"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
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.
