Alma Clark

Moving Beyond the Trappings of Multilingualism: Farah Ali interviews Dur e Aziz Amna

September 11, 2023 Interviews

DUR e AZIZ AMNA is the author of American Fever, a coming-of-age story replete with warmth, poeticism, and wit. It is a story about home and homeland and refuses to settle for easy definitions of either. The Guardian calls American Fever “a subversive debut” and the Los Angeles Review of Books calls it “a quiet triumph.” Over a series of emails, FARAH ALI and Dur e discussed how Dur e avoided sketching reductive pictures of Pakistan and America, illness as a vehicle for revealing uncomfortable truths, and the ways certain ideas are shattered after leaving home.

Nina and Frida Enter the Chat

May 8, 2023 Issue 25, Issue 25 Poetry, Poetry

By FELICE BELLE

these biddies with their deadbolt backs/ take naps
while i construct/ canvas from corset cast

art does not wait until you are well

what they did not understand—the training was classical

Albatross

May 8, 2023 Fiction, Issue 25, Issue 25 Fiction, Poetry Recordings

By ANNA BADKHEN

The Common Magazine · “Albatross” by Anna Badkhen

As soon as I read about the albatrosses in the Times, I thought of my big sister. Natasha.

“Natasha—albatross ty nasha,” Aunt Lyuba would sing in the communal kitchen, slinging blobs of wheat porridge into my bowl with the cornflower border. Each time she’d shuffle the bowl from the stove over to Natasha-and-my table, her felt slippers would catch on the peeling linoleum floor, and I’d worry about my breakfast. But Aunt Lyuba never slipped.

Walden

May 8, 2023 Issue 25, Issue 25 Poetry, Poetry

By STEPHEN HAVEN

Whatever Walden is to me—we swam there two Julys—
I hope to skirt that never-ending trope,
Drowning like a pilgrim in that pond.
We pushed past mothers and their kids,
Cedared summers in Wellfleet cottages,
Past foreign languages that hummed across
The narrow circle of that one dirt path

A Pity

May 8, 2023 Issue 25, Issue 25 Poetry, Poetry

By REBECCA FOUST

The creature was flushed from the snow
& flung like a tiny, limp footbag
before I could catch up to cup it below
my hands. While they collared the dog,

The Half-Hearted City

May 8, 2023 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 25, Issue 25 Fiction, Kuwait, Translation

By BOTHAYNA AL-ESSA
Translated from the Arabic by SAWAD HUSSAIN

(1)

In those days, everyone had the right to have feelings.
It was natural to feel things, and the right thing to do about your feelings was to make them known. Feelings were plenty, but broadly they were segregated into two groups: Love and Fear.
In those days, there was only one way you could sin: by faking your feelings.

Colony

May 8, 2023 Issue 25, Issue 25 Poetry, Poetry

By LUISA A. IGLORIA

A public square in every town, monuments
whitened in patches by lime and bird droppings.

Streets and bridges named after those who came
in galleons. They banished to the outskirts

Endless Enclosure and Passing Cloud

May 8, 2023 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 25, Issue 25 Fiction, Kuwait, Translation

By JASSIM AL-SHAMMARIE
Translated from the Arabic by MAIA TABET

I feel the wall with my bare hands, the peeling paint, the cracks along its surface…. They’re just superficial and haven’t impacted the solid masonry. There’s no light coming through.

The soaring, towering wall is solid; it is two lights and one darkness long. This is how I measure the passage of time in the endless enclosure of this space, either as glaring light or as pitch darkness…. Once, to figure out how long it was, I hugged the wall, reaching its farthest edge after two lights and one darkness. Truth be told, this exhausted me, and I may have slept one or two lights without knowing it.

Closure?

May 8, 2023 Issue 25, Issue 25 Poetry, Poetry

By CHRISTOPHER SPAIDE

Close your trap. Everyone you’ve ever lost lost
everything. Life’s closed. It’s not even close. At least

they aren’t distant. As if a stiff flick to existence

flung them unfetchably far to the shadiest suburbs
of substance, where no wintry entropy disturbs

Fowl Play

April 26, 2023 Dispatches

By CYNTHIA GRAAE

Eastern Shore, Maryland

My late husband was a man who invented facts. He was Danish by birth, and at a dinner party he mentioned that aardvark was Danish for hard work. “Copenhagen households keep them to clean the floors,” he said. Our otherwise intelligent friends, who hadn’t been to Denmark, believed him.

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