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"New Country" by Melissa Chimera Death has nothing to do with going away Rumi     This rainy Honolulu morning after a stormflooded our stream nearby and rainhammered the trees into the mud,the wind taking it all, or so it seems,I think of you, my friend, what you saidof night birds and turbulence, finally,of home: I want to run across the Green Line((The Green line refers to the geographical dividing line between east and west Beirut during the fifteen civil war.))until only the air they breathe divides them.And then of Gilbert, how you lovedthose floating islands of poems,the current that flows

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"Exit of Shirin and Farhad " by Babek Kazemi by Golan Haji, translated from the Arabic by Golan Haji & Stephen Watts  White olive flowers, poking from scorched trunks,  I smell them in the moonlight.  It’s mid-May. I hear the tender slap of your hand against its lower branches,  that glimmer in the orchard night, their silver leaves rippledby the breeze across their sheen of dust,  An owl flutters up–your son nurtured it like a tiny grouse in a guest-room,  it lives camouflaged like you, the door of its cage open, its eyes yellow  as narcissus eyes,  it will fly off tomorrow, in the dead of day, to

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I have only lived in Lebanon for a little more than two months and have spent the vast majority of that time in Beirut. Yet, when I saw Yara, whose eponymous protagonist has spent her whole life in the same isolated village in the mountains, I was struck by a feeling of familiarity. Abbas Fahdel, the writer and director, makes many explicit cultural and historical references in the film, but what touched me more deeply was something of a spiritual truth conveyed intuitively through its visual language, that gave voice to what I see (and this may be an outsider’s

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"House Illustration" by Amanj Amin by Alova, translated from Turkish by BUĞRA GIRITLIOĞLU Every night the child would seek his starsAnd the Moon, which he raised with brand new names:Cut nail, Luminous HammockGrowwalker, Bruised Orange When the wind would start blowingUndulating the water’s curtainAnd a callow frog tire of its own croakAnd jump into the moss-scented sky,He’d lose his starsThe Moon he raised every nightWould shatter When the wind subsidedSo that the stars took their placesAnd the Full Moon recollected its pieces,The child whose eyes grew heavyRested his head one nightAgainst his pillow made of the Milky WayAnd

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There is a concept coined by the Lebanese writer Walid Sadek which denotes a present endlessly postponed by the lack of pasts and futures. He calls it “the protracted now.” Since discovering it in his "The Ruin to Come, Essays from a Protracted War" (Motto Books & Taipei Biennial, 2016), I have been carrying it around with me, like an overweight suitcase that I would rather check in at the nearest counter than have with me as the plane flies over fictional borders that harm non-fictional people. During the flight, it is checked in and, in those few hours, past and

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Wonderland IV by Beatriz Morales Last year, my original plan: to come to America,But lack of money for passage stopped me         until early autumn.On the Seventh Day of the Seventh Moon,I boarded the President Lincoln.I ate sea wind and tasted waves for more than twenty days,But luckily, arrived unharmed.I thought a few days and I’d be on the dock,Little did I know of the suffering in the wood house.The barbarians’ harsh treatment really difficult to accept,Thinking of my family finances, a double stream of tears.Yet, I hope to enter San Francisco soon,Avoid living in

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I put down Laura Johanna Braverman’s poetry collection, Salt Water, and lay in bed thinking, “Is it possible for something to be contrived and honest at the same time?”   This book touched me greatly. I cried many cathartic tears with her as I lived, through her words, an experience of immigration that is familiar to me, and will be familiar to so many others. Braverman writes, “I realise/ in the strange, simple way an insight/ that should have been obvious/ all along suddenly ripens/ and drops from the tree:/ I am the fruit of exile”, and I nod, having realised the

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ريما رنتيسي ترجمته من الإنكليزيّة زينة الحلبي عبرت الزّمن لكون هون - الصّورة لزينة الحلبي جلست في رواق شقتي في الطابق الخامس حيث كان بإمكاني التقاط الانترنت من جيراني في الطابق الثالث. كانوا قد أعطوني كلمة السرّ لأنهم اعتبروني من العائلة، خصوصاً وأنني في سنتي الثالثة في بيروت، كنت لا أزال غير قادرة على إتمام أي معاملة رسمية، كتأمين خط هاتف مثلاً. أرسلتُ لكاثرين التي كانت في شيكاغو آنذاك، رسالة نصية عاجلة أقول فيها إنني غير قادرة على التحدّث معها عبر سكايب لأنني في الرواق، وإنّ صدى صوتي قد يتسلّل إلى عتبة جارتي المجنونة ويجتاز المزار الذي نصبَتْه لجميع القدّيسين،

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"Tell Me Again" by Heather Asaad Dreamers, before they lived a life of shadows,a short life but long years of chasing fear,before they found a room, sunblinds on windows,an L-shaped desk, a home they know is here, were children young as – most commonly – three,with fringes, hairslides, hair too soft to hold them,two hundred words in their vocabularyand shapes of sentences in which to mould them: sentence shapes like cradles for dolls to dream in,like railway tracks and bridges, tunnels, sidings,paradigms for journeys, returns and crossings, first languages, half-formed, dropped at a borderDreamers crossed and were

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    The first film by an Arab woman to be selected and screened at the Cannes film festival in 1974, Saat El Tahrir Dakkat (The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived) by Heiny Srour, chronicles the anti-colonial struggle of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf (al-Jabhah al-Sha'abiyah li-Tahrir 'Uman wa-al-Khalij al-'Arabi, PFLOAG). Recently restored by Nadi Lekol Nas,  Srour’s documentary closed the last edition of the Lebanese Film Festival and was recently screened in New York as part of a series focusing on the theme of decolonization in cinema.   The film’s opening sequence sets the stage by

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