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I come back to this machinery, this dark cologned compartment,   I come back to wool sport jacket rickety door and silver watch.   I put out my hand into the breath you keep taking back   stubborn with your eyes shut like caves no one knows are there.   The corridor you’d pass me in, the corridor where you were tired.   Comes back the wall-to-wall carpeting that took our steps, absorbed our weight,   made us all beige in that house, lulled possibility into drywall;   the joists between floors noticed something pressing down.   The timber I come back to from 1910, a derailed past,   where rain gets in sometimes, turns its entrance yellow, turns   our eyes to it; we try everything to keep it out.

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Once upon a time, a dog slept beside an empty bed in a house also empty, while all around   the sky sank. Days and nights the dog spent looking out the window for someone to save it and soon   fell in love with the view, a tree the long gone master had planted for the departed wife.   The dog grew thirstier, and thirstier, until it could hardly bark, but it never stopped loving the tree.   The night they came, the dog, as dogs will, begged for water but the soldiers left   only their footprints. By morning, the dog was no more and the tree, as trees will, said and did nothing.

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From the series Postcards from Rock Bottom One morning in between your fifth and sixth sip of coffee I will spread a map across the table, spill the contents of your mug into the nearest flower pot, (then make you another one – one sugar, no milk) and arm you with a magnifying lens until you trace back every alley, every bus stop, every local supermarket where somebody’s vocal chords had glitched and called you unremarkable. Barefoot, with a megaphone in hand, I will trudge through every muddy trail, from the riverside in East Kilbride to the Coliseum, back through the camping sites in south-west England and up into your bedroom window. I will spell your light

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I carry shards of the same broken promise in my pocket to rub against my clawing fingers and remind me that breaking and entering is a crime; Not a love scene. When you said we’d wait until we were sure and in love before allowing our lips to greet one another by touch, I wanted to believe that this time the glued pieces would stay together, because we would too. But in the alley behind the ice cream shop, when you leaned in for a lick of my mango sorbet and caught my tongue instead, I heard the sound of our promise fall to the ground: And though my hands wanted to

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dedicated to Jean Assy   Always the one driving others to the airport – never the one boarding a plane, I watch passengers walk idly by from one terminal to the next.   Jesus would’ve asked me to turn the other cheek though you only ever ask me to ignore and be happy.   But I can’t rise each time I trip over my own indiscretions. I can only engage in banal conversation.   So I’ll trade you my heart for one of your kidneys if you’d give me one of your lungs in exchange for my liver. We’d keep this organ-barter going back and forth till it becomes unclear where each organ belonged so that perhaps when your heart beats I’d feel it pound in my chest, and when I would take a deep breath your own perfume would percolate in

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It’s 9 p.m. and I’m at the dinner table, reaching; for something other than my mother’s words of approval.  She too is reaching; for the possibility of mending my “broken” edges.   It’s 10 p.m. and the heaviness of her, disappointment stops echoing into my surroundings, and she’s not reaching; anymore.   My hands meet, and my thoughts are silent prayers, reaching; for some God’s acceptance. Help me   It’s 11 p.m. and there is a cold, that seems to penetrate the walls of silence, I’ve become confined in. My arms wrap around my figure, like blankets reaching; for warmth.   I feel small. Powerless. Lacking.   I find myself shaking, reaching; for her; Come back, Please. I’ll reach; perfection. I promise.

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She carries it with her wherever she goes— perhaps in a handbag, a purse or a clutch, but sure as the blood-truth, she walks with a load. Wobbling on the plane against her left foot, her bag is exempt the strict stowaway rules as if it were un membre non prôche; a battery pack or emergency fuel. And yet, the scanner does not reveal much: a string of beads, the brand of her flip-flops, her skeletal keys, the profile of a toothbrush. Suspiciously plain. So they ask her to stop and stand up vitruvian, to be hurriedly touched as dustless gloves feel her up, pat her down and push her back

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- Prologue - I fight off sleep at 3:30 in the morning, Nineteen hours straight-counting. The goal is 24-hour support. No, really. I’m fine. I’m not tired. Black swirling circles cloud my iris, they swell into chronic nausea. Really, I’m not tired of holding your hand at 3:30 of every morning after that. At 7:30, my count is broken. I check my phone. Unmoved, You must have given up too. The goal was 24-hour support: We both failed. -1- Run, you say? I get up and run. Just keep running, you say, don’t ask questions: save your breath, you wink at me, for later. I shake my head and rub holes into my eyes. Fine, I’ll save it. I’d learned you

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An open balcony, vases, roses, a butterfly dancing. All that. Pristine skies over the balcony and almond flowers on the streets. The dervish still whirls but quietly. Semantics blurred in her mind; she couldn’t distinguish the butterfly’s dance from the dervish’s whirls. The butterfly tattoo on her arm exposed; it’s time to take a selfie, it’s time to take more selfies before the butterfly vanishes   because in the company of butterflies she feels more photogenic.  

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Before you had a name, when you were skin stitched to bone and a pulsing box in the center of the cavity. Begin. You are a child, balancing on the edge of a black pond, on the edge of falling. Begin before the falling. Before you took another body into your body through the oldest wound.   Begin before soldiers, which is to say boys with rifles. Boys with rifles they stroke like women. And the bodies that fall like sacks of flour to the earth. Begin before the tide of bodies, salt stripped from the sea. Before the web with its million wired eyes burrowing into human dirt, into the woman with

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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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