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In Search of Hassan Matar

October 25, 2021 Fiction, Issue 22, Issue 22 Fiction, Podcasts & Audio

hitsamty · Samtani_InSearchofHassanMatar_TheCommon

As the car passed the Flag and sped toward Za’abeel, Avi’s crisp V’s became softer and less pronounced—“wees,” even. By the time he crossed Sana Signal, coffee shops and villas having given way to the old city’s chai stalls and low-rise apartments, the languid, questioning “ahs” at the ends of his sentences had been abandoned, the tongue clicks dropped. “Paps, what time do we have to make a move to the souq?” he said to his dad on the phone, sounding like just another Bur Dubai kid. “Okay, I’ll be downstairs in an hour.” He gestured to the driver to pull up outside his building and hopped out, throwing the Capri-Sonne straw he had been chewing all the way from school onto the pavement. His gait had changed, too: on the Jumeirah side of the Flag, he adopted the exaggerated chest-swivel of the Khaleeji, ass jutting out, body taking up far more real estate than someone of his frame reasonably should. Here, however, he stepped within himself.

There were rules, though. If even one lochal or premium expat were spotted, accents would be drawn. Intonations would warp midway, vowels replaced with dressier ones like guest bedsheets.

Dispellations: Manomaya Kosha

October 25, 2021 Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry

By ANNA MARIA HONG

You can’t defeat nature, you can only
work with it. Just as speculating
on a perpetrator’s motives —sex as
power, power as hard exercise
of a phantom sense
of impotence,
blah, blah, blah—is trackless, so too is
asking what does it want, it wants
far less than you or I could
ever envision
in our least released
lives. It means no harm.
It needs a warm
host. We invoke genre to accommodate
events terrible and intimate,
to give fleshly narrative to cataclysms
of globular dimension— private/public, macro/micro
—samskara, samskara, these fictions sizzling through
the World Wide Gap,
racist, replicant, and species-specific.

The Sea Dreams of Us

October 25, 2021 Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry

By ROMEO ORIOGUN

Before the sea became my journey, it was love,
folktales, it was our origin staring at us,
it was our shadows, then the ships of migration
came, reminding us, that years back, people left
in canoes loaded with hope, with spices, seafarers
who navigated water, holding stars in their bosoms
until the sky became road. We never saw them,
only heard the rumors, only heard they grew wings

Quarantine

October 25, 2021 Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry

By HERA NAGUIB

Tonight, I halt to prior ghosts
that upwell again, funerary as the sirens
that shrill through the tracheal alleys.

Snake, Not Serpent; Hopelessness, Not Despair

October 25, 2021 Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry

By ANGIE MACRI

We shouldn’t use Latinate words,
too many syllables, abstractions, flowers.
Instead, use words with Germanic roots,
shorter, to the point. As if half our tongue
was wrong. As if flowers, too,
didn’t belong. Oh, you know what I mean.
Yes, I do: erase those empires and the gods. Say fall,
not autumn; ghost, not phantom;
drought, not famine; fire, not flame.
We have aches, not pains, graves, not tombs.
As if no one from such places
could speak of concrete things,
as if no one came here from such places at all.
Like immigrant. Say one who comes.

Angie Macri is the author of Underwater Panther, winner of the Cowles Poetry Book Prize. Her recent work appears in The Cincinnati Review, The Fourth River, and Quarterly West. An Arkansas Arts Council fellow, she lives in Hot Springs and teaches at Hendrix College.

[Purchase Issue 22 here.]

Fixation

October 25, 2021 Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry

By HALA ALYAN

It’s like knowing there’s
a house on fire and only
you have the key, but
there’s no address, the
streets keep changing
numbers, and if you
don’t make it in time,
everybody inside dies.
Even the houseplants.
You never make it in
time. I still like my
brain. This feels as
impossible as crown
shyness, but it’s true—I
feel its lure flash like a
camera bulb sometimes,
the magic and the grief
like two rivers necking
where they meet.

Joyriding in Riyadh

October 25, 2021 Fiction, Issue 22, Issue 22 Fiction

By TARIQ AL HAYDAR

“Saudi wastemen came over the bridge for boozy orgy celebrations.” —Noor Naga

The horror of the city. As Dhari tapped the steering wheel, he calmed himself by visualizing the beautiful woman who should be sitting next to him soon: shoulder-length blonde hair and sky-blue eyes. He eyed the two security guards idling at the gate of the hospital, joking with each other. The gangly one spit on the ground, then turned to the one with long hair, who handed him a cigarette. Dhari’s friend Dawood got caught with a woman he wasn’t related to once. Dawood was actually lucky to spend only a week in jail, but Dhari knew he couldn’t handle prison for even a day. If only he could have been born somewhere else, where people weren’t separated from one another like this. Whenever he watched American movies, he marveled at how men and women got together, threw dinner parties, clinked glasses. Relationships, dances, first kisses, all these things were taken for granted. How would they view Saudi weddings? Separate ones for men and women. At a wedding, all one did was shake men’s hands, drink tan Saudi coffee in small ceramic cups, and sit, waiting for meat and rice to be served.