Al-Khemia Poetica: A Women's Arts and Writing Journal: May 2023

Friday, May 12, 2023

Friday, May 12, 2023: Keiko Amano's two senryu and art photos

cherry blossoms

shoes are laughing

in the entrance

fusuma doors

make my eyes cross

granddaughters' skill

Keiko Amano was born and reared in Yokohama, Japan. She writes both in English and Japanese. Her first book, “Ocha Teacher” was published in 2015, and her short stories were published, from most recently, in the East Jasmine Review of Southern California, the Bicycle Review of San Francisco, Contemporary Literary Horizon of Bucharest, Romania, and Eye-Ai Magazine of Tokyo. She was an infrastructure systems programmer for large business computers for many years.

Friday, May 5, 2023

Friday, May 5, 2023: Giorgia Pavlidou's "Urban Love" and "Nudity"

Urban Love

Frigid cement,

hitting up bricks pathologically in love.

Emboldened brains of stone,

as expensive as geometric glass,

animated by the architecture of lack:

Isn’t this the burden of non-synthetic sex?

Nudity

This naked brain,

though part of the body

is divorced from it.

This bare body,

though part of the brain

exists uniquely in the nudity of the head.

Even the head,

extant only in the braininess of the brain.

All brains seem bare.

Their bareness smiles & gloats,

when I heedlessly try

& dress the headless bodies

in which the brain dwells so well.

Giorgia Pavlidou is an American writer and painter intermittently living in Greece and the US. She received her MA in Urdu Literature from Lucknow University, India, and MFA from Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Her work recently appeared or is forthcoming in Caesura, Maintenant Dada Journal, Puerto del Sol, Clockwise Cat, Ocotillo Review, Philosophical Egg, Entropy, and Moon & Sun Magazine. Additionally, Trainwreck Press launched her chapbook inside the black hornet’s mind-tunnel in 2021, and Anvil Tongue Books her full-length book of poems and paintings, Haunted by the Living - Fed by the Dead in May 2022.