WE ARE YOU PROJECT
Paul Sohar, internationally published poet, novelist, award winning translator, art critic, and book reviewer, ended his higher education with a BA in philosophy and took a day job in a research lab while writing in every genre, publishing seven volumes of translations, including Dancing Embers poems by Sándor Kányádi translations (Twisted Spoon Press, 2002). His own poetry books include Homing Poems (Iniquity, 2006) and The Wayward Orchard, a Wordrunner Prize winner (2011). Other awards include first prize in the Lincoln Poets Society contest; second prize for a story from Rhode Island Writers’ Circle (2014). Latest translation volumes: "Silver Pirouettes" (TheWriteDeal 2012) and Sándor Kányádi’s In Contemporary Sense (Iniquity Press, 2013). Prose works: "True Tales of a Fictitious Spy" was published by SynergeBooks in 2006, the collaborative novel “The Club at Eddy’s Bar” (Phaeton Press, Dublin, Ireland, Nov 2013, and a collection of three one-act plays from One Act Depot (Canada, 2014).). His magazine credits include Agni, Gargoyle, Kenyon Review, Rattle, Salzburg Poetry Review, Seneca Review, etc. He has given talks at MLA and AHEA conferences and lectures at Centennial College, NJ.
Bio: Paul Sohar
THE IMMIGRANT EMIGRANT
once you leave home
the country where you were born
the people you grew up with
the words that first connected you to hard reality
the stories that explained the meaning of life
once you leave all that behind
you have a chance to choose
the country where you can be reborn
the people with whom you can continue to grow
the words that will connect you to new things in a new reality
the stories that will make sense of a strange new life
and once you start living in a country of your choice
you'll be at home anywhere in the world
and the whole world will become your new country
your new reality
IMMIGRANTS
Put a desert between them and misery,
that’s what they wanted,
but they wanted to keep everything else,
so they packed up the mountain,
the garden and an inextinguishable melody;
but when the desert was in the right place
the mountain sank into the garden
and the garden crawled up a bare-brick wall,
the melody had a fainter echo
when someone tried to bite into a song…
Only the misery didn’t lose its zest
to the long trek,
now it wears a new suit and carries strange signs
but its foul mouth keeps exhaling the same
swarms of moths,
its grin cuts just as deep as back home,
and here it's too far to walk
to the cemetery on Sunday afternoons.
Raging highways get in the way wherever they want to go,
so they stay put near the farm or the bus stop,
and make only one trip to the cemetery.
HYPHENATED
No, I don’t have a cemetery to visit on this continent
and there was no one to greet me when I got off the boat
Am I hyphenated? . . . This- or That-American?
and unashamed?
Or refuse the label, still unashamed?
What’s the proper thing? What is it exactly you want?
Okay, not in so many words
but something like that tag all about identity
race species gender (not sex, it’s passé)
but then why is not nationality ethnicity or is religion passé
why is political alignment sitting in
the judge’s chair asking am I a human
male or female
a carnivore or omnivore
a believer or a skeptic
if you really want to know
I don’t really know though
I care I most certainly do
just say what you want me to say but
these signposts are not posted in the landscape where
I’m lost but still forging ahead
or at least it seems so to me
but I just heard my mother ask me if I
wanted to go for a walk down the street
let's say to the cemetery and visit grandpa
it's a sly trick of hers to get me to her grave
but I go along with the story
at least she never asks me who I am
to her I have the I.D she gave me a long blink ago
and she never asks me to show it