TONY BRINKLEY's poetry, art and translations have appeared recently in COLLATERAL, TRAFIKA EUROPE, ANA, NASHVILLE REVIEW, EXCHANGES, NEOLOGISM, POEMS IN TRANSLATION, BOMBAY REVIEW, PICTURA JOURNAL, BLUE UNICORN, MERION WEST, REVERIE, VIRIDINE LIBRARY, RUMEN, SOUL, LAST LEAVES REVIEW, LOVER'S EYE PRESS, MISERERE REVIEW, CONSEQUENCE FORUM, JERRY JAZZ MUSICIAN and ANTIFA REVIEW. Before retirement, Brinkley taught literature at the University of Maine. He is the author of STALIN'S EYES and GOMORRAH. A chapbook - AMERICA, AMERICA - and a book of images - ICONS OF WAR - are forthcoming.

The artist about this piece:

“I live in northern Maine. MESSAGES FROM NABLUS is a collaborative project with a friend who lives in Nablus and who for the moment wishes to remain anonymous because of the dystopian dangers in which Palestinians live. Together we work with photographs from her reality and mine as they mingle, alter and depict what we have come to think of as internalizations - inner life - within the outside that the everyday and the genocide, the day-to-day and the ethnic cleansing constitute. Henry Treadgill says that jazz is a way of opening your eyes and - as you listen - of seeing inside the outside. We think of MESSAGES as POEMS WITHOUT WORDS. Perhaps they witness and ask to the witnessed. They depict things that we don't know how to say.
The poems without words do not illustrate. They might be regarded as interruptions, perhaps in the way that events in Gaza and the West Bank have transformed daily existence even when the day-to-day is protected and both the genocide and the Nakba seem distant - as if they were not here and now.”