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"El Hay" by Sarah Richani I don't know the man it belongs to, my dad does. The house has seven floors. Ground: Here is the entrance hall that is overseen by the caretaker. He locks the main door by night and opens it in the early morning hours. Floor 1: The kind family that tries to invite me to gatherings Floor 2: The young man with a motorcycle. His dad yells at him and tells him to find a job. Floor 3: A family, I only know their car. It is of a sleek shade of dark grey. Floor 4: My family and my dad, the

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I pick up the telephone to dial Carol's landline number. All day, the fan has been switched on, but the apartment is still suffocating. Underneath my white chemise and black trousers, I am sticky and impatient. No answer. Soon after I put the phone down and mentally prepare myself to get a glass of cold water, the phone rings, startling me into a gasp.  "Carol?" I ask, breathing slowly. My body feels stiff, too stiff even for these sixty-six-year- old limbs. "And what if it weren't me?" "No one else calls." "You love to victimize yourself, ya Salma." I can hear my sister's exasperated sigh,

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The world has been dreaming. It dreams about undead things. It dreams about money. Do you want to know about its dreams? Let me tell you. Listen. It is dark. We have lost the path. We have tumbled into the night of the world. It is the night of a babel choir. There we meet the people, dolorous. There we meet the empousa. She greets us with spirits. She greets us with metals. She tempts us. She looks to be tempered. The empousa offers many gifts, takes many shapes. She lives underground. Some say it is where she hides. Do you

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From Sab Afsānay Meray (All My Stories) by Hajra Masroor Translated from the Urdu by Jaideep Pandey Wrapped in a black silk burqa, with the niqab pulled over her head, she stood at the train ticket window, somewhat surprised. It was 11:30 at night. Only fifteen minutes remained until the train's arrival. But the ticket window was still shut. She was exhausted from looking at the window which showed no signs of opening. She looked around herself. Hundreds of people were sleeping like corpses on the floor and on the benches, as if none of them really had to travel. She slowly turned

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It will flag like a Good  Conqueror, will be identified As an american poem, there will be drones  In its speculations of sky, it will lack imag Ination, the vaguely targeted  Will be vilanelled in To bodies of Repetition, children will be placed in proximity To slaughter, the american Poem will syntax the police state  Human, will disavow  Systemic Injustice & make settlement  In a journal named after stolen land, named  With stolen language, no one will own  Language in the american  Poem, which will be paid in maimed  Money without naming all money as maimed  Money, will exist within an

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"And do not spend wastefully. Indeed, the wasteful are brothers of the devils." [Quran 17:26-27] When they ask how I used my father's money to buy [      ],I will say: daughter is a synonym for regret. We were sincere college girls, exhaling the after-morning muskof our jilted mistakes. We fucked up. What else can I say? We kissed everything with a knife's heat.The poetry was supposed to be about the snow dust on the windowsill of the studio apartment where I practicedgenerosity with other sweat-stained bodies. Yes, me and my derelict girls. We hardly got a text back and

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*After What Women Want by Kim Addonizio Dear Readers,  It's done, and so I want a red dress to walk around on the arm of a woman. I want it cheap so that its peeling hurts. Tight, so I wear it and in a fit tear it, or someone tears it off my chest. I want it careless and backless and like my back, backless so they wonder, what. the. hell. is. going on, underneath. I want to knock around crossroads until my heels break, buy berries, buy everything I never needed. Pass past the cowhide market, they're filthy as fuck, slinging

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Dear Editor,  Sky's without a pore tonight, it cannot sweat and all the slums of Cairo have lost to dust as far as the eye can see I see nothing, only the then in now, yet there is all but out of sight Dust is skin, they say dead-once mouth to mouth breasts, bellies, legs spooned on brass beds gathering hands together wrapped past houseboats on the Nile, or did we not, once? Dust is a whore I loved and she's everywhere the cabarets on Haram Street pumping heat into men spinning her long hair like a fan lapping cash on sweaty chest and in this dust on my mirror I run my index finger down to see is a sliver of me, clearly the rest

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With translations by Fatima Kassem Moussa الدنيا قايمة والشعب غافل / راحت بلادكم ما حد سائل   The world is in uproar and the people oblivious / Your land is lost and no one notices -Omar el-Zeenni, "Al-Dunya 'Aymi"((For el-Zeenni's poetry and songs throughout this essay, I used the book el-Zeenni el-Saghir, Omar el-Zeenni, Molière al-Sharq. (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 2010).))    In 1918, Omar el-Zeenni looked around him and declared "The world is madness". Indeed, by the end of the First World War, el-Zeenni's world was turning upside down. The wider political world that el-Zeenni and past generations of his ancestors had belonged to, the Ottoman

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I. BURNING BANKNOTES In Tunisia, there are two common ways to destroy a banknote: burning or grinding. Burning was the old way the dinar banknotes were destroyed. It was a multi-step process. First, you had to determine which banknote was going to be burned. Then, you had to separate these banknotes from the rest of the bills. For example, when private banks bring the cash they have in extra to the Central Bank, each damaged banknote is identified and put aside. Some are only slightly ripped. They just need a little tape here and there so that they can be sent

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