Bids slowly wish.
With camellias.
With rose hips bee
balm with honey.
George Rapp 4th of July
May 2, 2022
Issue 23, Issue 23 Poetry, Poetry
The Marching Bands of Mahatma Gandhi Road
May 2, 2022
Essays, Issue 23, Issue 23 Essays
“Name and fame,” Mohammad Sabir said in English, shouting over the noise of the traffic. Manager and occasional trumpet player for one of dozens of marching bands for hire in Kolkata, India, he was describing the glamor that once compelled families across the city to hire bands like his.
Fifty-year-old Master Sabir, as bandleaders are known, was sitting behind his desk in a pink, threadbare shirt. A goat was tied to the electricity box out front, barefoot children raced past, and, nearby, bidi makers sat chopping dried tobacco by hand. According to my phone, it was only 103 degrees, but the reported “feels like” had hovered between 118 and 125 for days, and it was sometimes hard to breathe. This was in May of 2019, halfway through Ramadan and an hour before iftar; Sabir had not eaten or taken a drink of water all day.
The Stranger
May 2, 2022
Fiction, Issue 23, Issue 23 Fiction, Translation
Translated by NASHWA GOWANLOCK
Farah was struggling to keep her balance in the heaving crowd near the locked gate. Despite how long she would have to wait to get into the hall at Amman University—where she’d already been standing for more than an hour—she remained both calm and cheerful. She was even humming a song—the last one she’d listened to on the way from the border crossing to a modest hotel in the Jordanian capital where she was sharing a room with the university friend joining her for the Fairouz concert.
Public Fishing Dock
May 2, 2022
Issue 23, Issue 23 Poetry, Poetry, Uncategorized
By RALPH BURNS
We had to leave because someone saw my
father set his bottle down. Because
of something in us we leaned into one another
To My IUD
May 2, 2022
Issue 23, Issue 23 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry
I’m halfway home to Bed-Stuy
when I feel the cervical cramp.
I was told they’d be getting worse
Breakfast of Champions
May 2, 2022
Issue 23, Issue 23 Poetry, Poetry
By TINA CANE
I woke up in a panic this morning thinking what if my love language
is granola? I found a quiz online but was too chicken to take it having had
Russian bots once read my face and place me alongside a woman holding a mango
or some bullshit in Gaugin
nothing exotic for me today
The Birthday
May 2, 2022
Fiction, Issue 23, Issue 23 Fiction
Translated by JULIA SANCHES
At the end-of-year meeting, the teacher had informed me that Izadi needed to take up a sport, “discover the strength she had inside her,” “meet people,” “socialize,” “work on her independence.” The teacher said these things and other things, just as he did at the end of every school year. I pretended to be surprised, but I knew all of that already. Usually, I was on top of her, and I figured that was a good thing, or maybe I didn’t know, I wasn’t sure. In any case, Izadi was special, and that was the price to pay for raising her with principles. I wanted to enjoy her company as much as possible—after all, I’d wanted to have her so badly. Before Izadi, I’d never taken care of anyone, at least not for such a long period of time, and it was more complicated than I’d thought it would be, much more complicated than just loving someone. Weekends, holidays, every single day… I took care of everything as if it were a lesson plan. I was tired; maybe that was why our relationship had deteriorated. So that summer I signed Izadi up for kayaking lessons even though she didn’t want them.
The Hindiyeh Museum of Art: Selections from Palestine
May 2, 2022
Issue 23, Issue 23 Art, Studio
Three Omens of Federico da Montefeltro
May 2, 2022
Fiction, Issue 23, Issue 23 Fiction
By BEN STROUD
Urbino, 1472
Ottaviano held the staff high and steady as Scipio tugged at the bunches of leaves fixed to its top.
“He remains content?” Ottaviano asked the giraffe’s keeper.
“He does,” the keeper said. “Twice since sunrise he’s moved his bowels.”
Ottaviano watched Scipio chew. With his knobbly horns, his puzzled hide, and his great neck, he had clearly been made for a far different existence in his home beyond the Nile, a home for which even the library’s grandest atlas possessed only the most rudimentary of maps. And yet, snatched from that home, confined to his pen, the animal betrayed neither alarm nor sorrow.
A Letter to Leena
May 2, 2022
Issue 23, Issue 23 Poetry, Poetry
I came when you were born,
but soon the flying stopped.
By the time I came again,
we drove in private cars
