INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
Deji Adesoye
Changming Yuan
Violeta Allmuca
Beppe Costa
Engjell I. Berisha
Narendra Kumar Arya
Akwu Sunday Victor
Michelle Bailat-Jones
Laszlo Slomovits
Stefania Battistella
Agron Shele
Lana Bella
Fahredin Shehu
Alan Britt
Silvia Scheibli
Shutta Crum
Running Cub
Alex Ferde
Irsa Ruci
Jennifer Burd
Paul B. Roth
Richard Gartee
Elisavietta Ritchie
Peycho Kanev
Helen Gyigya
Amit Parmessur
Sneha Subramanian Kanta
Robert Nisbet
Jeton Kelmendi
Duane Locke
Richard Lynch
Jean McNerney
Fred Wolven
Ann Arbor Review
is an independent
International Journal & ezine
Copyright (c) 2017
Francis Ferde
All rights revert back to each poet.
--editor / Southeastern Florida
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AAR history note: in print 1967 - 1980. Irregular publications 1980 - 2004. As ezine 2004 - present. Most of 48 years all together....
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staff:
Francis Ferde
Silver Grey Fox
Running Cub
Fred Wolven
Submissions via e-mail:
DEAR GOD, DEAR INTELLIGENCE
I'm not a bomb
I'm not a killed child,
I'm not Hamas and not Israel
but I'm not even Sudan and Mali
Sirya and Lebanon
not even Hutu or Tutsi
not to speak of infibulation
I'm not even that
I'm not mutilated limbs and even diseases
and even aspirin that would be enough to heal
much less I'm not the conception that prohibits it
and that which authorizing hunger, flies and swollen bellies.
I'm not Islam nor Christianity
I'm not the Crusades and are not Egyptians
I'm not a slave, neither a witch nor a sorcerer
I'm not a bunker
or a concentration camp
I'm not a prison or a mortar.
I'm not a gun, a rifle or stone thrown
even the acid on the face.
I'm not even a missile in the head of an hospital
I'm not an ambulance
hurtling only departing and never when it returns
I'm not a corrupt head of state
nor an extremist party to one side or the other
not even a citizen who fills the mouth with words
without knowing from where they come from
I'm neither white nor black
not even the Pope or Muhammad
I'm not Buddha and every name has ever had
this conception and its movement.
I'm not stupid and I'm not, however, very clever
but I know for certain that I'm not a weeping mother
because she's no longer a mother
I'm not the madness of man
and above all, I'm not all of his conceptions.
I know everything I'm not
but, excluding this, can not be anything other
than what I am.
How do you put it all into practice
Dear God, dear Intelligence?
Stefania Battistella, Rome, Italy
Translator: Jack Hirschman, San Francisco, California