would I say this to someone?

Where would my breath go if these were the words that I needed to communicate? It’s fascinating to unearth those things from your own head and present them to a public who doesn’t know anything about you but your name.

TM: What is the importance of music in words?

Valentina Cano: What I’ve noticed in myself, and I’m sure any other musician out there will feel similarly, is that I tend to try to make my poems, my writing in general, melodies. Playing with consonants, with pauses, with repetitions, all of that gives the writing a musicality that makes it feel “right” to me. It’s what I look for in others’ writing, and it’s what I demand of myself.

TM: Do you have a website? Do you think it is important for a writer to have one? Why? Valentina Cano: I do. It’s a blog, where I post reviews and links to my poems, called Carabosse’s Library. I’ve also made myself get involved with Facebook and all of those social outlets, as time consuming as they tend to be. Yes, I do think that writers in this day and age need to have websites.

Let’s face it; pretty much everything is online now.

For someone like me, who dislikes large social events and therefore meets people less often, the internet is an easy way of getting to know people and getting my work out to them. It’s called the World Wide Web for a reason.

TM: What writers have influenced you, and how?

Valentina Cano: Let’s do poets first. Emily Dickinson is one I greatly admire. From her work, I’ve learned that poems don’t have to be huge, allencompassing behemoths. They can be small, titleless, just little scenes of domesticity and be just as effective.

Sometimes even more effective.

Margaret Atwood’s poetry inspires me with her imagery. She leaves me open-mouthed at her mind’s absolute originality. I have no idea what it must be like in her head. When it comes to fiction,

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Barbara Kingsolver is a wonder. Not only is her writing pitch-perfect, but it is also highly intelligent.

That something I want in my writing. Intelligence, sharpness. I like my words to wield knives.

TM: How do inspiration?

you

get

motivation

and

Valentina Cano: Motivation doesn’t really play into my writing. I write. Every day, whether I feel like it or not, whether I’m sick or sad or happy or counting the hours until bedtime. There’s no other way to do it, for me. Inspiration is a different matter. I read. A lot. And in reading, I find things, little jewels of words or sentences that start kind of glinting in my head, asking me to examine them a bit. They never fail to show me something new of how my own thoughts work. Sometimes it’s music, sometimes it’s a painting that I see or someone’s look as they cross the street. Anything that makes the “what ifs” start rolling through my head.

TM: What is the worst part of being a writer?

Valentina Cano: For me, the problem is that I don’t really know what I’m going to feel when I’m writing. Sometimes it’s a release and it’s wonderful, but other times it drags up all kinds of things I would rather have stayed under enough mental lye to keep them from stinking.

TM: What do you do for fun?

Valentina Cano: I read, as I said, but I also do a lot of baking. There’s something really relaxing about mixing a bunch of ingredients and having them do what they’re supposed to do. Bread baking in particular is a magical experience.

TM: Tell us about your projects.

Valentina Cano: At the moment, I have a manuscript with my literary agent, Steven Chudney. He’ll be submitting to publishing houses as soon as it’s crisp and clean and we’ll see if we have a bit of luck finding it a home.

TM: Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

l, o b a! w in a t S en l a V

Valentina Cano: Hopefully, singing all the things I’d never imagined myself singing and having a couple of books out there in the world. Ten years is a long time, though. There’s no way of knowing where I’ll be.

Nazar Look 7

valentina cano

florida, usa

http://carabosseslibrary.blogspot.com

In a Kingdom An upkeep at this moment would take more than I’ve got.

I’d end up spinning, legs knotting up as I submerged into the red.

Of you.

Of the words you’ve tangled around me.

A fairytale hedge of spiny lies and careless shakes of your wrist.

Sacred Ground Your head bobbed, taking time to bend the light around you until the distortion made me blink.

You wore a headdress of the softest fur, polished tentacles of lust.

Your eyes, fire pits, drum circles of light.

There was no way out of their chant.

I was caught.

A Bargain I purchased your smile with a look.

It wasn’t one I’d planned or one I even wanted to grant, but it was pulled out of me, like a line of syrup, scorching, too sweet.

It coated you, easting your skin as you crossed the room to pass me the rind of flesh I’d bought.

8 Nazar Look

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valentina cano

florida, usa

http://carabosseslibrary.blogspot.com

Daydream A husband made of air.

That’s what she wants.

As careless as the wind that ruffles the toothy orchid in the backyard.

She wants a husband who will not rattle panes at words or thoughts that carry chains around their feet.

She wants one who will spin sighs into a tablecloth just wide enough for their war-scarred table.

She wants a puff of nothing.

A man of clouds.

Eurydice in the Morning She stopped running.

Her legs trembled as her muscles locked shut, a groan of metallic sinew pulling tight.

There was nothing to do but gaze out at the land she wouldn’t reach, the fields of flowers bowing in the morning, as her body calcified there in the sun.

A pillar of doubt.

A tower of ifs.

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Nazar Look 9

alison shuman

new york, usa

www.alisonshuman.com

Tales from Tatarstan I took a trip last week to the Tatar village Aktanish. It's located about 400 kilometers from Kazan, any further east and you'd be in the neighboring republic of Bashkortostan. Aktanish the village, you could liken it to a small midwestern town, is the 'capital' of the Aktanish region which consists of small clusters of villages spread over the countryside.

The first day we went to the birthday party of a woman turning 80. The festivities began at 10 in the morning and lasted well into the evening. We arrived a bit late and were quickly shuttled into the main room of the house where we were fed a bounty of dishes: carrot salad with mayonnaise, beet salad with mayonnaise, fish salad with mayonnaise, and meat and potato pie, to name a few. I learned early on that the key to surviving a Russian feast is to never take anything for yourself and eat very, very slowly.

The first feast I attended, I made the mistake of piling my plate with the 14 various salads on the table, only to learn that this was the first course of four and that a plate cannot remain empty for more than about 15 seconds before someone notices that you're not eating, plops something in front of you and utters the command "Eat. Eat." We finished eating and I thought perhaps that this was the end of the celebration since we had arrived an hour late, but I was greatly mistaken. The party moved outside to picnic bench near the road that leads to and from this very tiny village. In earlier times, this Tatar village had about 40 houses, a small oneroom school and corner store. Now there are but 20 houses, the schoolhouse is a ruin of wood and building materials and the corner store is closed. As the elderly villagers pass away one-by-one, the village gets smaller and smaller. Russia is changing. Village life is disappearing. During Soviet times, it was in these very villages where ancestral customs, religion, and language were kept alive. Now people are free to move, free to practice their religion and speak their mother tongue. The young people move to the city and only visit when a certain occasion calls them back. I try not to label this as either "good" or "bad" but just accept it as fact. Perhaps it is from my own romantic views of Russian villages with the ornately decorated wooden houses, multicolored picket fences and miles of green pasture (I will NOT mention the babushkas!), but I feel a certain sadness about this. I guess it's another reminder of just how fast and how extensively our world is changing.

Back to the party...where the feasting continues. Millet porridge, shashlik-vinegar marinated chicken grilled over an open flame, Tatar blini- similar to pancakes, more salads, fruit, chocolates and a welcomed gift at any Tatar feast..Chak-Chak. It's difficult to describe chak-chak, so here you can read about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Çäkçäk. Accordion playing, singing, dancing, arm wrestling, eating and drinking, a proper feast was enjoyed by all. I would be remiss to not mention that vodka and wine are a part of every feast and toasting is not only customary, it's obligatory. Each person stands, drink in hand and speaks at length about the person or persons for whom the feast is held. Do not let the age of the guest of honor fool you; she was able to keep up with just about everyone, even strutting her stuff to Russian techno that blasted from a car's stereo speakers. She was probably one of the most joyful people I have ever encountered. After a number of hours, the weather turned and we moved back inside where were were treated to homemade pilmeni- meat filled dumplings in soup topped with dill and sour cream.

And accordion playing, singing and dancing commenced inside. Hours later, leftover chak-chak in hand, we plopped ourselves into the car, bellies distended.

The next day was the May 1st celebration. May 1st is not only International Worker's Day, but in Tatarstan, they also celebrate their own version of May Day, commencing the beginning of spring. There are various games and antics involving eggs, many of which are brightly colored and ornately decorated like Easter eggs. May Day is celebrated in various parts of the world and has it's roots in pre-Christian pagan celebrations. I made several attempts to find out where the Tatar tradition of May 1st came from, but nobody seemed to know how or why.

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jack peachum

virginia, usa

Jack Peachum is an American author: he has written and published poems, one novel (Tempest), one chapbook (Polyamory), essays, etc. He is also a playwright (Sessions) and has written and directed one film (Vignette).

During his lifetime he has been actor and model, detective and security guard, as well as working at many other occupations. At present, he resides in a small village in southside Virginia on Buggs Island (Kerr) Lake with his wife Julia and his wonderful pit bull, Eleanor.

BLUE HORSE MUCKWA & ANIMAL RESCUE For Rebiah Seminole At last - a place of refuge!

Pasture and meadow - an old horse ambles into quietude, the skittish mule once beaten with metal rasp stands in clover.

Pause, Visitor, and rest, for the gift here is time, and time is to be lived ask for nothing more, not for mercy, certainly, nor for kindness.

A starved feline dines alone near the tackroom - wary eye, neck tense, tail between her legs under the trees, a pit-bull yawns, forgetting cold nights on chain, fear and bloodsmell of the arena, but the scars go deep, deeper than memory sometimes memory squats in the barn, grinning, wearing a long tooth and the mindless face of Man. After muddy track and tumult, noise of the crowd, after hot irons, whips, blindness, enforced lameness, starvation, after glaring environment of the breeding pen here, one may even find room for the human heart.

Mecklenburg County, Va.

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Photo: David Silver

Nazar Look 11

kalvala suguna prasad

andhra pradesh, india

Kalvala Suguna Prasad is a Retired Officer from Andhra Pradesh State Government in India and now practicing as Advocate at his native place Khammam of Andhra Pradesh, India.

He is a poet who has published 15 books in his mother tongue Telugu, but lately he has written his work English.

Concrete Forest The Nightingale started singing its song I could not notice when it reached the dark mango tree in the garden of my house The dark Nightingale also became unnoticed in the darkness When I heard the wonderful song of it, I thought it to be beautiful But my assumption did not turn to fruitful Spring might also heard the Nightingale It tried to enter in my garden But could not find trees which were already destroyed for constructing houses and gone away tired, searching for forest in this cement forest.

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kalvala suguna prasad

andhra pradesh, india

Love and Live Honey due in the shiny early hours Rainy drops gathered on the leaf of rose in my garden Flying bird with feeling of proud for its beauty On seeing her in my car rear view mirror Small plant which came out of seed And praying God by joining its two budded leafs like hands A small mango that born to the tree which is in my garden A small kid smiling in the hands of its mother Birds flying in row before sunset The face of western sky turned Reddish with shy as the came nearer to it This nature gives a wonderful joy and happiness Forget the enemy and forgive him Open the heart and welcome a fragrance of beauty world Keep ready the hands to hug the love and affection One can own Everything on the earth with love and affection Poison can be given to drink with immense love But cake can not be made to eat with a bit of angry or enmity.

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Nazar Look 13

massachusetts, usa

Interview

Photo: Jamie Sheehan

tom sheehan

TM: Why are you writing, Tom? Tom Sheehan: My grandfather, Johnny Igoe, began to read W.B. Yeats’ work to me when I was 5 or 6 years old, saying, “Listen for the music in the words,” and “Find the words with handles on them” for your own use.” I have never forgotten his voice, his words.

TM: You are a Korea war veteran; can war and writing go hand in hand?

Tom Sheehan: To some it cannot. I know those who can’t go back over it in a public way, or an exposed way. I do because I made a promise to myself that I would not forget my comrades, and those comrades of my father and my brother and my cousins.

TM: What other interests do you have besides writing?

Tom Sheehan: Once there was a time when I read for nearly 2 hours a day for close to 20 years. Having played 3 sports (football, hockey and baseball), I follow high school and college and local pro teams with deep interests, and in the last few years have seen a World Series baseball game and a hockey Stanley Cup Championship game.

TM: Which particular obstacles have you encountered in your activity?

Tom Sheehan: Most recently, based on my submission query, a literary agent asked me to send on a hockey mystery novel, which I did. I received no acknowledgment of receipt, no answer to two queries (one after 4 months and one after 6 months) and when I caught up to her on the telephone (after 6 months) she said, “Oh, I am not taking any new clients.” With 84 years on the planet, 6 months down the drain is pretty significant. A chapter from the novel has appeared at least 4 times on the Net and I am a firm believer in its eventual acceptance.

accomplishments, characteristics, and exploits, and find that dedication extends to pals, fishing buddies, old teammates, classmates, and memorable neighbors here in Saugus, MA, a most likely place to write. From here, I can throw a stone into the First Iron Works in America, a National Historic site whose restoration (from 1636) I helped accomplish as a laborer and as a night watchman for several years before and after military service. Many stories have come out of that site, TM: Do you sometimes feel like saying no to a new inspiration?

Tom Sheehan: If it comes to me as I rise from sleep, I make a prisoner of it, because I am convinced it passed into me during the night and only I own it. I work it until it is finished.

Some casual entertainments coming to my mind (Like, “Oh that might make a nice story.”), I can drop like a hot potato. With 281 cowboy stories now on Rope and Wire Magazine, there have been times when I wrote down a series of 20 titles, and rarely did I not finish each story that came from a title idea, all of them arriving in me by chance and picked arbitrarily for the list, now and then a few of them done at one sitting with minor corrections, changes, revisions.

TM: How many times do you revise your work?

Tom Sheehan: As often as necessary until I am satisfied that someone somewhere will find in it something of interest, entertaining, of value, but ready to accept a rejection on it.

TM: What inspires you to write and how do you keep motivated?

TM: How much of your work ends up in the trash?

Tom Sheehan: I write much about comrades’

Tom Sheehan: I believe at this moment there

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tom sheehan

massachusetts, usa

are a dozen poems, or more, and half a dozen stories or articles to which I have not given full shrift; but they await me. It goes with my belief that we come with two things: love and energy, and we damned well better use them up. I have always told that to my children.

TM: How comfortable are you with online journals?

Tom Sheehan: I am very comfortable with online journals, receiving some grand acceptances from many sources, knowing that with the computer and online journals, I have come a long way in my creative efforts from the time when I had 5 typewriters at my disposal in the house (kitchen/cellar/bedroom/study/garage), each one never left without a piece of paper in it with an idea, a line of poetry, a title waiting on some special reason or purpose, even if it had to be a line from one of my other poems, waiting to be worthy, and being worked on while I was away from it.

TM: What determines the success of a writer?

Tom Sheehan: In himself? By satisfaction.

From others, who knows?

TM: Native Americans are reclaiming their own country, what is your opinion?

Tom Sheehan: Two of my eBooks, of 8 or 9 now in the queue with Milspeak Publishers, concern Native Americans (The Nations, and Where Skies Grow Wide) and the covers of the series by my sons are spectacular pieces of artwork (this from someone who is not graphically oriented.) Such is my stand.

TM: Where are you going to publish your latest poem?

Tom Sheehan: Do I suspect that to be with your site? Or else it is to be with Qarrtsiluni, an online journal with a poem called “Breaking down the House.�

TM: What are your writing goals for this year?

, l bo

Tom Sheehan: To finish off what I have shot my mouth off in this particular Q&A activity.

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w a S

!

T

om

Nazar Look 15

tom sheehan

massachusetts, usa

Leaving for Viviers

most errands these days, the way his father had patted him, the way he had learned.

The boy slipped from a hole in the remnants of a stone wall that marked one section of his grandfather’s farm, crawled behind a small tree, and stared down into the valley. At least a week before, shells from distant cannon and mortar had severed the wall in dozens of places, and a crater sat where the chicken house used to be. The pig pen, from the dead of winter, was a new abomination, with the small fence heaved asunder and unknown body parts strewn every which way.

On some days the boy had forgotten what his father looked like. He’d been dead for more than two years, shot by one side or the other at a tumultuous point of the war. So the boy didn’t know who he hated. But he hated somebody.

Anybody who came on their land stood a good chance.

The Alsace winter of 1944 had been cold and worn with misery, but now, as he breathed new air, he could see buds on the trees on the floor of the valley and across nearby hills. From a distance he heard a bird call for a friend, and heard the answer. It made him smile for the first time in the morning. Then, far off, he saw a group of soldiers marching back into their small encampment with three enemy soldiers walking ahead of them, docile prisoners at the points of rifles, their hands clasped atop their heads. All the soldiers, front and back, the catching and the caught, trudged tired and worn, as if they were weary of the war, too weary to carry on. Days earlier great tanks, support vehicles and hundreds of soldiers had passed through the valley and gone ahead. The boy could see their tracks trenchant in the new grass trying for green, in the matted grain fields on early legs, and coming out of the small, now distorted copse of maples and birches at the edge of the hill for a hundred years had provided heat for the family.

As he looked down on the small group, he didn’t know who to feel sorry for, the ones up front or the ones with the rifles. More than a dozen of them were armed with rifles. The sun bounced off their helmets and parts of their weapons. The bird called again.

“Just let us know if any soldiers are coming this way,” his grandfather had said as he ushered him out of the house that morning. “Give us enough time so we can hide a few things.” The old man had patted him on the head, the way he did on

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He saw an officer come out of a tent and stand at the head of the soldiers. Then all the soldiers of the small camp gathered around the officer, who was apparently talking to them. He saw the officer make gestures and point back toward Viviers. He could not hear the officer’s voice and tried to read his body language. Soon many of the soldiers ran to places in the campsite. Some began to shave, some just to wash their faces or strip to the waist and wash themselves. All of them had come to life in an instant, as if the war was over, but it was surely not. A whole fleet of planes, big ones, were flying overhead, the broad sky filled with aircraft as far as he could see, the noise another part of the everlasting whine even when he thought a small silence had been earned.

Three of the soldiers stood still where they were, not at attention it appeared, but the officer continued talking to them, making more gestures the boy could not understand. Then the three prisoners were put inside a fenced enclosure, and the three soldiers the officer had been talking to took up guard positions. Another low sound, a hum, came to him. At the end of the small valley the boy saw two big trucks coming down the narrow road. The trucks, big army trucks, stopped at the campsite. After a while all the soldiers, including the officer, climbed up on the trucks, but not the three on guard, or the three prisoners still inside the fence. The trucks turned around and headed back toward Viviers, down the narrow road, becoming dark dominoes moving.

The guards sat down. The prisoners sat down inside the enclosure. Each looked like they were talking to their own kind. A bird called, one answered and another. All six men looked back

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tom sheehan

massachusetts, usa

toward Viviers and then across the valley where the bird had called again, or one like it, or one near it. Buds, green as good vines, jittered nervously on tree limbs as a small spring breeze lifted its arms and waved. The boy smiled and said hello under his breath.

But the smile made the boy feel sad. For at that same moment he remembered his sister, and the day she walked into the barn just ahead of some soldiers coming from behind the barn. She had not seen them and at least three of them followed her inside. He was hidden where his grandfather had left him, in a hole against one wall, the hole he just now slipped out of as he watched more soldiers, the ones with the prisoners. His grandfather had told him never to leave the hole while he was away and told his sister to stay hidden in the barn, but he knew she just had to feed their last animal, a mere piglet. He remembered hearing her screaming and he cried again, as he had on many days since. The soldiers left the barn after a long while. When his sister did not come out of the barn, he crept out of the hole and went to look for her.

She was dead, hanging from a beam in the barn.

She was fourteen. Her clothes had been torn from her and she had tied some in knots to cover herself. The boy knew everything in an instant. The soldiers did not tie the noose. They did not toss the rope over the beam in the barn. They did not get her to stand on the milk stool that still leaned against one wall. But they were the hangmen. He knew it. He knew his sister.

It was the same day he heard the distant whine, the whine as it drew closer. It was the whine and roar of war and all its collected parts coming one at a time, or in continuing odd pairs, the machinery of war, sounding out itself in pieces but slowly building its full way. At first it was as faint as if an old playmate, Rene or Jean, had called from the next farm or the next hill, coming as it did into a part of one ear, at the edge of all sound, at the edge of the belief of sound, and then came all the pieces of sound‌ the single bullets slicing in the air, the soft thump against wood or clatter on rock at the end of poor aim, the arc of shells screaming inside his head harsh as a close whistle, the

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distant impulses that sent the shells toward him and the farm and the tremors in the earth, the vibrations in the air as strong as evil itself, and soon the yelling rising up on its legs, the orders, the cries of terror and fright, the war itself, the terrible machine rolling across the land the way plows once wandered, turning everything over, the very land itself and all it offered up, the vines, the grass, the golden grains, day into night, night into day, silence into noise, noise into silence, peace into war. The awful impulses that came with war.

With his grandfather off on the strange errands he often attended to, the boy kept watch on the encampment. He knew that more than silence and language separated the two small groups of soldiers down below. He tried to imagine all their differences and was hounded by the difficulty the problem presented. Nothing, he believed, could be resolved from distance. More whines arose. More planes passed over the valley, like a cloud of sparrows erroneously leaping south. The sound roared in his ears as the war continued beyond him and the farm and his secret hole in the ground.

For more than an hour the three soldiers on guard were talking and obviously arguing. One of them kept pointing over his shoulder, back to where the trucks had gone. Gestures and wild motions came out of him as if he were on stage, in a wild drama.

Perhaps it was a comedy. The boy did not know.

Then the lead actor, the one with the motions and gestures, walked to the enclosure, opened the gate and pointed off to the other end of the valley, where the war was. The prisoners came out of the enclosure and began to walk off toward the war.

Then they began running, stumbling, falling, rising, running again. The three guards put their rifles to shoulder and shot them in the back.

In the silence that followed the guard soldiers began to clean themselves. Two shaved, one washed his torso completely. All three were waving their arms in odd motions, marionettes against drab canvas. Finally all three of them, rifles over their shoulders, began to walk toward Viviers.

Now the boy knew who he hated‌

Nazar Look 17

william butler yeats

No Second Troy Why should I blame her that she filled my days With misery, or that she would of late Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways, Or hurled the little streets upon the great.

Had they but courage equal to desire?

What could have made her peaceful with a mind That nobleness made simple as a fire, With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind That is not natural in an age like this, Being high and solitary and most stern?

Why, what could she have done, being what she is?

Was there another Troy for her to burn?

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nazim hikmet Our Eyes Our eyes are limpid drops of water.

In each drop exists a tiny sign of our genius which has given life to cold iron.

Our eyes are limpid drops of water merged absolutely in the Ocean that you could hardly recognize the drop in a block of ice in a boiling pan.

The masterpiece of these eyes the fulfillment of their genius the living iron.

In these eyes filled with limpid pure tears had failed to emerge from the infinite Ocean if the strength had dispersed, we could never have mated the dynamo with the turbine, never have moved those steel mountains in water easily as if made of hollow wood.

The masterpiece of these eyes the fulfillment of their genius of our unified labour the living iron.

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Nazar Look 19

jason graff

new jersey, usa

Jason Graff's fiction has appeared in Bloodroot Literary Magazine. His poetry has appeared on-line at Zingology, Clockwise Cat and BrickRhetoric. He lives in Wayne, NJ with his wife Laura and cat Shelby. He is currently at work on a novel.

Photo: Laura Graff

Down from Stockholm “What didn’t go well?” asked Bill or as regulars at Shotty’s called him Bill Bill. He wanted to be seen as the resident inebriated sage as wise the unbroken seal on a bottle of cheap whiskey. The problem was he drank with such frequency and commitment that he’d often forget major details of the crises that he wished to impose his wisdom on, so everything had to be explained to him at least twice.

“Private matter between me and Cassie, Bill Bill,” Jake said. He hadn’t told Bill what had happened directly but as with so many of the matters brought to the bar for discussion with Brian, the bartender, Bill managed to overhear most of it. He even asked a couple of pointed and completely inappropriate questions about how things were going in the, as he

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put it, ‘boot-wah.’

“Who the hell is Cassie?” Bill asked.

“My girlfriend, Bill Bill. I live with her,” Jake said.

“You’ve met her. She comes in here a lot.”

“Right, right. I remember,” Bill said. “Blonde girl, big tits.”

“That’s her,” Jake said.

“So?” Bill asked. “What are you, a tits or an ass man?”

“What?”

“You have a gal with a nice rack,” Bill said carefully so as to not slur. “Maybe you think the grass might be greener down there, huh? Guys get bored with the tits, you know.”

“Have you ever gotten bored of big breasts Bill

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jason graff

new jersey, usa

Bill?” Brian asked, fixing them both up with another beer.

“Fuck no,” Bill said.

“Then why would anyone else?” Brian asked.

“It’s an optative type deal,” Bill said, spittle leaping from his lips.

“What’s that Bill Bill?” Jake asked, though he was really thinking of Cassie curled up on their bed, across the street, less than 100 yards away. For a fleeting instant, he wanted to run to her and announce that he wanted to be with her, start a family, get married, all of that. But then much of Jake’s life had been lived after such moments, past when he’d almost done the right thing.

“Where do you come up with this stuff?” Brian asked Bill. “Schlitz cans have a word of the day now or something?”

“Optative, don’t you kids know your Greek? It’s a verb mood. It signifies that behind our reality must lay a wish that things were different in order for the reality to have meaning for us. Like you,” Bill said. “You’re a fat male barkeeper at a dive that really wishes he was a shot girl at one of those clubs near the garden cause they make better tips. And you,” he said to Jake, “got a blond with a nice set of tits but you wish you had a young brunette with a tight little ass. Like one of them, what do they call them? Yogurt Teachers.”

“Cassie does have a nice butt as well,” Brian said with a wry smile at Jake. He and Cassie had from time to time carried on a flirtation and though they’d never hooked up Brian always left the possibility of it out there.

It wasn’t long after moving in with Cassie that Jake became a regular at Shotty’s. He and Brian often found themselves together on either side of the bar on a quiet workday afternoon with no one else around and nothing much else to do but talk about their lives. Jake, congenitally unable to keep his mouth shut, did most of the talking. Brian enjoyed hearing the tales of Jake’s wayward travels enough that he didn’t have to pretend too hard to listen.

After graduating high school, Jake had gone out west to college only to flunk out after a year and have to move home. Showing up for classes had turned out to be a bit more than he was capable of at the time. Then, he got a job canning fish up in Maine. Pneumonia laid him low for about a month and the moment he felt well enough, he came back once again to live with his folks. One spring, he moved to Florida and never adjusted. The heat made him feel sluggish and often confined him

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indoors, same thing for Texas when he gave working an oil rig a try. At least, he’d gotten good at tucking his tail between his legs and going home or so he said, trying not to sound too dejected about the failed enterprise that had been his life up to that point.

There wasn’t a single moment that turned Brian against the idea of Jake being with Cassie. Jake never did anything that made him seem like a bad guy. Like all of the truest and most sour resentments, it simply grew bit by bit over time until suddenly Brian saw Jake as a flake, a wannabe, a New Hampshire rube, not at all the kind of guy someone as substantial as Cassie could be happy with long term. The realization that he had been carrying a torch for Cassie soon followed, bringing Brian’s animosity into full flower.

When Jake told him about Cassie being pregnant, Brian knew it was all about to come apart. As Jake drunkenly spilled forth the story that rainy Tuesday afternoon, Brian felt guilty for not warning her. He’d known her long before Jake came around. Still, he told Jake to do what he wished he could. ‘Ask her to marry you,’ he said. ‘Tell her you want to be a father. That’s where Cassie figures her life is right now.’ Though Brian was conscious of having taken a tremendous risk by advising his rival in such a manner, the evidence didn’t point too strongly to Jake following through. When he came in the next day announcing he’d followed that advice, Brian felt sick to his stomach. Then Jake sat and drank like a condemned man, moaning about the mistake he’d made and Brian’s bartender instincts calmed him with the assurance that it wasn’t to last. Jake would soon reverse course and that would be the end of Cassie and Jake.

“I told you, Cass’d never go for it,” Brian said and took a sip of whiskey from the tumbler he kept behind the bar. “She doesn’t change her mind often and doesn’t like anyone who does.”

“Fucking anyone could know that, if they thought about it,” Bill said, sounding disgusted to have someone as clueless as Jake for a drinking companion. “Cassie’s no bullshit. Girl can drink too.”

“I didn’t really change my mind, not really,” Jake said. “It just took me longer to be honest with her. She expects me to make big decisions at a snap.”

“What decisions?” Bill asked.

“Private matter, Bill. Between me and Cassie,” Jake said and sucked down the last of his pint in a swallow.

He’d met Cassie on a bus ride from New

Nazar Look 21

jason graff

new jersey, usa

Hampshire to Boston. She’d gone up north Friday night to party with some high school friends but got bored when they went off skiing so she decided to head back to the city the next afternoon so as not to waste the whole weekend. Despite all of the empty seats on the Northway Coachline, she sat next to Jake. With his long hair and slightly dazed look, he had something of the air of a comic saint ready to laugh off his sins as though they might benefit mankind just to spite him.

They split the big can of Foster’s that she’d smuggled on board and talked the whole way, honing in on those superficial commonalities that fool certain kinds of people into believing chance meetings are predestined.

Jake felt like he’d known her all his life just because they both still listened to Ratt and had seen “Back to the Future” enough times that they could run lines from it.

“She wouldn’t want me telling everyone,” Jake said. “It’s nothing against you Bill Bill.”

“Shit,” Bill said in a cackle. “Ain’t no secrets here.”

“There are a few, Bill,” Brian said. “Even some about you.”

“Any secrets about me are so secret, I don’t even know them,” Bill said.

“A few about me too,” Brian said and gave Jake a smirk.

“What did you say to her anyway?” Bill asked.

“How did you manage to shit all over this so called private matter?”

“Forget it,” Jake said. “I should go.”

“You just got here.” Brian put another beer in front of him, hoping to hear some kind of confirmation that he and Cassie were effectively quits. “Have one on the house.”

“Nah, maybe I’ll go for a walk. Maybe I’ll come back later.”

But Jake didn’t return to the bar or go back to his apartment either. He walked over to the reflecting pool at Church Park. The water was a black mirror on whose surface stars shined like wet diamonds. Looking across it to the lights on the crown of the Belvedere Hotel, he finally found the strength to consider the truth that he’d never really loved Cassie, every time he’d told he did had been false. He’d loved the idea of living in the city in an apartment so close to Fenway Park that in the summer the sounds of the game rode the breeze through the bedroom’s open window. The fact that a great bar like Shotty’s was right across the street didn’t hurt either. It would have suited him more if they could have been roommates, only then he’d’ve been expected to pay for his share of the living expenses

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which, given his employment status or more accurately lack thereof, would’ve been a problem.

Next, Jake turned his usually self-destructive impulsiveness to good use for once and hailed a taxi for the airport. Pushing past the lost tourists and families on their way to vacations in Florida and other places New Englanders escape to just long enough to make them homesick, he managed to find a payphone and call his sister. All he said to her was that he needed to come home, no hello, no small talk. She told him to go find the Western Union office and she’d wire him the money. The shuttle flight back to New Hampshire was more expensive than he thought it would be. Four hours later he was home, asleep in his old room. His folks were a little surprised to see him but didn’t trouble him with too many questions that first night.

He told them all about what had happened a couple of days later without making them ask, feeling he owed them that. They didn’t say much and acted as though they knew something like that was bound to happen. To have your thirty-something son crash land back at home once again and reel off a tale that speaks for every inch of his irresponsibility and thoughtlessness must’ve been disquieting but not shocking. They’d grown weary of reproving him for his immaturity and for the next few days were just polite enough not to treat him like the minor nuisance he was. When he announced he was leaving, they didn’t ask where he was going.

They knew he’d go to his sister’s. Angela had yet to tire of his shenanigans, seeing Jake as something of an adventurer. It wasn’t the first ticket she had to buy for him so that he could come home. He told her his latest story the first night he was there. They killed a bottle of Jim Beam by the end of which Jake was shamelessly blubbering away about the mess he’d made of things once again.

They didn’t speak another word of it until the night before he was about to leave six months later. Jake’s old friend Wes, another enabler in his life of bounding, had hooked him up with a job in far northern New Hampshire, tending bar at his uncle’s place. It was all the way up by the Canadian border in a town called Stockholm, as cold but a lot less exciting than its namesake in Sweden.

It was kind of perfect for Jake, somewhere to hide away, where he could bury his head and no one would

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jason graff

new jersey, usa

bother asking him to look up. He never planned on putting down roots, if it was going to happen it could’ve only been by accident in the kind of place not just anyone would want to visit, let alone live. He was trying to decide if he had enough cold weather gear to make it through the brutal winter up there when Angela poked her head in the guest room.

“We’ll leave at 8:30. Gives us plenty of time,” then with a sigh and a shake of her head she said, “Stockholm,” like it was a prison sentence.

“I can’t go back Boston,” Jake said. “Not after what I did. I can’t go back and face her or any of our friends.

They all know what an ass I am by now.”

“It’s not exactly the kind of thing a girl goes bragging to all of her friends about.”

“I may have told some people too.”

“I’m sure you did, little brother. You’d only be able to keep a secret that big from your family,” Angela said, sounding cross for the first time about the whole situation. “Just out of curiosity, who was the first person you told?”

“Brian,” Jake said, holding an old sweater up to his chest to see if it still fit, “but he wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“You told a bartender first?” she asked with a laugh and another, more rueful shake of her head. “I guess that makes sense for you.”

“I was drunk, I was confused,” he protested.

“I can only imagine.”

“It’s not my fault that bartenders make the best therapists,” he said. “Anyway, I can’t go back to Boston with the way I left any everything. I’d be humiliated to see any of them again.”

“How long will your exile last?” she asked.

It was eight years before he got back to Boston.

He hadn’t meant to stay away that long but met Brigid not long after moving up north. She came into the bar on his second night of work there to get her old man.

Other than her, maybe a dozen other women ever came in that place the whole eight years he worked there. The ones missing teeth just barely outnumbered the ones missing chromosomes, so Brigid stood out.

She was tall and lean with a rough-hewn tomboy like beauty that commanded the world in front of her.

“You’re the new poisoner they sent in to kill my father,” she said which made the situation awkward with her dad sleeping like the dead in a booth towards the back. Jake was happy to see her since it was closing time and he had no idea how to deal with Frank.

“He’s back here,” he said and led her to a booth lit

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Nazar Look 23

jason graff

new jersey, usa

a hellish red by the neon Narragansett Beer sign hanging above it.

“Don’t get cocky, he’s buried two bartenders before you came,” she said as she examined her old man’s prostrate form.

“You want a hand with him?” Jake asked.

“Get me a glass of ice water,” she said, picking his wool cap and leather gloves off the floor.

She poured the whole cup over Frank’s head. He sat right up like that was how he was used to being roused. Frank slicked his hair back and yawned. His breath was hot with whiskey fumes.

“Where are your keys?” she asked, squatting down to get to her father’s level.

“I got ‘em,” Jake said, jingling them. “He told me to hold on to them while he sobered up.”

“You listened, Dad,” she yelled sounding almost as excited as she was irritated.

She took them without thanking Jake and left. They went through that same scenario a few more times before she asked for his name. That night she stayed late and got drunk with her old man and Jake held on to both their keys. He lived above the bar so he had them both come upstairs to sleep on the floor. Much later that morning, she climbed into bed with him and they made love while Frank slept on the floor just a few feet away.

Soon, they were spending all of their time together.

Brigid was a nurse and only worked two days a week.

She started keeping an eye on her dad at the bar and listening to Jake. He told her all about his past and Cassie and everything. His openness impressed her.

She’d been with so many liars that it was refreshing to meet someone who copped so openly to being a fuckup.

When Frank died, Brigid took it hard at first. It wasn’t so much the suddenness that bothered her but the guilt she felt for being relieved that it’d finally happened. She was happy to have Jake around and he managed to be supportive by not trying too hard to be anything for the first time in his life. Soon after, they moved into his place above the bar.

Years passed and rather than grow restless by the routine, Jake took comfort in it. During the cold winters, he’d spend days without leaving the square little twostory where he lived and worked. The days when Brigid worked were the only ones he’d even count as long but she was always back before he closed the bar.

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Then one Thursday, she announced she was going to an all-day nursing seminar at Children’s Hospital in Boston on the following Friday. She asked Jake to come with her and spend the weekend there, telling him it would be kind of like the mini-vacation they’d always talked about taking. He agreed without really thinking of the shame he’d felt when he left there so suddenly eight years before.

“Maybe you’ll see some of your old friends?” she asked.

“See that neighborhood you used to live in?”

“I was thinking about that,” he said, though it hadn’t occurred to him until she mentioned it. “I’d like to see if Shotty’s is still going. I doubt anyone I know would still be there. That whole crowd’s got to be pushing forty if not past it. Bill Bill’s probably in his sixties by now.”

“Ah,” Brigid said, “they’ve probably gotten old and wise like you.”

“I’ve always been wise,” Jake said.

After he walked her from the subway stop to Children’s Hospital, Jake wandered around the city on foot. He pretended like he didn’t know where he was going but all the time circling the old neighborhood, coming to it in a great long loop. He walked past Fenway Park and then down towards the Boston University campus before doubling back, retracing a route he’d walked many times to cool off after one of his fights with Cassie.

Finally shortly after noon, he found himself at the door of Shotty’s with a feeling that was somewhere between surprise and dread. Hesitantly, he leaned on the door to open it. So much brighter and newer with Red Sox memorabilia covering the walls and a huge open kitchen where part of the bar used to be, it looked nothing like he remembered. It was hard to envision Bill Bill sitting at the bar or Brian behind it. He left without getting a drink, a first, and wished he’d never gone inside.

On his way back to Children’s, a bus stopped halfway through a crosswalk where Jake was waiting for the light to change. There in the window right before him was Cassie. She was older, fatter and looked worn down but he could tell it was her. She didn’t see him, trying instead to console the child sitting next to her.

Jake approached the bus and squinted through the dirty window at the pair, trying to tell if the kid looked anything like him. Just before it accelerated away, the boy tuned and faced Jake. All he could think when he saw the kid’s face was that eight years was too long to be gone.

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nicholas damion alexander

jamaica

http://open.salon.com/blog/nicholas_damion_alexander

Nicholas Damion Alexander is a Jamaican of mixed racial heritage. His works has been published and featured locally, regionally and internationally in such journals and anthologies as: Tongues of the ocean, sx salon, Angelfire, Cartier Street Review, Truml, The First Cut, So much things to say, Meditations on divine names, e-buffet, Squid Inc. and B-Gina.

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nicholas damion alexander

jamaica

http://open.salon.com/blog/nicholas_damion_alexander

Troy They were all men preoccupied with the fame that death would bring.

Honor for them was war and living through it; history the sweet thrill of their blood mingled with dust.

So they wrote their names in the sands of time, with the sword of generations.

Their spirits in a piece of steel passed down from father to son: that was the great honor of being a soldier of Troy, much deeper than love and more powerful than death.

Grey Monotone A steady drizzle swarms the district teeming down in droves.

Starts and stops...starts and stops until the horizon is white like a grudge and the locality silent like the grave; the birds have vacated the air.

A dog scours the yard for food enduring the wet wet for belly-full.

Grey monotone inhabits the peace as a strophic drizzle chimes roofs.

Light has deserted time; rain scampers like a child hurrying homethe woman sleeps in the soon-dark of 6 o'clock dreaming of a brighter tomorrow.

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nicholas damion alexander

jamaica

http://open.salon.com/blog/nicholas_damion_alexander

Old Paradox, New Verse A heavy mist rises out of the valley like gun smoke, rifling the air, setting off a time piece of timelessness.

The sound of dew dripping from leaves, but no dew felt.

This unmetered rural wetness that meets me most mornings ever since I've transported to this mystic realm.

This meditation, this poetry.

A thousand unspoken words inhabit these fat, yellow-green leaves; these long limbs.

These crooked Einstein branches.

The figure in the cane whose greetings each morning without language haunt me.

The sunless days and moonless nights are the old paradox. of my new verse.

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melina papadopoulos

ohio, usa

Melina Papadopoulos is from Ohio, USA. Her work has appeared in other publications, including the Adroit Journal, Bluestem, and Used Furniture.

Mermaid I used to be a mermaid every day.

I didn't have the flimsy play clothes, the sequined flipper with the emerald scales designed for swimming in and out of light, but I had at least two dozen bathing suits some of them with flowers, others with fish. I could never decide which to wear into my kiddie pool Atlantic so I ran an autonomy of eeny-meeny-miny-

She will be a full-time college student as of Fall 2012.

No, I do not remember the newness of my body with a navel that looked nostalgic without umbilical cord and long legs, which everybody on the playground knew were made of lead.

No, they were made of hydrogen peroxide and bubble baths.

This running is a different kind of slow, all skinned knees and healing and too afraid to be anything but it.

no.

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melina papadopoulos

ohio, usa

--Once I dreamed that my breasts first took shape in a draining bathtub. I didn't know what was happening to me that night and I didn't know any better in the morning.

I should have remembered to ask a monarch butterfly if metamorphosis lasts longer than a couple midnights with hours as empty as miscarriage wombs. You don't start noticing how far you've come along until you're forced to and, by then, it's more about surviving than it is about taking pride in your progress.

By the time every growth spurt has finished dragging nails and hammers through your joints, a full almanac of moons will have lactated. You'll see the milk on the chins of cherry blossoms, sparrows making love midair but it's all fun and games, a round of tag consisting of nothing but a quarrel about who is supposed to be it.

Last summer, it was the girl.

Now there are nests dangling from every tree branch, cradles built for risk takers. One chick too curious but too shy to ask its mother about wings died on a hiking trail right in front of a group of moaning day-campers. I had been holding a small hand. It trembled and left mine empty. When I looked down, I found little Megan pointing at the ground, "Is he dead? He's with God now."

All I could do was smile and nod in agreement, but now I wish I would have told this girl what a miracle she is.

Forget the newborns with eyes like prisms and first breaths like prophets, forget the babies who look God right in the eye and then smile like a cherub. We need more children who can ask questions and then answer them on their own, unafraid that they might be wrong and satisfied with their logic. Maybe if they wait patiently, someone will respond to unravel the euphemisms and blow down the stork's nest. It's all the truth, and nobody should be afraid of seeing the truth naked. Its thighs cellulitic in both sunlight and shadow. It has the frown lines, the eye bags from worrying so much that someone is going to lie for it once it is old enough to count the veins on its hands.

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Don't lie for it.

Don't lie for her.

She's through with growing.

She's dodged the bullet holes of osteoporosis. Now all she has to worry about is that spine of hers. It's not that it took long to grow, it's that it never grew uproot.

Its shoots were as timid and as poor in posture as any other plant new to the world.

If you take her to her grave right now, she'll ask to see the bag of the soil we'll put her under. If you take her to the beginning, she'll remain quiet from the finger-to-lips cue her mother gives from the stove because she'd always ask the most inappropriate questions in front of company.

Mother was getting sick of cleaning the coffee shockspray off the place mats.

The rule was no baby dolls at the table.

--I used to be a genie every Halloween until I realized that I'm getting too old for this. It's not cute anymore.

You can only go around stuffing training bras with glitter and wrapping paper for so long because nobody wants to see a body like this under construction. It's taped off and it's taped together. It's as old as it is new. God knows that I won't ever know the difference, but maybe that's why he bothers.

Maybe that's why on the seventh day, he said, "fuck it, I'll come back to it later."

He came back to it later and he was right on time. I hadn't broken like dawn yet; I was still the pink you are when you're new and young and too dumb to know any better but smart enough to form every bit of naivety into a question.

I said to him, "How old am I? How new am I?" He didn't answer me. I answered myself years later.

I finally stopped trying to sneak up on my birthday candles.

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mike berger

utah, usa

Good Books What is a book?

Do you really know?

We reach on the shelf and select a good book.

We take for granted what’s in our hands.

Is it ink marks on some thin pressed wood?

Or is the key to the human mind?

Stop and think how amazing a book is.

It is more than a repository of human knowledge.

A good book takes on a life of it own, as it persuade, motivates and even depresses What separates men from animals; the ability to use signs and symbols.

The apotheosis of that miraculous ability is found in a good book. What comes better than munching on an apple, reading a good book in the shade of a tree.

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mike berger

utah, usa

Space Thing The creature, eight feet tall.

Colored bright Vermillion; looks like a scarecrow.

Didn't walk, it flapped.

Two cantaloupe eyes; vertical mouth. Scaly like our rotten fish and smelled just as bad.

High-pitched mechanical voice; runs through a translator.

Paused in the wrong places.

"Come to our planet for two years."

"As part of a cultural exchange" I asked.

"No," it replied.

"I am a recruiter for Wal Mart.

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mike berger

utah, usa

Creature from the Putrid Bog Rumor has it, a dastardly villain took refuge in the putrid bog.

Law man searched everywhere, but he wasn't to be found.

They say, the bog swallowed him up. On moonless nights, he rises from the murk. You know his there, you can smell him a mile away.

The tale is told that he wears a surly smile and has a sinister laugh. He moves with the grace of a constipated ape as he wends his way into town.

Townsfolk hide behind locked doors as he makes his way to Main Street. They say he is looking for sleeping policemen to gobble up; finding none, he stops at the all-night deli and orders a Reuben sandwich and a diet coke.

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john m. marshall

north carolina, usa

Principal & Founder - Epiphany Arts; Cape Fear Poetry Society Editor: Cape Fear Poetry Society; Epiphany Arts; Epiphany Press

Dirge for Neda (Dedicated to Neda Agha Soltan) She is in the midst of a vast darkness, A black tide, A malignant flood.

Torrid waters and murky clouds Cover her eyes, her soul.

All is rain, Heavy rain.

The sky is bleeding.

Earthen creatures move without sound, Without reason through a sea of red.

Is Love dead?

Surely, it seems; For what are mouths without words, Words without ears But a funeral mass?

The thief of innocence is about.

It clefts the fragile feet of children And gives a daystar the breath of night.

The serpent bites its tail, Bites its tongue; The bride of Spring drowns in a hail of bullets.

This is fear full-blown, The synthesis of a nightmare, A dusky mirror that drives the weary painter To blindness.

It is a bitter root, A poisonous flower; And its time of treason has turned the golden hour Into rust.

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Poetry Publications - U.S. Tribal Soul Kitchen, Beautiful Nuance, Wormwood, Poetry Motel, Charlotte Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, Alpha Beat Soup, Coastal Plains Poetry Review, Orphic Lute, IngĂŠnue, Bouillabaisse, Earthwise, Innisfree, Word Salad, Locust Magazine, King David, Whatever Is Pure, Universal Personality, Quill & Ink, Bone River Cantata, The Lyricist Campbell University, The Cairn - St. Andrews College, ATD Bulletin - Federal Aviation Administration, Dark Moon Rising, Poetic Rainbows, Ariga, Foliate Oak, Cross Way Publications, Caffeine Destiny, Ujamaa, Swans Commentary, Penwood Review, Poetic Voices, Autumn Leaves, Underground Window, The Horror Zine, The Star News, Aphelion Magazine, New Hanover County Public Library, Celtic Radio, Aphelion Poetry Publications - Other Countries Germination - Canada; Panda Poetry; - Wales, Flowing Mist - Romania; Open Wide - Liverpool, England; Mageworld - London, England; Poetry, Songs and Writers of Scotland - Scotland; Cyclamens and Swords - Israel; Poetica Magazine Israel Short Story Publications Germination C a n a d a ; Tintota Australia; Word Salad U.S.; AfterDinner -

U.S.

Writing Awards: 1992- Charles A. Shull AwardNC Poetry Society 1993- Caldwell W. Nixon, Jr. Award- NC Poetry Society 1994- North Carolina Poet Laureate Award- NC Poetry Society 1994- Charles A. Shull Award- NC Poetry Society 1995- Charles A. Shull Award- NC Poetry Society 2004- Poets' Choice Award- Beautiful Nuance Magazine

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andy flatt

kent, united kingdom

My Little Piece of Spring In the midst of concrete jungle A world bedecked in grey, April holds no expectation, Of nature's cabaret.

But in my bleak apartment, I savour nature's powers, For I possess a window box, Alive with bright spring flowers.

In the midst of the joyless ghetto My little pansies sing, Their riotous colour celebrate The coming of the spring. .

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Andy lives with his two rescue Greyhounds, Jazz and Layla, in the county of Kent, known as the garden of England.

Currently he is working as a home tutor, with children of all ages, to develop their literacy and numeracy skills. In his spare time, when he is not indulging in his passion for Argentine Tango, he writes poetry, for both adults and children, which he finds extremely enjoyable.

His favourite poets range from the sublime to the ridiculous, include Andrew Marvell, Robert Frost and Spike Milligan.

He writes poetry on whatever subject takes his fancy and, while it is not profound, he hopes to make people smile.

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jenean mcbrearty

kentucky, usa

jenean-mcbrearty.com

Jenean McBrearty is a graduate of San Diego State University, and former community college instructor who taught Political Science and Sociology at military installations and Des Moines Area Community College.

She received the EKU English Department's Award for Graduate Non-fiction (2011), and has been published in Main Street Rag Anthology -Altered States, Wherever It Pleases, Danse Macabre, bioStories, Cobalt Review, and Black Lantern, among others.

Her website is: Jenean-McBrearty.com

Interview TM: Jenean, you taught Political Science and Sociology, and now you are writing all the time.

When did you start writing?

Jenean McBrearty: I started writing in 5th grade. I won a poetry contest. I worked on the school paper in Middle and High School. As a student, I wrote nonfiction stuff - two MA theses. But then I took a screen writing class, and realized the format allowed for telling stories very quickly. To this day, I approach writing fiction as writing a screenplay just to get the basics of the story - plot, main character - on paper.

TM: Who influenced you, and how?

Jenean McBrearty: I grew up very isolated and read grown-up stuff early on. I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when I was about ten years old. But it was the hours I spent at the movies that influenced me the most. No one paid much attention to me, so I didn't have filters or censors. Things like pacing and dialogue I absorbed by osmosis. As for people, my greatest influences have been George Washington and Winston Churchill: they never, never, never, never gave up.

TM: What is the best part of being a writer?

Jenean McBrearty: The best part of being a writer is being read! I wrote for and edited a small desert town newspaper for a while and having people stop me on the street and tell me they thought such and such an article was good was thrilling. After that, the best part is being omnipotent on the page. I play God. Write and rewrite history, direct people's lives and exercise power.

If I wasn't a writer, I'd be a dictator.

TM: Is writing a book a very long process preceded by much preparation?

Jenean McBrearty: For me, writing a book, or flash fiction, is all about the story. Some stories seem to write themselves because I already have command of the facts, while others need lots of research depending on how complicated the story gets. I finished The Ninth Circle detective novel in six months, while Soulprice, a WWII novel, has been under construction for over twenty years even though I know a heck a lot more about war than detectives. As for preparation, life experience is the greatest preparation.

TM: What are the factors that activate you to be more creative?

Jenean McBrearty: I watch a lot of news and

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jenean mcbrearty

kentucky, usa

jenean-mcbrearty.com documentaries. History and current events are great activators. 9/11 inspired me to write Helmut Wolf, a novel that addresses clash of cultures issues. I keep reading non-fiction books about things I want to know more about - I'm reading The Age of Insight by Eric Kandel because I want to know more about the late 19th-early 20th century and psychology's influence on art.

TM: How have you handled the business side of being a writer?

Jenean McBrearty: With great admiration for business majors! I understand why successful writers get agents...or why writers get successful because they get agents. Like a good bureaucrat, however, I muddle through. If I ever make any money, I'll get an accountant and an agent.

TM: Do you have a blog or a personal website?

Jenean McBrearty: Yes. I have a website: JeneanMcBrearty.com. I don't blog in the everyday sense窶的 barely get to my facebook page once a week. But, if readers want to contact me, my e-mail address is on the website, and I'm good about responding to questions and comments.

TM: What benefits has your website been to you as a writer and do you think it is important for a writer to have one? Why? Jenean McBrearty: So far, I haven't seen much benefit from the website. Every writer is expected to have one, and, should I become better known, it will be an asset. I want to correspond with readers, and that communication is made easier with a designated site. I want a place where people can come to get a taste of what I've written and hopefully buy a book or two.

Jenean McBrearty: I do think electronic communication avenues - facebook, twitter, blogs, etc are getting to be mundane. Do I really want to know when people are going to bed and what they're having for dinner every night? No.

words or less. On the other hand, the explosion of online venues gives writers of all genres and styles access to readers they wouldn't ordinarily have. The turnaround time for writers and editors is spectacular.

Material can be fresh and respond to current events in a way traditional formats couldn't. Like everything else important in life, there are trade-offs and good-bad points that have to navigated and negotiated rather than decided.

TM: What other interests do you have besides writing?

Jenean McBrearty: Attending classes. I'm enrolled in an Instructional Design Certificate program to develop better ways of delivering on-line education; in the Fall I'm starting a Master's in Public Administration program. I'm also interested in sex, but it's a tough job finding able-bodied men over fifty who are interested in the Top Ten Tank Battles of WWII. TM: What is your latest work about and where are you going to publish it?

Jenean McBrearty: My latest project is finishing the last chapter of a novel entitled Raphael Redcloak: Guardian of the Arts. It's the story of Raphael Sanzio's rise from Messenger to Guardian in a spirit world inhabited by the greatest artists, archetypes, and literary characters of all time. Torn between his vow to his protﾃｩgﾃｩ and the love of fair Bianca, he learns that greater love than this, no man has, that he gives up his death for the soul of another. Of course, I'd like to have it published by a large commercial house, but...if not, then a small press or serialized on-line. It'll make one hell of a good movie!

TM: What are your writing goals for this year?

Jenean McBrearty: I want people to read my stories and say, "Dang. That was cool." It may not happen this year, but I'm going to keep writing and get my stories out there to anyone who'll give me a few minutes of his time. And I want to sell my novel.

TM: What is your opinion about the online journals?

Jenean McBrearty: Without a doubt, on-line publications are here to stay. It's difficult to publish longer pieces; it's difficult to tell literary stories in 500

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w a S

, l bo

J

! n a

e n e

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jenean mcbrearty

kentucky, usa

jenean-mcbrearty.com

Another Historical Tragedy The portrait of 22-year-old Neville Beaverton, Lord Beaverton's firstborn, hung in the Blue Room, the Lord's favorite room in the Beaverton's London residence. Lord Beaverton spent most of his time there, sifting through the family's cachet of legal documents, reading pages of diary entries from round-heeled men folk and long-suffering spinsters, and reconstructing as best he could the Beaverton family legacy that seem to read more like a rogue's rap sheet than illustrious saga.

The more research Beaverton did, the Neville's canvass presence seemed to him. often. Amelia Beaverton warned him not to about in old newspapers and journals, worst, because he might discover events best left undisturbed.

more real They spoke go mucking fearing the and people

"How can I understand Neville's execution, unless I understand what forces drove him to the scaffold?" he said to Amelia to justify his absence from her and the lives of his other three children.

"Well, go on then, but be quick about it," she said, resigned to becoming a widow to inquiry. It was a fate that befell many middle-aged women whose husbands survived their dearest child's death. There was nothing quick about melancholy disguised as the quest for understanding. The hanging of Neville's portrait in the Blue Room made it inevitable that her "Bevy" was just as tragically departed from her as her "Nevy".

Still, that didn't explain why he'd chosen the royal hunting lodge to wreak havoc. There was a guest list.

And his German wasn't that good. And who was the dark-bearded man who was arrested with him at the border and choked to death in his jail cell? It seemed to Beavy he would never find the answers.

Neville's wife, Christiene, answered Lord Beaverton's most important question, however, in 1948 when she produced the evidence he'd been searching for thirtyfive years: the letter from Tsar Ferdinand ending his acquaintance with Nevy.

"Life is so unbearably trite," Lord Beaverton said. He folded the letter and returned it to the envelope that bore the Imperial Seal of the Romanovs. "I'd hoped to learn Nevy'd caught the American passion for democracy."

"Perhaps he did. Did you ever ask Neville why he poisoned those people?" Christiene said when she put the envelope in her black sequined handbag. She'd worn nothing but black since the hanging. Even her underwear was black, Lord Beaverton discovered.

"It appeared to be an unseemly question given his avowal of innocence," Lord Beaverton said.

"I understand," she said, "it's the same reason I never asked him why he went to Capri in the first place. We were polite to each other, if nothing else."

Sequestered upstairs, Beavy mixed a daily cocktail of curiosity and regret to quench his guilt. There must be a reason Neville poisoned thirteen people at a hunting lodge near Sarajevo, and Bevy fearfully suspected he was a fair portion of that reason. Political confusion, he'd been warned by Randolph Churchill, isn't good for a young man with Neville's "temperament".

"And well-trained," Lord Beaverton said. "As the exiled Tsar said: ... pride is an important item in the making of a monarch...we're taught the avoidance of all outward signs of emotion. The main thing in life is to support any condition of bodily or spiritual exile with dignity. If one sups with sorrow, one need not invite the world to see you eat."

Churchill's words had been too subtle for Lord Beaverton. Only after Nevy returned from Capri, speaking acidly of his meeting with Tsar Ferdinand, was it clear that Nevy had thrown his lot in with the Bulgarian Independence Movement and succumbed to other vices that ended in his determination to destroy monarchy and sanity in the world. Bevy only traveled to Capri once or twice a year, and then only in disguise.

Nevy was such a wilde boy.

Lord Beaverton's sorrow, looking back as he often did to a more dignified era, was that he'd lost his wife and other three children to his long excursion into the Blue Room and to the London blitz. There was nothing left for him to do but move to Capri now that there was no one to care what he wore.

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edmund spencer Travels in Circassia, Krim Tartary, &c. (I) LETTER I Steam-Packet from Vienna to Pest-Passengers – Captain - Scenery on the Danube Pleasures of Travelling

by Steam - Arrival at Presburg Presburg, April 5th, 1836.

MY DEAR FRIEND, I am sure you will agree with me in thinking, that among the various modern discoveries which have had their origin in British genius, none is fraught with more important consequences to the welfare of mankind than the steam engine, none since the invention of printing more likely, ay, more certain, to prove the means of diffusing knowledge and civilization over those regions of the globe, where ignorance and fanaticism chain down the intellect of man.

Whatever direction the tide of improvement may ultimately take, its first course appears to be towards those lands watered by the Danube, the Euxine, and the Bosphorus. Here we already behold some of the fairest countries of our hemisphere called into a new state of existence, and attracting the attention of the whole commercial and political world.

These are the countries I am now about to explore,countries rendered, at present, so peculiarly interesting by the novel position in which the events of the last few years have placed them; and I only hope I may be able to contribute, if not to your extensive fund of information and geographical knowledge, at least in some degree to your amusement.

We have certainly to thank that industrious traveller, Mr. Quin, for much information respecting the steam navigation of the Danube. It however happened, unfortunately, that he journeyed down the river at a time when the works for improving the

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navigation were in their infancy, and in the autumn of a peculiarly dry season. Hence, he experienced many difficulties in the prosecution of his voyage, owing to a deficiency of water and other obstructions. Besides, his tour only extended from Presburg to Wallachia: thus, the whole of the Lower Danube to the Black Sea remained a blank, so far as regarded its navigation by steam. Fate, however, favoured me with a happier combination of circumstances. I arrived at Vienna early in the spring, when the Danube was swollen by the melting of the snows on the mountains, which induced the directors of the steam navigation to send their first boat, the Nador, direct from Vienna; for the river, after leaving that city, is so shallow during the summer, that no vessel, even of moderate burden, can come higher than Presburg. This inconvenience, I understand, will soon be remedied, as works are in progress for deepening the bed of the river; and a canal is now excavating, intended to unite Vienna with the great navigable arm of the Danube, distant about a league.

A less attractive object would have sufficed to draw crowds of the wonder-loving population of this gay metropolis; but so novel an occurrence as the departure of the first steamboat from Vienna, set half its inhabitants in motion, and so early as four in the morning, I found the road crowded with carriages, equestrians, and pedestrians. When our little vessel dashed gaily forward, the aspect of thousands of spectators, cheering us with loud vivats, not only presented a very animated picture, but gave a hope that the enterprise would ultimately prove a profitable speculation to the company.

There could not have been less than from two to three hundred persons on board : the arrangements for accommodation, I thought, were not so good as those in the Rhenish steam-vessels, and some of the persons objected to the high charges for refreshment ; and when we take into account the low price of provisions in this part of the continent, perhaps they did not complain without reason : still, to balance this, the fares were moderate, that in the chief cabin being no more than twelves florins from Vienna to Pest,-about a pound sterling.

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edmund spencer The national characteristics of our party were not, as you might have expected, either striking, interesting, or novel ; indeed I observed but little difference in their manners, customs, and costume from those of our countrymen on board a Thames steamer ; and assuredly, if this Augustan age should continue a few years longer, and the facilities for travelling go on increasing, the distinctive national features of Europe will be obliterated altogether, and we shall appear as if belonging to the same family.

The majority consisted of belles and beaux from Vienna, who had come on a voyage of experiment as to the pleasure of travelling by steam, which they soon found to be sadly chastised by fear. On learning, however, that two Englishmen were on board, (what steam boat in any part of the globe is without them?) apprehension overcame timidity, and several of the fair ones came in groupes to demand of Mr. Newton and myself, if any probability existed of an explosion; evidently taking it for granted, that a Briton possessed some intuitive faculty of descrying at a distance any peril that might threaten a steam-boat. When we assured them no danger existed, save in their own imagination, it was apparently regarded as nothing less than the response of an oracle.

We had also several Hungarians on their way to the races at Pest, which were to commence in a few days. The physical line of demarcation between them and the Austrians, rendered it impossible to doubt their identity, even for a moment; the Asiatic blood of the one showed itself in their fiery eyes, dark hair, light elastic forms, and restless demeanour; while the quiet pale blonde Austrian appeared good nature and content personified. In the inhabitants of the second cabin I found far more variety and nationality than among their aristocratic neighbours. Here were encamped, around pyramids of bandboxes, motley tribes of Tyroleans, Styrians, Moravians, and Bohemians, together with Poles and Jewish traders on their way to the fair at Pest; intermingled with dandy shopmen and smart grisettes from the elegant metropolis of Austria, who evidently regarded themselves with as much self-complacency as they bestowed contempt upon the gaudy dresses and vulgar tournure of their provincial fellow-travellers. (to be continued)

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aziz amet

(ametov)

Photoshop - Djurdjur Waterfall, Crimea

crimea (ukraine)

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Ozbek Han Mosque, Crimea (built in 1314) Photo by Aziz Amet (Ametov)

WWW.QHA.COM.UA