“Obviously, a huge part of recent history has been the AIDS epidemic. It has been a medical, emotional, social, economic, and political topic for so many including those we have lost, and those living with HIV/AIDS who are still stigmatised today.”
“I carry on running. My breath will catch up with me. I just need to focus. The ball is heading my way. I run to intercept—the world has turned blurry. Everything is in slow motion.”
“is there something in adopting the voice of a god, but giving him very human qualities and frailties? It turned out that adopting a persona that revolved at once about both being powerful and powerless was a great parallel for exploring subjects like climate change.”
“How long he sat in his car he couldn’t say, but he pulled out of the hospital car park when the noise of an approaching ambulance interrupted his thoughts. He somehow ended up on the Sea Point Promenade again, sitting on the bench they had sat on so many times before. By the time the sun set, painting the Cape Town sky a marvellous orange-yellow-purple, he had made his decision.”
Fiction: “Hugmanay 1983 – ah’m sat oan the couch in the livin’ room. Telly’s oan an’ it’s jist me an’ ma muther an faither cos ma twa bruthers are oot wi’ their pals. Scotch an’ Wry afore some Hugmanay show comes oan efter. Ah’m hopin’ the 50p slot meter disnae run oot on oor rented TV …”
Fiction: “She wishes that she had kept a written record of all the epic bloody nonsense that has come out of his mouth over the years because she could have gained some kind of minor social media fame and parleyed a book deal out of it to boot: Shit My Stupid Shag Buddy Says.”
Fiction: “One of the guards tried to calm me down. ‘We’re just doing our job, following the rules. The ladies have complained.’ And then he added jokingly, ‘dear engineer, you do know this place is not completely private, it’s ‘privastate’ as we call it…’ and then burst into laughter at their own stupid wordplay, spraying his saliva on my face. Last year, they also harassed me for wearing sandals with no socks.”
Fiction: “Hands clasped at me as I pulled you through the room, and I smiled and greeted and smiled again but I never let go of your hand, do you remember that? I kept you close to me.”
Fiction: “I can see your foot, your scuffed cool-kid sneakers, laces undone, next to my seat. You are sitting low in the chair behind me; I can picture you slouching without turning around. ”
Fiction: “He’s rolling up a ten foot length of astro turf into what looks like a giant sized spliff of fake grass.”
Fiction: “So this afternoon, this fantastically, impossibly unlikely configuration, will not come again.”
“Obviously, a huge part of recent history has been the AIDS epidemic. It has been a medical, emotional, social, economic, and political topic for so many including those we have lost, and those living with HIV/AIDS who are still stigmatised today.”
“is there something in adopting the voice of a god, but giving him very human qualities and frailties? It turned out that adopting a persona that revolved at once about both being powerful and powerless was a great parallel for exploring subjects like climate change.”
They were stones in a champagne flute,
I was always bound to smash.
But they were there for a while,
hanging on, two faceless punters waiting
for the gag, and then it all slipped out
of me as easily as a giggle. Once is a mistake.
Twice is careless. By the end of it
you could hear a pin drop in my heart.
“What is happening in Iran is heart-breaking, and this poem is testament to that, it is also paying homage to my Father and my Persian heritage, of which I’m so proud.”
A poem by Mark Czanik
Shortly after I left my job, a friend said she was surprised, she thought I cared. I told her I left because I cared.
I left Donetsk when it started there. Escaped with my two children. My ex-husband’s on the other side.
the small village where I spent the months from June to August as a child is now occupied by Russians
Fiction: “And as my body lay still, waiting for my heart to be healed, the mist, the lonely shivering feeling of being lost, huddled together, looking for a way out, came to me.”
Creative Non-fiction: “People have got their corner here, however modest, and they get on with it, despite all that is stacked against them, all that is thrown at them.”
“I’ve been in prison a week and a stranger keeps telling me he’s going to kill his wife.”
Whatever we feel as human beings, some poet down the years has distilled that emotion or experience into its elemental form. Poetry is language at its most perfect, the ultimate diviner of the human spirit. If we need solace, poetry will console us. If we need joy, poetry will take our soul and let us fly.
“Ukraine has been the first to face and, at times, set in motion, processes tray have worldwide consequences.”