& girls so many girls with long locks & red locks & curls & locked
doors you try to break into & out of & bare feet & the streets
you don’t look both ways crossing & all the ways you close your eyes & reach
to find what’s nearest by touch & touch & touch & touch &
By AMY ALKHALIFI
Translated by MAYADA IBRAHIM
Fardous Loses Her Mind and Invents a New Future
“At the beginning, it was easy. Customers were in and out all day, and money was flowing,” Fardous the soothsayer says to her neighbor Um Khalid after revealing to her that “business is bad.”
Light snow, bare branches.
It’s easier now to see
Deep into the woods,
Loss upon loss settling
Under a lattice of ice.
Phillis Levin is the author of six poetry collections, including An Anthology of Rain and Mr. Memory & Other Poems, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet.
We traveled as a group to Kenya on assignment to photograph zebra in complete abstraction, or the pores around the elephant’s flickering eyelid, or herds of giraffe clustered around salt licks like politicians deciding the fate of the country. We also drank. Fred, a Texan beer-sipper, always used a longer lens than the job needed. He worked in advertising, which meant that an assignment like this was his big chance to express himself. Franco bore his drink and our presence sardonically, a finger to the ear and always a story to accompany his glass of wine, usually about a donkey and metaphysics. It wasn’t a donkey after all was often the punchline. He was important enough that he could invite Heinemann to tag along on the trip. Heinemann’s wife was tending to an extremely pregnant NGO daughter, an activity that offered little for him, he said, personally. He was a professional magician elsewhere, not a photographer. But he was also very adept in the academic world, with an air of abstraction that suggested he had cleared collegiate hurdles in boredom. He drank vodka well. As for me, I drank gin and tonics as if they would stop malaria in its tracks. I had a name in photography, but after shooting the body for decades, my work had begun to disappear. A woman the men’s age, I had become invisible, as if I were left in too little fix.
Photography made Heinemann uncomfortable; he was an expert in everything else, or else he pleased his friend Franco by demurring to his opinion. The rest of us declaimed as if we knew every ABC in the book, but really Heinemann was the one we all envied with his academic paycheck, as evidenced by our earnest critiques of his amateurish attempts at taking pictures. Your gloating hyena is too hackneyed, we argued, the baobab against the sunset too obscene, and the dancing women adorned in beads and gold cloth are far too pretty to be pithy. Heinemann laughed and pulled a coin out of Fred’s ear. Advertising! he exclaimed. He settled on photographing the steam pouring over the car engine.
And though nobody knew what I would cost,
they kept me—a debt to be paid for centuries.
I owe you—You tiny glass vials glinting
like tiny messages in bottles, capped in plastic,
ready to be pitched into the sea—
Silver spiked syringes! Odorous alcohol swabs!
By MARIAM ITANI
Translated by WIAM EL-TAMAMI
On Greetings
Hello, Amman. Greetings to you, your people, your streets, to all the surprises and endless stories you have hidden up your sleeves. I landed here ten years after marrying one of your sons, fulfilling the prophecy of my grandmother, who always said, “Wherever you go, life will take you to Amman.” Yet coming to Amman was actually the last thing my husband and I expected to do.
We arrived at the wrong time, in the blazing heat of August. My oldest son, Izzeddin, was very happy, because he’d had two birthdays: one in Beirut, another in Amman. As for my daughter, I’d left her behind in Beirut with my grandmother, buried in the same earth, keeping each other company. I visit her more there than I would if she were buried in the cemetery here, far away from the city, covered in layers of dust and mirage. Coming onto the airplane, I was told by the flight attendant that this would be the last time I would be allowed to board a plane, because it looked as though I was about to give birth. I told her that I had decided to give birth in Amman, and showed her the doctor’s reports that allowed me to travel. I took hold of Izzeddin’s hand, and we sat in the very first seats on the plane. It was my first time booking business class from Beirut to Amman, because that gave us extra baggage allowance—something we desperately needed.
All the other professors emeriti
have shuffled in, neat in jacket and tie
except for the few ladies (flats and hose),
and nobody’s not in hearing aids—both those
with hair to hide the wires and those without,
and (a sub-category) those who shout
their greetings now while sporting a severe
kind of stopper, jammed into the ear
as if to bar the spillage of what remains
(old wine in old bottles) of their brains.
I know you think that evil always fades
like grass, that even when it spreads itself
like a bay tree, or cobwebs on a shelf,
time will turn it back, as sun with shade,
By KATE GASKIN
After she died
the crocuses bloomed
and the purple phlox.
The daffodils bloomed
and the snowdrops.
The star magnolias bloomed
and the forsythia.
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