Poem by Jessy Bissal

Lebanon: Not Enough Lubrication
dedicated to Lebanon and any other country suffering from sectarian strife

It starts.
Inexperienced pioneers
lust
over the volumes of
girth
their escapades will add
to their reputation;

a head of command
guides
his tools
penetrating through
the layers and layers of
unchartered fertile land
in search of a serviceable
kind of pleasure
of a quantifiable quantity.

It continues.
riots break out
exacerbating the endemic
effervescence
causing soldiers to rush in
and fill the entire field

while winds carry
waning whispers
of la petite mort
on the battlefield;
during which
conglomerations of contracts
ejaculate
a bit too prematurely
in absence of
contraceptive cases
that could protect this
ancestral womb
from a recessive pregnancy.

It ends
an eschatological eulogy
laments a once euphoric rapture,
reduced now, to a ruptured ring
chafed and charred
as its victim screams-
aware for the very first time,
that she is bleeding.

Jessy Bissal is a 24 year-old Armenian Lebanese. She holds a minor in Creative Writing and a BA and an MA in English Literature from the American University of Beirut. She teaches English at various institutions in Lebanon. “[I] write poetry on the side when the words suffocate me and force me to spit them out.”

Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in USA and Europe and he has had 9 one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum and The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Since 2007 His paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 160 on line and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Pollock-Krasner grants, the Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc. He currently teaches art to retired public school teachers at The United Federation of Teachers program in Brooklyn.