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November 2021

"Case 1" by Charbel Al Khoury "Case 8" by Charbel Al Khoury Dear Reem,  Greetings from Beirut.  Yes, I finally visited Beirut again on Thursday. It took me a lot of time to plan and negotiate my full-time job and curfew hours. It was raining heavily all the way on the highway. We even had floods yesterday! Nothing new, right? Excuse my complaints so early in the letter, but I'm challenging the system. I'm now complaining regularly because this is what people normally do in such uncertain times. Complaining needs to be normalized again in the face of toxic positivity. You left almost three months

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prose, Thematic Essay
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Photograph by Tania Traboulsi Words without Music The only belonging I actually lost on August 4 was my lyrics notebook. Although our little apartment suffered heavy damage, nothing was completely lost. Doors and windows had flown out of their frames, a table's legs broke, plants fell out of pots, our newly bought TV split in half, a bookshelf shattered into millions of pieces. Some things could be fixed, others had to be thrown out. But nothing disappeared. Nothing except my lyrics notebook.  I left our Mar Mikhael apartment that night and asked my friends who went back the next day to look

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Non-Fiction
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Still from "In Mansoura You Left Us" A film review of In Mansourah, You Separated Us An old man is standing. Behind him, large rocks are followed by a horizon with mountains covered in brown, ochre, and dark green. He wears a gray hat and a jacket that seems too large for his nervous body. On the jacket, we see military insignia, green and golden. He's standing straight almost as if he were taking an official shot. The camera does not move. Suddenly, we hear the director's voice, as she asks in French, "How come he survived and seventy-three others died?"

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Film Review
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"Absence" by Omid Shekari When I think of Humphrey Davies, I think of Uncle Humph. I call him uncle not out of a juvenile sense of biological attachment, but as belonging to that branch of the lineage of translators which I endeavor to be a part of. I write of Uncle Humph's passing and find myself unwilling to acknowledge it. Unwilling and resentful. How could he suddenly up and leave us like this with no warning, when we needed him so much? When I agreed to Rana Issa's offer to co-translate Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq's travelogue three years ago,

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Non-Fiction, prose, Tribute
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"Nine Ancestors" by Mae Anne Chokr I didn't think the stories we would tell you about your childhood would be like mine. I thought yours would be about cobbled streets, afternoon teas, the books that your father and I took too long to write, all the extra days you stayed in and all the extra hours you took on your way out, three countries, four apartments, and one indefatigable little stroller.   The stories your teta and jeddo told me were different. They related how, when your uncle Mehdi was ready to be born, on the day of the Israeli invasion of Beirut

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Non-Fiction
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"Absence" by Omid Shekari This particular metaphor will not be a worm in a shot glass of chemotherapy. It will be invisible to the human eye, soundless to the human ear, free of smell and taste, and untouchable. In this way it will connect historically to its struggle for autonomy along its long and winding road to androgyny. (Sounds like a Beatles song, but isn't.) The Big C was first discovered by Hippo-crates, the so-called "Father of Medicine," circa 400 B.C., on the island of Greece.  Hippocrates did not really discover the Big C. He simply named something carcinoma that had existed for all time-before

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Poetry
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"Can't Go" by Omid Shekari For months we'd been monitoring your news           as if you were a broadsheet, and I'd trace       the outline of your every response so I could recount it precisely. The light was always     on in the window, the mountains always                                                                   far away.         Then I went and missed

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acrylic paint, Poetry
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