By TANYA COKE
I.
Scrawny was my first thought. I’d babysat enough by then to place his age at just shy of a year. As my father handed him to me, the baby arched his back in protest, his chicken butt threatening to escape his diaper completely. I could tell that a man had fastened it, because the tape on the sides was all askew.
“Come, say hello to your brother,” Daddy said, smiling.
Jerusalem, 1967
Aba sent us around the neighborhood to cut down sabra, using a knife taped to the handle of a broomstick. We severed the fruit heads, rolled them a few times on the grass to get rid of their thorns, and dropped them into a bucket. Tamar sat on Eran’s shoulders, her small dancer’s body leaning forward to reach the cactus with the bucket. I handled the broomstick, severing the purplish-orange prickly pear from the body of the cactus. When we were done, Tamar took the fruit to her mom, so she could make it into jam. Once it was ready, we stored it in the bomb shelter, along with the rest of the emergency supplies. The shelter was in the basement of our building, and we shared it with three other families. Tamar arranged the supplies carefully, as if she were handling explosives. Jars of blueberry and raspberry jam, white bread, dark bread, apples, peaches, and tin cans stacked one on top of the other filled the corner of the room. She wore a turquoise skirt and matching top. Eran grabbed Tamar’s hips from behind, making her jump.
Memory: a man cradles his son onshore,
pressing warm sea breeze on his tiny rebellion.
If men gave birth, what would become of gods?
My boyfriend does not come with me to the penis museum. While I pay the eight hundred Icelandic krona to visit 276 specimens of pickled, salted, or mounted manhood, Dustin is at home packing boxes. His home. He is sweating there in the triple-digit heat of a Texas summer, sweating as he arranges his life into banker’s boxes and carries them out in bulky white waves to stack against the blank walls of the new place, the place we picked out together, the first apartment we will ever share. And while all this packing and inventory and heavy lifting has everything to do with me, with us, with bringing an end to the long-distance phase of our relationship and making a life together, it does not yet occur to him that what he’s doing has anything whatsoever to do with an Icelandic penis museum. He has no idea that by the time he picks me up from the airport a few weeks later, I’ll want him to make a donation. Indeed, at first, I do not know it myself.
By RON WELBURN
Life knows no embarrassment
than being unprepared,
caught in the rain flatfooted
before ceremonies,
nabbed in the seat of the pants
by the stealth of Coyote.
By EMAD BLAKE
Translated by ELISABETH JAQUETTE
1—Idiot
The oldest boys in the neighborhood—“bullies,” as our Egyptian neighbors would say—chased that boy… chased me.
I’d long been obsessed with watching Egyptian TV shows and films, sneaking into the cinema to see them because in our house it was forbidden… “forbidden, boy, to go there.ˮ According to my mother, grandmother, and the other women in the neighborhood, screens are the devil’s handiwork: they corrupt good boys and girls. Of course, they’re poor women, without an ounce of luck.
When she sheds
her last moony
red potential
a woman sheds
also obligation
(insert obligation
elsewhere)
fading from
lure to lore.
By DON SHARE and JOHN KINSELLA
17.
The cicadas come every…
How many years? The cycles
Are all fucked up now. Even
Insects know the end is near.
The emerald ash borer looks
Like a jewel; its value
Lies in destructiveness to
Species—ours—that feed on ash.
Courtesy of the Hindiyeh Museum of Art
ISLAM KAMIL ALI
UNTITLED (2011)
47 x 62 CM, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS
Translated by ROBIN MOGER
Not many of us knew Sharif. He had been gone from the village for more than thirty years, and the few times his name came up, the person in question would glance around and lower their voice almost to a whisper. Men’s heads would cluster together in brief and hasty conference. And should his father, Sheikh Abdennabi Wadd Saleh, appear at the head of the alley and walk their way, or his mother, Hagga Amina Bint Suleiman, approach the store, they would fall silent or change the conversation.
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