Al-Khemia Poetica: A Women's Arts and Writing Journal

Tuesday, August 23, 2022

Tuesday, August 23, 2022: Debbie Collins' "Richmond, Monday Morning 6 AM"

The Saint Francis Center is hopping this morning,

people lined up all jive and jest

the addicts and drunks and misfits

file in and out, raw around the edges

after a weekend of bingeing

the guy in the wheelchair out front

seems to be singing an opera tune,

the high notes run away from him on little feet,

dancing down the block

the geraniums in their pots flanking the doors

wilt from abuse, their dirt used for more and more

cigarette butts, an urban ashtray

above the city din, the air ringing with

the music of trash cans being thrown around,

the opera singer's aria rises and floats

some visitors sit outside, cardboard signs

and plastic cups arranged before them --

the Center staff tries to lure them back in,

home of rancid coffee and stale platitudes

but most go back out into the world of dirty sidewalks,

dirty asphalt, rushing toward the pop and fire

of a needle, the sweet smell of rot at the bottom of a bottle

they are the kings and queens of the street, the royalty

of the city, all tattered robes and tragic smiles

the week stretches out like a tangled ribbon before them,

almost impossible to unravel

Debbie Collins lives and writes in Richmond, Virginia. She has been published in many print and online journals including The Wild Word, The Lake, and Third Wednesday, among others. Her first chapbook, He Says I’m Fierce, was published in 2021 by Finishing Line Press. She lives in Richmond’s Northside with her husband Jonathan and their dog Billy, Billy being the subject of many haiku.

Saturday, August 20, 2022

Saturday, August 20, 2022: Three Works of Art by Giorgia Pavlidou

Bio: Originally trained in clinical psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, Giorgia Pavlidou is a Greek-born American writer and painter intermittently living in Greece and the US. She received her MA in Urdu literature from Lucknow University, India and her MFA in Fiction from MMU Manchester, UK, (though her meetings with visionary LA poet-philosopher Will Alexander have been and still are exceedingly more impactful). Her work has recently appeared in such places as Caesura, Lotus-Eater, Zoetic Press, Maintenant Journal of Dada Writing and Art, Puerto del Sol and Entropy. Trainwreck Press (trainwreckpress.com) launched her chapbook inside the black hornet’s mind-tunnel in 2021. Ireland-based Strukturriss Magazine selected her as the featured visual artist of their January 2022 issue 3.1. She’s an editor of SULΦUR online literary magazine. Additionally, her book of poems and paintings, “Haunted by the Living – Fed by the Dead,” is forthcoming with Anvil Tongue Books, and she'll be "featured femme artist and poet" of Clockwise Cat Magazine's 2022 spring edition. Before devoting herself full-time to painting and writing, she worked as a clinical psychotherapist for about ten years.

Tuesday, August 16, 2022

Tuesday, August 16, 2022: Theresa C. Gaynord's poem "Frailty’s Baggage~Channeling Jim Morrison"

There is no grief in language

when you’re stricken, cast down,

changes silhouette past silence

pausing sullenly through the

echoing corridors of my mind.

Torn posters without poetry,

without song, without love,

face hopes and fears in the mirrors

of pain; and his sex hangs unhidden,

and his metal heart sweeps through

abandoned philosophy as the curtain

closes on the sensual train.

I want repetition of song, recollection

in truth; to create from the oblique,

denying the erotic, an obeisance to

the power it steals from those of us

who can’t find anything to live for,

but everything to die for. Cast not your

demons of treachery, tears, anger, and

betrayal on me; the elevator is rising.

There’s fumbled endorphins offered

up as a cocktail with some really good

whiskey and meth cocaine. Smell the

lily and the rose,

let the bricks soften to deep greens,

let God speak austere though vacant

fields while you grow stillborn

through drugs so sweet. Let the

suicide take on it’s own craft and magic,

as daylight comes and a stranger’s face

brings forgiveness; blooming, blooming,

in the scent of your sweet blood. Your rib

is gone, son of Adam and He shall

have her heart; lowered lids expand as

they rise in total annihilation. Tick tock.

White roses growing in the corner,

lilies dead on the sidewalk.

Theresa C. Gaynord is a former elementary school teacher turned writer/published author. Her two horror narrative poetry collections are available on Amazon, The Spiritist and Rum Runners and Pirate Saints-Claria-The Birth of the Demon Fish.

Tuesday, August 9, 2022

Tuesday, August 9, 2022: Jan Steckel's poem "Queen of Sheba Market"

Queen of Sheba Market

In the turquoise-painted bodega in Samaná,

you could get enough beans for one meal,

a dollop of tomato sauce, a pinch of cilantro,

a piece of an onion. Everything aliquoted down

to the atomic amount, the very smallest portion

that could be priced.

Because who had enough money for the whole can

of tomato sauce, the whole onion, the whole pound of beans?

You could get two aspirin folded into a piece of brown paper.

You could get the news of just that day,

told to you in snatches of broken narrative,

overheard, secondhand.

In the hot-pink hand-painted bodega in Oakland,

you could get a whole can of beans already cooked

and seasoned. You could get a frozen pizza

and a Dos XX or a Modelo Negro or a cold Pepsi

or a dozen different brands of filtered cigarettes.

You could get pulled out of the bodeguita by a man,

who took the stroller from you with the kid in it

and wheeled it calmly to the child’s grandfather,

who took the baby inside the apartment building,

while the man returned just as calmly and began hitting

you methodically, in a business-like way,

until you were dripping in tears and blood,

and you would both have disappeared

before the police called by the white woman arrived.

There are bright bodegas everywhere.

There are pale-skinned women calling the police

but too afraid to get out of their cars

everywhere.

Jan Steckel’s book Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist Press, 2018) won Rainbow Awards for LGBT Poetry and Best Bisexual Book. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards.

Friday, August 5, 2022

Al-Khemia Poetica: A Women's Arts and Writing Journal is Now Registered With the Library of Congress

Today, I'm EXCITED to announce that Al-Khemia Poetica: A Women's Art and Writing Journal is now listed as an official periodical with the Library of Congress.

Al-Khemia Poetica has been intermittently publishing quality work since 2011. But the pandemic, and women's issues, (for all who identify as female), or lack of basic respect for them, have inspired me to take Al-Khemia in a focused direction that I believe is necessary, now, more than ever.

My thanks to all who have, and will continue, to extend the privilege of sharing their work with the world. As you can tell, my cat Prince Jules, First of His Name, is so thrilled when I shared the news... internally, of course. :) And don't forget to send us your best work. We eagerly await what will be coming to our inbox.

Gratefully,

Marie C Lecrivain

Friday, August 5, 2022: Marjorie R Becker's poems "In Bryon Where the Fruit Came From", and "Word of Dawn's Provisions Came Around"

In Byron Where the Fruit Came From

He said they treat you like a store

front brimming ripe with Christmas and

I, so Jewish in my ways and play

could only laugh the ground, the sound

that I depended on because I lived

and farmed a tiny bit of Byron, Georgia earth

my people left me. I owned a hut,

I won the keys to Sammy’s car

because, he said, I want to give you

wheels to blast away each time

they say such keen mistaken things. And

I, I wondered why he wanted then, again

to share my harmonies, my backyard

range of food I gave away to people

who arrived in times of hungry need

for all the fruits and greens we picked

and made into a sort of somehow

ripening.

Word of Dawn’s Provisions Came Around

The fruit itself, the wayward plums believed

their gifts adrift through dawn’s experience until

my great aunt played her violin and summoned

unsung notes askew, the naked notes themselves

believed they still conceived, ensure the violin

of dawn among the plums, the cantaloupe, the wild

experience of color, calm adrift, proclaimed the fruit

itself, those onetime plums believed, ensured their

colors shared the open dawn, the porch itself

asunder when we women of the Downtown Purple

Pawn arrived with hammers’ ripe experience.

The light delivered, its dawn belonged to us as we

began the song of plums asunder, plundered, too, tu

we, we women held the hammers fast, reprieved, restored

the wilderness of naked notes, of true belief

in wild astray, the sudden pie, the kinds of open food,

of treat that dawn’s experience, that naked need for

touch, for taste asunder that the plums themselves had

hoped that dearly dawn, that evening too, to ponder.

“I hold a Yale doctorate in Latin American gendered and cultural history and am the author of the prize-winning historical monograph Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution (UC Press, 1996), the forthcoming Dancing on the Sun Stone: Mexican Women and the Gendered Politics of Octavio Paz (University of New Mexico Press, 2022,) and the three poetry collections, Body Bach (2000,) Glass Piano/Piano Glass (2005,) and The Macon Sex School: Songs of Tenderness and Resistance (2020,) all from Tebot Bach. I have received an array of awards and am a professor of Latin American history and English at USC.”

Tuesday, August 2, 2022

Tuesday, August 2, 2022: Allison Grayhurst's poem "Poet"

Poet

My breath and blood,

my spiritual soldier,

death expresses itself

then ends to find another muse.

Hold me in your form,

unoffended, know I am

capable of true choice,

planting colours before unseen.

My last call, I am withdrawing,

weakening, biting a bitter morsel.

Darkness is a hymn, infiltrating

my subconscious.

I will take the globe and smash the sphere

my boundless exemplary love, lover

of the embracing midnight, star light and roses.

I have no customs I am determined to keep.

I will give up all my rituals, my summer garden

to walk again, with you, on fire.

Allison Grayhurst is a member of the League of Canadian Poets. Five times nominated for “Best of the Net,” she has over 1,300 poems published in over 500 international journals. She has 25 published books of poetry and six chapbooks. She lives in Toronto with her family. She also sculpts, working with clay. Collaborating with Allison Grayhurst on the lyrics, Vancouver-based singer/songwriter/musician Diane Barbarash has transformed eight of Allison Grayhurst’s poems into songs, creating a full album entitled River – Songs from the poetry of Allison Grayhurst, released in 2017.