Nicolás Antonioli

*

Superstition
is a good number
I write this in Jujuy by the Río Grande
at 11 hours in the morning of the least expected day
without knowing what I´m talking about when I say that
the witness
of all pain are about to die in the absurd and
unthinkable exercise
of knowing that we do not written yet
there is not even a book of promises
there is not humanity
still there is not a critical reading, or a nation
nothing is finished yet
neither a Tolstoi has born at the highlands
neither more nor less
One can say that “literatedium” is at his larval stage
in contraposition
any approximation is fiction or a lie
about a lie
about a lie
MADNESS IS A MANIAC COMPULSION
OF TELLING THE HIDDEN TRUE ABOUT
HIDDEN THINGS
Traducción de/ translation of Julia Melissa Rivas Hernández

**

If this is how they say
declare me in a permanent state of madness
as you did before the hermit came
In essence, telling the truth is not a poet´s thing
Is more the way of a sinister woman that row in his blend
At what foreign force does the orgasm belong to?
How exactly we are going to face the man and the eco of man
possessed by chronicles of a body
mutilated by only telling the truth
With the essential verbs
that we use to face the coward
that one that poke around in the tangle of moans
or in littler screams from the bowels
so now, how exactly we are going to face the man and the eco of man

***

Marosa Olga Alejandra Silvina
Susana Victoria Alfonsina
Juana Diana
Virginia
All of them dwell the silence
and endured each laceration
In what moment we lost all courage
and win only fright?
And now, what we are going to do with poetry?
Now that we know how the match of two words
can annihilate the world

***

Of how men’s show off about themselves
Of how we lost each other in the gloom
Of how it is bites and run away
Look how the sad ones ask for a whip that harass them
But how about the time?
What we do about the irony?
What the poetry pretends about us?
For what for words exist?
And masculinity?
What about if I kiss a woman?
If her body brings light
We will believe in the metaphor again

Nicolás Antonioli (Florida, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1985). Writer, editor, and cultural manager. Literature professor. Master in Creative Writing from the University of Tres de Febrero (UNTREF). Secretary of the Asociación de Poetas Argentinos (2009-2018). Director and founder of La Juntada-International Festival of Young Poetry based in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. Owner-Publisher of Baldíos en la Lengua Movement for Argentina. Books in Poetry: Sentires del Alma (2004), Se necesitan ojos (2005), Muñecas/maniquí/muñecas (2009), Mansalvar (2012), Mano emplumada (2013), Monólogo alucinado e interminable del sargento Cabral (2013), Las carnes ayunas (2017) and Cosmografía marciana o polvo suspendido en un rayo de sol (2022). Author of Mandinga (2011) and Dicienueve (2018) platelets. He has eight other unpublished books. In Argentina, he participated in many Poetry Festivals and International Book Fairs. He has participated at the 28th and 33 th International Poetry Festival of Medellín (Colombia, 2018 and 2023) and to the 30th International Poetry Festival of Medellín, virtual edition (Colombia, 2020). He obtained the ArBol Binational Poetry Contest Award (Argentine-Bolivian) from the Ministry of Culture of the Presidency of the Argentine Nation and the Ministry of Culture of the State of Cochabamba (Bolivia), 2014.
He obtained the Creation Grant 2021 from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes (Argentina).
His work has been translated into Quechua, English, French, Italian, Montenegrin, Macedonian and German.

Gaetano Longo

SHALOM BABY, SALAM MALEKUM

How beautiful a world would be
where children don’t have to spend time
Throwing stones at soldiers
instead of going to school,
where the soldiers will drop their rifles
That sometimes kill those children
and for them they built schools.
A world where the tortured ancients
they will not become torturers again,
where there were no more walls
of weeping and shame,
Where everyone greeted each other
shaking hands or hugging
saying Salam Malekum, Shalom,
May peace be with you and with us.
A world where Ishmael and Isaac
They could play together
Under a sky of crescents and stars
Leaving mistakes behind
of a treacherous father like Abraham
who did not know how to keep his family together.
How beautiful a world would be
where the young lovers of Palestine
they could kiss under the branches of an olive tree
whispering in his ear
Shalom, baby, Salam Malekum.
How beautiful a world would be
Where we all remember
that after all
Everyone is
We are all a little Palestinian.

THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER

After distracting myself for a moment
I no longer looked towards infinity
They had stolen my love and youth
Treacherously, they put a knife in my back
But I don’t hate those who did it
I’m just annoyed
I gotta stay in this awkward position
put on a pedestal
Who uses my name
indefinitely

He was a war journalist in Central America and in the former Yugoslavia, honorary consul of Colombia in Italy, consultant to UNESCO in Havana and editor-in-chief of the magazine UNION of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba.
His poems have been translated into volumes, magazines and anthologies in seventeen languages.

Ayo Ayoola-Amale

GAZA

Up there, down there, in a shadowed fortress,
life staggers out of control, ghostly.
guns hold us with a clenched fist tight,
A trap around our throats, slaying light.
The symphony of quietness, a haunting chorus
as the heartbeats of children scream in pain.
Dogs bark no more, birds stop their flight,
Cats curl in backyards, snubbing the night.
Trees stand as guards, their leaves turned to ash,
and households crumble softly beneath the weight of the crash.
Streets switch into graveyards where shadows gather,
draped in a shroud of the unseen.
In the shadows where silence breathes,
a mind at war, and truths that boil,
with each heartbeat echoes a mournful pulse, and weakens,
we are born whole, not brutish and weary
Everything, everywhere—In this cycle of breath, protest
streets become graveyards
screaming of floods of
a cloud of bloated butchered flesh.
Everything, everywhere
living to Die
Everything, everywhere
have all died.

Our Minds at War

“Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind. And therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” – John Donne.

Moving on to where our lung’s artery lies,
The clock becomes a gravedigger; wears a disguise,
With every inhale, we grasp the fleeting sun,
Yet each exhale whispers of endless dusk.
Fragments of breath suffocate the air,
Cracking remnants of hopes laid bare,
Every moment we lose, a silent scream,
Life’s brittle tapestry unravels its scars
that keeps ripping off all the hairs of our skin EVERY. SINGLE. MOMENT.
Our lives die.
Our LIVES do not EXIST – We want to die.

Ayo Ayoola-Amale is a Nigerian poet and lawyer born in Jos, Nigeria. According to Women in Peace, at a young age, Ayoola-Amale joined the peace movement. She was a member of the Rotary Club, the Rotaract Club, the Girl Guides, and Women in Nigeria (WIN). A 2024 article on the Peace From Harmony website indicates that as a teenager, she was involved with Girls Guide groups focused on social justice issues, including violence against women and girls.[4]