June 19, 2025

a girlhood summer passes

by Ghinwa Jawhari

This Pride Month 2025, Mizna is honored to be republishing selections from Mizna 21.1: Queer + Trans Voices for every week of June. This week, Ghinwa Jawhari teases apart the multiple layers of queer experience of a summer spent in Lebanon.

Use coupon code SWANAPRIDE25 for a discount on Mizna 21.1: Queer + Trans Voices and the special collection I Want Sky honoring martyred Egyptian queer activist Sarah Hegazy, valid through the end of June 2025.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

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we find fairuz on the radio. in sleepless tones
newscasters interject with head counts: bodies

—Ghinwa Jawhari

a girlhood summer passes

shouf, lebanon

july war 2006

you curl against me like a burning hair
as airstrikes pock the hillside, bare earth
red as afterbirth. upturned. we knob until
we find fairuz on the radio. in sleepless tones
newscasters interject with head counts: bodies
other bodies have yet to name. the slaughter
a spectacle from your balcony, each missile
a scream of fire & dust. your father’s palestinian
riles in you, wraps your fingers around the rail
like a stone. smoke pillows the heavens black,
gauzes stars away from view. beside me you tear
a weed apart. loves me loves me not loves me loves
until the stem is bare. a girlhood summer passes,
water under the bridge. we are tall & featureless
as the okra crop. we pull cat’s cradles in our hands,
scribble fates in cootie catchers. during the ceasefire
your neighbor begs us to come swim in his pool.
he watches our slim bodies assault the surface
of the water. from his perch he hoots, in english,
bombshell! & we both laugh nervously, thinking
he must be talking about the other. we’ll remember
the brief war this way: dirty water, a man’s eyes
fishing us openly, legs crossed on the wet concrete
as the news drones over fairuz, a list of countries
that have brought warships to collect their citizens.

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