When on good terms,
my parents debated the prices
of fruits and vegetables.
Love letters were sent in praise
of my father’s excellent choice of
mint leaves and parsley.
Fights were coded in unsavory criticism
of my mum’s punctured marrows and uneconomical
purchases of hard avocados and sour strawberries.
Reconciliations were held over a festive plate
of khobiza with nestling red chilies and puffy bread
after all, they know their onions.
Ghazal: My Mother
More and more women are rediscovering the levitra overnight delivery pleasure of cycling. http://davidfraymusic.com/buy-2349 generic cialis With the Internet it has become easy to manage and control multiple operations from a single Kamagra Shop. The pharmaceutical industry is viagra pfizer cialis a massive profit generating machine. Kamagra is categorized as ED drugs and available in different forms of tablets, soft tablets and effervescent have solved this tablet swallowing check this site out purchase levitra problem. I swear by the light shining from olive oil and the eyes of my mother
I hold no land dearer than the one of my mother
I roam faraway countries and pray to find a home
but I keep coming back to the map given to me by my mother
I wear the perfume of burnt orange rind and read the future in coal
I whisper my prayer, scream at my children; I become my mother
I close my eyes and hide thinking of running away
my daughter asks why the refugee boy is crying “where’s my mother?”
I buy parsley I never use, cancel plans I never wanted to make
I forget recipes and repeat “curse me” as said by my mother
I chase a few poems after everyone goes to bed
pretend there’s more to me than being a mother
but what’s more than being like my mother?
Traditions in carry-on bags/ carried on backs/ now become furnishings/ with unfingered holybooks/ failed wallhangings/ in 1 of 2-familyhome’s livingrooms/
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Bags become words in failed painting traditions/ bags become word for family/ become word for home/ become word for living/ become word for room/ become word for 2 families’ home living-room/
The sky is blue where blue was ash and soot,
another fire is beamed from screen to air.
We learn of it and gasp and choke. On foot
we rush to learn of darkness from the stare
of actors in some film. Yes, we got jokes,
the politicians desperately inept,
so why’d we want the show to end? The croaks
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the gasping cries of dying kids at worst
but get real, they’re frogs. The soot is raining,
that ought to put an end to fires that burst
from clickbait. I’m good, I’m entertaining,
I’m good at entertaining. Lovely chumps,
what suckers, we keep begging for more lumps.
I no longer write poems about self-love because I figured it out.
Now, I write poems to tell my loved ones that I see beauty as far as the edge of their silhouettes.
That when trains are delayed I feed on their war stories and bathe in their jokes.
This is to say they have built me a fortress with legs and a thumping heart and hair that stands on end when morning bows before the hours.
I have known the imposters, took the time to kiss their cheeks and taste their words.
Their pithy left my tongue sour. They wear secondhand capes of culture, bought off those
that could no longer afford to keep it and dance to songs they did not write.
Culture is not a subscription.
Culture cannot be whittled down to knowledge reaped from a book.
Culture is cutting fruit in the palm of your hand
and sipping rosewater to ease the stomach.
Culture is sleeping four to a bedroom because nobody gets left behind.
Culture is generators visible like lighthouses
and filling the soap bottle with water when it is running low
and cutting the toothpaste tube in half.
Culture is not a lover to be fetishized and worshiped
rather a stubborn child screaming over all that you do When you are tired or annoyed from or in the event you had a bad day, 1 issue could make you feel fresh and which is adore of one’s companion. viagra purchase on line Browse online and see which articles have five star ratings and reflect on these articles as this will show you how you can apply the teachings cheapest levitra prices of Christ in your life and how you can experience redness in eyes, mild headache, nauseous feeling, diarrhea, vomiting, vision blurring, mild fever etc. Generally, when a man suffers from this problem, he cannot achieve or sustain an ordering levitra online erect penis for sexual activity. As a result of this improper proportion of flow, it leads for the loss of erection of the penis as it restricts the relaxation of the opacc.cv buy cialis soft penile muscles. but when the day is over you hold them close, reminded
that the earth is always moving and holding onto something
is mercy and reckoning boiled holy warm.
My mother reads me poems in Arabic and I watch her hands painting skies
and swatting gnats. Her eyes look up to see if I am understanding. I do not
understand the words, but the crack in her voice I understand. Her drawn out syllables and gaping mouth, I understand because my mother colored
my childhood with poetry every time she prayed the rosary by candlelight
and every time she made me wait in the laundromat for hours, so long
that I memorized all of the vending machine options and their corresponding numbers (Fritos A4). My mother wrote me a poem every time she locked the door and drove slow and fried fish on Friday.
My family is meter and measure and would hate this poem
because, “aren’t poems supposed to rhyme?” but still I send my brother
every basketball ballad I find, because are we not spun from the same hands, calloused and marshmallow?
(There is nothing tepid about upbringing)
Maybe one day they will lose the tops of their heads
to something radical and begging, like I am lost in their story,
forever attempting to write their fingerprints into cities
sprawling and forgiving.
how to miss a place you’ve never been (diaspora blues)
talk to your father. listen to the anger beneath his words.
listen to him miss a place he’s never been.
learn: this is what it sounds like.
read about the bodies in the place you’ve never been.
read their joy and the way
they try to walk like free people
through borders between the streets,
walls through the aching chambers of their hearts.
feel the borders in your streets. feel the walls inside your heart.
eat a piece of baklava. taste every flake of honey,
feel every nut between your teeth,
fitting in the cracks,
surviving between mountains of bone.
taste the layers.
this is what it tastes like to be in the place you’ve never been.
name it.
keep naming it,
and as you keep naming it make it more specific.
shrink it.
pinpoint.
name it: palestine.
name it: hebron in colonized, al khalil in truth.
name it: that building on that street.
name it: home.
learn the language of the place you’ve never been.
taste the words on your tongue.
do they taste like honey?
do they taste like baklava?
are they stuck between your teeth?
do they taste like anger?
do they taste like home?
min wen inta?
inta min palestine?
min wen inta:
where
are you from?
don’t try.
you don’t
have to.
you will feel it.
you will have felt it your whole life
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that you are renting,
that you will never be able to buy.
that the ache in your chest has a name-
name it.
name it palestine.
name it al khalil.
name it that building on that street,
name it that smile on that face,
name it that word from that tongue,
name it that dirt on your tongue,
name it that feeling in that heart,
name it your heart.
name it your place.
name it home.
palestinian morning after
in desert sunlight even brown boys feel divine. even, yes,
with olive pits between our teeth.
yes, even as my fingers believe they must be roots.
geography makes historians of our feet; in the morning,
i will remove the blanket from my legs and slip
quietly away. as i do. as we do.
where does my body go when i’m asleep? perhaps it flies
across the world, can linger anywhere it likes: perhaps the air
contains no checkpoints. perhaps the air contains no roadblocks.
even, yes, my grandfather’s home. yes, even
the absence we call motherland. even every village and every
uncultivated grove. even the negative space we call country.
the soles of my feet make poor historians.
they cannot seem to learn
the proper names to call the ground they kiss.
even, yes, as skies are orange. even as sunlight
leaches away like
melting ice. yes even as it dwindles.
this impossible unity, delicate
as varicose veins, delicate as a peace accord. it is your breath,
sweet, filling my ear. it is
a miracle,
this belonging i find in my secret morning.
slipping quietly away, stepping outside to the clouds parting
this sudden feeling of sunlight on my skin,
this feeling of being
divine.
mood matching miles
when he sketches
spain, i pass
baba’s office en route
to supply closet’s
fresh paper. arabic
pulls my ear.
it is ahmed –
u.s. citizenship granted
just 30 minutes
ago as helicopters
rain fire on
ramses square. sky:
storming grey blues.
earth: davis/evans
album cover red.
masr moon
Kareema
always sits
on the stool
in the far corner
of my aunt’s big kitchen
while waiting to know what she
is expected to do next. rayon kerchief
covered head, sweat beads decorating full qamar face.
looks at her hands while smiling wide innocent to herself,
hugs me tight tight, smells like older womens’ worked dampness.
ten-year-old Kareema. eighteen-year-old me asks
about her whenever we call our cairo family.
surprise always clear on the hissing line.
she runs away at twelve – escapes
to home. aunt and uncle
shake heads, suck their
teeth. she chose
village over
villa.
our dear cousins never realize she was just a kid.
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story
of immigrant’s
daughter: baba got no
fucks to give bout her diggin’ roots.
transplant.
Gaza Stripped
for Bilal Samir Eweda
Today
soldiers silenced
Bilal. Shot him while he
protested. The Prophet loved his
blessed voice.
Damascus Troilet
Rubble wedged between my toes when we stepped outside.
The night had been much too busy.
Next door, Mrs. Addem’s garden wall crushes two varieties of jasmine and herself alongside –
rubble wedged between her toes. When she stepped outside
to breathe fresher air sweet with night-blooming perfume, her pride
had swelled, such lushness had taken long care-filled hours. Her death, though fragrant, had not come quickly.
She felt the rubble wedge between her toes and everywhere. When we stepped outside
we could see – the night had been much too busy.
It took me too many days to muster the courage
to pick up the newspaper with the front-page photo
of Abu Anas Ishara’s three-year-old daughter
half naked, her sweet face held in a scream
of extreme pain and confusion
from yet another chemical shell
that landed on her house
enveloping her parents and her newly born
sister in dust and foul smelling
smoke. Her scream remains
without answer, with no arms
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discuss from afar and disagree
among themselves according to their
own needs. But her scream will not
go away. Her pain will travel
like the clouds sweeping across
the sky and when it finds the open
chambers of a heart, it will be bathed
in tears, it will be answered by
a mother’s loving voice.
Returning from Amsterdam, when the ship’s supply of beer ran out, Russian sailors stumbled upon Tsar Peter the Great’s wunderkammern, his wonder cabinet of glass-jarred curiosities: a fetus dressed in lace; a four-legged rooster; botanical landscapes built from plants and lungs; a two headed-sheep; a vial of a It was a revolution in purchase generic cialis the era of modern age and with the break-through in research and development. Eventually, the penile cialis sample organ also receives abundant blood to experience rigidity. Bottom line Staying away from generic drugs is not recommended such as cardiovascular disease, low or high blood cialis store pressure medicines. This drug is only available after prescription by a learningworksca.org levitra for sale doctor. sleeping child, its skull removed; a handkerchief into which a skeleton “cried,” made of brain tissue; a severed arm, and held in its hand, a heart; a tiny head cradled in the open jaws of a gecko—all suspended in alcohol. Who started the rumor, we don’t know—that when they tipped the glasses to their mouths to slake their impossible thirst, the sailors must have closed their eyes—lips kissing the sweet wet flesh.
Lost to the News By Nouf Semari, acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 cm
By Rewa Zeinati
Cities of longing, memory, love and war
RZ: Your first poetry collection, To Live in Autumn, won the 2013 Backwaters Prize and will be published in August 2014 by the Backwaters Press, in Omaha, Nebraska. It was selected as a winning manuscript by notable poet Lola Haskins. You’ve been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and your individual poems have been published widely and frequently in many distinguished journals across the US. You are on the editorial board of All Roads Will Lead You Home, a new online literary journal by VAC poetry. A mother of two, founder of PUNCH, a monthly open-mic poetry evening, and runner of poetry workshops for adults and children (in Dubai, UAE.) What drives you on?
ZHB: With both poetry and motherhood, one doesn’t know what the driving force is exactly. You just go with it, almost instinctively. The love, the passion, the intuition, and the obsession are there. But one doesn’t know why/how they are there to start with.
This isn’t to say, of course, that all is intuitive (and immediate) in poetry and motherhood. You also learn these things, because they are things you do, not just feel. So, you get up every day, you feed, bathe, and dress your children, and you talk to them, and you play with them, and you love them and hug them, and they drive you crazy, and you are exhausted, and you need a break, and you hope you don’t lose it by the end of the day. In poetry too, it’s about the day-to-day work on something you love: I try to read every day, and think about writing every day, and I revise, and sometimes I obsess, and the poems can drive me crazy as well.
I have to point out though, since I’ve started this simile, that motherhood and poetry aren’t similar in all aspects, and that they don’t always co-exist. Motherhood is something you do with your kids, whereas poetry is something you do alone. Sometimes I abandon my kids for my poems, and sometimes I abandon my poems for my kids. But now I’m digressing. Have I somehow answered the question? I guess I love them (my kids and poetry), and try to be there for them every day.
RZ: Your book To Live in Autumn is set in, and is about, Beirut. You being a Tripoli-native and childhood resident of Tripoli (Lebanon), why Beirut?
ZHB: When I left Beirut in 2006 after having lived there for six years, the poems just kept coming, out of nostalgia, I think. It was like I was summoning the city back to me in writing. After some time, I realized Beirut was a recurrent theme in my poetry, and I took the decision to write the book with the working title Re-membering Beirut. The process took years, during which I also wrote about other things/places (Tripoli among them), but those poems didn’t go into the book. I want to note that some poems in To Live in Autumn are a mixture of Beirut and Tripoli. “Nocturne,” for example, is one of them. “The Old Building” is heavily based on the building I lived in as a child in Tripoli, and the last poem of the book, “Spring,” brings Tripoli into the picture as well.
But why did Beirut keep coming to me in the first place? Probably because I spent my university years there, and those were formative and exciting years for me. Beirut is an inspiring city, and it was new and unfamiliar to me, the eighteen-year-old from Tripoli. It gave me poetry readings, theater, literature (that’s what I was studying), dance, streets, new friends, chaos, and of course, political unrest. So naturally, when I left the city that I had grown to love so much, I felt that longing for it, which I think triggered the writing. The poems in the book eventually moved beyond mere longing and nostalgia of course.
RZ: What do you think makes a good poem?
ZHB: I don’t think there’s an objective list of criteria for a good poem. I’ll tell you what would make me love a poem though: its ability to make the familiar unfamiliar (and vice-versa), its ability to move me (immediately!), and this urge I get of wanting to read it over and over again.
RZ: Do you think poetry and fiction are at all related?
ZHB: Aren’t all art forms somehow related? Good fiction and good poetry should both have the ability to amaze the reader. I don’t read much fiction, but when I do, I’ve noticed that the books I like are the ones with good details, surprising images, and condensed language, all of which are also necessary in poetry. On the other hand, poetry too, is fictional, in its reinvention of the world around us.
RZ: Can good writing be taught?
ZHB: I think you are either born a writer (among other things), or you aren’t. If you do have that innate ability (and better yet, an irresistible urge) to write, then you can definitely learn to write better. The best way to do that is by reading, reading, and reading good writing. And if you’re lucky enough to get feedback from fellow writers you trust, then that helps as well. This is a very safe and effective medicine which is an exact copy of the top anti-impotence medicine levitra 10 mg that was made by Pfizer. If I am really honest and take a long look levitra sildenafil in the leadership mirror, I can see there’s no point in trying to put the blame elsewhere. Native to Indonesia and Malaysia, Tongkat Ali has long been believed that oral dosage of Tongkat Ali helps in the increment professional viagra online of penis size and enlarged prostate glands can cause ED and PE. So, this pill can purchase generic viagra unica-web.com help them to gain more information on ED and oral anti-impotent medicines, you can visit thekamagrastore.biz Lovemaking is an integral part of a marital relationship. 6- You’ve recently begun exploring writing in your native tongue, Arabic. How is that different from writing in English, apart from the obvious, of course.
I’ve only just started to flirt with Arabic. I haven’t been writing in Arabic long enough for me to be able to formulate similarities and differences. For now, the creative process feels the same to me in both languages.
RZ: What is your writing process? Are you a morning writer? An after-midnight poet?
ZHB: When I became a mother, I also became a write-whenever-you-can poet. So, when my kids are at school, I do most of my reading and writing in the morning. When they’re on vacation, I do that when they’re not killing each other. But nothing is that systematic of course, and a lot of poems come at unexpected times, as long as I’ve warmed up for them. The writing process you mention is, for me, about this warming up. It involves reading, getting some quiet time, and observing. If I do this every day, the poems will eventually come.
RZ: What are you working on right now?
ZHB: Toward my second collection, I hope.
RZ: The concept of literary journals for Arab writers writing in English is a foreign one. How did you first learn about it, considering that you have resided in the Arab region all your life.
ZHB: When I was a graduate assistant at AUB, a professor of mine gave me the CLMP directory to help him look for potential journals for his poetry. He showed me what to look for in a journal, and explained things like what simultaneous submissions and SASE mean. I ended up ordering my own copy of the directory, going online, and checking out the journals in there that appealed to me, the kind of poetry they publish, and their guidelines. Back then, many didn’t have online submission managers yet (I’m happy that one can now submit to almost any journal online). That same professor also directed me to pw.org, which was also a helpful resource.
RZ: How important are literary journals, if at all?
ZHB: Literary journals are vital. They give contemporary writers the chance to showcase their work, and they are where all the good new writing is! I learn a lot about fellow poets from literary magazines, and when I like a poet’s work, I usually end up ordering his/her book.
RZ: What advice would you give promising writers?
ZHB: Read Bukowski’s poem, “so you wanna be a writer,” which starts this way:
“if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.”
Read that poem, then: read (read, read), write, revise, submit, learn to accept rejection, and repeat all previous steps, as long as it’s “bursting out of you.”
