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

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

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

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

—Ghinwa Jawhari

a girlhood summer passes

shouf, lebanon

july war 2006

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

Ghinwa Jawhari is the author of the chapbook BINT (2021), which was selected by Aria Aber for Radix Media’s inaugural Own Voices Chapbook Prize.

A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, she is the founding editor of Koukash Review. Her essays, fiction, and poetry appear in Catapult, Mizna, The Adroit Journal, Rusted Radishes, The Margins, Narrative, and elsewhere.

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This Pride Month 2025, Mizna is honored to be republishing selections from Mizna 21.1: Queer + Trans Voices for every week of June. This week, Mejdulene B. Shomali chronicles a revelatory moment of self-realization and tributes the iconic actor Patrick Swayze.

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

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

                the bouncer of my road house heart
           my wild Johnny
the first man i thought to love

—Mejdulene B. Shomali

To Patrick Swayze, Thanks for
Everything! Mejdulene Shomali

Patrick Swayze nailed the lift
                baby out of the corner
           into the sky        a rare bird
something beautiful

my VCR rewound & replayed
                to see his smile
           watch her sink down
against his chest        his unbuttoned black shirt

Patrick wore that red dress
                drove queens in the desert
           locks blowing in the convertible breeze
saved Stockard from a bad man

made a whole town believe in something
                in whiteness
           fuchsia sweetheart neckline
lacy black gloves

even as a ghost Patrick moved
                penny up the door i wanted
           to see it again when
he passed too young too gaunt

with what cancer took
                i remember him like this
           tight black jeans no spaghetti arms
twisting hips from tips of feet

Patrick was never a punchline for me
                the bouncer of my road house heart
           my wild Johnny
the first man i thought to love

Mejdulene Bernard Shomali is a queer Palestinian poet and associate professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Williams College. She is the author of Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives (Duke University Press 2023) and the chapbook agriculture of grief: prayers for my father’s dementia (Finishing Line Press 2024).

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This Pride Month 2025, Mizna is honored to be republishing selections from Mizna 21.1: Queer + Trans Voices for every week of June. This week, Lambda Award-winning trans poet and scholar Trish Salah teaches us about the loneliness of inhabiting spaces beyond where borders demarcate in “Prayer Glitch” and “Blurred Witness”.

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

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

When you try to speak of home
What comes out is kisses, birds

—Trish Salah

Prayer Glitch

One sister remembered, one not
One curated voiced in a song cycle
One divides the ocean, a drifter

It is difficult to be molten, alone
Drum the breakers and vanish
Teach the young, without force

Evacuated in silence, not knowing
As readin seed the horizon 
All thought only of glass 

Desired like a monitor nothing 
Hooking up, having had a sex
Arguing with heavy liquor, a mask 

Lonely through the park to the bar
Once could yet be taken up 
The act of only writing poetry

Center halve and childlike report
Sibling questions bred apart
Dare memory’s compassion

River of words, rushing cavities
Claimed seasonal every girl 
In plague, only to repeat

Blurred Witness

What is required by this history? 
A rage muse, it is your body still 

Encircling the city of your lover
Wander the written path

When you try to speak of home
What comes out is kisses, birds

Past, another possible remove, 
How do you become a stranger?

Faces thinly papered over
despite how alike we look

Her past, or his, an awful trust
Without country or reference

To arrive I stay abed for days
Inside a house within another house

Try to retrace what was cast out
quiet 

Born in Halifax, Trish Salah is the author of the Lambda Award-winning Wanting in Arabic, and of Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1. She is widely published in journals and anthologies., and the co-editor of a special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, on Transgender Cultural Production. Her research program, Towards a Trans Minor Literature, is an inquiry into aesthetic and political projects of transsexual, trans, genderqueer and two-spirit writers. She recently organized the Writing Trans Genres and Decolonizing and Decriminalizing Trans Genres conferences at the University of Winnipeg. Currently, Salah is assistant professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University.

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