A special portfolio of work from Morocco, featuring stories translated from Arabic, and art from the Hindiyeh Museum of Art. Essays on India and England, new fiction from Celeste Mohammed, and poetry by Peter Filkins, Aleksandar Hemon, and Jose Hernandez Diaz.
- SUSAN COMNINOS Something about the hinge / of your hips, the way you held them straight / when you danced. You pushed my palm to fringe: / the pelt of your belly, then sought the gate / you’d take into my body. Slick / as a wet floor that ruins / suede shoes—the sand tick / that hangs on from sea dunes...
- ELIZABETH SCANLON Your mother is a creep. / Everyone’s mother is a creep; / we have envelopes of your teeth in our bedside drawers, / clippings of your hair. We check your browser history. / Listen to your footsteps in the night back and forth to the bathroom, / listen even harder if you’re in there too long.
- ANTHONY BORRUSO Jobless, 26, a ghastly scab marching / from the base of my skull down / my neck; beside me, my father kneels at the curtained / threshold with a saucepan of warm / water. Steam obscures the boundaries between / me and my past self, 6, smiling, slamming...
- VIRGINIA KONCHAN There is no enough in exile. / I am accustomed to eventless days. / Funny thoughts slide into the head alone / on the interstate: I thought you were dead, / for example. Be kind to the body, stranger / that it is. Matter at odds with materialism: / I’m done perishing beneath weeping willows.
- ALEKSANDAR HEMON When you enter a town follow its customs, / Praise the people and their kindness, / Kiss their flags, groom their peacocks, / Love their wars, leaders, and politeness. / The people will like you, open the doors wide. / They may lock their pantries, slap and hide / Their daughters...
- LATIFA BAQA I walk in and find the women there in the large hall. I can hear their soft, melodious voices, which means there is no man around. (More accurately: there is no man doing all the talking.) I instinctively head toward them, like an animal finally encountering its species. I take a seat and wait for my turn. Before…
- ABDEL-LATIF AL-IDRISSI I knew her from the night club. She was a prostitute, old and vulgar. He who is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone. I offered her a yellow beer of the cheapest kind, essence of bitter gourd. She drank it, spat it out, kicked it, and cursed it. Everyone laughed.
- MOHAMED ZAFZAF This is our first son. And our celebration of his Seventh must be a celebration so good it shuts the women’s mouths and the men’s, too. You know how people talk, even about things they don’t see or hear. If we get a blind band, no one will be able to say anything at all.
- MALIKA MOUSTADRAF Lice and stench and cockroaches. I thought head lice died out ages ago, but in this dump they’re still going strong. The flabby woman sitting across from me is picking through her friend’s hair. From time to time she yells out, “There’s one. I’ve got it!”
- ABDELMAJID HAOUASSE Each time they died, they rose up again like cartoon characters and carried on aiming, then rummaging in the soil, when all they had was a single real bullet. But just having that was enough to give them an altered sense of the weight of war.
- ABDELAZIZ ERRACHIDI I know a man whose heart is instructed in Bedouin life. He knows the desert and its moods, and has learned early on that it doesn’t like to be challenged. I know him walking without pause, teaching his feet and his heart the ways.
- HINDIYEH MUSEUM OF ART The museum in Jordan exhibits a distinguished collection of contemporary Arabic art from the start of the 20th century to the present, with frequent new acquisitions from established and emerging artists. The museum is home to...
- MAKALANI BANDELE then, the bottom fell out. until then, your black ass better treat every cop with suspicion. even then, the narrative arc is an aporetic irruption between disequilibrium, and equilibrium-restored. then comes marriage.
- CELESTE MOHAMMED Kimberley didn’t know that her estranged father, Mr. H, cloth magnate, up-and-coming politician, had been shot. While he was in Trinidad, sliding from the leather backseat to become a heap on the floor of his car, she was still in self-imposed exile in Barbados...
- PETER FILKINS Turner could have done no better, / nor did he, articulating the light / made now radiant, prismatic: / hills, lake, trees and woolen sky / filtered by this sun-threaded squall. / of snow as real as veneration, / the smell of rain, the heft of stone, / or the thought that within an hour / it will…
- ALLISON ALBINO I wonder if anyone ever asked Mary / if she wanted a baby? If she was fine / with skipping the sex and going straight / to pregnant? & when the angels / announced she was to going to deliver / the son of god, if she didn’t think / Oh shit, how will I do that?
- RICARDO WILSON She is on her knees in the garden. The sun, as of yesterday, an hour early. There are no dead snails in the saucers of beer, though she has finally seen the pale-yellow cabbage butterfly. Searching the half-eaten mustards and turnips, she looks for the caterpillars and their eggs...
- DENISE DUHAMEL I’d started a strength training class ($25 a pop) / after my mom’s hands no longer worked, after her arms / hung weak by her sides and she didn’t have the power / to pull up her pants. For two years I’d thought / about the class but was too cheap to sign up...
- WYATT TOWNLEY To see the unseeable, measure / its shadow. It takes eight telescopes / on six mountains and / four continents / ten days. // In the middle of Virgo is a black hole / more massive than six billion suns. / Hardly a virgin, her mattress sags / in the dark...
- TALIA LAKSHMI KOLLURI I am not pleased. Paint is dripping down my hoof and the colors are muddled together. I shouldn’t complain. I agreed to it, of course. Hafiz is putting together a zoo. And he asked me to be the zebra. “You’re a very good donkey, habibi,” he told me three days ago, “but the border is closed, and…
- MICHAEL CATHERWOOD Two Men and a Truck are here to haul our / piano away to a nice woman’s / house, who’s agreed to move it to own / it, so her children can learn to play. An hour / early, two men in the truck pass a pipe / while on my open porch I read / the sports page.
- EMMA SLOLEY He laughs in an antic way, his longish surfer’s hair whipping around his face. There’s something different about his mood, she can tell before she even gets close, something anticipatory, like the held breath before a storm.
- FATIMA ZOHRA RGHIOUI I’m frightened of everything. I walk around with my abnormal body. I haven’t learned to accept it yet, this body that bulges in every direction. Now I have two round lumps jutting out of my chest, and shrubbery growing in my armpits and between my legs.
- KATHRYN HAEMMERLE I think of all the ways / the women in my family have died, // the slow disease of genetics and childbirth / here in the curve of my cheekbone. // The doctor speaks as if this bloodwork / were routine, and I smile to make it false, // make this procedure only a safe precaution.
- L.S. KLATT I would kill for the feeling of television. / I felt it once. I felt it holster light. / I felt it clutch me in the dark and treble / my house. All the houses. I felt the firefight / on television, the car chase, the crime / and punishment. I got caught up / in prisms, then smashed them, high…
- PHILIP NIKOLAYEV the inexpressible isn’t that which cannot / be expressed but that which will fall / expressed upon deaf eardrums meet with / sightless eyes centerfolded / even or on the front cover it will escape notice / and upon the face itself remain undetected...
- RAGE HEZEKIAH Nostalgia is a well- / intentioned wound, / you have to hold / it in mind all at once— / you have to need it / enough. I’ve been / running from what / needs me. Perhaps we are not responsible / for the lives of our / parents. We become / a beautiful collection / of knots...
- MARIA TERRONE As a Bronx kid at a homeless shelter, he watched / a peregrine falcon devour a pigeon on the windowsill, / and what began in violence leapt to awe, / and awe begat beauty. / He’s grown to be a birder who shares our passion. / Through the lens, he sights a warbler / and the flash of…
- LATIFA LABSIR Prickly pear cacti are always squat and spindly bushes—that much I know. The exception to this rule, however, is the prickly pear grove found in my grandfather’s village. It’s lofty. It towers into the sky, its foliage so dense it always struck me as foretelling of a secret that was to be hidden away for good in its…
- JESSICA FISCHOFF I remember the first time I saw a vagina / on the white pitched walls of an art museum— / Columbus, Ohio, mid-afternoon. I was five, maybe / six, maybe a few months shy of my grandmother’s / cremation, the day after my goldfish, Rosie, jumped...
- AHMED BOUZFOUR Marzouka? She’s carrying a bundle wrapped in a cloth on her back, and her earrings sparkle. Marzouka comes closer, and I move closer to her. The sun is scorching, and her large earrings are blinding. Should I greet her? I kiss her hand, so she kisses me on my forehead.
- LORE SEGAL If I had kept a journal in the early fifties, when I was new in New York, I would have marked the day on which I saw the basalt bowl in a store window in Greenwich Village. It was small, and had an in-curling rim and the finest matte black finish.
- RAVI SHANKAR Tomorrow is Amma’s seventieth birthday, and I’m wondering what to buy her. She’s told me that the only thing she wants from her children is a new toilet seat, a pair of sensible black shoes, or a replacement floormat for her decade-old Honda Civic.
- CARLIE HOFFMAN No moon tonight but the white bells of a woman’s / eyes squinting tacitly toward a camera, staring out // from the glossy page of a high school yearbook / on a spring evening that stings...
- JOSE HERNANDEZ DIAZ A man in a Chicano Batman shirt got a tattoo of the state of California on his neck. He rode his longboard to the tattoo parlor early in the morning. This was going to be his third tattoo. He also had a tattoo of palm trees on his chest and a skeleton on a surfboard on his…
- GARY J. WHITEHEAD Then our hearts grew claws / and we lived in a cold reach, / twice-a-day tides, / the lows and the highs, / and we were drawn to our desires / salted and seeping from a bag. / What we thought was happiness / was set and tied and marked / in a rocking up above us, / one…
- KEITH LEONARD I fell in love and became like those men in Plato’s Republic / who heard music for the first time and began singing, / and sang beyond reason, beyond dinner, beyond sleep, / and even died without noticing it, without wavering. / Thank you for ferocity, for our being beyond reason, / for the incendiary marvel of us.
- MARTHA COOLEY At any rate, although neither of us was skittish about talking, we couldn’t seem to find common verbal ground, and our conversations had grown increasingly fraught. My husband wanted a kid; I wanted to want one, which wasn’t the same thing.
- DAVID H. LYNN Gales surge again and again, driving wind and wave into the Goat Walk’s stone base, finally cracking and wrecking and all but sweeping it away. Great shards of broken pavement and collapsed foundation lay hulked in the mud. Ancient fieldstones have been torn free...
- ALEKSANDAR HEMON My father once asked me: How is it I can recollect / with utmost clarity what happened forty years ago, / but not what I did this morning at all? I didn’t know, / but I recognized I would always recall that moment. / It was late summer. We were driving to the country / to see my grandfather...
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Contents
Stories and Art from Morocco
Introduction by Hisham Bustani, Arabic Fiction Editor
Moroccan Art from the Hindiyeh Museum of Art in Jordan
“The Seventh” by Mohamed Zafzaf (Translated by Alice Guthrie)
“A Hot Day” by Abdelmajid Haouasse (Translated by Nashwa Gowanlock)
“The City’s Pantaloons” by Abdel-Latif Al-Idrissi (Translated by Nariman Youssef)
“Heaven’s Hand” by Latifa Labsir (Translated by Alice Guthrie)
“The Cripple Gets Married” by Ahmed Bouzfour (Translated by Nashwa Gowanlock)
“Adam’s Apple” by Latifa Baqa (Translated by Nariman Youssef)
“Lousy” by Malika Moustadraf (Translated by Alice Guthrie)
“Two Stories” by Fatima Zohra Rghioui (Translated by Nashwa Gowanlock)
“The Ache of the Sands” by Abadelaziz Errachidi (Translated by Nariman Youssef)
Fiction
“Our Day in Peredelkino” by Martha Cooley
“Home” by Celeste Mohammed
“The Cassandras” by Emma Sloley
“Misdirection” by Amalia Gladhart
“The Good Donkey” by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri
Essays
“The Grain in the Rectangle” by Lore Segal
“A Journey Up the Exe” by David H. Lynn
“The Five-Room Box” by Ravi Shankar
Poetry
“The New Inexpressible” by Philip Nikolayev
“Finis” by Virginia Konchan
“Annunciation” by Allison Albino
“Light Ranger” by L. S. Klatt
“Cento for Surrender” by Rage Hezekiah
“After Surgery, My Father Helps Me Bathe” by Anthony Borruso
“Back Door” by Susan Comninos
“Piano Movers” by Michael Catherwood
“In the Biopsy Room” by Kathryn Haemmerle
“Bird Man” by Maria Terrone
“Lobster Trap” by Gary J. Whitehead
“Instructions for the Endgame” by Wyatt Townley
“Devotion” by Elizabeth Scanlon
“We Shouldn’t Be Afraid to Talk About” by Jessica Fischoff
“Nigrescence” by Ricardo Wilson
“Sun Through Snow” by Peter Filkins
“Trap Street” by Karen Skolfield
“Sundown, Looking at My Estranged Cousin’s High School Yearbook Picture and All the Damage Done” by Carlie Hoffman
“First” by Keith Leonard
“unit_ 20, as a unit of energy” by makalani bandele
“Ode to a California Neck Tattoo” by Jose Hernandez Diaz
“New Town” by Aleksandar Hemon
“Recollections” by Aleksandar Hemon
“Strength” by Denise Duhamel
Issue 21
