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August 2018

Two steps aheadI choose my words wiselywhen I lose countof stained white baby blanketsphotos of my younger selfpity the smallness of my lifethe smallness of my angerI wash this imagethen hum a lullabystaring at the sky:there was a timeyou were not herethere will be a time,I won’t be herebut now we are both here     you arewhat I thinkI beg youI beg you againknock the delusions outmy head, my bellygiving me blackened eyeswith a long silent pauseI will surviveI’ve got all my life to liveDid you think I’d lay down and die?Did you think I’d crumble?I’ve got all my love to giveIt

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  Mournings (About A)   To See The teller told me they were premonitions, visions, not my imagination. A green velour couch. A child with short chestnut hair running arms wide open to the front door to welcome you home. But in time, the couch becomes grey, the child breaks into static, and the hinges rust shut.   Easy Playing cards, rolling paper and condoms lined the bottom shelf behind the counter of the all-night convenience store. In that exact order: Playing cards, rolling paper, condoms Adjacent to one another. Underneath packets of cigarettes. The other best sellers and late-night buys. I

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  Tilting Towards Windmills   Perhaps there are many ways to parse a dream? As I tilt towards it, the windmill tilts at me.   I have seen many things to make unicorns wonder In a strangely horsey idiom.  I have been a stranger   To a language in which I might have been stronger – Speaking in a pidgin that wilts as much as it can   Before the dangerous logic of a better, farther man. And to speak of danger, one begins to understand   The oneness of many things one didn’t, ever. In oneness I began.  In oneness: far

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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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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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