Poetry

Mark Peterson

By

Soodabeh Saeidnia

Gratitude to Trump

Nothing rhymes in English with Trump

He tremendously stands on the last floor of his tower

and cheerleaders are like the fresh blood in a centrifugal pump

Nothing rhymes in English with Trump

He makes magically everything great

He builds a wall for who need a long jump

Nothing rhymes in English with Trump

He deports every color and religion to its origin

Muslims to Mars, Mexicans to a new planet Flump

I took a left up at the Grand Central, when

I wrote this satire in my car that hit a speed bump

Nothing rhymes in English with Trump

Note: This is an adaptation of the poem “Gratuitous Oranges” by David Shapiro

Apology

I owe you an apology

I didn’t steal

I only borrowed your tongue

to make my crafts

I’m afraid, mine is too odd to make sense

Instead, I promise to return

a mixed emotional poem,

a brown hybrid of black and white cauldrons,

in which all your words are buoyant in a panic stew

A poem, in which kids drop their slippers

and run on the landmines that no longer camouflage

behind the hot, barren soil

The soil that has never been cultivated anymore

A poem, in which adults throw up the froth,

and whimper of wandering in a hopeless boat

climbing and stepping on each-others’ shoulders

and during the time that I am searching for

the correct plural form of corpus,

they’ve already stacked corpora of withered bodies

and while I am wondering if I unify the number of lines

in all stanzas, they’ve lost a number of their siblings and kids

I think I owe an apology to them and to myself

to my ancestors who lived in Cyrus, the great Empire,

and already carved the human being rights on rocks

They never expected their offspring like me

to translate it from other languages to the mother tongue

Rise

Douse me with vinegar

Drown me in wine

Bury me inside the deepest cave

of an Egyptian pyramid

Leave me for thousands of years

No matter what you expect

I will never die

I will either ripen or rise

I will return and burn

with the purest fuel

that you may only find

somewhere in the solar flare

Soodabeh Saeidnia

Soodabeh Saeidnia lives in NYC but is originally Persian. She got her Pharm D and Ph.D. of Pharmacognosy and has worked as a researcher, assistant and associate professor in the Kyoto University (Japan), TUMS (Iran) and University of Saskatchewan (Canada). She is interested in English literature and poetry, and has published a collection of her poems, Words for myself, in Farsi. Her English poems have been published in “Squawk Back”, “Great Weather for Media”, “Indiana Voice Journal”, “Sisyphus Quarterly”, “Paradox”, “TimBookTu”, “Bobbling of the Irrational”, “SPINE”, “American Writers Journal”, “Tuck Magazine”, “La Libertad”, “Tiny Poetry”, “The Pen”, “352 degrees”, and so many more. A number of her poems have been printed in the anthology books “Where the Mind Dwells” and “American Poet” as well as “Moonlight Dreamers of Yellow Haze“. The first collection of her contemporary poems “Street of the Ginkgo Trees“, and also the newly released collection “Voice of Monarch Butterflies: Middle Eastern Anthology by Ten Poets from Ganges to Nile” are now on Amazon.