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HomePosts Tagged "posts-issue7" (Page 3)

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Brouhaha Dubai For Faten   The serried gloating clang, The vile awkwardness Of the hammering –   Nearby, at a distance – construct this Mortgage of and in the ear… Certainly, the wife’s not song-   Smitten by this brouhaha, and as You might expect, she speaks her mind And builds this fear, these   Concrete layers of fear… There are no summery illusions here (Blinder within gladness   And madder in the hat’s own bower) For this and this and this is where The moan of a woman’s most   Naked, native power May come to make his sadness, Whale-large with incompetence   As he is At the hawk-sharp sibilance Of these eyeless rocky serpents   Winding round the ear, making That same dumb feature hear The fat

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after Jake Adam York   I go arm in armwith only the shape of me   the men arm in armogle me like some strange   dodging cars and looksfeline bodies dead or alive   he says ‘fantastic’in the space between us   passing, just a secondand all of my time   imposing himselfforever, a word   he believes to be minea whiteness, a look   some body he seesas not belonging here   too much, too little   somehow surviving.no one likes to see that   not in this city,especially if you can get out   if you’re not from herepassing, papers, flights   you’ve seen the insidesof the walledoff US embassy   worth more than my ownlanguage thrown at me   not worth my own languagetonguetwistedsafety   Why did you

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Extermination                                                                                                                             يوم القيامة for Yazidi Women   rape us whiter and holy we will assemble the bones dismember memory of the past stories trusted to oil bloodied lips from burnt olive trees dripping down to fingertips destroy the iridescent crescent beat of a song that sings blue but it drums like god listen allah        allah         allah a sigh of something beautiful you will be witness to the many stages of the end  the many stages of resurrection vision dazzles  sun and darkened moon are one ignore hereafter for herenow your collarbone escapes you leg wound around leg  الله          الله           الله  gives life to the dead          

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on june 12th at last call, there was a massacre. do I know anyone in orlando? as I read the headline selfish, humanThe News compared shootings in the USto hurricanes, tornadoes, recurrent eventsnatural disasters human premeditation caught myself begging, hopingfor it to be another one of theirsnot someone they could pin on uswhen you hold your breath think white, male, christiancloseted homophobe not brown, male, muslimcloseted terrorist cell you worry about your humanity about all the pretending we’d rather seepeople live inside lies rather than lovelisten, your spine is cracking too, crushing me and you and my mother said ahsan, when I told herthe kind of

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Every time I go back I take a sprig of lavender. Tuck it into the folds of encircled heartbeats, sun-dry and spoon it into bags with stray eyelashes. Wrap around people-colored dreams and rub the buds against the walls to mask the smell of white.   Every time I went back, I took a sprig of the lavender that god in heaven below was regurgitating by the time I decided to leave.

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for Marilyn Hacker   Outside, the clouds part and a cold sun silvers the sea. Inside, as butterflies and swimming women surrender the mantelpiece to polar bear cubs and bright berries, I lie on the sofa reading the Qur’an, a heart-shaped cushion tucked under my arm. Like caviar-hunters, the surgeons have filleted my chest, scooped out every last suspect cell. Their blue dye haloes my nipple: for a year my breast will weep lapis lazuli tears. Online, a man with eyes of dark fire says he admires my courage. I am not brave. All I have done is submit to the will of the seasons, embrace an untranslatable change.

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Much as I wish to write only poemsin which tall trees standfor the lungs of the world and the moonrises like a sigh in their branches,I still sometimes dreamof being a serial killer. TonightI raped a faceless young womanin a corrugated sewage tunnel,disembowelled her and smearedfistfuls of viscera and shitover the tender breastsof my tremblingaccomplice, an act I filmedand stored on a micro-SD cardsoon discoveredby the IT guy sent to fix my workcomputer, a silent man I hunted in the darkplaying fields of a secret NATO base,awakening at four a.m.just before the slaughter. To healthe disappointment,I watched YouTube videosof Arab

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  the high the way   Dust through my eyelashes, fluffed out pollen California ride the coastline up down a redwood between you, me yellowjackets eat meat we laugh   stop for baby woodpecker bird to save you say “it’s got spots, it’s a woodpecker” look up at me, chirp, empty throat, dry and blind I got nothing to regurgitate, not a worm, not a dream   So die in the sun in the rock we talk about spotted wings, where we could pretend end ain’t here nor there, right ahead right around the bend, Highway One the only end   Smell

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A balcony Four chairs My mother, brother, and I sat With the Tante Fathiyye of my childhood At a scraped plastic table Its once whiteness smudged. Her back turned to the view of the sea Wearing her wrinkles like its waves She nibbled at her mankoushe Stirred gunpowder into her tea As she Told us how Kiryat Shmona was founded over skeletons in her hometown, how Her family evacuated Fled a war and snuggled in the arms of another Anchorless A series of houses Flooded Burnt Pulverized With scraps of life between escapes How her eight-year-old nephew drowned His mother lost her mind And two of her cousins Threw their lives on a border And snuck Back into Palestine In an ambulance How her brother’s accidental nap On the roof

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  Tout omnia tutto todo   I’ve dabbled in it all Enough to make this mustache remarkable— believable Enough to make these knuckles crooked— broken Enough to not trust my own fingertips   I’ve seen the sun set over psychic tears purple, only purple, over the ocean over brains, melted, melting Rivers crackling electric synapse washed out to sea bobbing up the seagull shit Lost steel cartons of China Tuna chin Albatross eyes rolling tide   I’ve watched thighs twist with sweat naked torsos naked breasts I’ve wondered if they will connect with my own A foot a toe a mouth I’ve

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About Us
Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal was founded in the English Department of the American University of Beirut in 2012 with the intention of creating a space for both emerging and established writers who have a connection to Lebanon.
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