Executive Editor George Abraham’s introduction to Mizna 25.1: Catastrophe contemplates the work of editing in a time of genocide. Link to order here.

Love takes the form of rain clouds: we accumulate despite our im/possible wounds, gather even in miraculous conditions. We join our kin in the swarm, all of whom gathering, like us, as waters from unknowable sources. And then the flood.

—George Abraham

Toward an Apocalypse of Letters

Challenging the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonized that their world is fundamentally different.

—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Palestine is not a laboratory. It is not a site of sympathy. It cannot be reduced to a sterile problem. Palestine is a place of abundance, an abundance of lessons about persisting in the looped and looping time of the present . . . There is no postcolonial, postracial, postZionist. We cannot await a secular salvation or a messianic apocalypse. We are in the apocalypse.

—Sherene Seikaly, “Nakba in the Age
of Catastrophe,” Jadaliyya.com

This does not seek a remedy

this does not need a balm
this needs an ending

—Dionne Brand, Nomenclature for the Time Being

What does it mean to edit in a time of genocide, or moreover, a time when the many ongoing colonial catastrophes that underpin our current world order are hypervisible for the communities we claim to serve? The job of the editor, in one view, boils down to keeping the publication machine going. We check in on writers to keep timelines synced toward a publication deadline. We read pieces closely to move them through content editing and copyediting, layout, and proofing with as minimal potential setbacks as possible. A question I have been grappling with over the course of the past eleven months is, how can the material and ideological implications of this job translate to serving a community that is, intentionally, trying to stop this horrific genocidal death machine; a community making art that, as Mizna beloved Rasha Abdulhadi says, can be thrown like sand into the gears of empire? How does one reconcile these opposing orientations in space-time, making room for the long, deep, slow, relational thinking our movements need, while the world accelerates in its insistence on unmaking us?

One answer, of course, is that communally-focused editors can serve as ambassadors, working to break down imperially-imposed barriers for their authors and build possibility-generating avenues during a time of catastrophe. I cannot introduce this issue of Mizna without naming the ways much of its construction was inspired by listening to poets at explicitly pro-Palestinian gatherings: Aurielle Marie’s pieces which came to us after a Poets for Palestine event organized by Claire Schwartz in October 2023; Olivia Elias and Yahya Ashour who came to us from the immense labor of love that went into organizing Palestine Writes in September 2023 against the wishes of one of the wealthiest institutions in the world; the constellation of conversations that emerged from Mizna+RAWIFest 2023. 

But this is only part of the answer. How do we reach our people, by which I mean continuously go out of our way to find and welcome our people, in a world whose catastrophes are set on tearing us apart, from our land and from each other, isolating us into silos to make us vessels of pure imperial domination? What is a politics of listening (or the dangerous charades masquerading in the name of listening¹) if not backed by an anticolonial politics of rigorously working to break borders as we expand the circle, to accept the infinite unknown implicit to all community-building? In this way, the job of the editor is not merely to be a listener but to be a cultivator of relations: to provide the shelter necessary to keeping each other, let alone each other’s artistry, alive. In this way, I return to the original classical Arabic meaning of the word mizna: a desert cloud that brings needed shelter, perhaps the possibility of rain, in a world insistent on the catastrophe of otherwise.

Having taken on an executive editor position in July 2023, I have, over the past few months, had to learn the beauty and terror of working to build a real-life mizna. At every turn, I have been reminded of just how difficult this position can be. When institutions canceled events with us last-minute because of racist fears of hosting Palestinians in a time like this, I learned and relearned that to be a mizna is to pivot on a moment’s notice, responding to whatever catastrophes the day may bring us. When our insistence on decolonial language and framings were watered down by institutions who cannot see us as more than a “cultural heritage” space, or who cannot tolerate words like “insurgent” or “intifada” or any other gesture toward resistance, I learned that to be a mizna was to embody a kind of collective-oriented sumud: one that knows no other name for future than the collective, the eternal becoming of us as Palestinians and lovers of Palestinians. When, again, board after board of institution after failed settler institution, engaged us in bad faith, gaslit our people, and could not even virtually look us in the eye, I learned that to be a mizna was to be an im/possible wound: to know that many are unwilling to meet us in the depths of our catastrophe, and thus, possibility emerges when confronted by the miracle of finding our people and becoming more radically ourselves together.

This is the ethos I have inherited, from the generations of (predominantly non-male) SWANA artists, editors, laborers, dreamers, and intellectuals who built Mizna. I remember visiting the Mizna office in summer 2023, when our executive director Lana Barkawi filled a box with every single issue the journal has ever published, including our now out-of-print first issue from 1999. As we paged through issue after issue, she recalled the tiniest details: how Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, who graces our pages still today, used the term SWANA in our first issue, decades before it became popularized as a less Eurocentric term for the region; how a flyer from Suheir Hammad’s legendary Poetry for the People reading, presented by Mizna in March 2004 at Open Book in Minneapolis, fell out of a 2003 issue of Mizna, bringing back memories of the packed room that resonate to this day; how the words of contemporary beloveds, from local legends like William Nour to icons such as Naomi Shihab Nye, Susan Muaddi Darraj, and Joe Kadi, consistently appear in our pages, carrying the many trajectories of our writing community through miniature snapshots in time. At every moment, Mizna held the im/possibility of the time in which it was being published, responding to events we now know as history, such as 9/11 and the Arab Spring, and memorializing deceased giants in our community from Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish to Etel Adnan, in more recent memory. Listening to Lana talk through page after page, I came to understand that this is the nature of our work: love arrives in the attention to even the most minute details. Love takes the form of rain clouds: we accumulate despite our im/possible wounds, gather even in miraculous conditions. We join our kin in the swarm, all of whom gathering, like us, as waters from unknowable sources. And then the flood.

Carrying the entirety of Mizna’s print history, I headed to the airport the next day to board my plane to Chicago, only for the box to set off the TSA scanners. An officer extracted the box of journals from my suitcase before proceeding to inspect every single issue, flipping through every page, testing the surfaces with a chemical swab, and even shaking out some of them to be sure nothing more than the occasional flyer was tucked away in its corners. I didn’t know it, then, but I was, indeed, carrying a weapon that none of us had the capacity of imagining in that moment: I was holding a sheer force that would keep me and many of my loved ones going through the months of genocidal escalation to come, after sustaining itself for such a history for twenty-five years; a force, at once, in/visible to our enemy; a force escaping the margins of imperial terror or colonial anxiety. I was carrying a flood.

* * *

April 2024, seven months of escalating genocide in Gaza. While cowriting EVE with my good friend Fargo Tbakhi at an Arab American National Museum residency, I began venting to him one particularly stressful afternoon. I was juggling our project alongside my editorial work, and more broadly, the work of demanding better from literary institutions in this moment of genocide. Although Gaza deserves our endurance was a running throughline in my head, the burnout was catching up to me. It was the result of months of stalling and bad-faith engagement from the Poetry Foundation, during a boycott that, as I came to see, was popularly supported more out of fear of potential criticism than from a place of actual care for and commitment to Palestinian liberation. At the time, I was also months-deep into conversations with Kundiman’s founders over their (now former) board’s wavering stance on Palestinian liberation—something that, in the months that followed as the Kundiman board proceeded to betray their constituency and fire their ethical staff, I would come to see as a small moment within a broader pattern of bad faith engagement, stalling for self-protection, and downright manipulation of Palestinian generosity. These moments culminated in my venting to Fargo, and eventually my outburst, “Why can’t these people just do their jobs? Why are they so bad at the work they so proudly claim to be doing?” To which Fargo replied something like, “Habibi, you’re having these difficulties and conversations with them precisely because they are doing their jobs.” 

At that point, it all clicked for me. What I was witnessing with these institutions, amid the broader landscape of horror stories from academia and literary nonprofit work, was just a microcosm of that terrible fact: this stalling and antirevolutionary manipulation of politically activated writers was these people’s jobs. They had aligned themselves with empire the second they stepped foot into the executive board or foundation or tenure-track or whatever function they played. They had signed an invisible contract with the ruling class to join their project of producing the right kind of literary citizens: writers who know not to bite the hand that feeds them; literary nonprofits (including the many marginalized identity organizations currently wavering on PACBI) engaging in corporatization, political sterilization, and otherwise joining a united front to insist on silence and apathy in the face of imperial genocide; editors who operate with an assumption of scarcity, neoliberal diversity and inclusion politics, and reform-centered ideologies that are deradicalizing in nature. The types that respond to genocide by reposting Darwish quotes and decidedly not by listening to Palestinian demands of our cultural moment and joining the cause. The types who, on one hand, solicit writing from Palestinians and claim to make space for us, knowing full and well they’ve ignored us for the decades when we had less cultural capital to lend them. The types who, on the other hand, can only stomach Palestinians when we are dead but have no ability to support us while we are still living, to say nothing of insisting on our aliveness.

This is the nature of the neocolonized literary citizen: a term I’m using to name the imperial collaborators who, while often not directly employed by colonial governmental administrations (though PEN America’s former CEO and the Poetry Foundation’s former president are disturbing exceptions) are willing accomplices to empire, upholding values that implicitly morph into, and otherwise fail to challenge, imperial lines of power. These values include but are not limited to implicit anti-Palestinian racism, normalization of Zionism and the occupation, and superficial, corporate DEI policies that hide the underlying elite capture of identity politics writ large. 

The neocolonized literary citizen is a slant rhyme with what Fanon terms the colonized intellectual in The Wretched of the Earth: the kind that seeks to become the exact colonized elite that the colonialist bourgeoisie seek contact with in moments of potential anticolonial insurgence and liberation.² The kind that “learned from his masters that the individual must assert himself” and prioritizes individualistic, representational wins at the expense of collective-oriented structural repair.³ The neocolonized literary citizen is the kind of il/literate that finds value in projects like Poets for Harris or Renga for Obama; the kind of liberal that engages in a daily performance of becoming the ideal representation of themselves, and furthermore, works to service, repair, and otherwise maintain the imperial death machine that produces such a regime of neoliberal representation. In other words, they are (often) not the literal CIA, but they’re comfortable uncritically supporting the new DEI-washed faces of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Paris Review, the Stegner program, and other spaces with such histories of statist infiltration and political sanitization.⁴ They are not literal workers of the political establishment responsible for maintaining the genocides that underpin our current world order but are more than willing to accept material support from, and mold their politics to implicitly service, such regimes. As such, the neocolonized literary citizen ultimately proves to be fundamentally incapable of thinking (or acting) structurally or responsibly. 

The problem is im/material. Material, on one hand, in the sense that all money is blood money, and no one, including us at Mizna, can consider themselves exempt from the horrors of the nonprofit industrial complex. It would take an entire essay, or more, to unpack these material implications.⁵ The problem is also one of imagination—or rather the ways in which these material realities implicitly hinder our imaginative potential. What would it mean for culture workers to orient ourselves not by a politics of scarcity but by one of abundance: to live and embody a praxis that knows the job of the editor, instead of selecting representative literary citizens to uplift, is one of dreaming and building structures capable of holding the sheer mass and magnitude of our people’s brilliance? What if instead of participating in the reproduction of an imperial mentality of hoarding wealth and putting our heads down out of fear of backlash from the ruling class, we engage in the harder work of liberating and redistributing such resources that have been stolen from our communities, in whatever sphere we are able to occupy, however small our impact? In this way, the task of countering an idea of literary citizenship boils down to the question of how capaciously, how im/possibly, we can love our people. Love, understood via Etel Adnan and Franz Fanon, as a kind of violence that destroys world orders and death machines of empire. Love understood in all its impossible hijackings, in all its necessary excess. 

Palestinians have shown us this kind of love: in their political actions from the homeland to the diaspora, and also in the ways their literary works join (but do not replace or impede) resistance. Suppose US-based poets were to shed their egos—their allegiance to imperial Craft⁶ as described by Fargo Tbakhi, their fixations on representational wins. Suppose we were to take inspiration from our kin in Gaza, all of Palestine, and the Palestinian diaspora, instead, who have survived under im/possible conditions beneath the bombs we paid for, at the checkpoints we funded, within institutions whose inclusivity we applaud as they pave over our corpses. What kinds of relations—to each other, to marginalized people in our communities, to the planet we’re actively murdering—might we build toward by taking the lead of the dispossessed as we fight alongside them for liberation? What kind of world is possible if we, as artists and culture workers, model a more responsible listening, a more insurgent response, appropriate to the kinds of catastrophes that underpin our colonial world order? How might we take their lead to build a world where—instead of upholding the normative trend of pitting Sudanese and Palestinian folks against each other in a colonially-mediated audition for empathy, as pointed out by Safia Elhillo⁷—we are able to unpack the structural entanglements of our shared struggles with rigor and integrity; to say, we cannot fight for a free Palestine without fighting against states like the UAE who are complicit in Sudanese, Gazan, and many other genocides that structure this world order?

The question, again, is one of imagination. How might we better encourage structural-oriented thinking, highlighting the interconnectedness of our movements, instead of selling out to a scarcity myth that people cannot hold more than one struggle in their minds at a given time? Isn’t this the exact imaginative il/literacy that the elite need of neocolonized literary citizens? Suppose our response, instead of isolation, was one of the hard, rigorous, ongoing work of relation-building through catastrophe and editorial work therein. Suppose this was the Nakba that made organizers of us all, academics and editors included? Suppose this Nakba inspired the kind of love that comrades like June Jordan, Etel Adnan, and other radical writers of past generations worked so hard to model for us? Suppose we took seriously the words of Black queer Southern organizer and poet Aurielle Marie who, in a heart-stopping poem that meets Palestinians at the depths of our catastrophe, insists, “don’t you run from me. love me back. let us all be together beneath this green sun.” Suppose we were to finally break the cyclic catastrophes induced by the villanelle that has become of western empire that, as River 瑩瑩 Dandelion reminds us in their poem, will end “only in ashes.” Suppose we were to take seriously the stakes Mohammed Zenia articulates when saying, “in a political poem, you write like a suicide bomber or it’s not political.” How might these poems offer us, if not a balm, a brief ending; if not an answer, the questions that will get us there? What relationalities are waiting for us on the other side of empire?

* * *

The works of this issue, brought to us by gatherings in a time of catastrophe, are but a small portrait of the ways our community embodies the kind of decolonial love that resists the closures and boundings of neocolonized literary citizenship. As the US faces a rising fascist right wing, proudly invoking legal canon that deems Black people subhuman, alongside an increasingly fascist democratic party that dismisses catastrophized Palestinians as just another single issue, this edition of Mizna assembles work insisting that we make catastrophe empire’s urgent issue, and furthermore, models the kinds of relationalities possible beyond the current power configurations plaguing our literary landscape. As PEN America responds to principled writers who boycott them for continued silence on Palestine and a long history of entanglement with the Zionist entity with accusations of flattening nuance or inhibiting free exchanges of ideas, the authors in this issue offer, instead, a lexicon of abundance: the kind of abundance that, in a poem by Alan Semerdjian dedicated to Artsakh, ends in the insistence on Armenian aliveness; the kind of abundance that holds more than thirty years of Arab American history, as Summer Farah does in her epistolary poems to Etel Adnan, in a poem written after our Mizna+RAWIFest gathering in October 2023, where Palestinian love for each other looks like “leena’s hand in mine three days straight”; the kind of abundance capable, as Michael Lawrence Payne has done, of translating poetry from eleventh-century Gazan Palestinian poet, Sulaymān al-Ghazzī, with a grief that’s as heavy, relevant, and instructive today as it was then; the kind of abundance that ties together the geopolitical and intimate scales of catastrophe, as Leila Mansouri has done in her short story “Flashbang.”

Although this issue is heavy with many griefs, especially with Sudanese, Armenian, and Palestinian writers at the center, the process of editing it has reminded us of how we are not alone in this struggle. This issue would not have been possible without our comrades from RAWI, who occupy an unique position in the literary landscape as a grassroots organization building community from the ground up and modeling inclusivity and repair beyond what is capable of literary institutions. Long-time Mizna family, such as Leila Abdelrazaq, Ruba El Melik, leena aboutaleb, Mejdulene Bernard Shomali, and Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, join with many writers making their first appearances in our pages: elder Nakba survivor and Francophone Palestinian poet Olivia Elias, alongside critically acclaimed writers Noor Hindi, Nadia Shammas, mónica teresa ortiz, Danez Smith, and Arthur Kayzakian, alongside Sudanese writer J Omer and Palestinian American Ghazzawi writer Sarah Aziza. Together, with the staff laboring to make this issue and every beloved contributor across the world, we stand in steadfast solidarity with our kin, and everyone around the world resisting the many colonial catastrophes that underpin this world order.

Together, the mizna of this issue is a rare accumulation in today’s literary landscape. The literature of empire will never have what we have between these pages; they will never, truly, know love. They who only know how to murder each other, in and beyond their words, for the sake of that failed love: the kind that only knows names like hoarding and borders, and never abundance, liberation, unboundedness. They who cave to illiterate executive boards, who allow cops to lead their foundations, who make promises to our community that they are incapable of fulfilling because they are incapable of loving anyone, including and especially their own selves.

We will not mince words: the moment we are witnessing is nothing short of apocalypse. And so, in response, we demand nothing short of an apocalypse of letters.

May we gather.

May we swarm.

Then, the flood.

1. 1. Fargo Tbakhi, “Being Listened to: On Philip Metres’s Shrapnel Maps, Colonialism, and the Violence of Conversation,” The Poetry Project (Fall 2020). Retrieved from https://www.poetryproject.org/publications/newsletter/262-fall-2020/being-listened-to-on-philip-metres-shrapnel-maps-colonialism-and-the-violence-of-conversation ︎
2. 2. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2005), 9.  ︎
3. 3. Fanon, 11. ︎
4. 4. For further reading, see Eric Bennett’s Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015), which, amusingly, was published by the University of Iowa Press.  ︎
5. 5. For further reading, see INCITE!’s The Revolution Will Not Be Funded (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).  ︎
6. 6. See Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide” Protean Magazine (December 8, 2023). https://proteanmag.com/2023/12/08/notes-on-craft-writing-in-the-hour-of-genocide/ ︎
7. 7. Subscribe to safiamafia.substack.com to read Safia Elhillo’s article, “we shouldn’t have to compete for empathy: a war that defies summary, that defies soundbites,” which is also excerpted on her instagram @safiamafia.  ︎

George Abraham (they/هو) is a Palestinian American poet, essayist, critic, performance artist. Their debut poetry collection Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020) won the Arab American Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. They are the executive editor of Mizna, and co-editor of HEAVEN LOOKS LIKE US: Palestinian Poetry (Haymarket Books, 2025). They are a graduate of Northwestern’s Litowitz MFA+MA program, and teach at Amherst College as a Writer-in-Residence. 

Toward a Free Palestine: Resources to Learn About and Act for Palestine

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The post Toward an Apocalypse of Letters—Foreword to 25.1: Catastrophe appeared first on Mizna.

Leila Mansouri’s brilliant short story, “Flashbang,” inhabits the many scales of catastrophe that inhere in the word. Originally published as part of Mizna 25.1: Catastrophe. Link to order here.

There, the news was on. Somewhere, there was a war. A reel of bombs and bodies played on the TV. A man in a suit droned in front of it. There were soldiers, then boys, then more soldiers, then an explosion. Someone threw a flashbang and lit a house up. The windows got so bright, my eyes hurt.

Soon my mom came out with tea.

Then she brought fruit.

—Leila Mansouri

Flashbang

What you need to understand is this: when the link opened, everything flashed over.

Before I could form a thought, before my eyes could resolve the pixels into dark, taut nipples, hot, bright shock raced through me and spread—out through my nerves, out into the dorm room, out and out into every corner of my world. Understanding was for later. Lungs, fear, air, shame—all for later. My cursor blinked, unmoved, in the reply box as my eyes traced and retraced the subject line.

“You?” the email asked.

I had no answer. I glowed hot, white hot, engulfed.

Behind each nipple, a breast. That much was clear even when everything was still too bright to breathe. There were two of them, the breasts, and skin, and ribs. A torso.

Also sometimes a shoulder. But not always.

The parts, they moved and moved and refused to stay still. Fingers curled. Hands grasped. Now two, now three, now two again. And at the grainy edge, a slack jaw dipped in and out, in and out.

I couldn’t have spoken then, not even if my irradiated brain had had the power to think in words. My fat slug of a tongue sat leaden between my molars, and my parched lips clung fast to my gums. In my silence, the slick, weird image of a mouth parted wide, wider, into a wild, toothy moan, and I understood nothing. Heard nothing. The only noise in me was my own blood. And no matter how hard my eyes strained, no matter how long my fingers hovered ready at the keyboard, adamant that they could save me by shooting Jeff the speedy right answer, the moving parts refused to make a person.

Was I really somewhere in those pixels?

I didn’t know — and also didn’t want to know—or wanted to know only if the answer was one I could live with—one I’d survive. So it was a relief, the beginning of a hot exhale, when, after how long with that video on a loop I don’t know, I admitted—or maybe I decided—that I couldn’t make out anyone except the little stuffed bear—a bear like the one my parents had bought me from the student store the day they’d moved me in, a bear whose neck was ringed with the stethoscope I’d resented nightly as I did my chemistry sets and conjugated Farsi verbs and daydreamed about the other me: the me who had aggressively blue hair and took experimental poetry classes, the me who wanted to jolt you, to make you gasp and say, “this changed my life.”

That me was the real me, I was sure. Or it was going to be.

I would become her just as soon as I finally gathered the courage to tell my parents that I was dropping orgo—that instead of labs and study groups I’d be making mixed media installations, that I’d already made one, in fact, a simorgh lit with kerosene, and that I wasn’t pre-med anymore—I’d never been, actually, not in the way they’d wished for—not really.

The bear, though, was unmistakable.

It was my own Agha Bear, or one just like him. That was obvious even in the bad resolution and dim light. And the desk, too, was familiar. Its dull sheen and thick wooden shelves could have come from any dorm on campus. Which meant the parts in the video could be anyone’s.

Even mine.

So I did the only thing that felt possible from inside my bright hot shock-wave—the only thing I could live with—that felt like it had any hope of being survivable.

I deleted the email, broke up with Bijan, dropped the Farsi class I had with Jeff, and became a doctor.

* * *

“It made sense at the time,” I insisted to my therapist, years later, when we met behind the privacy curtain on the far side of the hospital cafeteria.

The sex tape wasn’t what we were supposed to be talking about. We were supposed to be talking about the victims whose wrists I’d spent half a horrible day tagging yellow or red or green.

The explosion at the refinery had been so massive, all the breaking news segments had ended with ominous questions: Could this be sabotage? Who did the terrorists hate? Were there more explosions to come?

But by afternoon, the story had resolved itself into something more ordinary: a bad safety valve and corporate greed. After that, no one was scared anymore, just filled tight with unleachable anger—the kind that makes your fingers swell and comes out in unfunny jokes about conversion rates between corporate bonus dollars and reattached limbs.

My residency was in oncology, but I’d been paged to the emergency room for triage. I’d gone from body to moaning body checking pupils and asking if anyone felt a sense of impending doom.

No one did, not even the sanitation worker with the metal bolt in his skull. He was the cheeriest of everyone, in fact.

As I rushed him to surgery, he grabbed my hand and said, “Can’t you leave it in, doc? I pick up radio waves now.”

Then he asked where I was from.

And how I liked Michigan.

And if I had kids, or a husband, or a boyfriend, and if I wanted them.

When I said I was moving back to California, his face fell.

“My parents are there,” I apologized. “Plus, I miss the fruit. The nectarines, the apricots.”

Right then, the time Jeff pulled dates from his rucksack flashed back through me. We’d been doing Farsi homework in my dorm room, and I’d looked up from my alif’s and be’s, and there they were, three fat dates. Jeff insisted I try one even though I wasn’t hungry. “Have you ever had a fresh date?” he demanded. “I mean a really fresh one?”

The man with the bolt in his head waved away my apology. Then he said “California,” too slow, his voice bending strangely.

So, I looked again behind his earlobe.

The thread was still buried deep. You could hardly see anything.

That was how I’d almost missed it when I triaged him.

His wound had barely even oozed.

I wanted to say something comforting—to reassure the man that I liked Michigan, too.

But before I could, we were surrounded by the surgical team.

“You should try the sherries,” he told me as my hand slipped from his.

I nodded, not understanding.

“The sherries,” he said. “Promise.”

Then he was gone, and the hallway was bright and not at all quiet, and by the time I realized he was slurring cherries, it was days too late to warn anyone.

The hospital mandated trauma screening for all residents, and I was assigned to Farah. Or, that’s what she told me to call her. I couldn’t, though. Not when her hair was neatly covered, and she sat so prim and straight on her plastic chair.

“Doctor Al Masry,” I tried.

She laughed. She wasn’t even an MD, just a family counselor in training.

I wouldn’t take it back though. “Dr. Al Masry,” I repeated.

“Really? Are we going to pretend we’re our parents?”

I shrugged.

For days, I’d been telling the other residents that these screenings were a waste. My plan was to lie my way through—to run out the clock. I’d even made up a story about a man who’d watched his warehouse collapse. He survived because he had forgotten to turn his headlights off, I was going to say—that’s why he’d been in the parking lot. He’d remembered an hour into his shift and ran back out into the Michigan cold.

Then, boom.

All of a sudden, no building left to speak of.

The clincher was going to be my own story, or really my aunt’s. The one she’d told years ago, in St. Louis, as we circled the Gateway Arch.

One night, my uncle had come home from his pharmacy shift to find their Tehran apartment in rubble. A missile had hit—“a dumb Scud,” my aunt said, as we puttered up I-44 in my parents’ rusty Volvo.

My mother was annoyed. “Look!” she switched loudly to English. “There is arch!”

But my aunt talked over her, sticking to Persian. “Night sounded like this,” my aunt told us, puckering her mouth and spitting out explosions.

That year was endless. Boring, murderous nights, my aunt explained. Again and again, there were blasts and waiting. Then, mostly, nothing. Night after night of it. Loud, distant, terrifying nothings. To the sound of these nothings, my aunt made tea and dreamed of redecorating. She wrote long letters to my mother in America. She set elaborate dinners, and, as my uncle ate, gossiped to him about the neighbor-couples, whose private fights she heard through the walls. My uncle never gossiped back, though, or gave opinions on rugs and pillows. He asked my aunt little about her days. His concerns about her parents’ health were perfunctory. My aunt didn’t understand—not at first. When they’d courted, he’d been chatty and charming. He’d made her believe every word of hers was precious to him. Once he became a husband, though, he turned stubbornly inward. Most evenings all he seemed to want to do was eat and snore. My aunt’s questions about his work at the hospital got only bland, empty answers. Her pleas for a new vase or tea set met with irritable grunts. And when she asked what news the neighbor-husbands had shared when my uncle passed them in the building hallways, he looked at her like she was an irksome child. “Do you think I have time to remember who Mr. Hashemi is angry with today?” he’d shake his head. “Do you not see that I work constantly? Did you forget there is a war?”

For a while, my aunt blamed his stress on bad management at the hospital pharmacy. He’d come to his senses once the shelves were restocked, she told herself. But as the year of booming nothings dragged on, her patience steadily curdled, first into resentment, then into disgust. Soon, every sound my uncle made became repulsive to her. His sighs made her want to scrub his breath from her skin. His snorts made her nauseated. But it was the revolting grooming habits he no longer bothered to hide that became the focus of her fury. The night a missile fell on a busy bread factory, she’d found my uncle’s nose hair clippings in the sink and thrown the soap at him. A month later—the same night a family her cousin’s friend’s brother knew from university was obliterated—she’d lain awake enraged because right next to her in bed my uncle had picked dead skin from his foot calluses.

“Roya-joon, remember this.” She turned to face me in the back seat, her expression so serious I was sure I was in trouble. “If a man cleans his toes in bed, he does not love you.”

“Ani!” my mom screeched, but my aunt waved her off.

“Promise you will remember, Roya-joon.”

I didn’t understand, so I nodded solemnly, and my aunt settled back into the passenger seat.

It was months of this nonsense, she continued, ignoring the arch’s fat, shiny footings. Months of my uncle’s flaking skin in the bed sheets. Months of his soapy hairs in every crevice of the bathroom and his toenail clippings working their way into the living room rug.

Then out of nowhere came the direct hit.

There was no air raid siren—not that night, my aunt insisted. All the neighbors swore it, too—there’d been only the usual nothing right up until the horrible boom.

The building next door was stripped naked, its shattered windows gaping onto disarranged kitchens and bedrooms. My aunt’s building was leveled entirely.

“Pow,” she said, flattening the air between her hands.

By chance, she wasn’t inside. She was visiting a neighbor—but my uncle hadn’t known that. He’d seen the building, or what was left of it, and been certain she was under the rubble—certain her lifeless body would soon be unburied, still sheathed in her white nightgown. He was out of his mind when she spotted him, tearing at the debris with his fingernails. “God forgive me, God forgive me,” he kept saying. “God, God, what have I done?”

As she watched her husband clawing at the wreckage, my aunt’s heart sofened for the first time since the missiles reached Tehran. Maybe she’d judged him too harshly, she considered. Maybe what she’d taken for his disdain was something else. Pride pickled in fear, possibly? At the very least, he seemed genuinely distraught.

She approached where he was kneeling and put a hand on his heaving shoulder. Gently, she raised his dusty face to hers, anticipating he’d collapse with relief.

But, to her shock, the sight of her only seemed to make him wilder.

“Am I possessed?” he cried, stumbling backward. “Have you returned to curse me? Am I so guilty I deserve to be forever tormented?”

That was how his affair came out, my aunt explained.

Or she tried to.

But my mother wouldn’t let her.

“Ani-jan, tell Roya about the beautiful seashore,” my mother jumped in, repeating herself louder and louder, until my stubborn aunt was forced to yield. After that, it was, “Ani-jan, do you remember how we always stop along the road to buy oranges?” We’d driven halfway home by then, but we were still on the freeway, near the Woolworths.

Once my aunt finished discussing roadside fruit, my mother turned to me at a stoplight. “In the mountains, I get always carsick. Do you know that once I throw up on your Khaleh Ani’s favorite shoes?”

“Not only mountains,” my aunt confirmed bitterly. “At home. At school. On my favorite dress. On so many things I can’t list them.” But then she tried to list them, anyway, which bought my mother another five minutes.

And for the rest of the drive home, and that evening, and every remaining day of my aunt’s three-month visit, my mother was relentless. Whenever Khaleh Ani tried to speak about the missiles or my uncle in front of me, my mom would goad her. “I always feel bad for your khaleh, you know, because I am our madarbozorg’s favorite,” she would tell me. Or, “do you know, Roya-joon, that I was best student in school? Top marks. All the teachers say I am genius.”

Khaleh Ani took the bait every time.

“I was the genius,” she’d say. “I was the favorite.”

She spent the summer furious with my mother, the story of my uncle’s affair always cut off just a few words in. That’s why I didn’t find out how she got her revenge until a decade later. By then, we’d moved to California and left the arch far behind us.

Those first years in Gilroy, all my parents did was save and work. They’d bought a gas station out by the produce warehouses. During the day, my mother rang up farmworkers and semi drivers. At night, my father barred the windows, and meth heads skulked at the floodlights’ edge.

This was all for the future, they promised. Only the future mattered, not the farm smell, not the bulletproof glass screening the register. In their future, I would go to medical school. In their future, my aunt would come and stay for good.

By then, we’d been waiting years on my aunt’s visa. My parents had filed the paperwork back in St. Louis, and ever since, every three months, they’d called to remind the lawyer who they were.

Do you have our address?

Can we do anything else?

Will you let us know soon?

But when their application finally made it to the top of the government pile, my aunt balked. She refused to fill out more forms. She declined her Dubai interview. There was no point, she announced, because she’d never move. She had her house, her garden, her tea, and no interest in uprooting herself—especially not to live in her arrogant sister’s half-renovated garage.

My mother told me the news as she was picking me up from my shift at In-N-Out: “Your aunt killed your uncle and now she is killing me!”

I gulped my chocolate shake. The cold turned my tongue thick and numb.

According to my mom, my aunt began this slow murder the night the missile fell on their apartment. My uncle had been having an affair with a pretty nurse. That’s what had sealed his fate. Each Tuesday and Friday, he met this nurse in the hospital supply room, and after, as she basked in their illicit glow, he’d detail his private unhappiness. My aunt henpecked him constantly, he’d complain. Some days all she talked about, it seemed, was their small apartment and noisy neighbors. And even when she was quiet, their hand-me-down furniture silently taunted him. He resented every last scrap of it—every last fussy table and dusty rug. It reminded him of just how much else his in-laws had given him all the other things he could neither repay nor afford to give up. Money for his father’s doctors. Tuition to finish pharmacy school. Proper suits. A respectable watch. Without their generosity, he’d have ended up a poor and friendless orphan. Now, he was trapped by his modest comforts and was determined never to forgive them for it.

“Let’s run away to America,” he begged this nurse every Friday. “We’ll buy a ranch in Montana. We’ll eat nothing but Big Macs. We’ll grow happy and fat.”

Usually, the nurse ignored him. “Saeed, you talk too much,” she’d shush. Or, “Saeed, can you move your elbow? It’s on my chador.”

But the Friday of the Scud missile strike, she’d at last given a tepid, “Do you really mean it? Could we really go? Just the two of us?”

“Yes,” he’d told her. “Yes yes. We can. We will. I promise.”

So, when my uncle came home to the flattened apartment building, he’d concluded that this must be God’s punishment. He had been unfaithful and now he’d lose everything, even the dishes and rugs he’d hated, even the nagging wife whose wealthy parents he’d been ungrateful for.

That’s when, like a hellish miracle, my aunt had appeared before him. And at the sight of her, he admitted it all, weeping in the dust at her feet.

To my aunt, the affair was unsurprising. Weeks before, she’d smelled perfume on his collar and guessed another woman—guessed it was a nurse, even, and felt so little besides disgust for him that she’d washed his shirt and let it go.

But, ever keen, she sensed power in my uncle’s public confession.

God was merciful and she could be too, she told him. But, she added, loud enough to be sure the neighbor gossips heard, she had her honor to think of, and her family’s honor, too. So, her faithless husband would have to make it up to her.

And he could do that with a house.

A nice one. One with a garden and tall walls. A fountain, too, maybe. Not here. North, by the mountains. In a better neighborhood.

My uncle knew this mercy was a death sentence. He could not afford such a house, not even with her parents’ help. His job at the government hospital didn’t pay well, so to get the money he’d need a second job, then a third. He’d have to take midnight house calls. He’d have to work straight through Friday prayers. He’d probably also need to start smuggling. Western eye creams, maybe. Or, more likely, wine and European spirits. Hash, too. “Medicine,” his records would say. “For palsy. And insomnia.” But every client, every supplier, would know the truth. And even if the smugglers didn’t kill him, even if he stayed out of jail and managed to keep his dealings quiet, he’d never get to linger in his own prized garden—he’d hardly ever see its blooms by daylight. No, he’d have to work and work until even his bones were exhausted, his too-brief dreams stalked by men who could ruin him. He’d work until his liver groaned, until his heart gave out. He’d work until he labored himself into an early grave.

Still, how could he say no to my aunt with all the neighbors watching? How would he ever face them, and his in-laws, too, if he refused?

I took a hungry swallow of chocolate shake.

“So? What did he do?”

My mother shook her head.

“What could he do? He said, ‘Yes, my beloved. Yes, of course. Anything. Anything for your forgiveness. I’m at your service.’”

The cruelest part, my mom told me, was that my khaleh Ani, too, had been having an affair—hers was with a dissident poet. For weeks before the missile strike, she’d been sneaking her secret lover into the apartment on nights my uncle worked late. Barely an hour before the missile hit, this poet had left my aunt dozing in her marriage bed. He’d given her two soft kisses, then departed by the back stairs, leaving behind only her pining sighs and a dozen whispered promises to die for her, should she ever want that.

Once my aunt heard the door close after him, she’d risen, like always, to brew some sumac tea. She needed it to settle her stomach—despite the poet’s flattering reassurances, her guilt over the affair was gut-twisting.

But she’d found the tin empty—that afternoon, my uncle, unbeknownst to her, had had a guilty stomachache of his own.

So, she’d gone to beg more sumac from a friend three blocks over. She was returning home, pockets bulging, when she found my uncle digging at the rubble.

My mother’s eyes burned, mean and gleeful, as she spoke.

She took my shake and sucked in a long drag.

“Your uncle is fool,” she went on. “He works until his eyes bleed. He works so much his bones ache. Then he dies, less than one year after he finally gets your aunt this house, and—do you know—she weeps not for him but for her poet.”

I reached for the shake, but my mom didn’t give it back to me, didn’t even seem to see me.

“Now your aunt will die in her garden,” she said. “She will die drinking tea, all alone. And this poet, they put him in Evin prison. He is still in there, you know.”

When I tell my aunt’s story, Americans rarely ask if I saw her again. They don’t wonder much about my uncle, either—not if I liked him or what he died of. Not even whether he ever learned about my aunt’s secret love. If they want to know anything, it’s about how he made his money. Or about the pretty nurse and her chador. Or maybe, if they’re humanitarian types, what the jailed poet is in prison for. That’s why I was going to tell my aunt’s story to the cafeteria therapist. I could tell it and not tell much else, I figured. It would fill our half-hour well enough.

But I never got the chance to.

After Dr. Al Masry explained what she was screening for, she asked what I’d been doing right before the refinery explosion. And I was so thrown I’d told the truth.

I’d been Instagram stalking my ex-boyfriend’s wife. “Instagram stalking?”

“It’s stupid, Dr. Al Masry.”

“It doesn’t sound stupid, Roya.”

“It is. I mean, I’m a doctor.”

“You’re saying doctors can’t be human also?”

That’s how I ended up explaining about the cakes. Cupcakes. Cheesecakes.

Chocolate cakes. Spice cakes. Marbled mirror glazes.

“She just keeps posting them,” I told Dr. Al Masry.

And other things, too. Their redecorated townhome. The themed birthdays she put on for their two love dumplings, now five and eighteen months. But mostly it was the cakes that kept me coming back to the Instagram of the girl that Bijan, my college boyfriend, was married to now, I explained. “Or, woman,” I corrected myself, the bleach smell thick at my nostrils. “The half-Cambodian optometrist from Reseda Bijan started dating three and a half months after I’d called things off and blocked him on Facebook.”

“This man, Bijan—you two were serious? And you broke things off ?”

“Yes. Well, no. Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?”

“There was a video.”

“A video?”

“A sex thing. I didn’t know what to do.”

When I said those words, I was in four places at once. In the cafeteria chair.

And also at my dorm room desk, with Jeff ’s link. And in the redwood grove, too, as Bijan’s face twisted and soured. And in my Farsi class, with Jeff, the day he sent the video.

But before he sent it. When we were learning food words. Sobhkhaneh. Sabzijat. Gojeh farangi. Miveh. Angur.

Jeff had searched me out that day, as usual. The whole semester he’d been relentless. He asked about my weekends. He asked what sports I followed. He asked whether I’d tried the dates he’d left. He asked if I’d ever dated a Marine. But the day of the video was different. He didn’t ask anything. He just looked. At me. Like I was a pit. Stripped and sucked clean.

And right after class, he sent it.

“The video of you?” Dr. Al Masry asked.

“I don’t know if it was me.”

“What?”

“In the video. I don’t know who it was. It could have been me. But I wasn’t sure, and I deleted it.”

“You didn’t try to find out?”

I blinked, confused that she was confused. “How could I? It would’ve blown everything up.”

I felt sure that would settle it.

But she asked, “What do you mean?”

So, I changed the subject to the refinery explosion.

But she changed it back.

So, I changed the subject to the man with the bolt in his head.

But she changed it back.

So, I changed the subject to Evin prison. Did she know there were poets jailed there right now? I demanded.

But she changed it back.

So, finally, I said, “You, of all people, should know there would have been no good answer. I mean, let’s say it wasn’t me. Maybe the video was a fake, or someone else’s porn. So, what then? I go to Bijan and try to explain it to him? What could I say? That a guy, an older military guy in my Farsi class, was sending me this stuff? Porn that looked like me? Porn that had my Agha Bear in it? And that I’d done a whole class project with this man, and he’d insisted I eat his dates? How would Bijan see me, then? What if he thought I’d cheated on him? What if he told his parents? Or mine? No matter what, he’d still probably break up with me. And if he didn’t, how would anything be okay? How would we go back to watching movies and playing foosball?”

“I get it. I do,” said Dr. Al Masry. “I mean, I’m from Dearborn. But are you sure it would have been that bad? He doesn’t exactly sound like the traditional type.”

I shook my head. She only half understood. “But what if it was me?”

“What, then?”

“Then, I was with Bijan. There hadn’t been anyone else. So, did that mean Bijan had filmed it without telling me? Probably, right? That’s the only reasonable conclusion. So, then what? I tell the school? I show the video to some sweaty administrator and file a case? And what if Bijan went and told his parents? They knew people who knew mine, you know. I didn’t want to be that person, the one everyone whispered about when they saw my mom in the grocery store. I didn’t want to live with that. I didn’t want my mom to live with that. So, I said nothing.”

Dr. Al Masry took a deep breath and smoothed her long skirt. There was something in her face I couldn’t read. “OK, but what about a friend or a roommate?” she asked, softly, hesitant. She took a breath, then another. “Did you at least tell someone?”

I wanted to lie and tell her I had. I wanted her to believe I had my shit together. I could have told someone back then, if I’d thought to. It’s not as if I had been friendless. Plenty of people would’ve listened. Plenty would have hugged me and let me cry. But I had never tried. I had kept it in. Staying quiet had seemed so natural, I had made the decision without realizing I’d chosen it.

I shook my head slowly. “Everyone assumed it was a normal breakup. I never told them the rest.”

Dr. Al Masry leaned forward. “And if you had? What would you have said?”

That’s how I discovered the thing that had been buried so deep I hadn’t known it was there, the thing that had been lodged in me all these years—the thing that had held everything in place even when I hadn’t known there was anything to hold. What I really believed—believed even though it made no sense, believed even though I was sure it meant I was crazy—was that it was me and Bjian on the tape, and it was somehow Jeff who filmed it.

“But that’s too far-fetched,” I said. “I mean, yes, Jeff could have planted something. A camera. The day he was in my room for our class project. It was absurd but not completely impossible. He was military after all. A Marine. He could have figured out the tech. But how could I look anyone in the eye and say that that was what I suspected? That I was sure of it to my core even though it sounded like a conspiracy? No one would have believed me. They shouldn’t have believed me. The story didn’t hold together. Some guy in my Farsi class films a secret sex tape after I refused to eat his dates? Who would listen? Who could take that seriously? It was easier to say nothing and forget.”

Dr. Al Masry was quiet for a while. Across the cafeteria, someone sneezed. Bleached air burned in my throat.

“It doesn’t sound crazy to me, though,” she said, finally.

“What?”

“Really. I’m not saying it’s true. But I’m saying I could believe it.”

I was sure she was mocking me and couldn’t say so. Not when she’d been so patient. Not when I’d been calling her Dr. Al Masry all this time.

I wrinkled my nose and raised an eyebrow. “What does that mean?”

She looked away, toward the privacy curtain.

“My mother was born in Ein el-Hilweh—that’s a camp in southern Lebanon,” she said. “My mother grew up around guards and soldiers. And what she always told me was to watch out most for the friendly ones—the ones that offer help and candy. They were the most dangerous.”

I reminded her that this wasn’t Lebanon—that I’d been in college, not a refugee camp.

I had missed the point, she told me.

“Listen, when I was a kid, one year my mom took me to the state fair. Me and my brothers. We’d been asking, I guess. Maybe someone at school went. My mom had her hair covered and people were staring, but she didn’t care. She took us to the Ferris wheel. She got us fried ice cream. She even let us pet the goats. She wanted us to enjoy it—to feel like we were normal. And we did. We rode the rides and played those whack-the-whatever games. I won a stuffed shark. My brother won a stuffed donkey. The whole day was great, perfect, really, until we got in line for the spinning teacup ride. That’s when this guy started talking to us. To me, mostly. He had a woman with him, too, but she didn’t say anything, not at first. And he kept asking me things, like what was my favorite subject, and what kind of ice cream did I like, and did I want to be a pop star or a movie actress when I grew up. He hardly spoke to my brothers and wouldn’t even look at my mom. And he kept bringing up that he was a soldier—that he’d met girls like me before, in Iraq. He fought for those girls, he kept saying. Little ones. Some that didn’t go to school. Some that didn’t have toys or electricity or shoes. I didn’t like him and didn’t like his stupid questions and really didn’t like how white curls peeled up all over his sunburned nose. So, I was relieved when the line moved, and my brothers and I got in our teacup, and the man didn’t get on with us. He disappeared while our teacups spun. I thought it was over. I forgot about him. But after the ride, he found us. He had ice cream cones now, for me and my brothers. I didn’t want one, I was sick from the spinning and the heat and the elephant ears. But I thought I had to eat. When someone offers you food, you take it—that’s what my mom had always insisted. So, I reached my hand out and felt the cone in my fingers. And then, all of a sudden, my mother slapped it away. It fell and splattered. The ice cream went everywhere. The ground. My brother’s shoes. My ankles. I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what I’d done. I started crying. It was my fault, I was sure. I couldn’t see how, but that didn’t matter. And then the girlfriend started ranting about how my mom was a bitch, and we were all ungrateful. We should be sent back, she screamed over and over. We hated America. We hated freedom and God. My mom was walking us away by then, walking us out of the fair, but all I could hear was the girlfriend. ‘That’s right,’ she screamed after us. ‘Go back to where you came from.’ And when I turned to look behind me, the soldier was just standing there, staring at us, like he didn’t know what to say—like he didn’t understand what had happened either. I stared back at the ice cream cones in his fists, at the two he hadn’t given me—the ones he got for my brothers. They were melting already. They were losing their shape in the sun. I remember watching as they dripped, watching as the white ran down his knuckles. My mom waited until we were out of the parking lot to start yelling. ‘You don’t let these people give you things,’ she shouted over and over. ‘Never. You don’t take anything from them. Not money, not ice cream. Nothing.’ Back then I didn’t understand. My mom must be a little crazy, I thought. I mean, it was just ice cream. I couldn’t see what the big deal was. Now, though, I think she was right. I think she knew exactly what she was doing. I think she understood more than she knew how to tell us.”

I took a slow breath.

“So, you’re saying I was right to suspect Jeff?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe he was dangerous. Maybe Bijan was, too. What I’m saying is, you didn’t know. You still don’t.”

“So?”

Dr. Al Masry looked like she wanted to shake me—like she wanted to grab me by the shoulders and rattle something loose. “So, why didn’t you ask for help? Why did you try to handle it all on your own?”

The question landed in me like a mortar shell. “It would have killed my parents,” I said. “They came all this way for me. I couldn’t let them find out it was dangerous here, also.”

Dr. Al Masry looked at me so kindly that I hated her. “Did you ever think they might already know that?

I never saw Dr. Al Masry again. Twice, she called to set a follow-up, and twice, I ignored her voicemails. The third time she begged me to talk to someone even if it wasn’t her. “You can’t start rebuilding until you clear the rubble,” she said.

But I didn’t answer that voicemail, either. I needed to get on with my life. Or that’s what I told myself.

So, I finished my residency and moved back to California.

I went to work at the hospital, got groceries, had bad dates.

I didn’t tell anyone else about the video. Not boyfriends. Not roommates. Not my mom, either. Not even after she found Agha Bear and tried to give him back. That day, I’d driven to Gilroy with my aunt’s chemo pills. I’d been trading the hospital pharmacist for them. A month of chemo for a legal benzo script. The pharmacist gave her pills to her undocumented brother. I gave mine to my parents. Then my parents packed them into film canisters. They shipped the canisters inside thermoses wrapped with sweatshirts.

The chemo wasn’t working, though. All that effort and still Khaleh Ani’s cancer had grown. And now, she was refusing to travel for more intensive treatment, my mom explained as the tea brewed—refusing, once again, to fill out the visa paperwork.

“She wants to die in her garden,” my mom sighed. “The one my uncle got her?”

“What?”

“At her house? The one he worked himself to death for while she pined for the dissident poet?”

I was just asking—just thinking out loud, really, too tired and hungry to catch myself.

But my mom was furious. “This is how you talk of your khaleh?” she demanded. “Is this how you speak of me when I’m dead also?”

I wanted to defend myself. I wanted to point out I’d only repeated what she’d told me back in high school. Besides, I’d risked my medical license to get Khaleh Ani better cancer drugs. Shouldn’t that count for something? I wanted to say. Couldn’t I get a little slack for once?

I didn’t, though. My mom’s eyes were wet at the corners. I didn’t want to make it worse. I didn’t want her to start crying.

So I mumbled an apology.

Then, I went to the living room.

There, the news was on. Somewhere, there was a war. A reel of bombs and bodies played on the TV. A man in a suit droned in front of it. There were soldiers, then boys, then more soldiers, then an explosion. Someone threw a flashbang and lit a house up. The windows got so bright, my eyes hurt.

Soon my mom came out with tea.

Then she brought fruit.

Apricots. Cherries. Nectarines. Plums.

She and Baba had stopped on the way back from the gas station, she said. It was an apology, I knew.

I took a nectarine slice, and she took one also.

Then, as more explosions flashed, my mom ran through the usual questions. Was I seeing anyone? Did I know her friend’s son was single? Did I want her to set me up?

No, I sighed. No, no.

But that day she was persistent. She asked about what had happened to that nice boy from college, the engineer whose parents lived in San Jose.

“Bijan,” I said, as the living room fractured in the white light. “He was Bijan. He’s married now. Two kids.”

A blast threw her frown into relief. Still, she didn’t give up. I should find someone like him, she said. Kind. Thoughtful. Like Baba.

She grabbed my hand. “I want you to be happy, Roya-joon.”

I was annoyed. “I thought you wanted me to be a doctor.”

On TV, bullets flew.

I expected a fight. I was ready for one.

But instead my mom got up and left—and when she came back, she had my Agha Bear.

“Look what I find! He hid in your closet! All these years!”

She placed him on the coffee table, next to the dates and nectarine slices. His white coat brushed against the cherry bowl. His stethoscope puffed out proudly.

I blinked.

He was still there.

I touched his fur. It felt different than I remembered.

“You love Agha Bear,” Maman said, looking at me.

I wasn’t sure if it was a statement or a question.

I could have told her then that Agha Bear was never lost, just hidden away.

I hadn’t been able to look at him after the video, but I couldn’t throw him out either, not when he’d been a gift from Baba. Not when none of this was his fault.

So, I’d put him in my old closet.

He’d been there this whole time, wearing his useless stethoscope.

All these years I’d known exactly where he was.

I didn’t know how to say so, though. Not when my aunt was still dying. Not after I’d said nothing for so long.

So, instead, I told Maman about the man with the bolt in his head.

From the refinery, in Michigan.

I explained how I’d held his hand until his surgery. How he’d told me to try the cherries. How I’d forgotten his name—or maybe never learned it—and never found out what happened to him.

“What is bolt?” she asked.

I didn’t know how to explain it.

“It joins two things,” I tried.

But this confused her.

“It’s metal,” I said. “You twist it.”

But she had no idea what I was talking about.

So I looked up “bolt” on my phone.

But the word the translation app showed didn’t make sense to her either.

Finally, I reached under the coffee table.

I’d guessed right. Bolts held its legs on.

The cold nub of one protruded beyond its nut.

I took my mother’s hand and guided her fingertip to the thread.

“This,” I said.

“Ah!” She smiled, saying the Persian back to me.

I smiled, too.

Then, I pointed behind my earlobe.

“No,” she gasped. “In his head? And he is alive?”

I nodded.

“He was,” I said. “Before his surgery. I was talking to him.”

On TV a fighter jet flew by, low and hot.

In a flash, my mom understood.

Her eyes got wet again. She covered my hand with hers. She looked at me, her face very serious.

“You are good doctor, Roya-joon. He is okay now. You help him then. I believe this.”

“I hope so,” I said.

Then she ate more fruit.

And I ate more fruit.

And, together, we watched more of the war, the light of faraway explosions slicing through us.

Leila Mansouri is an Iranian-American fiction writer, essays, and literary critic. Her creative work focuses on the Iranian-American and SWANA-American diasporas and has appeared in the Offing, The Believer, Rowayat, Nowruz, and elsewhere.

The post Flashbang appeared first on Mizna.

We are honored to publish Aurielle Marie’s “Now, for the Weather,” published as part of Mizna 25.1: Catastrophe Issue. Link to order here.

here: here: here: here: take what I have in exchange
(but what do I have?) just this:

—Aurielle Marie

Now, for the Weather

Before that she flips the hair over her shoulder
says they are storing the dead in ice cream trucks and 
every violence has been like this, an innocent image gutted 
A thousand pairs of feet, bloody 
beating a path in the dirt in the name
of a freedom they have never known 

For six months this year alone
I march my body in circles
in search of it, trying to create distance between
| the people I love| and |the men who built a killing field
in Weelaunee forest
martyred our sibling for opposing it
then blamed that death on the trees| 

while tortuguita’s body bloomed with 60 places for air
to escape
the State made quick work of mythmaking—first it was
only 14 shots then they wonder if it was just one errant
bullet
volleying between the wood as if an accident
finally, we just fired 57, only 57
The evening pundits speculate that maybe
Manuel Esteban Paez Terán shot all those guns at
themself, by themself

so when a so-called-news woman 
tells me (on behalf of Israel) that Hamas was under
the bridge so they burned the bridge or Hamas was
driving
the car so they must bullet the car
or cry there! Hamas there! underneath
the bed! where seven toddlers are sleeping before
leveling
the last standing hospital, I know I am again meeting a State at its splintering 

my sister, on the phone as we sit vigil, weeps 
when she realizes she has
been speaking to me in Arabic
her mouth beseeching god
in a language it can name its fears by 
I have not prayed since Ferguson. 
Tonight, I tell her, I must try 

every violence is like this, a wail escaping my mouth like a lost tongue
prayers segregated from the dialect that birthed it and each god I meet
allows horrors done in his name 

Maybe if it ever ended, the summers of
death cooling into autumns of disappearance, bodies piling like leaves. . . 

If there was ever any reprieve I wouldn’t be
            so angry,
                            so exhausted
                                                  so willing to become
                                                                       what my enemy says I am
                                                                                           so I might (finally) end him
                                                                                                             if that ending wouldn’t be
                                                                                                                                the start of another so-called war
                                                                                                                                with only one side

                                                                                           But that is a lone prayer unanswered

                                                 this world is what it is
                           And justice is a poem
           that has hung me too often
across where the line breaks

Inaction is
not my birthright,
is  not my job is 
not, even now, my choice 
But what to do with the impenetrable loss?? 
                               what to do about the damned weather, 
                               mundane and always having some little fit 
                               shifting to satisfy the tide or eat away at the land 
The seasons change lalalala 
And from behind the clouds, a fighter jet
Simple and regular, so the state tells me 

No. No. 
No. No. 
No. No. 
No. My god, my heart
                                  no. every violence wants me 
                                  to remove the humanity from my blood 
                                  so politicians and corporations 
                                  can devour me
& like the man driving an ambulance
full of the nearly-but-not-yet-martyred
through his ruined city on my phone’s blue screen,
I refuse to be consumed anymore than I might already have been

I don’t know what kind of human absolves themself to the end
of a world but habibi, I too count children and the seconds
between the dead falling from where they once were
to where they’ll never move from again 
and so how, on a night spilling saffron and sorrow
could I not sit vigil, useless though I may be 
against the mortar and phosphorus and soldiers—God 
what meaning are we to make of a world where the poem is only a container
for the despair that would consume me if I 
didn’t have a line to break or a pitiful lil
image to make meaning of, to give my hands something to fucking—

END IT ALL, GOD! 
end the whole damn twisted mess! but save the sliver of land between the river and the sea! I demand!
bring back the children and mothers and the uncles, the beloved queer librarian, GET TO IT! the doctor
who stayed when they told him to leave SEE TO IT! the people bleeding, waiting, not gone yet beneath
homes older than a fraud State. find the pregnant nail technician GET TO IT! the teenager who was, RIGHT NOW, in flight school AND MAKE IT SO
return them all I REQUIRE IT 
yes give back breath to even 
the men who did a hard thing in a desert 
in the name of possibility ESPECIALLY THEM! ESPECIALLY! 
GLORY TO THE WAY-MAKERS! 

here: here: here: here: take what I have in exchange 
(but what do I have?) just this: 

In 2014, one of us was slaughtered every 28 hours and I could have murdered every white pig with my rage from Gaza, from beneath another nakba, a girl my age shows me how to cool the tear gas from my eyes how pebbles
can disarm goliath, how to run sideways when they weaponize noise with their machines and—I survived.
she must have, too. she is alive, that girl. please?
she must be. if in my mouth. no—our mouth. let it be so. asé o.

Gaza you are not mine, but you are mine 
we, a minefield, beloved and belonging 
I am here I am here I am here I am here I am here I 
I with you I with you I with you I with you, with you 
how dare I feel so alone this little room 
not in pieces my hands clasped together my 
one crooked tooth drawing blood from a chasm it has ushered unto my lip, and I apologize
that I am so whole otherwise, disabled by old wars in mundane ways, considering 

Beyond these empires
Beyond a storm’s swift chest 
there is another world (if only the poem could build it mo’ quicker, beloveds)
lemme use my hands lemme use my guns 
lemme use our body, our useless money 
Our sex our scum our spit, the fires we stoke

beyond these empires there is another world 
And
I am running—finally!—toward one 
in which we only know how cold the night 
is because we gathered in it 
our death absent 
our joy as ordinary, as the changing 
of breeze a young sun 
none of our aliveness coming to an end 
                                  this poem breathing on and 
                                  on and on until 
                                  you meet me 
                                  there 

Aurielle Marie is an acclaimed poet, essayist, and storyteller. The author of Gumbo Ya Ya (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) and winner of the 2021 Furious Flower Prize, the 2020 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and the 2022 Georgia Author of the Year, Marie lives in Atlanta, Georgia, on unceded Muskogee land.

Toward a Free Palestine: Resources to Learn About and Act for Palestine

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This poem is published as part of Mizna 25.1: Catastrophe Issue. Link to order here.

A year ago, Gazan poet Yahya Ashour left his home to come to the United States for the literary conference Palestine Writes. Yahya has been exiled in the US ever since, waiting for the genocidal war to come to an end. In the year since then, Yahya wonders what is there left to say but “Gazan Despair”?

Ashour is currently a fellow at Mizna, and we have published his debut book online, A Gaza of Siege & Genocide. Proceeds of book sales as well as the sale of other items go directly to supporting Ashour and his family who are trying to survive genocide in Gaza. Links below:

+ A Gaza of Siege & Genocide
+ Sumud letterpress print
+ From the River to the Sea letterpress print
+ It Matters letterpress print

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

Gazan Despair

Dear sky, 
where were you
when our homes were being
bombed?

Dear sea, where were you
when our bodies were being
charred?

Yahya Ashour | يحيى عاشور is an exiled Gazan poet and awarded author, born on April 22, 1998, based in the US. He is a Mizna fellow and an honorary fellow at the University of Iowa and the author of the ebook A Gaza of Siege & Genocide (Mizna, 2024). Ashour’s portfolio also includes poetry collections, children’s books in Arabic, and contributions to global anthologies and journals, including MQR and ArabLit. He has received multiple scholarships and fellowships and has read poetry at more than fifty U.S. organizations and universities, including Princeton, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, and UCLA. His poetry has been translated into several languages, including Spanish, French, Japanese, and Bengali. Ashour studied sociology & psychology and he has worked as a creative writing mentor.

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trans. by Jérémy Victor Robert

We are honored to publish Olivia Elias’s “It Always Starts with Words,” published as part of Mizna 25.1: Catastrophe Issue. Link to order here.

above the ghetto in flames   
frantically dance the goddesses
of vengeance & conquest

Double, double toil and trouble

—Olivia Elias

It Always Starts with Words

the fortieth day is over
& so it’s night
the dove didn’t return
did she lose her way back
engulfed in phosphoric
smog     is she lying 
wings broken     under rubble

fireballs zigzagging in the sky
explode into
monstrous clouds of black smoke
& one after the other the time
to count one two three  
houses collapse like sandcastles 
their inhabitants inside

/

Fire burn and cauldron bubble
sing the fateful witches,

blood will have blood
& death will feed on death

It always starts with words

their mouths   missiles launchpads
spit in a steady stream
death sentences

 terrorist     all of them without any exception

terrorist in the making      even in their mother’s
womb      they say

/

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble
sing the fateful witches,

“Mowing the lawn” 
“Flattening the landscape”
         “Sterilizing”

It always starts with words

sterilizing language     sterilizing life
ravishing it from Latin rapere
taking by force

above the ghetto in flames   
frantically dance the goddesses
of vengeance & conquest

Double, double toil and trouble

/

refugee in my home thousands
& thousands miles far from there  
I sometimes raise my head &
look outside

the light is so beautiful   it seems unreal

does horror have no bottom just like hell?

November 21, 2023

____

*”Blood will have blood” and “Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble” come from Shakespeare, Macbeth, Acts III and IV

“Born in Haifa in 1944, Olivia Elias, a poet of the Palestinian diaspora who has been living on three continents, writes in French. Translated into Arabic, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese, her work has been published in numerous reviews. In November 2022, with Chaos, Crossing, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid and shortlisted for the Sarah Maguire 2024 International Poetry Prize, she made her English-language debut. In September 2023, she published Your Name, Palestine, a chapbook translated by Sarah Riggs and Jérémy Victor Robert (both books published by
 World Poetry). https://eliasolivia.com 

Jérémy Victor Robert is a translator between English and French who works and lives in his native Réunion Island. He published French translations of Sarah Riggs’ Murmurations (APIC, 2021, with Marie Borel), Donna Stonecipher’s Model City (joca seria, 2020), and Etel Adnan’s Sea & Fog (L’Attente, 2015). He recently translated Michael Palmer’s Little Elegies for Sister Satan, excerpts of which were posted online by Revue Catastrophes. Together with Sarah Riggs, he translated Olivia Elias’ Your Name, Palestine (World Poetry Books, 2023).

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And the World Borne Between

Mizna is honored to publish Mohammed Zenia’s “Gaza 2 Khartoum,” published as part of Mizna 25.1: Catastrophe Issue. Link to order here.

Toussaint Nate Turner Leila Khaled John Brown Tubman Joseph Garang 
(2 name but so many few)

— Mohammed Zenia

Gaza 2 Khartoum

Birdsong drifts

Over murder north

(But this is more than murder)

They are trying to unname the dead

Whole litanies of olive bloodlines stuffed teeth Moloch

Cadillac future moves its carrion cannon/

Like famous fathers of death before them

An air raid silence rumbles the pentagon but

No body tinged burns will bear the

Silence of tectonic plates no longer

– Maybe this does mean war,

– But altogether I think we may be on opposite sides of the equation—

Cross over Golgotha has long been buried maimed or homeless and the stench of this

Evil traces its first step  lost colonies  nestled island desert Virginia

Burials at sea 

But the kids of Kumerica still holster their Stones

No surprise who is who, 

Clearly this has always been here—2 many for 2 long have in vain explained 

And some even rode—

Toussaint Nate Turner Leila Khaled John Brown Tubman Joseph Garang 

(2 name but so many few)

Jihadist for the Word 

After kingdom walls fell

Serpent struck Jericho 

— Fucked Babel —

— Today We stand shoulder to shoulder in the trenches of resistance — 

Oct 7th—communique from the Sudanese communist

Party trapped in the bombed out suburbs of Omdurman—

From Shendi 2 Jerusalem echoes the prophecy,

That this world will burn its shell 2 make way anew.

—Ellijah has fled 2 Chad on the back of a Toyota—

And the holy land has fallen into the hands of the Romains once again—

From Al-Aqsa to Mosul we avenge the ruins but inshallah 

There will be birds born free over Gaza once more and no slight

Can unravel this fundamental truth

The earth may never yield its burns

The cosmos maintain its mysterious silence

 Our long march 2 exile repeated 

Over and over to the soundtrack

Of Triumph of the will

And if the deathcamp is the only future

Then

Serenely we will engage the

Endless intifada

To face this

Future of war.

But climate change is I empire is indigenous struggle.

And from Lenape 2 Palestine 2 San Juan 2 the Nile basin

Back 2 Patagonia

In Bay Ridge outside the Hemos you

Could smell the sage.

Diana Di Prima once wrote about

How it feels,

To be up to your eyeballs

Revolution— love spelled backwards

And I couldn’t help but cry

Cuz’ it’s really  that

For a free Palestine A free Sudan land back America 2 Australia 

S/o Wellhanue

The Philippines and Guam will see the sun

Thailand 2 Nepal beam without the yoke

Planet Arab rise LOVE

\The true unification of the Habeshas nation

From Sahrawi 2 the five stars of Somalia

Yemen breath birth! 

 Borderless AFRICA drum spread the healing

(Earth without sadness) 

Our conferred confederacy tribes

Once and will again

HOLD GARDEN PAST PRESENT FUTURE 

Till it’s backward.

Free Palestine.

(From the river to the sea)

Palestine free.

Mohammed Zenia is the author of Tel Aviv, James Baldwin’s Lungs in the 80s, and Black Bedouin. Their work has appeared in e-flux, Changes Review, poetry project AND 240 magazine among other publications. 

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We are proud to present this text as part of a list of resources to take action for and learn about Palestine, as well as works by Palestinian artists, writers, activists, and cultural workers.

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We are honored to publish Danez Smith’s “Poem,” published as part of Mizna 25.1: Catastrophe Issue. We would also like to extend a special congratulations to Danez Smith on the release of their poetry collection, Bluff—check it out here!

nature

i hear your prayer.
i see your terror. 
i know my teeth. 

— Danez Smith

Poem

I was born a Black woman and now

I am become a Palestinian

against the relentless laughter of evil

there is less and less living room

and where are my loved ones?


— June Jordan, “Moving towards Home” 

he calls them “the children of darkness” and being one myself— 
having been plucked from between stars, having been born again
in the dark, dark bellies of those ship, delivered as cargo 
onto the suffocating light of america—i find my kin. 

human animals he called them, and having been ape, been dog,
been mongrel, cattled and culled, i knew who was my brother. 

this late in empire, late meaning near its end not near its completion, 
let my language be clear and dangerous as water. 
let my mind’s tongue move sound, be exact 
with where venom is intended and where light sought.

animals. he called them animals.

Free Palestine
             said the birds
Free Palestine
             said the fish
Free Palestine
             said the mice
Free Palestine
             said the mountain lions
Free Palestine
             said the cattle
Free Palestine
             said the wolves
Free Palestine
             said the horses
Free Palestine
             said the bats 
Free Palestine
             said the elephants
Free Palestine
             said the deer
Free Palestine
             said the squirrels
Free Palestine
             said the bears
Free Palestine
             said the wildebeests
Free Palestine
             said the geckos 
Free Palestine
             said the snakes
Free Palestine
             said the dogs & cats 
Free Palestine
             said the bees
Free Palestine
             said the spiders
Free Palestine
             said the ants
Free Palestine
             said the rhinoceros 
Free Palestine
             the birds again

nature

i hear your prayer.
i see your terror. 
i know my teeth.

Danez Smith is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead, winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection and a finalist for the National Book Award, and [insert] boy, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Their latest collection, Bluff, is forthcoming with Graywolf. They live in Minneapolis.

Toward a Free Palestine: Resources to Learn About and Act for Palestine

We are proud to present this text as part of a list of resources to take action for and learn about Palestine, as well as works by Palestinian artists, writers, activists, and cultural workers.

The post Poem appeared first on Mizna.