Winner of the DISQUIET Prize for Poetry
By IQRA KHAN
I begin as revelation. As explosion of glottal light against silence.
I am again asking for directions to the Haram, my ankles fluent in Arabic.
I am again asking for direction, ya Haram, my ankles flowing with Arabic!
Hagar, watch how God transforms this wilderness to civilization.
This event has passed, but you can watch a recording of it below, or here on YouTube!
Join The Common for the launch of Issue 28! We welcome four esteemed contributors who happen to be local: Disquiet Prize-winning poet Iqra Khan, MacArthur Fellow Brad Leithauser, environmental economist James K. Boyce, and fiction and essay writer Douglas Koziol. Issues will be available for purchase. We’ll have brief readings, a short Q&A, and lots of time to mingle!
Left to Right: Iqra Khan, James K. Boyce, Douglas Koziol, Brad Leithauser
Iqra Khan is a Pushcart-nominated poet, activist, and lawyer. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at UW Madison. She is also a winner of the 2024 Disquiet Prize in poetry and the Frontier Global Poetry Prize 2022. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Indiana Review, Denver Quarterly, Puerto del Sol, Southeast Review, Adroit Journal, Swamp Pink, The Rumpus, among others. Her work is centered around collective nostalgia, Muslim credibility, and the Muslim burden of becoming.
New poems by our contributors DAN ALBERGOTTI, KATE GASKIN, IQRA KHAN, and CARSON WOLFE
Table of Contents:
The Dumb Show
By Dan Albergotti
They showed you the models. They warned you well
in advance. Levels and gasses and ice melt and us.
Storms and floods and fires and famine and us.
And now it’s here. And now you act surprised.
When I was studying Hamlet in college,
I wondered how Claudius could be so taken aback
by the inner play’s events when the silent pantomime
of the dumb show had already given away the plot.
My professor explained that the royals
would usually ignore the dumb show, would shield
their eyes, thinking such explanatory preamble
to the play itself was far beneath their station.
The dumb show was for the average folk, he said.
In the end, both Rosencrantz and Claudius are dead.
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