GREAT COAL BEDS OF SOME WORLD By Glenn Shaheen
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....
View ArticleA Hostile World By Jihan Shaarawi
Part 1: The Eternal Dupes The Boy’s father sat on his small wicker chair staring at the newspaper that was brought from the capital. The Boy’s parents managed to send The Brother to the capital to join...
View ArticleFragments of Libya By Nour Naas
The air is hot and heavy when you walk out of the plane and you know that you are finally home because you should not be smelling cigarettes this deep inside the airport, but you do. The windows are...
View ArticleUntitled by Jenna Hamed
Traditions in carry-on bags/ carried on backs/ now become furnishings/ with unfingered holybooks/ failed wallhangings/ in 1 of 2-familyhome’s livingrooms/ Make one word for livingroom/ no// one word...
View ArticleLower Paradise Road by Sahar Mustfah
She refused to exit the car that her son had borrowed from his white roommate. She was convinced they both smoked marijuana. One year and she barely recognized him with his hair grown out and jeans...
View ArticleTeaching Transnationalism as an Identity: Expressions of Simultaneity in...
In her latest book, Looking Both Ways: An Egyptian-American Journey, Pauline Kaldas expresses the synchronous, connected, simultaneous experience of the transnational individual. Where distance once...
View ArticleI Had Never Seen a Dead Man Before By Hedy Habra
Until my father-in-law died that summer in Tucson, Arizona He seemed to sleep in his suit and tie, expressionless, the color of death freezing his shrunken features, almost youthful in his eighties as...
View ArticleOutta Here By Patty Somlo
The first time the officer told the boy to drop the bat, the boy began to walk forward. He was just under five feet tall, so the bat may have looked longer than it would have appeared, if held by a boy...
View ArticleTwo Poems by Lina Al-Sharif
Relationship Goals 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...
View ArticleDust
by Lana Habash Stone streets of an old city, carts lined with rings of fresh bread, seeded sesame, the scent of coffee mixed with zalabieh, where songs of prayer mark time– here, the hand of God is...
View ArticleMaskoon by Sara Elkamel
We clung to our dreams like ants to sugar. In them we walked, we meandered uncertain, we strained to remember colors of the sea. Then in dream after dream the homes of our mothers and fathers crumbled....
View Articlelies told honestly in three propositions by Sahar Khraibani
1. I wrote a poem on the subway We drove across the Sonoran desert at 10 pm And it felt like Two in the morning The I-10 at night is pitch black But you can see the stars Like you’ve never seen...
View ArticleEgyptian Proverb Pt. 2 By A. Mustafa
she finds me awashed, lost / in the shallow of the prairie boasts slick wet promises / seduces even, my marrow strokes my spine / a signal story: of fires amidst the desert of Dakhla white...
View ArticleThe Day I Found Home by Nofel
“Our eyes will see what had been written on our foreheads.” The Arabs declaim this as an expression of fate: your fate is predetermined; there’s no escape. I leaned toward the mirror—all but my eyes...
View ArticleNo one’s Innocent by Frank Dullaghan
Jack’s a prisoner in his box. The doll’s house has lost all sense of calm, its furniture haphazardly arranged, its dolls prone on table tops, on stoves. One is waterboarding in the bath. The unicorn...
View ArticleDeath of a Patriarch by Marianna Marlowe
In the hot dry wind they congregated, all of them who had come to mourn a patriarch, a husband, a father, a father-in-law, a compatriot, a friend. Dressed in black they gathered, those of them who had...
View ArticleThese Threads of Memories and Sounds by Micah Khater
The eulogies of a diaspora bear fruit in the homeland. I carry with my half-Arab, half-white body songs of Lebanon. So that when I step foot in Lehfed, after so many years away, I feel the elegiac...
View ArticleHazem Fahmy’s Red//Jild//Prayer (Diode 2018) Reviewed By Helen Wing
It is red rage that guides the poet, who is ‘swinging [his] legs like a hammer’ as he observes the West’s ‘close-up on the dead Arab’ and questions why he is alive if the only images of himself he sees...
View ArticleThe Power of Culture and Narrative: An Interview with Susan Muaddi Darraj by...
The writing community is a small one, and the Arab American writing community even smaller. I believe in being a good “literary citizen,” in helping to support and promote other writers.
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