Issues

Melh

By REWA ZEINATI

 

Water. 
At the shore we don’t build anything. Behind our sunglasses, our eyes dart in every direction. A man carries a sandcastle on his back. A fish. Or is that a tattoo of a fairytale palace? His arms are full sleeves of ink. Maybe he’s been working in the financial district for years. Maybe he’s only here for three days. 

In the water we talk salaries and offices and how much saltier this sea is compared to ours. Ours? We talk about hunger, the likelihood of lunch. On my left, Burj Al Arab juts forth its belly of glass and steel. 

Melh
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Appetite

By DAN ALBERGOTTI

Emerging from her cocoon without a mouth,
the luna moth climbs onto a stem to unfurl
and dry her wings. She’ll find a mate tonight.

There will be no kiss. There will be no taste.
There will be no speech or song. After midnight
the still, silent couple will join like drops of rain.

Appetite
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“It was No Arabian Nights at All”: Coming of Age in America’s Kingdom

By KEIJA PARSSINEN 

This was Arabia as a romantic imagination might have created it; nights so mellow that they lay out under the scatter of dry bright stars, and heard the silence beyond their fire as if the whole desert hung listening. 

—Wallace Stegner, Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil

“When we arrived there [Aramco], it was no Arabian Nights at all. It was just a kind of shack, it seemed to me.… Air-conditioned shacks with a great big swimming pool in the middle with a canvas over the top.” 

—Mary Stegner to her husband’s biographer, Jackson J. Benson

“It was No Arabian Nights at All”: Coming of Age in America’s Kingdom
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Igerilaria

By JULIAN ZABALBEASCOA

For Lorenzo Esteban Benavente and my father

 

LAKE SUPERIOR, 1974

A slight wind picks up and moves over the lake, clinking rocks together in the wash. Salvador squints into the darkness. The way his fellow construction workers talked about America’s proximity, he’d half expected to sight the faintest outline of one of its cities’ skylines as a shimmer set deep against the horizon. Instead, there’s only the night and, stretching to meet it, the mumbling water.

Igerilaria
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Mapping Exile: A Writer’s Story of Growing Up Stateless in Post-Gulf War Kuwait

BY MONA KAREEM 

Sitting on a green couch in what is now a bedbug-infested Brooklyn apartment, I suddenly realized that my flight to meet my family for the first time in five years was actually tonight, not tomorrow; 12:30 a.m., not 12:30 p.m. I had planned to wake up early in the morning, make two cups of coffee, and pack a small bag with the few gifts I managed to buy last minute for my siblings. I thought I had more hours to sit with my heavy feeling, which I assumed to be a mix of excitement and longing, but which was rather a combination of wariness and fear, of things going wrong, of encounters no one can prepare for. 

In front of the couch, there was a round coffee table, which I circled around in panic, not sure if I could make it to JFK on time, to Kiev on time, to Tbilisi on time. For months, my sister and I had saved and borrowed so we could have this one-week reunion trip in a country we knew nothing about. A few months after my arrival in the United States, the Kuwaitis had denied my application for passport renewal, subsequently making me an asylee. My family’s attempts to get U.S. visas were repeatedly denied, so we began to make different plans. We called embassies every morning, in the United States and in Kuwait. I asked, “Do you accept a U.S. refugee travel document? How long to issue a visa?” while they asked, “Do you accept a stateless travel document? How long to issue a visa?” The mutually closest country was Georgia, a place Arabs have come to discover in the past few years, this time not as conquerors, but as refugees in transit, hoping to infiltrate Europe from her eastern side. 

Mapping Exile: A Writer’s Story of Growing Up Stateless in Post-Gulf War Kuwait
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Ghosts of the Southern Ocean

By CARIN CLEVIDENCE

An image of the deck of a vessel on the South Atlantic Ocean

My mother cuts the outboard motor. Over the slap of waves on the boat’s black pontoon, I hear the fur seals barking. The cliffs are dotted with white albatross. Seals sprawl along the rocky shoreline: gray fur seals with black, rowdy pups, and brown elephant seals beached like massive timbers. Their smell carries across the water, a familiar, testosterone-laden stink, like a mix of musk and onion rings.

Ghosts of the Southern Ocean
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