INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
Lana Bella
Hongri Yuan
Lyn Lifshin
Duane Locke
Elisavietta Ritchie
Michelle Bailat-Jones
Fahredin Shehu
Laszlo Slomovits
Andy N
Alex Ferde
Lekan Alesh
Michael Lee Johnson
Running Cub
Ali Znaidi
Silvia Scheibli
Robert Nisbet
Richard Gartee
Amit Parmessur
Jennifer Burd
Paul B. Roth
Sanjeev Sethi
Keith Moul
Arjun Dahal
Alan Britt
Richard Lynch
Fred Wolven
Eddie Awusi
Joanie Freeman
Hongri Yuan
Amit Shankar Saha
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:
Do you still wonder, why I walk and ponder,
With a carefree downcast spirit,
When you can see and read the handwriting,
crafted in the pinnacles of wafting cheerless
fate of the Niger delta?
Don't you see the polluted smiles
of my evanescent homestead,
contaminated with sneer and indifference
And indignantly stagnant progress:
revulsive, revolting and provoking?
Even if you are daft and blind to read
and perceive the signs that are all over
the stifling and strangulating air.
The forest trees are bowing.
The earth is shaved bald and leaveless.
The world pulsates and quakes in our heartbeats,
As the fires of Shell petroleum company,
Blithely bristled into the hemisphere.
The seasons comes and goes,
Beaten and pillaged by oil spillages,
Leaving bountiful hunger in our hands,
And draught in our sore throats.
Do you still wonder, why I walk and ponder,
With a carefree downcast spirit,
When you can see and read the handwriting,
crafted in the pinnacles of wafting cheerless
fate of the Niger delta?
I WISH THEY UNDERSTAND WHY WE CRY
It's a cold hell in here,
with this haunting gas flaring,
Full of surprising thorns:
Sizzling and killing the world in my palms -
and choking vegetations -
In aqua ebb and flow,
Gasping moody muddy staleness.
Have you seen the children lately,
With oil cursed kwashiorkor jespers,
Tiny sickly legs like grasshopper's,
Pregnant eyes in fast retreat,
Into fleshless sockets of skeletal skulls:
They are the haunted maps of our creeks.
The nights are begging to see daybreak,
And daylight is in haste to hug bed-time song.
Serenity and serendipity:
Two flightless flock of a feather,
Scampered frightfully into confines of mirage,
Always sighted but never manifesting.
And it is a cold hell in here.
MY HEART SCREAMS IN GOLD PLAITED PHARYNX
My heart screams in gold plaited pharynx
In helios of doggedly striking cymbals
Steeply giving in to exotic cries
Of the ghastly deflowered flora of the deltas
In muted slit of moaning fiona
Opobo; Gbaramatu; Brass; Okrika:
How many more ruptured landscapes
are my outcry partners
In this spectrum of brutality
Sinking into mutilating tools
Of crude oil explorations.
For them, my heart has continually screamed
In gold plaited pharynx
Eddie Awusi, Benin City, Edo State, Nigeria