All posts tagged: May 2025

Amman Compendium

Amman Compendium

May 5, 2025 , , , ,

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.

Amman Compendium
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Aqueduct

Aqueduct

May 5, 2025 , ,

By MARY JO SALTER

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.

Aqueduct
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Cedar Park Café 

Cedar Park Café 

May 5, 2025 , ,

By TERRA OLIVEIRA

at cedar park café, praised for their chicken & waffles, 
i sit at the corner table, & a young blonde child 
with their family in front of me takes a sip of water, 
looks right at their parents, raises their right hand, 
back straight: i commit to not look at my phone, 
even when it’s right in front of me. 

i make the same commitment to myself every day. 
before recovery, no amount of self-control could bring myself 
to stop it. i was sort of big but the phone was bigger. 
this compulsion is real & serious—i thought it, i knew it, 
i’d pray for my behavior to change the next day. 
first thing the next morning, my hand would up 
& move itself, no thought of the rest of the body.  

like any addict there is hope for us too. 
in recovery—yes—i turn to meetings, 
turn to phone calls, to God & to fellows, 
& to readings. i pick up, i slip, i try again, 
further away from where i was (the hours & days), 
& closer to where i want to be 
(so many more hours, so many more days). 

my chicken & waffles are served, 
melted butter & maple syrup & crispy chicken 
& warm sweet & spicy sauce. 
i put my phone (just a notebook) back down.  

the parent: put your phone away. 
the child: we’re going to have to put it in the fire of death. 
the parent: the phone? 
the child: yes, in the fire of death. 
the parent: we don’t need to put it in a fire of death. 
and the phone: 

 

 

[Purchase Issue 29 here.]

Terra Oliveira is a writer and visual artist from the San Francisco Bay Area, and the founding editor of Recenter Press. Her poems have been published in The American Poetry Review, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. During the week, you can find her managing two bookstores in the North Bay.

Cedar Park Café 
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Amman in Color: Majd Hijjawi, Momen Malkawi, Husam Manasrah

Amman in Color: Majd Hijjawi, Momen Malkawi, Husam Manasrah

May 5, 2025 , , ,

By MAJD HIJJAWI, MOMEN MALKAWI, and HUSAM MANASRAH

 

Photography by Majd Hijjawi

Garden courtyard

An abandoned villa in Um Uthaina. This house is a remnant of a once affluent residential neighborhood in Amman, with an eighties architectural style popular at the time. This home no longer exists, as commercial projects have been taking over the neighborhood. 

 

Amman in Color: Majd Hijjawi, Momen Malkawi, Husam Manasrah
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City / Non-City

City / Non-City

May 5, 2025 , ,

By YARA GHUNAIM
Translated by WIAM EL-TAMAMI

Eight Ways of Looking at a City

1.

Every day, on my way to work, I make a bet with myself: Will I find the tree—the one next to the Own the Apartment of a Lifetime! sign—still standing in the same place? When we’re together in the car, my mother wonders aloud: “My God, when did that building come up?” I imagine the buildings sprouting up from the earth, like plants.

 

2.

I spend more than half my day in an office, behind a closed door, inside a gigantic glass building. I sit in front of the computer screen. I contemplate how empty space becomes apartments to be bought and sold. Now that homes have become investments, there is no sky left; all the air is now conditioned. They’ve blocked out the sun, buried the sea in another city. And yet, when I go out, I see flowers growing, forcing their way through the concrete of the sidewalk. I marvel at their intuition—their knowledge that concrete is bound to break.[1] 

City / Non-City
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Hotel Philadelphia

Hotel Philadelphia

May 5, 2025 , , , ,

By KHALED SAMEH
Translated by WIAM EL-TAMAMI

1.

As I sit here in the Hashemite Plaza, I am surrounded by noise—visual, auditory—coming at me from all directions. This grand forum attached to the Roman Theatre has now become a breathing space for hundreds of thousands of residents of East Amman and the surrounding governorates. Some come here for recreational reasons, to get together, or to make a living. There are many other reasons why people come to this square, reasons that are not unique to Amman and that are found in most cities around the world. There are pimps and sex workers (heterosexual and homosexual); children being exploited in different ways; dealers of hashish and other drugs—along with various other things that Ammanis would include in their long list of taboo topics.

Hotel Philadelphia
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Selections from Lettres en forêt urbain

Selections from Lettres en forêt urbain

May 1, 2025 ,

By BERTRAND LAVERDURE
Translated by SLP

Poems appear below in English and the original French.

Translator’s note

I stumbled on these poems, fairly literally, in a bookstore in Québec.

I immediately recognized the hyper-connected world M. Bertrand Laverdure writes of—the new networks of pop culture and politicians and internet also familiar to me as an American, and the older networks of gargantuan trees, shaky trees, trees above streams and children playing and park benches and promotional flyers and guidewires. I recognized the surreality of his world. Of the double-address, where each poem is an epistle both to a specific tree with a clear local history, and to figures from cartoons (Skeletor), film (Poltergeist), myth (Penelope), classic literature (Gatsby), and more. The surreality where each tree and literary figure is also “a jpeg,” and where plugging devices into outlets, or each other, mirrors trees (the French word for plugged in is “branché”).

Selections from Lettres en forêt urbain
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