Various poems
Samovar
Soviet metal urn
transported from Uzbekistan
sputnik falling to earth
landing like a piece of
space junk
in the gulag of the new world
a memento
gifted to me
on the passing of two
former Soviet citizens
good people
I wonder about the hours it sat simmering
smoky Russian tea
for noble workers
in the workplace canteen
walls lined with glorious images —
a goose step into a five-year plan
a lamp carried into the coalmines of Donbass
a sickle gathers the harvest in Kuban
the hammer of a carpenter in Moscow
a flashback to the coronation scene
Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible
Prokofiev’s Orthodox hymn
voices loom
icons watch, dissenters plot
crowns himself Tsar
showered in gold coins
autocrat of all Russia
the great nobility long banished
summer and winter palaces
museums of excess
but revolution’s harvest yielded
new dictators and oligarchs
thievery continues
in a modest apartment
workers arrive home
wipe their brow
on their shirt collar
the samovar boils on
Vasilka Pateras
Caged
I live in a cage in my head where guilt flagellates me raw red,
as down memory’s cul-de-sacs I’m led and hindsight’s gristed mill I tread.
I’d enjoy being fiscally free to pursue perspicacity
and indulge in philanthropy. But then where’d be my misanthropy?
I live boxed in by obligation that limits choice, invites frustration.
To cut through would cause deflation of dreams, reveal fixed station.
I’d like to be spiritually deep and take soul-transcendent leap
to godhood, in truth and grace keep myself, past pinnacled self steep.
I resign me to this place and time of COVID-19 ragged rhyme
and hope for an after, sublime, where I won’t comply with chipped, circled chime.
Barry Gittins
Thinking outside the box
Real power never changes hands
And yet like a spell we cast our votes
In a ballot box for the same corrupt government
A shooting from the old one
Where they practice crop rotation
Fill up their pockets
Making their soils fertile and rich
Making us search for greener pastures elsewhere
Forcing us to think outside the box
Racheal Chie
Vasilka Pateras is a Melbourne-based poet and emerging writer whose work is published in n-SCRIBE and Mediterranean Poetry, The Blue Nib and Poetry on the Move. She regularly reads as part of the Melbourne Spoken Word community.
Barry Gittins is a Melbourne writer and poet.
Racheal is a 23 year old writer, poet, singer, and rapper from Mutare Zimbabwe. Racheal has self published three books, Sweet Deceit, The Indians Child, and Book of Poetry under the name Doreen R. Chitondwe. Racheal's short story ‘Covid as we know it’ was published in The Blue Marble Review and poetry on PoetrySoup.com. Five of Racheal's unpublished poems are set to be published in the upcoming anthology called Poetry Is Life. Racheal received the 2019 Certificate Petal Star Award from Inked With Magic.