INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
Ali Znaidi
Silvia Scheibli
Richard Gartee
Deji Adesoye
Shutta Crum
Solomon Musa Haruna
Alan Britt
Fahredin Shehu
Laszlo Slomovits
Robert Nisbet
Gale Acuff
Rekha Valliappan
Fred Wolven
Aneek Chatterjee
Alex Ferde
Michael Lee Johnson
Jennifer Burd
Running Cub
Duane Locke
Ann Arbor Review
is an independent
International Journal & ezine
Copyright (c) 2020
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 53 years all together....
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staff:
Francis Ferde
Silver Grey Fox
Running Cub
Fred Wolven
Submissions via e-mail:
SONNET: REALITY X-RAYED
Nothing is real.
Reality is a mixture of poisons.
We seem to be
pseudo semicolons because
colons and
periods are on the verge of extinction.
Life is but a
quest. Life is a series of quests wasted.
But how is
reality being generated?
—Generation
after generation we only float
on an infinite
stream of losses and frustration:
Just fake
jouissance, and kitsch chocolate.
Fake news and
avatar selfies. {Also wikihow
instructions on
dating and fashion tips}.
Shades of grey
no longer hold. Are there
still rites of
passage? Anyway, prom dates
still hold
hands, although everything right now
emerges from
glitzy cyber bazars and viral myths.
SONNET IN WHICH SCARS WEAR US LIKE FLIES
There are scars
everywhere. Still, it’s better
to have scars
than having nothing at all.
Scars wear us,
hence we live by addition.
The reason
things add up is because scars
keep developing.
Scars wear us like hungry
flies on a piece
of rotten marrow. Scars wear
us like unsaid
poems hunkering beneath our skins.
Although scars
look like silent words budding
on the cusp of a
nymph’s lip, they always mesh
like cogs to
satisfy the palimpsest of our bodies.
—A thing to
remember, even when we have
Alzheimer's.
From now on, who is still scared
from
scars?—Those epitaphs carved on our bodies
—Those preludes
to a world of our own composition.
SONNET IN WHICH THE INSIDE WAS DARK
The inside was
dark. Thus dark things inside
would look
larger than the dark sky because of
proximity.
Sinking into imagination with closed
eyes is a bit
risky. Sometimes, solitude (inside the
dark) is better
than walking in a street full of pitfalls
and trash. The
crow’s caws and the owl’s screeches
only blossom in
the dark. Life would be so much
frustrating
without the existence of night & what
is the night
without silence? A thousand silent words
make graffiti
and graffiti give meaning to life. Fireflies
were climbing
through my body in the dark. The
graffitied walls
of my room were pouring over the edge
of silence.
Words were the only things that glitter. Still
fireflies were
throwing firecrackers at each other, at me...
Ali Znaidi, Redeyef, Gafsa, Tunisia