Siani Ammons

Confrontations with Amman: A Love-Hate Relationship

May 5, 2025 Amman Portfolio, Essays, Issue 29, Issue 29 Essays, Translation

By RANEEM ABO RMAILA
Translated By MAYADA IBRAHIM

A Confrontation with Place: The City Changes, and We Change with It

I walk amid the traffic and the rush of people downtown. Here is where I first came to know the city, or so my memory claims, and I fall for it. Downtown has a “soul” that other parts of the city lack. It reminds me that I, in defiance of the hostile noise, am here, and that Amman the city is also here, attempting, however feebly, to find answers to questions that have long exhausted us. The soul of the place tempers the weight of those questions.

We return, regardless of how much we try to run or hide, to our questions about place and identity. Does the city grow weary of its people? Do we become, in our attempt to understand it and to keep up with it, the victims of place? The city changes rapidly; it loses its characteristics and becomes a stranger to us. Those of us who fear suffocating in our city try again to find familiar things in it. Downtown, whose landmarks begin with the Roman Theatre and end at Al Shamasi¹ and Al Kalha Stairs, once formed the identity of the city; today there is only dissonance. Shops, cafés, and the ambition of investors extend across it from every side. It no longer resembles its past; it no longer resembles us.

As for me, weary of walking in the center of town, I try to lean on the first stairs I see. Others around me, fellow tired wanderers, take refuge in the stairs as well. There is no room to rest in this city. It’s as if Amman entangles us in an imminent and predictable trap. It commands us to keep moving while concealing our destination.

Someone Else’s House

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By EMILY LEITHAUSER

When you arrive in our city,
you will see, Prophet,

body bags; shoeprints rising
from the mud, still;

shards of homes; a razed,
blackened, and burned

Chasing the Light

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By KEVIN O’CONNOR

When taking a visual field test
to map the areas you cannot see,
you need to keep your gaze fixed
on the screen’s central point
so when lights flash on the periphery
your eye will not just anticipate
and follow the quick programmed glints
you click on like someone playing
a video game—“chasing the light”
in order to get a higher score,
instead of learning where
the blind spots in your vision are.

Half-blind in one eye
and riddled with dead-zones
in the other, you see now
that you have spent most of your life
searching each human encounter
for random flashes of romance,
never admitting the limits
of your vision—the need to keep your gaze
fixed on the person at the center,
to remain patient, waiting in the dark,
for the horizon to light up
as if suddenly before you.

[Purchase Issue 29 here.]

Kevin O’Connor is an editor of One on a Side: An Evening with Seamus Heaney and Robert Frost, and his poems and reviews have appeared in Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review Online, James Joyce Quarterly, and other publications. He is faculty emeritus at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

Negative Capability

May 5, 2025 Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By DAVID LEHMAN

Imagine the money the Keats estate would have made
if they could have copyrighted “negative capability”
and charged permission fees for its use, nearly as pricey

December Tanka

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By PHILLIS LEVIN

Light snow, bare branches.
It’s easier now to see
Deep into the woods,
Loss upon loss settling
Under a lattice of ice.

[Purchase Issue 29 here.]

Phillis Levin is the author of six poetry collections, including An Anthology of Rain and Mr. Memory & Other Poems, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet.

Decapitated

May 5, 2025 Fiction, Issue 29 Fiction

By TERESE SVOBODA

We traveled as a group to Kenya on assignment to photograph zebra in complete abstraction, or the pores around the elephant’s flickering eyelid, or herds of giraffe clustered around salt licks like politicians deciding the fate of the country. We also drank. Fred, a Texan beer-sipper, always used a longer lens than the job needed. He worked in advertising, which meant that an assignment like this was his big chance to express himself. Franco bore his drink and our presence sardonically, a finger to the ear and always a story to accompany his glass of wine, usually about a donkey and metaphysics. It wasn’t a donkey after all was often the punchline. He was important enough that he could invite Heinemann to tag along on the trip. Heinemann’s wife was tending to an extremely pregnant NGO daughter, an activity that offered little for him, he said, personally. He was a professional magician elsewhere, not a photographer. But he was also very adept in the academic world, with an air of abstraction that suggested he had cleared collegiate hurdles in boredom. He drank vodka well. As for me, I drank gin and tonics as if they would stop malaria in its tracks. I had a name in photography, but after shooting the body for decades, my work had begun to disappear. A woman the men’s age, I had become invisible, as if I were left in too little fix.

Photography made Heinemann uncomfortable; he was an expert in everything else, or else he pleased his friend Franco by demurring to his opinion. The rest of us declaimed as if we knew every ABC in the book, but really Heinemann was the one we all envied with his academic paycheck, as evidenced by our earnest critiques of his amateurish attempts at taking pictures. Your gloating hyena is too hackneyed, we argued, the baobab against the sunset too obscene, and the dancing women adorned in beads and gold cloth are far too pretty to be pithy. Heinemann laughed and pulled a coin out of Fred’s ear. Advertising! he exclaimed. He settled on photographing the steam pouring over the car engine.

Amman Compendium

May 5, 2025 Amman Portfolio, Essays, Issue 29, Issue 29 Essays, Translation

By MARIAM ITANI
Translated by WIAM EL-TAMAMI

On Greetings

Hello, Amman. Greetings to you, your people, your streets, to all the surprises and endless stories you have hidden up your sleeves. I landed here ten years after marrying one of your sons, fulfilling the prophecy of my grandmother, who always said, “Wherever you go, life will take you to Amman.” Yet coming to Amman was actually the last thing my husband and I expected to do.

We arrived at the wrong time, in the blazing heat of August. My oldest son, Izzeddin, was very happy, because he’d had two birthdays: one in Beirut, another in Amman. As for my daughter, I’d left her behind in Beirut with my grandmother, buried in the same earth, keeping each other company. I visit her more there than I would if she were buried in the cemetery here, far away from the city, covered in layers of dust and mirage. Coming onto the airplane, I was told by the flight attendant that this would be the last time I would be allowed to board a plane, because it looked as though I was about to give birth. I told her that I had decided to give birth in Amman, and showed her the doctor’s reports that allowed me to travel. I took hold of Izzeddin’s hand, and we sat in the very first seats on the plane. It was my first time booking business class from Beirut to Amman, because that gave us extra baggage allowance—something we desperately needed.

Poems in Tutunakú and Spanish by Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez

April 3, 2025 Poetry, Translation

By CRUZ ALEJANDRA LUCAS JUÁREZ
Translated by WENDY CALL & WHITNEY DEVOS

Poems appear below in English, and Spanish and Tutunakú, the original languages.

Translators’ Note

Poet Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez creates her work bilingually, in Spanish—the language in which she was educated—and in Tutunakú—the language in which she was raised. Tutunakú is the home language of approximately 220,000 people in the Mexican states of Puebla and Veracruz. It has multiple variants and Lucas Juárez seeks out speakers from different communities to expand her poetic vocabulary.

She generally begins writing in Tutunakú, but lines also come to her in Spanish, so she moves back and forth between the two versions of each poem, creating the bilingual pair simultaneously. “It’s two creation processes happening at the same time,” she says. Tutunakú is agglutinative, so it contains words up to a dozen syllables long that translate as whole phrases or sentences in Spanish. Her translation process must be “letter by letter, not word by word, because each word contains so much,” she explains. Tutunakú is also a highly metaphorical language: “being pregnant” translates to “I am not alone,” while “I miss you” translates literally as “My stomach is sinking.”

Although poetry is a regular part of Tutunakú cultural life, Lucas Juárez is the first woman to publish a book of poetry in the language. These poems are drawn from her 2021 debut collection, Xlaktsuman papa’ / Las hijas del Luno. The title, “Daughters of Luno,” uses the masculine version of the Spanish word for moon (luna). Luno is the metaphorical father of Tutunakú women.

We began co-translating “Daughters of Luno” in 2023, inspired by the depth of Lucas Juárez’ poetic voice, written when Lucas Juárez was in her early twenties. To create our English translations, we worked primarily from the Spanish, observing and listening to the Tutunakú versions, though neither of us has formally studied the language. We met with the poet in person and via video call, and also exchanged many messages. We are grateful for her patience, generosity, and linguistic expertise, all of which have been crucial to our process.

— Wendy Call & Whitney Devos

Table of Contents

Litutunaaku
Tantsulut Bird
The Voice of The Buried

“Litutunaaku” is the Tututnakú people’s name for themselves. The word translates as “people who belong to the culture of the three hearts,” referencing the brain (memory), the antomical heart (physical life), and the stomach (emotional experience). Together, these three interdependent “hearts” sustain Tutunakú “triple consciousness.” “Li,” the word’s first syllable, refers to a Tutunakú person’s homeplace—which is central to identity.

Excerpt from Group Living and Other Recipes

February 18, 2025 Essays

By LOLA MILHOLLAND

These piece is excerpted from a memoir-cookbook entitled Group Living and Other Recipes by Lola Milholland ’07, a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025. Register for this exciting, 10^th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life.

When I visit my mom in the Driftless region of southwest Wisconsin, we bike together. She’ll pull out the old road bike her brother Paul built from parts when he lived with us in Portland. It’s in the shed that sits between her little year-round greenhouse and the outhouse that serves as the only loo on the property. We cycle up her one-mile gravel driveway, out to roads that twist and turn through hilly farmland, past Amish kids in overalls and sturdy full-length dresses working with horses and hanging up laundry. From the ridgetops, the hills in every direction look like bubbles on pizza dough.

In the fall, the hillsides change color every day. The basswood leaves turn a daisy yellow, and the oak leaves become the orange-red of a Firecracker ice pop. The Amish on Wolf Valley Road will be harvesting corn. Their two-horse team pulls a metal scythe through the stalks, leaving behind a flat field of roughage like a pile of cut hair.

Gently

February 11, 2025 Essays

By DAN HECK

It’s sometime in 2007. I’m almost 21. At night I stock bulk items in the backroom of a Target. Dante helped me get the job. My best friend since eighth grade: the human bully-repellent with rockstar swagger and long, luscious hair. Target’s pay sucks, and I hate work, but it’s something I can do with Dante.

Most nights, we unload the truck’s thousand or more items together. The two of us in a tight, hot, truck container, tearing down walls of packaged toys, clothes, food, and cleaning supplies. One time, the wall of goods is packed extra tight. It’s probably 120 degrees in the container and managers demand we keep the unload moving. I’m too precious with the cargo, so nothing moves and heat exhaustion creeps in. Eyesight blurs. Standing dizzies. I’m a couple sweats away from passing out. I get a cold Gatorade and a five-minute break, but only if I finish the unload. A manager threatens to steal both away.