after Myles Cameron

we arrive in a dream dressed up in yellow,
the smell of frying samosas swimming through
our warm skin. the first time i saw my parents kiss

over sizzling oil— a memory i muddied the color
of the sun. fireworks dance in a rusty pan beneath
them & i know, i know i shouldn’t have been sneaking

around but if mischief is memory-making, i am
grateful for this image: my baba holding my
mama’s face. her smile giving & keeping itself

a secret. oil hot enough, it makes music. a whisper
of a moment my childish hunger stumbles into
then struggles to hold together. when we left

i tucked this shade of yellow underneath each eyelid.
i’ll protect anything i felt once. & what if what i recall
of love is unreliable & what if i stain everything

in my path the color of a brilliant sun? the dream
eventually undresses, dons itself in fading embers
instead—the exact shade of an inevitable absence.

when we left, we never stopped wanting to turn back to
the golden hour, to a love so soft it rustles its own self back
to sleep. we never stopped wanting to turn back time to

yellow.

________

Daad Sharfi is a stubborn Scorpio, immigrant rights advocate and law student from Chicago. Her work has been featured in 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Sawti and The Drinking Gourd.

Braid my cheese and

slaughter a goat for my graduation,

Overstay your welcome,

Unspool prayer into cupped palms

& spread it over our gleaming faces,

feeding us sweets at funerals

and 3aseer laymoon in sickness,

Burn down all hotels

& industrialised hospitality,

Cry every bayt is baytak,

every home is home

did you want gossip or cumin?

did you just say mabrook at a funeral?

Give me a room that swells

and animal fat in green bottles,

salons in shadows and

women shapeshift into sandalwood,

stroke my palms baba and repeat

9abaa7 9abaa7 kisra bil moolah,

Sing to me your question

bayt al 3aroos wein &

set the bottomless trap,

let me giggle gidaam &

giggle gidaam & giggle

more than 4 spoons of sugar?

did you just say al baraka feekum to the bride?

Gal lek fi wahid,

who reads Hiba and wonders

Vaseline-shining girl or gift,

(gidaam)

her empty of small talk is filled with

Allah’s remembrance and

stories about this graceless tongue:

(gidaam)

she asked for mokhadarat at a vegetable stall!

and called her tribe Jalabiya!

she steals every joke from a passport!

Marvel as I release them all with gidaam

& Spit sleeping giggles

resuspended from underarms,

Mother of all punchlines!

________

SALMA ALI is a 21 year-old Sudanese poet studying Biochemistry at the University of St. Andrews

________

SALMA ALI is a 21 year-old Sudanese poet studying Biochemistry at the University of St. Andrews.

________

DALIA ELHASSAN is a Sudanese-American poet and writer living in NYC. Her work has been featured in a number of publications, including The Kenyon Review, The Oakland Arts Review, Rattle #59, and most recently in the New-Generation African Poets Series (Sita) with her chapbook, In Half Light (2019, Akashic Books and the African Poetry Book Fund). She is the recipient of the Hajja Razia Sharif Sheikh Prize for nonfiction and was shortlisted for the 2018 Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She can be found online @daliaelhassan.

We find a perfect piece of shade underneath the warm sun,
and Azza pours the tea before she speaks

Azza never looks the same.
Each time you get close enough, each time you think you know her,
she reveals another surface

If you don’t pay attention, you might almost miss it
the way her crisp white toub falls gracefully on her shoulders,
how the gold crescent in her nose accentuates her face tenderly

Azza is timid, but captures your attention
She is not a mere stop on your destination
So, plan to stay awhile.

Listen to the way she uses language to weave stories full of heart
Pay attention to how she sings songs of love
Count the scars and ask her how many battles she has fought

You will be surprised to learn how many of them she’s won.
Sip your tea slowly and know that she will offer you a place to stay
Let her soft voice trickle into your ears, and
Let the cool breeze touch your skin

No need for formalities,
Azza has no care for them
She has no need for ceremony nor procedure

She takes big leaps, wanders on the dangerous route
She fears nothing, and is ready to risk it all
She is fearless, but never reckless
Beautiful, but never boastful
Smart, and always dreaming

She paints pictures of hopes and what-ifs
See how her eyes light up when she talks of future
Notice when she smiles
Because it does not happen often

Savor the moment,
Ask her the questions
Listen to the answers
Sip your tea slowly

________

LEENA BADRI is a student of International Relations at the University of Toronto, a writer of multiple genres, and a lover of all creative mediums of expression. She explores and writes about issues of culture, politics, and society.

________

AYA ADIL ELBAZ  is a 22 year old writer, and a freelancer  at Al Jazeera Media Network. She was born in Sudan into a family of authors, journalists and filmmakers. Aya moved to Malaysia at the age of 9 and was raised there. She is an accounting and finance graduate and is now perusing a masters degree in Journalism in Doha, Qatar. 

Excerpt from Ya Waldah Ya Maryam by Mahjoub Shareef

Maryam, daughter of the country, mother of men held hostage—and sometimes crucified. She did not arrive as a song but as a poem. Born in Kober prison, born in 1973, born to Mahjoub Shareef, Maryam was a plea for waiting out the darkness. She cradled stories of fight and more fight. Of cellmates who did not give—not at the first break of blood, or at the smell of copper. She was enough fuel to fight a system, enough memory beat it. Maryam was a simple woman with simple dreams. She only ever wanted freedom but the longest distance between mother and child is a paid soldier.

Excerpt from Telegraphs by Mohammad Elhassan Salim Hummeid

Sit Al-Dar bit Ahmed Jabir, born to the village of Nuri. Wife, mother, and comrade. She did not arrive as a poem but as a sickle and hammer. In the very belly of tradition, in the very heart of tribe. When they called in the village archaeology, she called theft. When they called in the city labour, she called theft. Sit Al-Dar saw whiteness for what it was, called machine a machine, called her husband a hero. She cradled stories of fight, of rebellion and small revolutions. Sit Al-Dar did not witness victory but knew it would come. She did not witness much, but reveled in all of it. She only ever wanted freedom but freedom was a train too far and a dollar that would not stretch.

Excerpt from Nora by Mohammad Elhassan Salim Hummeid

Nora, daughter of the dry years, born to the people, kin of my kin. She did not arrive as a woman but as a prophecy. Nora was made not of thick skin but thicker burdens. Gave but not from abundance, took only to make more. Nora was loved by men whose only service was in departure. Far away men who knew her dreams and shared them. Knew her fears and shared them. She cradled stories of fight from the mouth of the margin. Nora had visions of fire but Nora was promised the rain. Nora was promised return. Nora was promised the rescue. Nora had asked to learn. Chalk and board and compass. Plough and herd and grain. She only ever wanted freedom but only ever reaped the pain.

///

I, daughter of the revolution, born to my mothers before me, sister to the saved children—did not arrive by chance. I arrived armed and with intent. Cradling a gangrened womb, five young girls swallowed by the Nile, and Noura. I arrived afraid but I do not walk in fear I walk from it. I curse the uniform that calls me a whore. And curse the walls too high. And curse the beds too low. And curse the air that makes me cry. And curse the locks that turned on me. I leave behind my father’s back to curse him too. I do not wait for men to write me a poem, but I will hold their hand when they bleed. I will sing their songs and fight the war but I will fight it even after they have claimed the win.

________

QUTOUF YAHIA is a poet and writer and a cofounder at Locale, a Sudanese initiative for the development of creative efforts and local talent through cultural advocacy.

Humming

What did I want? Everything
in the commercials,
what my parents couldn’t afford.
A talking mermaid
doll who lit up at night
and covered the ceiling in angel
fish, entire galaxies filled
with fantasy, a Milky Way, a Snickers,
as a child I stole so many things
and never apologized once. Eating Milk Duds
and dreaming about Slinkys, Barbies,
and Easy Bake Ovens.

You see our poverty was hidden
beneath my mother’s fur coat
smuggled on a train from Poland
and worn over another smuggled
leather coat on the flight to America

And I’ve been hated, truly hated
by a woman I did not know who
watched my mother use food stamps
to buy fresh fruit and vegetables

and by the classmate
years later who on my sixteenth birthday
finally gave me the Easy Bake Oven
of my dreams, the box
covered in swastikas.
He had been meticulous
found a doll who looked just like me
took the time to melt her legs and singe
her hair, I still imagine him standing in his
kitchen thinking today Luisa turns 16
and humming, humming, humming.

Yom Kippur

I know nothing of forgiveness,
it is a yearly tradition
for me to practice and fail
like the sonnet that I still
do not understand how to write.
I could tell you about the time
my mother forgave her father
for a lifetime of destruction.
She meant it enough to spend two hours
trying to pull his half dead body
out of the bathtub, tearing her shirt
and weeping. In his room–
a tower of Russian smut magazines
stacked so high, they almost
looked like a steeple.

Luisa Muradyan came to the United States as a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union. She is the winner of the 2017 Prairie Schooner Book Prize for American Radiance and has had work appear in the Threepenny Review, The Missouri Review, Coffee House Press, and the American Literary Review.

It seems a former lifetime—
those two-day Passovers
in the Bronx, standing
in the little room above Tibbett Ave

fingering the dust on glass
flowers as I felt the migrations
of multitudes. My mother said
all of New York was en route

as if in the jointures of bones
where I held breath I could feel
the compression of beams
on the old George Washington

Bridge, the cacophony
of horns over the water, the stop-
lights of Manhattan and in the corner
of my mind. I slept

in the living room, on springs
that prodded. In the middle
of the night tiny lights
illuminated small cages

of darkness. Grandma,
living alone without loneliness,
lips hooked around her gums
as if nursing an ancient bitterness.

Once you called me “spoiled.”
I responded with silence
as if it could be heard
over other silences.
The sound of your sister breathing
like an angel saying goodbye
on your last night together.

To get past immigration,
you gave a piece of your eye,
a layer of sclera so fine
it stole no sight from the grey
cloudy harbors of your eyes.

And since coming to the Bronx,
you collected shoes,
stacked them on the closet door.
My cousin and I stuck our hands in them
as if they were puppets,
feeling their loose, ragged tongues,
shaggy buckles, battered soles.

We ran up to the second balcony
of Bella’s old apartment
and looked down at the cracked
grass-dappled yard below,
as if there were no higher point
from which to stand,
no more precarious ledge
from which to fall.

When you died, a stranger
asked me what you loved.
And I couldn’t think of anything
except that you loved Passover.
As a girl, in a place razed
out of time, you thrilled
at opening a sacred chest
to lay the special plates.

________

Aviva Kasowski’s work has appeared in Ninth Letter web edition, The Bellingham Review, South Carolina Review, Spillway, and others.  She is a former Bread Loaf work-study scholar and was a poetry resident at Art Farm, Nebraska.  She holds an MFA from the University of California, Riverside, and is completing her PhD in English and Creative Writing at The University of Georgia in Athens.  She enjoys hanging out upside down on aerial silks and looks forward to practicing again with her community.

If He had split the sea for us,
and had not taken us through it on dry land,
it would have been enough.

—Dayenu

It wasn’t enough that we slogged pale across horse latitudes
bound burros west through muck and jungle, malaria the eleventh plague,
forded the Amazon, tambourine danced like Miryam omein and omein
we thought Loja was Eden, an eternal spring of lush fruited soil
but they found us, we could smell their burnt breath in the wind
fled further north: Cuenca a river Jordan if we ever saw one
streets paved in Inca gold then washed bloody    they found us
we covered our bowls climbed higher, beyond el páramo to Riobamba
but here they were waiting, tightening their racks, licking their lips
of fire to devour us we walked through the valley of death
dug our heels into this mountain covered our tracks with switchbacks,
prayed to Abba that the world would forget our names, sack cloth
and ashes omein and omein counting ten thousand Shabbats, here
we’ve stayed. May our children’s children never forget why we came.

________

Lupita Eyde-Tucker writes poetry in English and Spanish. “Guaranda” was selected as a finalist in the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize by Ilya Kaminsky. Her work has recently appeared in Nashville Review, The Acentos Review, Raleigh Review, Columbia Journal, Women’s Voices for Change, Yemassee, and Chautauqua. Lupita began pursuing a MFA in Poetry at the University of Florida this fall, and will be a Staff Scholar at Bread Loaf Translators Conference next summer. Read more of her poems at: www.NotEnoughPoetry.com

CARS

“During the Gorbachev era…most people really
wanted blue jeans, VCRS, and most of all cars.”

— Svetlana Alexievitch

So that we can fly beyond the Urals
make all the neighbors jealous.
A car for half-uncles and second cousins.
A car for our catalogue clippings to come to life.
A car for everyone to be happy, at last.
An engine lashed by the sawed-off branches
of riverbanks, haunted by snowflakes
and the bedtime stories of our Jewish grandmothers.
If only we could’ve guessed
that the first car we’ll own in America
would be a 1984 red Audi.
That with each new kitchen appliance
we can start again, reborn, like Athena
rising from the head of Zeus.
A bit of saliva wipes down the blades of a new machine;
blood sticks our eyelids shut. Petra-oil burns
our nostrils like an advent candle on Christmas morning
guttering on a windowsill. What did we not
once have to prove to suspicious landlords?
There are no Jews here, no partisans or poets;
no traitors to the motherland.
And all we need now is a good pair of sunglasses,
a highway over every major ocean,
and to believe that the worst part is over.

THE MOURNER’S KADDISH

MACHETE ATTACKER STABS 5 AT NY RABBI’S HANUKKAH CELEBRATION

________

Elvira Basevich is a poet and assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Her first book of poetry, How to Love the World won the 2019 [PANK] Books Poetry Contest. Her poems have recently appeared in Palette Poetry, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Poached Hare, TriQuarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Projector Magazine, & Feminist Wire.