Courtesy of the Hindiyeh Museum of Art
ABDUL KARIM FARAJ
UNTITLED , 1989
PRINT 5/6 (48 X 32 CM)
For a moment I was a failed skip of stone
sunk into the river for a moment I was the river
purling in long last shadows of September
for a moment I was a skinny grizzly climbing
from a beer can
—for my brother Joey
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.
Some blue & some red lights also flooded the water—flashed
as a girl approaches a mirror,
not yet a queen, and maybe never,
seeing in the water
no man’s voice to answer,
to say you are better
than another.
By ODAI AL ZOUBI
Translated by ROBIN MOGER
A sticky patch
1
Tamara says that I am constantly on edge; she says that for people like me, meditation can help. “Meditate on what?” “On yourself,” she replies. “Look inside yourself.” There’s nothing there, Tamara, nothing to see; everything that crosses my mind lies outside me: Goya’s caprichos, the appalling translation of Bertrand Russell’s essays on epistemology I was reading yesterday, the over-vinegared salad I ate today. Perhaps this is my self, Tamara: nothing worth contemplating.
Sitting in her mother’s white wooden chair
my mother eyes me up and down, tells me
the medication I’m taking is making me fat
but yes, I know you need it. Like lipstick
smudged on a glass, she studies my hairline,
my father’s nose. I will never be her daughter.
By 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.
By MOHAMMAD IBRAHIM NAWAYA
Translated by ROBIN MOGER
Seige
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. And when at last I despaired, and turned my back to come away, my head knocked against the wall of a water tank, greater still, shut fast against me.
By FERREIRA GULLAR
Translated by ILAN STAVANS and TAL GOLDFAJN
Just as two and two are four
I know life is worth the pain
Though the bread is precious
And the freedom, rare
By RAW’A SUNBUL
Translated by ALICE GUTHRIE
Absent Butterflies
She takes off her clothes and covers her chilly, naked body with a heavyweight green gown. She steps into the white plastic slippers and gets up onto the birthing chair. She leans back, gulping hungrily at the air and mumbling a plea for help in the form of the Quranic ayahs she’s been told will ease the pain of her contractions: “When the earth is leveled out, casts out its contents, and becomes empty… casts out its contents and becomes empty… casts out….” Her words are silenced by a new contraction slamming into her from behind, then bursting out from the middle of her back and wrapping its monstrous arms around her, engulfing her, linking its hands under her belly and squeezing, clamping down, pushing down, down, down. She bites her bottom lip and clasps her hands over her chest. She digs the nails of her right hand hard into her left palm, streaming sweat, a tear escaping the corner of her eye.
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