A Mole or Hacker Masked
          by Scuiba Weedler

This week the names of Ames and Hannsen have appeared again,
reminding us of craftiness in Han-state arrogance.
From eighteen up to twenty citizen operatives
were jailed and/or killed as CIA corrob’ratives.
Between the years of 2010 and 2012, it seems,
the MSS corrected those not lulled by Chinese dreams.
For it’s well-known, the Ministry of State Security
improves all errant stragglers with helpful subtlety.
One guy was shot beside coworkers in the courtyard of
a governmental building by a minister of love.

Who was the mole or hacker who performed the damage done?
Was he like covert FBI informant Kun Shan Chun,
who up through 2016 shared his data with the Reds,
disloyal to the int’rests of his nation, the US?
Or was he like the Navy’s own commander Edward Lin,
who violated protocol with sloppy discipline?
Or like the case of Edward Snowden, just an analyst,
who gave away state secrets to the Chinese communists?
With hoopla round the CIA, the FBI and Trump,
one wonders who will be the next drop in the info dump.

 

Scuiba Weedler is a poet of intrigue. Influenced by writers such as Marlowe, Defoe, Maugham, Greene, and Le Carré, the first novel he ever read was Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, which shocked him out of his happy teenage complacency with its frank brutality and crisp diction.

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Let Me Bring You Up
          by Beadle Crew USI

Since living isn’t easy with eyes closed or open wide,
misunderstanding will occur despite what you decide.
It isn’t hard to be someone, since everybody is.
It doesn’t matter you’re untested; life is not a quiz.
The seagull sits beside the waves; the eagle in a tree;
a lowly-paid fruit-worker picks strawberries in a field.
Who is the highest in the land? Who is the lowest one?
Wherever you may be is good as long as there is sun.
Since everything is real, though it may not make much sense,
and some don’t think it matters much, it makes a difference.

 

Beadle Crew USI is a poet conglomerate: Abel, Ice, Rud, & Wes. His favourite poetic line is “I am he as you are he as you are me/ And we are all together…” from the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus.”

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New Molecular, Complex Knot
          by Euclidrew Base

For years the World’s chemists could just synthesize one knot,
of all the many billions of the prime ones we have got.
It was the intertwined trefoil, like a three-leafed clove,
in 1989, the Jean-Pierre-Sauvage team wove.
In 2016, for the work they did in Chemistry,
for helping to develop their molecular machines,
Feringa, Stoddard and Sauvage each shared the Nobel Prize;
they brought the heavenly down to the nanoscale size.

And now it seems new scientists have made a triple braid
in chains of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen conveyed,
along with nitrogen and iron ions, chloride too,
all heated up and pieced together, in a sticky stew.
This happened at Manchester, England’s University;
Leigh’s team has made a knot of even more intricacy.
This latest knot with eight points crossing is much tighter than
all those made up to this point…round, so dense, and small in span.

 

Euclidrew Base is a poet fascinated by the confluence of science, and mathematics, as seen in the work of writers, like Archimedes, Pascal, and Newton.

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Outside the Turkish Embassy
          by Çelebi Ürwëdas

Outside the Turkish Embassy, while Erdogan looked on,
a strong man came to Ceren Borazan with open arms.
He was drawn to her chanting voice. He grabbed her from behind,
and gripped her neck so tightly, she was scared out of her mind.
The people suffering in Turkey, far way from them,
when he was yelling—kill you, bitch—they could not have heard him.

The men in suits, the bodyguards of Tayyip Erdogan,
had come to roust protesters out—Kurds and Armenians.
Attackers kicked one woman as she lay curled on a walk;
Abbas Aziz, a teacher, got a lesson in free talk.
He was knocked to the ground by men, and kicked in chest and head.
This is America, this isn’t Ankara, he said.

 

Çelebi Ürwëdas is a poet fond of Anatolia. His favourite Turkish writer is Ferit Orhan Pamuk.