Today, Mizna is honoring the launch of beloved contributor and Palestinian performance artist Fargo Tbakhi’s debut poetry collection TERROR COUNTER. This ambitious, experimental collection is, at once, a battle cry, a love letter, a reminder that we will die and that we are not dead. Lena Khalaf Tuffaha writes: “Through a variety of invented forms and stirring unravelings, these poems tunnel, excavate, eulogize, exclaim, and most elegantly imagine where we might go once we reject the dehumanizing gaze and obsessions of a crumbling empire and return to ourselves and to each other.” Purchase a copy of TERROR COUNTER here.

—George Abraham, Editor-at-Large

I wander through what remains of You

In the holding

We are not repeated here

We traverse some space outside of narratability

We are somewhere nobody can see us

—Fargo Tbakhi

Palestinian Love Poem

Something in me wishes for a dead cell
tower.
I’m a little grime. I’m arterial clogging.
Blister
on the tongue on skin You weren’t aware
could
blister. I puked up a drone today
warm
and stillbreathing. Necrosis of the giver
give
to all the grimes a gift: cleanness.
Up
the throat and toward fresh air. My
goodness
what a pretty taste. The interrogatory lawyer
bends
me over and his briefcase touches my
soul.
I’m a little filth. Blood of a good man
catch
it in my cupped hands. To drink You is to
know
who I will become. I’m a little pest.
Warbling
my little deathsong like a king’s
bane.
I swear I can see through myself tonight,
all
the way through to You, my watcher, my
sweet
interlocutor, silently workshopping
all
of my lines.

Gazan Tunnels (Through Yehuda Amichai’s “Sonnet”)

from “In the Knowledge That You Will Die, and I Will Die”

for my baba

And we will walk

Into nowhere

You with Your smallness and me with my smallness

The beach where we froze—were frozen—together

When the patrol officer held You he held You

When You held me You held me close

I answer the video call and Your hair has become white

Thin and vanishing—poverty—wraithlike—

Some incontrovertibility inside of us

And our times

I answer the video call smoking and You say You smoke now? then light up with me

The two of us and our cigarettes and distance

Stumbling along toward death

When my poems disintegrate You will remain in the documents of the court

When the courts disintegrate You will slip with me into anonymity

Where we began and where we looked for love

The indictment text holding You still and frozen

Where You are defending Yourself against the being-told-of

And You are named Defendant Last Name First Name

And You are named for me and I for You

The pages typed by somebody’s hands

Who listened around You shapeless in the clear light

I keep telling You about time

And what we need it for

Though I do not believe—

We find ourselves this morning in our capitols

Farther than a ship from safety

On the horizon line

Its vagueness and its cruelty

I have told Your story and You in Your way

You have told mine

You have told it to me

We tell each other the temperature and find that the numbers match

And I look for You in the white of my own hair

Its unexpected entrances

To miss each other’s funerals because of our difference

To have lost, finally, our eachness

To be, finally, no discrete things to be legislated

I wander through the ghosts of Your hair

I wander through what remains of You

In the holding

We are not repeated here

We traverse some space outside of narratability

We are somewhere nobody can see us

And here You tell me I am whole and wholly Yours

And here I tell You I let You go, again and again, each day

And here we are sweetly entangled and disentangling

Somewhere beyond the electronics store and its robberies

Your hair is becoming its own memory of itself

And Your jacket resides on me like a welcome tick

Drawing from me my life

My somewhereness and my penchants-for-

I, begging some God for illegibility

You, forgotten dream of instability

Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is a Palestinian performance artist and the author of TERROR COUNTER (Deep Vellum, 2025) and ANTIGONE. VELOCITY. SALT. (Deep Vellum, 2027). 

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Eluding illusion and treading warily around “the blank falsity of day,” Palestinian poet Ahmad Almallah’s recently-released third collection of poetry, Wrong Winds, presents us with an enduring suspicion of the apparent and the seeming. Purchase a copy of Wrong Winds HERE.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

I don’t know mainly how
to save myself from my
words: I would want them
all, alive and well, or at
once, all at once, burning.

—Ahmad Almallah

AFTER AL-SHANFARA

ولكنّ نفسًا مُرة لا تقيمُ بي                 على الذأم إلا ريثما أتحولُ

◆

الشّنفرى

◆

• but this proud bitter self
• has no place in it
• for injury;
• it scorns
•        till eyes turn
•         toward an
•                   other
• beyond those places
• in the past I’ll leave—
•              setting out in me.

WOOK

When the world ends
—as in the now—we’ll
have to turn books to
their source, and use
them as burning wood.

For now: I look at my
stack—of scrap books?
Mostly wood on wood
doesn’t burn on its own.
What will I part with
first to keep warm, or

cook my self something?
Because you can’t eat a
book, not for sustenance
anyway! Or could I make
a structure out of all my
books—what would wood

look like in that form?
Would the words stick
out facing the sky, or
would they be dripping
in, on my head, on my
everything. I don’t know

how to save myself, any
how? most of the time?
I don’t know mainly how
to save myself from my
words: I would want them
all, alive and well, or at
once, all at once, burning.

PURE&LOVE

1/2

the object
doesn’t
exist—

thus: no
one is
drawn

to another;
but what
if two

are drawn
together—
will this mean

you’ll be wait-
ing for me in
the after-

life, where
figures
don’t

have to touch?

2/2

benefit-cost-ratio
demands that the
canvas be as wide
as can be drawn

like an expansive
golf field confront-
ed by all the love
cliches: dawn, sun

etc. everywhere
every color is made
invisible by another
color; because the
heart can’t pump love
all day, it takes it away
for matters of living—
isn’t it sad to let go of

chance, for the sake
of the design, the
already given
              structure?

LIFE&DAWN

Both are drawn. This
is the blank falsity
of day. This: I take
as reality. Eyes can
or not. Look in or
out. There. Death
announcing itself
in squares, balanced
on the corner. Boxes,
like boxes that turn
out to be simple fact:
boxes, and more
boxes against
the sun, which I start
to draft, beginning
and brushing its light-
lock. Everywhere, the
mind is a god. Misstep
and you’ll fall prey to
illusions. So: carry on
without starting. Be
the cause to be, because
one has to misstep in
order to defile, because
one has and one has not:
                                                           etc.

Ahmad Almallah grew up in Palestine and currently lives in Philadelphia. His newest poetry
collection, Wrong Winds, is out with Fonograf Editions (2025). His other collections include
Border Wisdom (Winter Editions 2023) and Bitter English (Chicago 2019). He is currently artist-in-residence in English and Creative Writing at UPenn.

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As we celebrate a ceasefire and renew our commitment to fighting alongside our Gazan kin toward a free Palestine, Mizna shares a new poem by Randa Jarrar that insists on a future of Palestinian aliveness. This piece will be published in Mizna’s forthcoming Futurity-themed issue, edited by Barrak Alzaid and Aram Kavoossi.

A Palestinian Tomorrow

after Jotamario Arbeláez

For us, all of us, part of our resistance to the erasure of genocide is to talk about tomorrow in Gaza, to plan for the healing of the wounds of Gaza tomorrow. We will own tomorrow. Tomorrow will be a Palestinian day.

—Ghassan Abu-Sitta

not the day after the war but a day after
the day after the war,
—that day—
the men will sleep for the first time 
without fearing death or its thefts
and for days after that day they will rest
but only a little bit after everyone else 
especially the children 
and the days after the day after the day 
after the war because there is always a war 
the mothers will sleep for two weeks
in shifts
and after that they will start a school
but only after the day that they lie
on the bare earth to say,
I will hold you and only you
in my lungs and heart one day, 
but thankfully not today.

Because today there is still a war and 
maybe after the war there will be a day,
if after the war I have a drum or even a mouth 
to fix to say that we will dance 
and laugh so hard a day 
after the day after the war
and after that we will sleep some more
if after the war there is more 
than a day if after the war
there is a ghost
of a heart or of a lung
if after the war we meet
by each other’s graves 
after we crawl out
on that day, the day
after the day after the
day after the war

Randa Jarrar is a Palestinian artist, author, professor, and actor based in Los Angeles.

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 A Palestinian Tomorrow—A New Poem by Randa Jarrar appeared first on Mizna.

Mizna is honored to share an excerpt from Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha’s heartbreaking collection of poetry, Forest of Noise. For readers in the Twin Cities area, see Mosab Abu Toha speak at the Palestine Festival of Literature on Dec. 9, 2024, link to purchase tickets here.

Before I Sleep

Before I sleep,
Death is always
sitting on my windowsill,
whether in Gaza or Cairo.
Even when I lived
in a tent,
it never failed
to create a window
for itself.
It looks me in the eye
and recounts to me
the many times
it let me live.
When I respond, “But you
took my loved ones away!”
it swallows the light in the tent
and hides in the dark to visit next day.

Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and essayist from Gaza. His first collection of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and won the Palestine Book Award, the American Book Award, and the Walcott Poetry Prize. Abu Toha is also the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, which he hopes to rebuild. He recently won an Overseas Press Club Award for his “Letter from Gaza” columns for The New Yorker.

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 Before I Sleep—Poem from Forest of Noise appeared first on Mizna.

by Moustafa Bayoumi

This text is published as part of Mizna 18.1: Surviving, guest edited by Moustafa Bayoumi. Available to order here.

Survival of the Physics

When I was growing up in Canada, the civil war in Lebanon was raging. I was a teenager then, which meant I was focused on other things, like my hair and being one of the only brown kids in my high school, but still I remember the gruesome images of the war filling the nightly newscasts on television along with the grave concern my Lebanese Canadian friends and their parents had for their families back home. There weren’t a lot of Lebanese in Kingston, where I was, but London, Ontario, had many, and I knew the London kids well because we all attended a Muslim camp during the summer and would gather over various weekends during the school year to hang out. 

There came a point during the war when there was enough of a lull in the fighting that several of my friends were dispatched by their parents to Lebanon for most of one summer. As is the case today, our parents thought it important to send us to the region when opportunity struck and finances allowed as a way to keep us connected to our families and our traditions. I had likewise traveled to Egypt several times, and there should have been nothing remarkable about my friends going to Lebanon, except of course that there was an unforgiving war going on. 

The next time I saw my friends was a few weeks after that summer, when we all gathered for a weekend in London. I remember how we drove several times from one friend’s house to another, sometimes in multiple cars, but whenever we got to a stop light, my friends would suddenly pretend that we had come to a roadblock instead. This was clearly a pantomime that they had played out many times. They made as if tires were burning in the middle of the street and occasionally we all had to pile out of the car. A few times, one friend pretended to check our documents, sometimes throwing one of us into a different car or pretending to arrest one of us before taking that person away. They thought it was hilarious. I thought it was strange. 

I was slow to realize, but soon I understood that my friends must have lived through a tremendously stressful time in war-ravaged Lebanon. Of course, these teenagers had the luxury of leaving Lebanon easily and coming back to Canada, and at this time, many new arrivals, refugees from the war, also arrived in Canada. I met many of them, too. The war refugees often had the same look in their eyes as my friends had shortly after that summer, a look that was somewhere between manic and catatonic, though with the new arrivals, the look fell deeper and darker into their eyes. 

My friends had bought keffiyehs while in Lebanon and one of them told me a story concerning the keffiyehs in Canada. Another friend of ours worked at his parents’ convenience store. While he was on the late shift one night, the rest of the guys decided to surprise him. They put the keffiyehs on their heads and grabbed those neon pump-action water cannons that were all the rage. They ran into the store, keffiyeh-clad and water gun-toting, pretending to take over the establishment and yelling Arabic expressions at the top of their lungs. My friend behind the counter started laughing uproariously, and then all the kids started laughing the way teenage boys laugh at pranks. It was really funny. Then they heard the words. 

“Don’t move,” a police officer commanded. He had his gun drawn and was standing in the doorway of the shop. Around the outside of the store were dozens of other officers, all with weapons drawn, ready to believe that this was an international incident of terrorism targeting a local convenience store. The officer in the doorway looked scared out of his wits and his weapon-grasping hands were visibly trembling, while my friends became frightened for their lives. The police eventually took the boys to the station and called their parents, and then everyone learned why the police were there in the first place. A bystander had seen boys in keffiyehs toting guns. Conclusions were reached. 

* * *

When conclusions are reached, guns are often drawn. Let’s pause for a moment and take a look at this sentence. Grammatically speaking, the sentence is made of up two passive voice constructions, which means the person reaching the conclusion and the people drawing the guns are hidden, shielded from responsibility. In the world of grammar, the passive voice means that the object of a sentence becomes its subject. In the world of real life, this means that a group of people will first be objectified and then be held responsible for the very racism oppressing them. The passive voice is something never to be taken lightly. While it’s true that the passive voice may assist a sentence grammatically, it’s also true that in the real world, the result is too often a death sentence. 

Conclusions are reached every day in the United States. Guns are drawn. Shots are fired. My friends are still around, unlike Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Janet Wilson, Walter Scott, Alton Sterling, Yvette Smith, Philando Castile, and so many others. Real change has yet to come, but, at least since the 2014 protests in Ferguson, national attention has been increasingly focused on the malignant amount of state violence that African Americans face daily. Their consciences pricked, many Arab Americans have been active participants in the Black Lives Matter movement. And activists from across the spectrum are also connecting various movements such as Black Lives Matter to other liberation struggles across the globe in profound ways. 

The results of this cross-pollination are appearing in important and sometimes unexpected places. An August 2014 story in Ebony titled The Ferguson/Palestine Connection details how: 

“Over 9,000 American officials have trained with Israeli police and military units on responding to civilian protests and terrorism. These operations reflect [a] failure to distinguish between the apparent duty of police to protect civilians and military responses to war. This fusion has had life-costing implications for Americans, specifically black, Muslim, and Arab people.”

Increasingly, this generation is understanding how oppression at home and oppression abroad are not only two sides of the same coin but are also mutually reinforcing and jointly justifying forces. As many good people of conscience and action have noted, the struggle for indigenous rights in the United States cannot be separated from the Palestinian struggle for their rights. We now know that the Bureau of Prisons helped establish the CIA’s clandestine torture program, linking the industrialization of incarceration in the United States to US imperialism abroad. The rush to declare certain people “illegal,” as we are living through in today’s United States, not only forgets the colonial history of this country but also feels like it could be the prelude to a massacre to come. 

* * * 

The people making these connections across the world are not only found in the United States, of course. There is an energy today among the global oppressed that traverses geography to discover the common cause of freedom. If this energy could speak, it would probably say something about how we will no longer be bribed and cajoled into accepting half measures and partial solutions to the problems historically created by colonialism, sexism, warfare, greed, and corruption. There is a world of possibility in such a principled position and in the potential of a global assemblage of liberation movements. 

But it’s also a truism that every movement produces its opposite. In the United States, an anti-liberation movement clearly exists. In fact, it is currently found under the name of one Donald Trump. What is Trump if not a reactionary, anxious, arrogant, artificially colored, barely literate, and violently sexist manifestation of the old order? Trump is nothing much more than this old order gasping and ailing at the serious fact that their ability to control the world is waning. To understand that is easy. The difficult part is to comprehend that Trump is also the president of the United States. 

And in this age of Trump, Arab Americans are living through some of the most trying years we’ve yet encountered in this country, but as a nation, we have never really been far away from what Trump represents. What may be better this time around is our collective ability to discover our common opposition to Trumpism, but we should never forget that what we call Trumpism is a noxious ideology that existed in this country long before Donald Trump appeared. 

In our opposition to Trumpism and all it represents, Arab Americans are constituent members of this global liberation collective. There was a time when Arab Americans sought other avenues of politics. One approach was to reassure other Americans that they shouldn’t fear Arabs. Gibran Kahlil Gibran, for example, believed in a somewhat Orientalist notion that Arabs could enrich Western culture with mystical Eastern spirituality. He was hardly alone in this belief. And many Arab Americans after Gibran’s generation often believed in making comprises with the mainstream, all in the name of fitting in. Mohammed became Moe or sometimes even Mike. 

Today it’s different. We are no longer debating what we should change about ourselves to be included in this country. (Because, seriously, who needs that old-time bullshit?) Instead, we’re demanding that the country change to include us, which can likewise bring about change beyond the borders of the nation. And we can feel this proud, assertive identity in the pages of this issue of Mizna. “Swallow your blood and bare your teeth, they are seeds,” Jess Rizkallah instructs in aphorisms for lonely arabs (p. 1). This is sound advice. 

Here’s some more advice. For years, we’ve actually misunderstood what being Arab American is all about. Being Arab American is not about identity or politics, and it’s certainly not identity politics. It’s about physics. Arab Americans are endless combinations of matter and energy. We are the profound study of movement through space and time. We are the result of the sometimes-forced propulsion of particles and objects- also known as people- from one land to another. And when we crash and collide headlong into each other, something new is born. And yet, our past is mysteriously retained. Ask Paul Kaidy Barrows. He writes about discovering that inside him sits a soul older than himself, one that is “shaped like a tear” and that “glows like an opal but is soft like smoke” (p. 36). Being Arab American is both physics and metaphysics, flesh and spirit. If you think it’s simple and straightforward, read these pages and learn. 

What you’ll realize is that today’s artists and writers of Arab America are carefully attuned to the sympathetic hum of the world, that low frequency of understanding that all hounded, subjugated, exploited, tyrannized, and harassed people are hearing today. The oppressed are uniting, and their thrum resonates through this issue. You sense it when reading Bernard Ferguson’s alternative universe in which no human body can be illegal, for example. Here, Ferguson describes an alternative, Whitmanesque place where “we lay on a quilt made by someone’s grandmother and bring enough of a meal for ourselves and whoever is lucky to sit next to us and we watch our favorite films in which everyone we love is still alive and the light flickering across the sky becomes our new god and every blade of grass is green and citizen” (p. 8). You hear it in Marion Gomez’s rumbling rumination on the thoughts sparked by her last name (p. 9). You perceive the thrum turn into celebration in Noor Hashem’s essay on traversing distance and finding inspiration in protest (p. 38), and you hear it throb like a heart urgently pumping blood in Sagirah Shahid’s Yes: “My complexion is a swear word. / I’m sure you’ve noticed. If you’re Black / and Muslim you don’t get a break” (p. 13). 

That’s the thing about Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, African Americans, and all of us who make up the maligned masses in the entropic age of Donald Trump. We may be vilified and denigrated, and we may be pushed around like wobbly shopping carts in an empty parking lot, but the cheap politics of people like Trump will burn out long before we become ashamed of who we are and how we connect to each other. Arab Americans, after all, are a microcosm of the cacophony that is this country. We are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, atheist, agnostic, gay, straight, cis, trans, citizen, non-citizen, indigenous, male, female, brown, black, white, refugee, immigrant, resident, alien, Arab, Latinx, African, Asian, European, young, old, English-speaking, Arabic-speaking, and everything in between all of those categories.

And we are more, just like all of us are more. We may be among the people for whom conclusions are drawn, but what we share is the knowledge, born out of experience, that beyond ourselves, each of us is an “other” to someone in power. Out of this truth must come not only our ability to withstand this age but also our ability to triumph over it. Why? Because we cannot -and will not- be objects in any- one’s sentence any longer. With all of our sisters and brothers, we will speak in the active voice and sing our collective music in all the minor keys. Such is the song of our planet. And such is the physics of our survival.

Moustafa Bayoumi, a two-time winner of the Arab American Book Award for Non-fiction, is the author of How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America (Penguin), and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror (NYU Press). A professor of English at Brooklyn College (CUNY), Bayoumi has also written for a wide variety of publications and is a columnist for the Guardian. 

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