RR

July 2024

Untitled | By Nour Annan Binary Stars There was a version of you,a little more sun-kissed maybe.Same unruly curls,same dark silken fuzzon the back of her neck.She belonged to Beirutor Baghdad,or Gazaas freely as you belong to Brooklyn.(Did she also scavenge like a magpie,collect sticks and rocks and leaves,make altars out of dry, dead things?)She ate stuffed grape leaves without complaining,never had mac and cheese out of a box.She saw her grandma every Sunday,together they plucked parsley leaveslike tiny flowersand made tabbouleh.In your nightmares you yell"My umbrella!" and "Don't leave me!"What horrorsdid her dreamsunloose?To her father she was baba,to

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2 Against 1 | By Omar Khoury On my 34th birthday my father forgot it was my birthdayas I fed him hazelnut frosting without the cake that could make him choke. I wiped his mouth with a wet cloth and gave him a sip of water. His eyes were watering and wondering something wideand unwieldy about the world, about his world in this momentwithout access to an expansive library, his memory, his legs. He stared at me and asked me about death, what it would be like,as if a young boy who just learned of death, his

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