A special portfolio of stories from Syria, essays on identity and borders, fiction about reincarnation, art, and the Kosovo War, and poems by Bob Hicok, Richie Hofmann, and more.
- LUQMAN DERKI We got out and started reading the letters to the recipients and even translating them into Kurdish. Amin the driver was doing the same with one of the villagers, who were illiterate one and all. Suddenly we heard one of the women wailing and beating her chest.
- IBRAHIM SAMUEL âTheyâre hereââ she was about to scream, bolting upright, heart pounding in her chest. It was as if a snake had brushed against her bare skin under the comforter. He snatched his arms away from where they lay against her neck and her cleavage. They were both naked.
- ALFONSINA STORNI You want me daybreak, / you want me sea-spray, / you want me pearl-like. / You want me lilywhite / and, above all, chasteâ / my perfume faint, / my petals shut tight. / Not even the moonlight / gets through with its beam. / No daisy can claim / sheâs a sister to me.
- ANANDA LIMA I wait and weigh the odds/ of me being who feeds/ and feeds and scrolls through/ feeds feeding on grey/ matter de eu ser um ser que come/ supported by skeleton feeding on/ feeds que se alimentam de massa/ cinzenta made of carbon as all living
- JENNIFER HABEL Is the fifth sense talking?/ How do you do a capital G?/ I have to, donât I?/ Do you want to be just like me? / Why did you put on makeup to go to the grocery store? / Why donât you wear your boots?
- BENJAMIN S. GROSSBERG Weâre all undone by appetite; but which, / at least at first, is up to us. He pressed / himself against me in a parking lot. / Weâd just finished our coffee and small talk. / A Sunday afternoon: cars pulling out / around us, and him salacious in my earâ
- COLETTE BAHNA During the first few months of my service, I made up my mind that, before anything else, I would set aside my sensitivity and put my poetic sensibilities on hold, leaving them until I had first finished my service and then published my collection.
- SHAHLA AL-UJAYLI So what was she to do but take off her shoe and use it to rain down blows on the manâs head and body? The director screamed and begged for mercy from a shoe whose sole had now almost completely come away from the upper.
- BOB HICOK I meant to be taller, / I tell my tailor, who tells my teller, / who cashes my check all in ones / to suit the height of my ambition. / And kinder, I tell my trainer, / who trains my tailor and my teller too / to look better wetter and dryer, kinder / to people and blue skies, moles / and republicans,Â
- ERICA EHRENBERG He saw me once in a pool under the water so he sees this in his mind often when heâs near me. He tells me about swimming across a river. Where is this river? I see branches with blue-black berries on them sinking into the water.
- VIRGINIA KONCHAN Nothing is analogous to God. / In order to strike, a cobra also needs / to recoil. When it comes to vice / and juridical proceedings, I abstain. / All good things, and strokes of bad luck, / happen in threes, and so let it be this way / with us: from lust, to neutrality, to disgust.
- CALLY CONAN-DAVIES âŠOpening / the open sea like a long polished wound, / baffling the wind / with a force mustered from currents / where free is / two thingsâ / âŠbarnacled as if born and raised / between Aphrodite and the devilâs thumb / a whale heaves out a whale-tail...
- TYREE DAYE Every summer when theyâd visit weâd make a moon around them / and listen to stories about city life, / my mother always in the background shaking her headâ / she could hear us leaving already. / My favorite part was the train, / how it can take you / where you needed to be.
- RAW'A SUNBUL Before leaving the hospital she swears the solemnest of oaths that this will be the last time: she assures everyone that she will not be putting herself through this painful experience ever again. And she doesnât forget to mete out a stream of foulmouthed curses.
- PATRICK RIEDY Like any story it sounds harmless, though not when youâre stuck in it. And then decades pass. Honest to God, youâd think with only two or three real-bad storms in half a century it wouldnât still be publicity the city canât get out from under.
- FERREIRA GULLAR Just as two and two are four / I know life is worth the pain / Though the bread is precious / And the freedom, rare / Just as your eyes are clear / And your skin, dark / Just as the ocean is blue / And the lake, sereneÂ
- MOHAMMAD IBRAHIM NAWAYA I sprinted towards them as they battered away. Tried, but could not open the bolted door. I shouted out, called at the top of my voice for those around me to help, but to no avail. At last I despaired, and turned my back to come away.Â
- BOB HICOK Everyone should be given a bucket of roaches and a bucket of air, one for company, one to pay the bills. Be made to clean a grease trap for a year with his or her fingers, with his or her nose infected for life.  Â
- ODAI AL ZOUBI Tamara says that I am constantly on edge; she says that for people like me, meditation can help. âMeditate on what?â âOn yourself,â she replies. âLook inside yourself.â Thereâs nothing there, Tamara, nothing to see; everything that crosses my mind lies outside me.
- MATTHEW GELLMAN Sitting in her motherâs white wooden chair / my mother eyes me up and down, tells me / the medication Iâm taking is making me fat / but yes, I know you need it. Like lipstick / smudged on a glass, she studies my hairline, / my fatherâs nose. I will never be her daughter.
- ANGIE MACRI as a girl approaches a mirror, / not yet a queen, and maybe never, / seeing in the water / no manâs voice to answer, / to say you / are better / than another. / Over her shoulder, her mother / formed a constellation...
- JENNIFER JEAN What if there were no light, he wondered. / Just sound & scent owning the night, without the invasive / Surf Shop green neon, or PCH streetlamps glowering at everyone. / Their glint was wrong, false, while the waves sounded / like aloe on a burn, a quick fix.
- MATT W. MILLER For a moment I was a failed skip of stone /Â sunk into the river for a moment I was the river /Â purling in long last shadows of September /Â for a moment I was a skinny grizzly climbing /Â from a beer can for a time I was Christmas lights wrapping around downtown's smokestack
- THE HINDIYEH MUSEUM OF ART Selections from Syria, courtesy of the Hindiyeh Museum Of Art in Jordan exhibits a distinguished collection of contemporary Arabic art from the start of the 20th century to the present, with frequent new acquisitions from established and emerging artists.Â
- DONOVAN BORGER The man and I step out of the stall barn, our chores finished. / Diesel exhaust reveals our breath in the morning air. / In these summer months, we wear long-sleeve shirts...
- ROWAN BEAIRD You are from Nevada, from a town we visited once when I was very young, before your parents passed. My only memories of it are placing my hand in a basket of hot, shimmering tortilla chips, and watching several cats sleep at the lip of a driveway.
- ELIZABETH METZGER The quickness of living. The quickness of wanting to kill something. Forget dreams, they attack me and I welcome their landings. / Kiss me again without being asked / or asking if I do love / as a gas mask filled with all our unsayable thoughts.
- STEVE KISTULENTZ There can be nothing humble about a modern supplicant / if circumstance leaves him begging for a five-pound block / of cheese. Someone makes sandwiches of broken glass / and light mayo for the children of the divorced, who are us.
- GHASSAN ZEINEDDINEÂ Hani Nuwayhid first heard the professional mourners sing at his sisterâs vigil on a winter night in â84. He was ten. His older sister, Serene, lay in a white dress on a bed propped in the middle of the parlor. Her cheeks were powdered red.
- CLEO QIAN I was settling down for a quiet afternoon at my usual cafĂ© when the waitress asked me if Iâd like to try their new marmalade. âItâs made from special wild oranges from Ehime,Ëź she explained. They were planning on officially introducing it next month.
- CATHERINE STAPLES Some say three, others nine. Varro claimed / one was born of water, another played daylight / like wind, invisible as the airs on Calibanâs isle. / A third made a home of the human voice singing. / Dear Hesiod, perhaps it wasnât the Muses / you glimpsed on sodden farm fields
- PIBULSAK LAKONPOL The Eighth Month exhales a veil of gray smoke around the Pi Pan Nam Mountains. Without their leaves, teakwood trees stand naked beneath a blistering sun, while in the dry wind, the ashes of a distant grassfire drift. At night a crescent moon shines with a lonely yellow light.
- DENISE DUHAMEL In this story, the gun doesnât go off. The sun melts the pistol into a vase, the intact barrel becoming a lip to hold flowers. The un-murdered kiss, their clothes sliding to the floor, their orgasms proof of a feminine ending.
- DIANA BABINEAU You go where you belong, my father says to me, / ten years old, listening at bedtime to his story / about how he once was mugged in Brooklyn / in 1974, a small, polite Canadian / trying to buy gas and a Coke. Like here, he meant, / this neighborhood where crime is low...
- AATISH TASEER It was black American writing, and the black American experience more generally, that first alerted me to the presence of history in America. It made the TV-prepared reality I inhabited less flat; it was my first intimation of something tragic and complex...Â
- ANTONIO ROMANI I pressed my bikeâs pedal, and immediately focused on navigating safely through the motorized fleet. In my new city, bicycles are merely tolerated, like dual citizens by the U.S. government. Drivers often donât âseeâ them, and when they do, they mistrust them.
- RICHIE HOFMANN The streets are named for German poets /  in my huge provincial Midwestern city. / Dust whirls up from the tires of passing cars, / lifting a veil over me, like Romantic longing. On Goethe, I want nothing / more than to reach down and feel a loverâs big skull
- RIVER ADAMS Andrew told me later theyâd just wanted me to hear a familiar melody, a familiar language. They didnât speak Albanian, so they brought whatever melody they came acrossâexotic, intricate. Rhythmic. I knew the song: it was a ballad about murder and lost love.
- Curated by: SARAH WHELAN Happy Launch Week! We are so delighted that Issue 17 is here in time for spring. Enjoy recommendations from some of the people who brought Issue 17 into the world: Ilan Stavans, Patrick Riedy, River Adams, and Hisham Bustani.
- HAIDAR HAIDAR All the former prisoner wanted was a fragment from the circle of calm, stripped from the body of noisy time. He lay down to doze, trying to rid himself of the noise and the horror of imprisonment coursing through his nervous system. With his return, the silence had returnedâŠ
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“Translation as Art: Against Flattening” by Hisham Bustani (translated by Robin Moger)
Contents
Fiction
âTrousseauâ by Rowan Beaird
âWild Orangesâ by Cleo Qian
âThe Reincarnatesâ by Ghassan Zeineddine
âAntipodeâ by River Adams
Arabic Stories from Syria
âBorder Strip: Three Storiesâ by Luqman Derki (Translated by Jonathan Wright)
âThe Memoirs of Cinderellaâs Slipperâ by Shahla Al-Ujayli (Translated by Alice Guthrie)
âTo Be Led from Behindâ by Mohammad Ibrahim Nawaya  (Translated by Robin Moger)
âDeath-Flavored Life: Two Storiesâ by Rawâa Sunbul (Translated by Alice Guthrie)
âThe Silence of Fireâ by Haidar Haidar (Translated by Jonathan Wright)
âSilenceâ by Odai Al Zoubi (Translated by Robin Moger)
âÙ â by Colette Bahna (Translated by Robin Moger)
âFrozen: Three Storiesâ by Ibrahim Samuel (Translated by Maia Tabet)
Essays
âWe Shall Be a Country with No Historyâ by Aatish Taseer
âThe Spirit of Placeâ by Antonio Romani
âEnds of the Earth & Edges of Dreamâ by Pibulsak Lakonpol (Translated by Noh Anothai)
âTravels with Billâ by Marietta Pritchard
Poetry
âHow Do You Get to Harlemâ by Tyree Daye
âMalibu Beachâ by Jennifer Jean
âRoachâ by Elizabeth Metzger
âA Pause in the Actionâ by Bob Hicok
âUnder Constructionâ by Bob Hicok
âAutobiographyâ by Matt W. Miller
âHorsesâ by Matthew Gellman
âOnly the Surface Breaksâ by Cally Conan-Davies
âYou Want Me Daybreakâ by Alfonsina Storni (Translated by Nicholas Friedman)
âThe Life Domesticâ by Steve Kistulentz
âHomileticâ by Virginia Konchan
âTwo Plus Two: Fourâ by Ferreira Gullar (Translated by Ilan Stavans and Tal Goldfajn)
âTranslationâ by Ananda Lima
âDean Saysâ by Patrick Riedy
âThe Aladdin Hotel, Woodbourne, NYâ by Erica Ehrenberg
âPhilosophical Flowersâ by Richie Hofmann
âWhat My Father Saidâ by Diana Babineau
âCatherine the Greatâ by Benjamin S. Grossberg
âAndromeda Came to the Silver Riverâ by Angie Macri
âAbout the Musesâ by Catherine Staples
âLife (with Apologies to Chekhov)â by Denise Duhamel
âAfter Watching the Changing of the Guard at Arlington National Cemeteryâ by Donovan Borger
âExamples of the Interrogative in Janeâs Kitchenâ by Jennifer Habel
Art
Selections from Syria, courtesy of the Hindiyeh Museum of Art
Issue 17
