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"Something to Remember" by Alexey Adonin

My Mother Won't Let Me Write About Home by Janiru Liyanage

​During 1987 - 1989 in Sri Lanka, followers of the JVP movement would terrorise people’s homes,
​and threaten the 
population to shut all house-lights off by 6 PM
Your country won’t listen 
but we still hear the dead roil warm under the dirt 
humming to an old love song / we want to break 
we want to singe, soft as a hymn whispered
circling above our heads / death-belled hum of 
vanishing / my mother asks, who are you going to
blame / don’t let there be a name to call or 
one we sew into our chests / a tiny fist inside us 
wounding our throats / don’t talk, don’t say
somewhere, someplace better
they climb to surface, gasp – find us
her body; give us a flame torch & lead us 
home, & yes, home as in the stain, as in the 
graves / remember you’re safe / stop talking about 
, a country 
ritual / can hold us / can drag the
warmth / out of us / only some can live
in the dark
names we passed between our mouths, limning 
all the ones we learnt to swallow, ones all tongue, 
light, all smoke & breath fogged against our
so I'll only say this once
my mother, awake in the kitchen
the black sky open
under a sheet, she lights a match: threat
a plane; she is afraid to speak, afraid of
blame; in this poem don't let there be
a body found dumped in a lake
quivering & alive, the scream only
a word but the bad memories have to live
so why not let them haunt this body?
kneeling, all the dead names still knot
inside of her
single clot of blood on our unmarked
home / there are only so many ways, we
can mispronounce our grief before its
beasts out in the night, culling them for
names we lifted to our lips
they kiss the ground, their heads rising
our fangs, blood-bright
& our only 
mirrors,
                                                                                                          windows

Janiru Liyanage is a 15-year-old school student and Pushcart Prize-nominated poet. His recent work appears or is forthcoming in [PANK], Diode Poetry Journal, Wildness Journal, The Journal Of Compressed Creative Arts, Ekphrastic Review, Cordite Poetry Review, Homology Lit and elsewhere. He is a 2019 winner of the national Dorothea Mackellar Poetry Awards, a recipient of an Ekphrastic Award from the Ekphrastic Review and Sydney finalist of the Australian Poetry Slam. Born as the son of Sinhalese immigrants, he currently lives in Sydney.

Alexey Adonin is a Jerusalem based abstract-surrealist artist. His works have been showcased locally and internationally and are held in private collections around the world. Alexey uses a unique and beautiful technique in which he layers oil paints solely on top of one another to create a mystical, transparent look. His philosophy stems from the idea that one's reality is made up of what they believe it to be. Alexey uses his art as a platform to express his profound ideas about reality, humanity, and their intertwined behaviors. You can view more at www.alexeyadoninart.com.
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