Airport Road 06

ISSUE 06

AIRPORT ROAD www.electrastreet.net/airportroad NYU Abu Dhabi 19 Washington Square North New York, NY 10003 Send inquiries to: Publisher Airport Road NYU Abu Dhabi PO Box 903 New York, NY 10276-0903 electra.nyuad@gmail.com ISSN 23121777 © 2017 Electra Street

Front Cover Image: Detail from Night Shift by Luis Carlos Soto Back Cover Image: Child’s Gaze by Valeriya Golovina

CO-EDITORS

EDITORIAL BOARD

Juliรกn Carrera Rosy Tahan Tzy Jiun Tan Hafsa Ahmed Paula Breฤ ak Louise Gerodias Thirangie Jayatilake Dominique Joaquin Stephanie Lim Zoe Jane Patterson Vamika Sinha

MANAGING EDITOR FOR DIGITAL

Viswanath Chandrasekar

FOUNDING EDITOR

Sachi Leith

EXECUTIVE EDITOR

Deborah Lindsay Williams

PUBLISHER

Cyrus R. K. Patell

Issue 06 Fall 2017

CONTENTS PROSE Paula Brečak, Dida and the Red Pipe 14 Branden Kang, Daddy Manual 26 Tzy Jiun Tan, Consumerist 68

Jamie Uy, Daniel in the Desert 82 Shalini Corea, Roach 93

J. Karolis Degutis, A Commentary on Dualism 99 Alice Huang, Free and Wild 116 Paula Brečak, Prison Mice 120

Yu-Chieh (Andrea) Chung, If Only You Knew 132 Yu-Chieh (Andrea) Chung, Half Baked 139 Alice Huang, If the City Were a Movie 143 Harper Cho, Stranded 164

Jamie Uy, pre-departure 174 POETRY Rosy Tahan, Confetti 10

Vamika Sinha, eldorado cinema 12 Tzy Jiun Tan, Mother 22

Ayah Rashid, AMPI-theatre 46

Tzy Jiun Tan, Get Off My Lawn 57

Zoe Jane Patterson,The Dancer: A Villanelle 59 Shamma Al Bastaki, Goals and Stuff 61

Rosy Tahan, Abecedarian on the Limitations of Language 67 Zoe Jane Patterson, Ode to Socks 70 Tzy Jiun Tan, Staged Fright 72

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Tzy Jiun Tan, Long Distance 76

Paula Brečak, Pass by Romance 79 Vamika Sinha, Oceans 88

Reem Almenhali, Day of Judgment 114

Leanne Talavera, Why I Envy Your Guitar 119 Paula Brečak, After Midnight Jazz 127

Sudikchya Shrestha, Pregnant Bitch 131

Amal Al Shamsi, Last Words/Lost Words 135 Salha Al Ameri, Paper Cut 137

Rosy Tahan, Life Sentences 146

Shalini Corea, The Horse in Battle 150

Thirangie Jayatilake, Consequence 160 Alice Huang, Morning Poem 179 VISUAL Luis Carlos Soto, Night Shift [Detail] (Front Cover)

Shamma Al Bastaki, Accident (Erasure of Sartre’s The Emotions) 11 Matthew Tan, Human 20140906 13 Thirangie Jayatilake, Doorway 21 Hatim Benhsain,Gigantic 25

Benjamin Roberts and Geography of Robots, Pop-up Radio at the New Orleans Night Clinic 45 Nada Al Mosa, Untitled 56

Nada Al Mosa, Faceless Flower 58

Maria Paula Calderon Acon, Dementia I 60 Mariam Raslan, Dancing Flames 64 Adele Bea Cipste, The Poet 65 Nada Al Mosa, Lilies 66

Nada Al Mosa, Roots 69 Luis Carlos Soto, KZ 73

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Hafsa Ahmed, Wo Durbar / Aik Durbar / Ye Durbar 74 Kevin Mokhtar, The Rock 75

Shamma Al Bastaki, Laws (Erasure of Sartre’s The Emotions) 77 Ethan David Lee, Kestane 78 Nada Al Mosa, Untitled 81

Asma Balfaqih, Echoes of Faith 87

Ethan David Lee, Humans: North Padre Island 91 Maria Paula Calderon Acon, Tusk 92

Shamma Al Bastaki, Therefore (Erasure of Sartre’s The Emotions) 98 Matthew Tan, Human 20140111 113

Maria Paula Calderon Acon, Perspective II 118

Hafsa Ahmed, “‫ جیسا بھی ہو گا اچھا لگے گا۔‬،‫ ”بادلوں کے نیچے اپنا گھر ایک ہو گا‬123 Valeriya Golovina, Afternoon 124 Emma Kay Tocci, The Tailor 125

Lateefa Almazrooei, Home//Despair 126

Valeriya Golovina, Something Charming about London in the Rain 128 Emma Kay Tocci, Father and Son at Fish Market 129 Kevin Mokhtar, Beyond the Fence 130 Nada Al Mosa, Book Love 136 Mariam Raslan, Sparks 138

Maria Paula Calderon Acon, Perspective I 142 Valeriya Golovina, B&W 144

Mariam Raslan, Strolling 145 Nada Al Mosa, Untitled 148

Luis Carlos Soto, Callejones 149

Adele Bea Cipste, Age (“The Old Courtesan” by Auguste Rodin in a Charcoal Interpretation) 154

Hafsa Ahmed, Alone, not Lonely 155 Asma Balfaqih, Ephemeral 156

Shamma Al Bastaki, Soup (Cento—Snippets Taken from Sappho, Reznikoff, Maya Angelou, Ancient Egyptian Love Poetry) 157

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Gabrielle Branche, Dancing Girl 158 Mariam Raslan, Threads 159 Nada Al Mosa, Untitled 161

Ethan David Lee, From Above 162

Hatim Benhsain, Anxiety Deconstructed 163 Maria Paula Calderon Acon, Loris 169

Maria Paula Calderon Acon, Ink Practice 170 Thirangie Jayatilake, Taking a Break 171

Ethan David Lee, Young Street Musician 172 Valeriya Golovina, ‫ ربابة‬173 Nada Al Mosa, Conflict in Identity 176

Thirangie Jayatilake, Pillar, pillar in the wall 177 Hatim Benhsain, Filthy 178

Shamma Al Bastaki, Draw (Erasure of Sartre’s The Emotions) 180 Asma Balfaqih, Retrouville 181

Luis Carlos Soto, Night Shift 182

Valeriya Golovina, Child’s Gaze (Back Cover)

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INTRODUCTION What does Airport Road mean for our university?

Being on the NYU Abu Dhabi campus can induce a sense of omniscience.

We are a small student body, on a small campus, on a small island we

often accuse of isolating us. It’s hard to evade information on our campus.

We all know each other. We gossip about each other’s political affiliations and weekend actions. We are intimately familiar with the nameless

campus buildings we enter and exit every day. We no longer have to tell taxi drivers to take Exit 11. “NYU Abu Dhabi, please” is enough.

And yet, things still emerge out of the sand, in digital whispers, in off-therecord forums, out of black plastic bags. And, as always, in art.

Art reveals. Drawings, paintings, photographs, and writings are windows to intersecting realities, ready for us to peek inside. It is tempting to

indulge in the plainly visible—judge it, evaluate it, make assumptions

about it, but anyone who’s looked through a window for long enough will start seeing themselves reflected back in the glass: ghostly

superimpositions upon the figure behind it; a camera lens, a finger on a shutter button. Two subjects: one behind the glass, one behind the camera. We are embedded in what we see.

This reflection is not out of human narcissism. Art encourages us to create meaning by bringing in our own baggage and putting it in conversation

with the artist’s. We all have different conversations. We create meaning

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based on what we know; since we are ever changing and ever different, our interpretations are endless. We don’t know where a piece of art will take us; we don’t know if we should trust our interpretations; we don’t

know how many possible meanings there are. We don’t know if we will—if we can—find answers.

Art is simultaneously a personal and a public space. In a university where everyone seems to be in plain sight, works published in Airport Road can gently reorient perspectives. From heartfelt poetry about loved ones, to

playful collages tinged with irony, these works challenge what you think you know about the creators and yourself.

Now, as our population grows, we are realizing that we cannot know

everyone. Out of the sand has emerged the Louvre Abu Dhabi, inviting us to engage with objects and creators from past and present. The public

bus now stands outside the Welcome Center. The street from which this magazine took its name is now a taxi-ride away. We are realizing how large and how elusive our small island and our small city are.

Art makes us realize how much we do not know, but then again, the

function of art is not to provide conclusive answers. Reading Airport Road is not supposed to tell us our peers’ secrets. But it is a reminder that

secrets will always exist. That there is depth to mirrors. That there will

always be an unknown, and always more to discover about ourselves, about our peers, about the world.

Julián Carrera

Rosy Tahan

Tzy Jiun Tan

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Confetti

Rosy Tahan there is a sharp twist

of two circular halves and a pop and for

a long moment

I am an astrologer

on the fearful cusp of the decade

constellations

of colored paper form and unform

we accelerate

around the sun

we return to the same place.

I am the same

waiting for God to cast his net

through the explosion

the unformed manuscripts, plane tickets, headlines, homeless currencies, pill packets, bedsheets and crumpled tissues, flutter up, flutter out, flutter down, swept up and repackaged for next year.

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Accident (Erasure of Sartre’s The Emotions) Shamma Al Bastaki

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eldorado cinema Vamika Sinha

beneath the way to the exchange, i watch him light a cigarette.

his head hung like an office shirt,

making sums with pavement patterns. his thoughts fall soft as ashes, spirals – i see him glaze into clichÊs. is he a man from kerala

who eats at night with taxi drivers? i paint his eyes dim and tired, drooping over dirham chai.

i wonder what he dreams about: laundry, porn and petrol prices,

some things, perhaps, about his wife. is he the man from kerala? belly straining at his shirt.

a pot of unfulfilled desires.

one forgotten, balding hero

from the row of filmy posters hung at eldorado cinema.

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Human 20140906 Matthew Tan

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Dida and the Red Pipe Paula Brečak

IN 1967 MY GRANDMOTHER’S FATHER built a house on the outskirts of an old coastline town on Croatian Adriatic. It looked towards the sea and the industrial port some kilometers away, from back when there still was a promising industry in Croatia, back when Croatia was still Yugoslavia.

On its right was the brick red railway that has been silent for long before I was born, leading to somewhere North-West in Europe, somewhere

better. He was a railway man, my grandmother’s father, taught to respect

all things red, although I always remembered him with silver white hair. We called him Dida, a colloquial name for a grandfather, although he was not a grandfather to any of us, and that colloquial expression did not come from our dialectical region. For years I thought that Dida was his actual name, today, that is the only name I remember him by.

Back in 1960s he was assigned a rail director role on that small railway

station at Nowhere, Yugoslavia, later to be known as Forgotten, Croatia.

With it came the perks—a scrap of land on something that will become a vastly popular beach fifty years later, and the comrades’ respect that

could have been earned only by hard work and the breaking of knuckles.

He was fit for the role, a hard man even in his retirement. Coined and bred in the Russian winters and sepia summers of a socialist Utopia.

His hands never comfortable, always blistery and rough—he wore them

like war emblems. His face wide and full of deep wrinkles, he must have had one for every wagon that passed his jurisdiction. Dida’s life was a

book of stories told to us children sometimes as lessons, sometimes as reminiscences.

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As a young boy, Dida wanted to be a priest, just like every other young

boy in early twentieth-century Europe. It all changed though, as it usually

does, one day when he walked back into the classroom after the lessons had all finished and found the local priest, his hero, naturally, giving an

oral examination or something like it to the third grade teacher right there in front of a blackboard on the teacher’s desk. What a timing he had! The priest must have thought the same because he took the boy, took the

belt that was already unbelted and around his ankles, and spanked Dida into the next life. Going back home that day, with dirt smudged by tears

on his face, a red bum, and a funny walk, Dida decided that he will not, in

fact, become a priest. He was a character though, even back then, strong willed and heavy with the feeling of righteousness—so he told his father about this ungodly priest that fondles teachers and beats children. The

same night, Dida’s father knocked on the priest’s door with the barrel of a shotgun and told him that if he ever sees him again around the town, he will shoot him. For the longest time after that, the village did not have a priest.

When I was a young child, so the story goes, I loved to play around the yard of that beach house and inspect different plants. One day, Dida

caught me plucking a leaf from his cherished laurel tree positioned right in the middle of the garden. The wrath of all the Gods came down on

me and a promise that if I ever did that again, I would get spanked. My

father, following the family tradition, when he heard of this, came down to confront Dida, without a shotgun though, but still yelling profanities and a conclusion that Dida should never again yell or punish his children, or else.

DIDA HAD THREE CHILDREN, and they went on to have more children,

all in all, my father had seven cousins. My grandmother, as Dida’s oldest

child, was given the top floor of the house, while Dida and his wife hosted

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the rest of the family on the ground floor during long summer months when everyone yearned for an ocean’s relief.

Dida would sit at the head of a long table on the porch, smoking his pipe and reading his newspaper or solving a crossword puzzle. The family

would be milling around like ants on a mission, everyone with their own task. My grandmother waking up early before the season’s tourists so

she could go clean the fish in the sea and feed the entrails to the gulls.

Her brother and his wife making a trip to the village market to obtain

fresh bread and vegetables. My grandfather picking figs from three trees creating shade in the garden, then drying them behind the house. My

grandmother’s sister, the fat one whose husband left her, peeling potatoes on the two porch steps and complaining about something or other. Their children, our parents, all seven of them and their partners, the modern

generation of the day, drinking coffee and reading their modern books or

running to catch the best spot at the beach with their Walkmans and their cassettes.

I was the oldest of Dida’s seven great-grandchildren, so early on I had to learn how to entertain myself during those long summers spent on the

beach. Such scenery would be every child’s dream, but I began to dread it pretty soon. As a shy child, I had no friends; I also had no cousins who would help me make friends. When they grew old enough, I was already

appreciating the silence and the solace that lone summers in that house would bring me.

When we were still very young, back when our parents were our best

friends, we would crawl in between the bushes and the trees overgrowing

the fence and hunt for turtles and pine nuts, until one of the grandmothers called us to gather for dinner. There is never a table big enough for such a big family, so we kids would often end up sitting at a small plastic yellow table while adults sipped red wine and snapped at us not to bicker.

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DIDA PASSED AWAY on the 25th of April, 2006. After that, no table in that house was ever small enough. With his funeral came the bureaucracy, came the paperwork, came the inheritance, and soon grandmothers

were preparing three different dinners for three different tables. It was

the bad blood of our family, the tough character, strong will, and heavy

righteousness. When Dida was alive I was too young to recognize it, but

I saw it in my own father all the time. He and his brother did not speak to

each other. In my mind I see my parents, my uncle, and his wife, all sitting in our living room in the apartment that my grandparents left us. There

is a fight, a misunderstanding, a disagreement; I am not understanding

any of it. All I can tell is that it is about a car, a stupid bickering, my aunt is saying that the car is red, my father that it was not worth the price.

That was the last time my uncle and his family ever came to our place.

My parents have never seen their niece. Truthfully, it was never about any car. It was about the apartment, the inheritance, the paperwork, and the bureaucracy. For years to come my uncle did not speak to his parents

either, he was upset that they left the apartment to my father and not to him. Eventually, he wanted to spend summers in that beach house that

Dida had built in 1963, so he made peace with them. And once he did, my parents decided it was time to buy their own beach house.

Dida’s house has been cut up, divided, the pine tree torn down, laurel long dead, the swing hanging from the fig tree thrown away. My

grandmother’s fat sister left; took the apartment in a city, never to come back to the beach house again, never to be invited, neither her nor her three children. My grandmother’s brother got the ground floor, the one

with the porch where Dida used to sit and smoke his pipe while keeping

a watchful eye on the plants and all of us. Except now, nobody sat at the porch for too long, so the others would not interpret it as an invitation.

Faintly I remember the array of my father’s cousins, my aunts and uncles, from when they could still be seen around. They were all quite young, so

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to me they seemed quite hip. An uncle who used do my nails and then

let me do his. An aunt who took me to town to get ice cream and walk on the Riviera. Another uncle’s first wife who hung out with my mother and taught me how to swim. My father’s brother who would take me fishing really early in the morning before the swimmers and the sunbathers

showed up. They were always smiling, always happy, always here, as long as Dida was.

Now he was gone and so was everyone else. Out of seven cousins my father has, I haven’t been to any of their weddings, birthdays,

graduations. Out of five cousins my sister and I have, my parents have only met two; we faintly guess their ages and their names, never quite

sure if we are right. My birthdays always host six people and no more, my parents, my sister and I, and my grandparents. As a child I never

understood why we don’t invite all those nice aunts and uncles; it would mean getting more presents at least. I was too afraid to ask about them though, since one time when I talked about it to my parents and said,

naively and innocently, how they hate everyone in their family and that is why we never see anyone, I got slapped.

LAST YEAR CAME THE TIME for me to learn how to drive. One of my uncles, the one whose nails I colored with pink nail polish, works as a

driving instructor in a street next to our apartment. My father met with him, after twelve years of not seeing each other, and arranged for me to take his classes. I spent several months learning how to drive with

him. This man I vaguely remembered from when I was six years old. This man, who, I am sure, would never recognize me on the street. Somehow we were related, same blood running through our veins, and I could not

see it. That tough character, strong will, and heavy righteousness which

marked the past ten years in that beach house, in this family, did not exist between my uncle and I. He was happy to spend time with me, happy to

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talk, happy to grab a drink. We never opened up to each other, always a feeling of cautiousness in the air between us, carefully choosing our

words. I guess there was a kind of fear, that more-than-ten-years-old kind of fear of strangeness with someone you are supposed to be the closest to. So what good is it to us now? Cousins, relatives, family caught in the

feuds fueled by self-righteousness, feuds we still do not fully understand, yet know that they somehow put us on the opposite sides of history.

We never talked of Dida, that one old man, the only one actually linking us

together, both in blood and in early summer nights of watching the fireflies and catching crickets. I do remember Dida smiling, telling us stories. I

remember everyone telling me how his wife died a few days after I was born; how she was waiting on her first great-granddaughter in order to

leave. I remembered how he worshiped the plants, the books. There used to be an old guitar hanging on the living room wall of that house, the one Dida played as a young man. I would look at it on the dry afternoons,

when the winds coming from the sea were too strong to play outside. I

would sit in front of the guitar and look at it and paint with watercolors,

always the same picture, always the sunset. Dida said I will be a painter, like him. I think I stopped painting after he died.

The outside, that little forgotten place screamed of order. It screamed of Dida. Right next to the abandoned railway station, the rusty tracks

overgrown by yellow grass. That used-to-be industry port, now gray and green and squeaking nothingness. That is where I first learned how to

drive, at the age of ten on my father’s lap. There was nothing there, no

one, only emptiness in between old, hollow repositories. It still reminds me of Dida tremendously.

Dida was a man of hard hands and gentle touch, coined and bred on the

red rails of socialism and family unity. A living proof that those two words

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were not antonyms. He didn’t take shit from anyone, from that priest that

beat the Jesus out of him, quite literally, when he was nine, right down to his own family. Yet in the same breath, he was the favorite person of all

the cats on the street. He would only have to click his tongue, and they

would come running down from all the rooftops to melt under his hands.

He ruled with an iron fist, him and his pipe, over the broken railways and

the garden filled with laurel, pine, and fig trees. He brought us all together, like a flock returning to the stern yet protecting parents’ nest.

I do not remember his funeral, or anyone crying. I don’t think anyone

particularly loved him, yet under him, they all loved each other. No one

ever said they missed him, but they all had stories of him stored beneath their breath, always ready to spill them at children’s bedtime.

NOW MY UNCLE AND I, we sit over red wine, after I had passed my

driving test and have gotten my driving license, and I think of socialism.

I think of father figures. I think of authority made out of hard worker’s

hands and soft parent’s touch. I think of Yugoslavia falling apart after

Tito’s death. I think of my family falling apart after Dida’s death. Everyone

grabbing whatever they managed and retreating to their own little corners.

Everyone fighting for a bigger table, just so it could be half empty at

dinner time. Now my uncle and I, we sit at the same table over red wine, twelve years since the last time we sat at the same table and did each

other’s nails. We know we come from the same family, and still I do not understand how we ended up on different sides of history.

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Doorway Thirangie Jayatilake

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Mother

Tzy Jiun Tan

I. I ripped apart her maternal breasts

When I stood firmly on my two feet Learnt how to walk

and told her I no longer believe her love was Unconditional.

II. Hot nights on a dusty wooden king sized bed adorned with mother of pearl

She bought for thousands of ringgits scammed by prospect of an investment

I talked religion to her and told her I have become An atheist.

We watched the night grew darker I think she cried

When she turned away from me Pretending to be asleep.

III. I blew cigarette smoke on

A faded picture of me in her arms

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So innocent.

IV. When had she become so small in size In comparison to my

Infinitely expanding ego Like the universe

She used to be my universe.

V. We used to bathe together Now I close the door to brush my teeth I miss her stretch marks Proofs I was hers.

VI. It is not my fault that the umbilical cord almost choked me to death Before I was screaming anger

Grabbed sharp scissors and cut it off.

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VII. No one makes oats with condensed milk and honey like she did Before I catch the bus at 7am to kindergarten And now when the kettle boils I miss her hands.

VIII. We stare at the bloody aftermath, faces stained with tears No one said a word. I packed up to leave but not before Saying goodbye.

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Gigantic Hatim Benhsain

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Daddy Manual Branden Kang I. It’s not easy to operate daddy; he malfunctions easily. Mommy told

me he needed to be treated with care. I wanted to ask her if it was like

walking with a glass of water, and what would happen if I dropped it from my hands, but I kept it to myself and nodded. Her face looked too sad.

Whenever daddy malfunctions, the doctors and nurses all come rushing

to help him, so the room bustles like an arcade. One morning, a fly went

inside daddy’s nose, so I had to press the emergency bell. Even a fly that doesn’t do anything but fly all day can be lethal to a robot like daddy.

‘Lethal’ was a word the doctors used often. I added another entry into my daddy manual that day.

103. Watch for flies. They’re “Lethal.”

Daddy began turning into a robot when I was in kindergarten. As I went onto the second grade, he transformed more and more into a robot.

Looking at daddy laying in his bed with strange machines attached to

his arms, legs and mouth, I had the thought that being a robot would be

nice. I wouldn’t have to get up in the mornings to go to school, or do my homework. When I told daddy about it, he said with a blank face, “Don’t get too jealous.”

Of course, he didn’t really say that. Talking robots only exist in cartoons

and comic books. Whenever daddy wanted to speak, he blinked his eyes, the only part of his body that hadn’t turned into a robot. The doctors

attached these things called sensors onto his eyes and connected them

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to a screen. When he blinked fast three times, the words “I love you”

flashed in red Calibri font. But even blinking was not an easy task for

daddy, and the sensors didn’t always work properly, sometimes flashing

random words like “cockroach” or “sycamore tree” on the screen. Daddy told me we could communicate through telepathy, as long as we think of each other.

“I always think of you.”

Daddy charges himself on the bed during the day and turns into a

superhero at night to fight villains. Monsters under the bed, evil scientists, and alien robots are all powerless in the face of his strength. Daddy often told me stories of his brave battles against villains, in which he used his super punches and laser beams to triumph.

One night, a ghost appeared in my room. She was wearing a white dress that had been torn and smudged with dirt, and she had cracked, scarlet lips. She looked like she hadn’t’ showered for weeks. She crawled out from under the desk and approached me. I think she found out that I

hadn’t done my homework. Paralyzed with fear, I shut my eyes and sent

daddy a wave of telepathy. Staring into my eyes, the ghost caressed my cheek, and I peed on the bed. Then the door swung open, and daddy

stepped inside my room. His steel body glimmered under the moonlight.

The ghost made a terrified face and vanished without a trace. I ran to daddy, and he held me in his arms.

I woke up the next morning to bed sheets blooming with sunflowers.

Before mommy could find me, I ran to the hospital. Daddy was lying in his bed, pretending as if nothing had happened.

“You saved me, right?” I asked.

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After a brief pause, two words flashed on the screen in red.

“Of course.”

I launched myself at the bed and hugged him. The emergency bell rang,

and loud beeps ripped at my eardrums. I had pulled off the oxygen cord attached to daddy’s nose. He was malfunctioning again. Nurses rushed inside, and daddy laid unconscious for an hour. I clasped his hand and watched him with tears dripping from my chin. I added one more entry into my daddy manual.

89. Don’t hug daddy too quickly.

II. Daniel called daddy a freak. It was the third time. My friends at school don’t believe he’s a robot. They just laugh and say that I’m a liar. I

punched Daniel in the face, and his teeth became smeared with blood.

Mommy had to come to the principal’s office and apologize. It was her

third time. I told her that Daniel called daddy a freak first, and she said, “They’re just jealous they don’t have a robot daddy.”

When I returned to the classroom, everyone was quiet.

“Some of you might have heard the bad news from your parents already,” said our teacher. “Rebecca has been reported missing since last night.”

“It’s the clunk monster,” whispered one of the girls at the front line.

Kids from our neighborhood began disappearing since last fall. Rebecca

was the fourth from our class. Policemen handed out flyers and searched

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every inch of the streets, but the missing children remained lost, and

empty desks decorated the corners of classrooms. Among us spread a

rumor that the clunk monster was the culprit. Making a clinking noise, the clunk monster would approach children and eat them alive.

If the rumor was true, there was no way a few police officers could

stop the clunk monster. Only daddy would be able to handle the job. I

imagined him defeating the monster and presenting himself to the class,

glorious in his indestructible body of steel. Everyone was ought to believe daddy’s a robot then.

I raised my hand. “My daddy will stop the clunk monster.”

The silence of the room was broken by laughter. Daniel laughed the

loudest. I gave him a spiteful look and turned to my teacher. But the edges of her mouth were twitching.

Daddy used to be a baseball player. He was the best pitcher in the world.

Each ball that left his hand got sucked into the catcher’s mitt like a laser beam. One day, uncle Ernest came by to visit when daddy was just

beginning to turn into a robot. They were friends since high school. Uncle

Ernest was one of the batters who helplessly swung their bats through the air when daddy took the mound. His nose was the size of my fist, and his brown curly hair spread evenly on each side of his head like two patches of ramen noodles. The two talked in the room until the tips of their noses turned pink.

“How are you doing?” Asked uncle Ernest. He snorted when he spoke.

“I’m doing fine, how about you?” I replied.

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“I’m fine as well.”

“Well, you won’t be soon. If daddy turns into a robot, he’s going to throw even faster pitches at you, and you’re going to look silly again!”

Uncle Ernest responded with a guffaw that made his belly jiggle. The hall echoed with his voice, and I burst into laughter. A few seconds passed, and he knelt beside me to tell me a secret.

“When your daddy becomes a robot, he won’t be able to play baseball anymore. He’ll be too busy fighting villains.”

It was a sad thing to hear that I won’t be able to watch daddy play

baseball anymore. He’s been a pitcher ever since I’ve known him, and

we’ve played catch together since I was six. We were like an inseparable pair of AA batteries.

I remember our last game of catch. I threw the ball over daddy’s head into the trees on the edge of the field. He followed the flight of the ball with

his head and gave me a thumbs up. The brisk breeze kissed our cheeks under the sun. After that summer, daddy’s team went into postseason

and played against uncle Ernest’s team in the first match. Uncle Ernest

hit three home runs. I assured him it would never have happened if daddy were on the mound.

At first, daddy didn’t realize that he was turning into a robot. He just

said his ankles were aching. He was hospitalized after a few weeks, and I could only wait outside in the hall for the results. I hated the smell of

hospitals. It made me feel feverish even though I wasn’t actually sick, and I imagined the misled doctor would then stab me with a needle. Daddy

30

doesn’t like needles either, I thought. I sat down and prayed that he didn’t get hurt. A few minutes later, he walked out with a smile (he could smile back then) and looked me in the eyes. Like a pitcher and a catcher in a baseball game, we exchanged secret looks. He was about to pitch the last, perhaps most important fastball of his life.

“Daddy’s going to become a robot.”

III. No one walked with me. Other kids walked in pairs or triplets with their

hands folded together, but I was a single. That didn’t bother me, though.

In front of the school were friendly police officers, garage sales, and Mr. Gordon, our neighbor who often fixed toys for children. They kept me from being bored.

I went to the field where daddy and I used to play catch. My dream was to become a pitcher. A pitcher like daddy, who made every hitter look like a

fool. In seven years I’d be able to try out for varsity baseball, and I needed practice to make it to the team. The cement wall at the end of the field was a decent training partner.

As I walked back into the streets to go home, a man approached me. It was Mr. Gordon.

“Coming back from baseball?” He asked. He must’ve seen the mitt poking out of my bag.

Mr. Gordon was an extraordinary man; he could fix anything. Daniel said

he’d even seen him bring a dead stray cat back to life, but he’s probably lying. But that Mr. Gordon was a skilled man was undoubtable. Broken

31

cars, bicycles, and toy M16s all became as good as new when touched by the magical hands of Mr. Gordon.

“Yes, from the field behind school,” I replied.

Mr. Gordon smiled. His smile reminded me of a piece of watermelon

sliced into a wedge. He told me to get home before sunset. He must’ve heard the rumors about the clunk monster.

“Mr. Gordon, have you heard about the clunk monster?” I asked.

“The clunk monster?” He responded.

“Yes. The monster that takes children and eats them alive.”

“I haven’t heard about that yet. But it sure is a scary thing to hear.”

“Don’t worry, my daddy will defeat him.”

“Your father’s a police officer?”

“No. He’s a robot. He fights villains every night.”

Mr. Gordon widened his smile, then nodded his head. He seemed to believe me, so I felt happy. I told daddy about it through telepathy.

When I got home, mommy was sitting in the dining room with her face

buried in her palms. She must’ve been tired. She started working a full

time job because it cost a lot of money to turn daddy into a robot. I was old enough to understand that. We walked to the hospital together.

32

“I waited for you,” flashed the red letters on the screen.

“Daddy, will we be able to play catch again?” I asked.

“Of course,” flashed the letters on the screen again. But this time they

flashed dimly. I could tell he was lying. It was sad to think we won’t be able to play catch together anymore. Sometimes I wished he wasn’t a robot.

He blinked three times, and I blinked three times back at him. We didn’t need to talk to connect with each other. We were a pair of AA batteries.

I placed my daddy manual on the table by his bed. Fighting villains was a tough job, so daddy was ought to malfunction regularly. The doctors

helped me with the first few entries of the manual, but mommy and I filled in the rest on our own. Checking if sufficient oxygen was being supplied to him and making sure liquid food didn’t get stuck in his throat were

some of the first entries we wrote down. The nurses couldn’t always be at daddy’s side, so it was up to me and mommy to take care of him.

I remember the night before daddy completely turned into a robot.

“I still remember the day I met you,” he said. He could only talk very slowly.

“When was that?” I asked.

“When you were still inside of mommy,” he replied. “I saw you through

an ultrasound, and you were smaller than a fingernail. I’ve loved you ever since.”

33

“Even though I was that small?”

“Of course. I recognized it was you as soon as I saw you, and you

didn’t even have eyes or a nose back then. And like that you spent ten months in mommy’s belly. You won’t be able to remember, but I ran to you as soon as I finished every game and whispered to you with my

cheek against mommy’s tummy. I talked to you about how many strikes I pitched that day, how my day had been, how much I missed you.”

“I think I remember hearing those things,” I said.

He gave out a laugh.

“You know what else? I was right by your side when you came out from mommy’s belly. Your head was pretty big, so you gave her a hard time.

You entered the world crying so loudly that the nurses had to cover their ears. I couldn’t stop tears from pearling in my eyes when I held you. I promised that moment that I’d always love you.”

Daddy spoke in a deep voice that warmed me. He was breathing heavily

with his mouth. Tears trailed down his face and wet my hands. The device attached to his heart made an unpleasant noise, and the nurses rushed inside the room. I wrote another entry in my daddy manual.

24. Don’t make daddy cry.

IV. Daddy looked more tired than usual. His eyes were barely open, and he didn’t blink when I talked to him. The screen refused to flash with red

letters, as if it was upset at me. I rummaged through my daddy manual,

34

but I couldn’t find the solution to an unresponsive screen. Mommy called the doctors. She looked more anxious than usual.

I was never a smart kid. I wasn’t good at sports, I didn’t play instruments, and art was boring. Naturally, I drew myself away from school, and

towards the hospital, where I could talk with daddy all day. Staring at

the screen flashing with red letters was enough to keep me content for

an entire afternoon. Of course, not a lot of conversation was exchanged between the two of us. Many days daddy only had the energy to blink three or four sentences, and on some days he remained silent and

listened to me talk. I told him a lot of secrets, mostly about boys I liked.

Mommy’s face was never bright. She wasn’t happy that daddy was

turning into a robot. Sometimes, she sat and cried without making a

sound. I understood how she felt, as there were many things I had to

give up too because daddy was busy fighting villains. “But crying doesn’t solve anything,” I often told her. She usually responded with a smile.

One day after school, I was walking home, and I saw her standing at the bus stop across the street.

“Mommy!” I called out.

She stared at me with a surprised look. It was the first time after daddy turned into a robot that I ran into her in the streets. I asked her where

she was going, and she didn’t answer. She plunged into the bench. She looked as if she was about to burst into tears. I had a feeling that if she went on to ride the bus like this, she’d never come back.

“I’ve been having these dreams lately,” I said.

35

She remained silent.

“That daddy flies into space. Far away, until he reaches Saturn. I realize

he’s never coming back, and I cry. But the sadder thing is that you’re not here with me either.”

I clutched mommy’s hands. They were trembling. We sat on the bench with our hands trembling together. Nine buses went by, but we stayed still. As I was about to fall asleep, she stood up and said, “Let’s go home.”

Later that day, we walked to the hospital to see daddy. I looked into his

face. It had become stiff, but he was still handsome. I caressed his grasslike hair.

“Wake up, daddy. Tell me about the stories of monsters you fought last night.”

At that moment, he blinked his eyes. The screen flashed with red letters, but I wasn’t able read what it said. Mommy walked into the room. She said the school had just contacted her, that Daniel has been reported missing. I was shocked, but daddy was more important.

“I think daddy’s up.”

As soon as the words left my mouth, the emergency bell rang. It seemed

to be louder than usual. I covered my ears. It was a noise I heard at least four times a week, but it made me anxious every time. I could see that

mommy’s face had turned pale as well. I might’ve screamed if the doctor hadn’t burst in. He began touching the cords attached to daddy’s body.

36

“Go outside,” said mommy.

I wanted to stay, but I walked outside into the hall and shut the door

behind me. My heart pounded. I sat in the chair by the entrance, with

nothing to do but think. Daniel entered my head. I guess to some extent I

was pleased, but I felt scared and guilty. I had prayed every night that the clunk monster takes him away.

The door opened, and the doctor walked out of the room. I saw his belly first, and then his stubby nose. I stood up.

“What happened to daddy?” I asked.

“I have bad news for you,” he said. He knelt beside me.

“You couldn’t fix him?”

“No. He malfunctioned really badly this time. It’s lethal. You probably

know already, but daddy’s had a rough time fighting all those villains. It’s time for him to rest now. He’ll have to go somewhere far, far away to fix his broken parts.”

I couldn’t understand what he was saying.

“Why can’t you just fix him?”

“I’m sorry.”

His faced looked old, like my grandpa’s. It was a defeated face that made me angry.

37

“No! Fix him now!”

I thought about all the toys that had broken and were never fixed. I

thought about the broken microwave mommy threw into the recycling bin.

I thought about the dreams of daddy flying into space.

“Your daddy tried hard.”

I wanted to rush inside to see him, but I was scared. It felt like someone had nailed my feet into the ground. Then a thought struck me.

Moving as quietly as I could, I crept across the hall and into the elevator.

When I reached the first floor, I ran out of the hospital. I had no time to

waste. If the doctors couldn’t fix daddy, there was only one person who might be able to. The man who could fix anything; Mr. Gordon.

V. For some reason, I couldn’t keep out of my head what daddy often told me when we played catch. “You need to focus when you pitch the ball.

Don’t think of anything else but the catcher’s mitt.” As I ran to find Mr. Gordon, my shoelaces flapped around like a set of broken propellers.

I ran without stopping. Past the harbor, past the supermarket, past the lottery store. I was sure daddy would disappear if I stopped even for a

second. I could see police officers standing across the school. When I

reached Mr. Gordon’s shop, he wasn’t there. I caught my breath between tall shelves of metal tools and gadgets. My heart was about to come out of my mouth. I wiped my face and it became smudged with snot, sweat and tears.

“Why are you crying?”

38

I turned around to a familiar smile. If Mr. Gordon hadn’t appeared from behind me, I probably would’ve collapsed on the spot.

“Mr. Gordon.”

“Yes?” I told him about daddy that he’s the best pitcher in the world, and that he’d become a robot. I told him he needed to be fixed.

Mr. Gordon started packing his bag. He filled it with spanners, bolts, hammers, and toys.

“I’ll fix him for you,” he said.

I let out a sigh of relief. Mr. Gordon can fix anything, so he’d be able to

fix daddy without a problem. Maybe it was true he brought the dead cat back to life.

“But it’s not an easy job to fix a robot, so I’ll have to stop by at my house and gather some more tools. Come with me.”

I had no choice. We walked side by side to his house.

“Did you tell anyone you were coming to visit me?” He asked.

“No.” Mr. Gordon’s house lay farther than I had expected. We had to walk for more than thirty minutes on an unfamiliar trail into the forest.

39

“Are we almost there?” I asked.

“No.” There was a sense of satisfaction embedded in his voice. He was whistling, too.

“My daddy’s good at whistling,” I said.

“I see you have a great father. He’s the best baseball player in the world, a super robot who defeats villains, and he’s a good whistler as well.”

Hearing compliments of daddy always made me happy. But Mr. Gordon stopped talking, and he wasn’t whistling anymore either. A few more minutes passed, and he opened his mouth again.

“You see, my father wasn’t a great person. All he did was drink.”

His tone was still hinted with joy. I didn’t know what to say.

“My daddy liked to drink too. Before he became a robot.”

“No no, it wasn’t liked that. He was obsessed with it. Addicted. He didn’t

care about his wife and kids. I wished that my father died, several times a day. I wasn’t like you.”

There were only the two of us in the forest. The only thing I could hear

was the sound of our footsteps. Mr. Gordon was smiling, but he wasn’t

the Mr. Gordon I had always known. Staring at the treadmill of gravel and dirt below my feet, I slowed my pace.

40

Then I heard a clunk.

It came from Mr. Gordon’s bag. The spanners and bolts waltzed among each other and produced a lifeless symphony that echoed beneath the trees.

“So I swore to myself,” he said. “That I’ll be a good father. That I’ll love and care for my children.”

I stepped backwards, and he yanked my arm towards him. He wrapped himself around me like a boa constrictor.

“But the children never gave me a chance. They all cried, and tried to run.”

He looked at me and stretched his mouth. I could see his tongue, writhing like a serpent. His eyes remained unsmiling. I couldn’t see my reflection in them—only a depthless pit. I tried to scream but my voice hid behind my throat.

I woke up to the pungent scent and humidity of the basement. There were cockroaches crawling on the cement floor. Mr. Gordon was unpacking and arranging his tools.

“Are you the clunk monster?” I asked.

He didn’t respond.

“Did you take Daniel too?”

“Yes. He said he’d come along.”

41

There were no windows. A small light bulb attached to the ceiling faintly

lit the center of the room. Mr. Gordon was swinging a hammer back and forth, forming shadows that danced amid the walls to the tune of his whistles.

“Can you let me go home? My daddy’s waiting for me.”

“No, I’m your daddy from now.”

He slapped me. Tears rolled down my face, and the scent of blood leaking in my mouth somewhat dissolved the unpleasant smell of the room.

“Be a good girl now. I’ll give you toys and buy you ice cream too.”

My hands trembled in fear, but I felt a sense of pity for Mr. Gordon. He probably never played catch with his daddy, felt the tender rub of a

bearded cheek, or was held in someone’s arms until he drowsed to sleep.

If he had for once in his life felt those things he would’ve known, that love isn’t something that can be forced.

“That’s not what daddies do,” I said. “They first tell you they love you before giving you toys, or buying you ice cream.”

Mr. Gordon walked toward me. He still had the hammer in his hand. At

that moment, a shriek came from the corner of the room. It was Daniel.

Mr. Gordon turned around in the direction of the shriek, and dragged his feet across the floor. When his entire body became veiled by the dark, I

ran to the door. I slammed my body against it, and it vomited me out of

the room. I sprinted up a flight of stairs that led to the exit. Mr. Gordon’s fingers brushed through the tips of my hair, and bursts of breath swept across the back of my neck like waves crashing against a cliff.

42

Then, suddenly in front of me I saw the shadow of a figure. It was winding up, as if to pitch a baseball. It had the form of the best pitcher in the

world. The shadow threw the ball, which cut through the air like a laser beam and hit Mr. Gordon between his eyes. It was a great pitch; not

even uncle Ernest would’ve been able to hit it. Mr. Gordon collapsed on the ground. The shadow revealed itself—and as I had expected—it was daddy. He had completely turned into a robot. He looked down at me, and stroked my head. The coldness of his metal fingers made me feel even more sorry.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t fix you,” I said.

He clenched a fist, and pointed his thumb upwards. We gazed at each other as the brisk breeze kissed our cheeks under the sun.

“I’ll always be your dad.”

He was crying, even though he was a robot. I told him I’ll always be

his daughter too. My tears made daddy look blurred. He seemed to be

waving his hands. I heard the sound of police sirens approaching me, and the cacophony of yelling neighbors filled my ears as I closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, I was at the back of a police car. I noticed the officer who normally stood outside the school. The siren still resonated in my ears.

“What happened to Mr. Gordon?” I asked.

“He’s being sent to the hospital. He’s had a stroke.”

“What about Daniel?”

43

“He’s in good shape. We found the other missing kids, too. They’re all fine.”

“Can you take me to the hospital?”

“Why?” “My daddy might be dying.”

The police car changed direction, and we reached the hospital in twelve

minutes. I rode the elevator to the fourth floor, and rushed inside daddy’s room. There was no one inside, and his bed was empty. He had gone away to fix his broken parts. But he didn’t forget to leave a goodbye

message for me. Familiar words were flashing on the screen in red, Calibri font.

“I love you.”

I ran to the window, and blinked three times at the sky. And then I wrote

the last entry of my daddy manual, as if I were throwing the last strike of the game. Teardrops fell on the pages and smudged the ink.

105. Tell daddy I love him often.

44

Pop-up Radio at the New Orleans Night Clinic Benjamin Roberts and Geography of Robots

45

AMPI-theater Ayah Rashid

DurrĂŤs, 41.312186 N 19.445323 E Open river on the front porch

Open glass eyes that let the winter Wind

whistle

through

Open packages in a mailbox we borrowed

Open walls painted with drawings from art camp

Open unwashed burgundy curtains twenty years young Open grandmothermade quilts Of

layers

socks

thermals

Open laptop at 2:36 a.m. to write love scenes Open paper cuts let them litter the wood sill Open fiction book then

Drown

the family

in

the

binding

Open dresser drawers put your elbows inside Open notebooks stored away Never

wash

your

armpits

In the recesses of the closet

Pages so dark with your anxious breath

Even you can’t see what the younger you wrote

Open the fringe of the carpet where you always lose your mind

46

Open the door of the bedroom only when you’ve found it again Open the small space between the backs of your knees Let

children

swing

there

Open spider webs in the corner

Open Wifi fan and be let down by a non-existent boyfriend signal Read

them

to

sleep

Open your jar of fears right before dawn

Let them chain you to the bed for two minutes Sniff them Open your hands on the porch where peace is cold Open spaces are much warmer full of people

Open bedrooms are essential for self-discovery

Tipaza, 36.593252 N 2.445456 E Imagination balloons over the trading capital.

No ring on my finger yet but the Duke of Gloucester Gave me permission to be married on farmland Sedan wearing a white dress

Cake is ancient

Cake of confederacy

Cake causing mass influx

47

Lights sagging through pecan tree

Not enough towels for the squirrels

The youngest child is the pool party thief Take our uncertain wedding pictures in the woods Take our clothes

Take metropolitan measure of guests.

Coastal vows

Freshly cut grass sufficient evidence That everybody ate well

Dressing in the little bedroom Cavalry in whicker baskets

Bowties floating on the river water Imam with rocks in his hair

Uses a day to pick them out Classical music where we will sleep on daffodil bulbs Demographics of not enough toilets to go around

Who will choose which mass residential surplus of White people to bar from the wedding?

If we only invite two neighbors

We can share them with cousinsistersbrothers Only bake cookies for the aunts

External links to villages of stone tools High heels and fancy dresses

Blankets to float downstream on

Blankets of silver

Blankets of Englishmen

48

Everyone must wash his or her hands with soap

Sip sawdust before having ice cream.

Always take them to play HOUSE for initiation.

The first guy didn’t make it through The two days you kept him there

Cried leggings the hardest

Thermals the loudest

He had turned out to be shitty gloves

Possessing-stools Possessing-legs

Possessing-red-palms

You breathed him.

House creaks forward Crushes him a little

Leans back and murders you

Thumbs mattered way too much Coughing up the vacation home in the wall Coughing up your metal couches

Coughing up between the wood and into the floor.

Heavy bodies.

Serious-conversations

Serious-fear-in-throat

Serious-reconsidering-of-snow

Seen your room

He had touched your counter

Eaten your cookies

49

Forgot to be yours.

Always take them to play HOUSE for initiation.

Plovdiv, 42. 14678 N 24.75094 E Wind caught in my scarf So many birds

The tornado of two

thousand and twelve years Blurring houses It missed our home

Forest with poetry under root Makes my ribcage whistle Yes, invisible dogs

Ripped through this section of woods

Scoop out the sky Buy three homes and

an extra asphalt driveway Biking across gravel

Love the gaps in the trees, ghosts of gusts Pour through the—

Never go pedaling alone

50

It is safer on the roads

In deer colors even if enticed Empty rickety fields

Or you might get shot Don’t go into the forest dressed Like a stray bullet casing

White hunters can’t tell Black faces Apart from tree trunks And bare branches

So avoid fallen leaves Riding spokes with cousins Break cables that own ponds And cold wind

Who will kiss them warm Discovering rich homes

With hovering mosquitoes

Don’t be a seat-post tie

Daffodils the tire and the rim together

Hold the lives you collect from the plantations On the way back home

Solin, 43.538469 N 16.473956 E Arrive wearing tire marks on shoulders

Bags of sweaters, hair ties, and children’s movies All girls from East Coast sitting on porch

51

The rest of bloodline will show up eventually My siblings and I watch “violent things”

They brought The Sound of Music with them Everyone excited to fill wood with noise

What shall we do first Exclamation Mark No one wants to sleep in his or her own bed

Rooms are separated by grand chasm named Bathroom-With-Spiders-Clinging-to-Edges We can’t possibly stay up with Bathroom Separating us Exclamation Mark Teamwork to transform floor

From pathway to place of mattress Parents didn’t care they got beds ALL COVERS

Wait leave something for Aunty and Grandma ALL PILLOWS

Wait aren’t those small ones SOMEONE WILL BE PILLOWLESS That’s all right I’ll sacrifice myself

GET THE SHEETS FROM THE CLOSET

Who is going to sleep on couch cushions?

I WANT TO SLEEP NEXT TO ______ We can’t all get what we want I AM NOT WARM ENOUGH

Cuddle next to somebody then

52

We actually never went to sleep

Is that what we tell Mom and Dad?

Whisper gosh darn it you’ll wake them up

Stop laughing so loud you sound like a horse Are we allowed to have midnight snacks

In your house or do we wait until breakfast?

The light from the fridge will hurt your eyes

She took all the covers and hogged the pillow Oh my God someone farted I’m going to die Don’t use the Lord’s name in vain

Jelly-fish marks laced up their legs Hospital or no hospital Pee on it, should help

Get Ummie she can look at it

Never going into the North river again Sun hasn’t split the surface of the trees

Bare feet gentle on splintering gray wood Invisible footsteps avoid the piles of

Disintegrated clam powder mixed with seagull shit Yarn around pier post dangling, lost tooth in water We take turns sitting in the folding chair Sometimes husband and wife together Sometimes-solitary-sibling

Never young children alone

53

Consistently strutted upon by seagulls No one has ever come to visit

And not left without a canoe ride

One foot in and we become Pocahontases Even the boys become Pocahontasirs Expert steering at age 10

Even in families there are cliques The reunions don’t fool me

Salamis, 35.185522 N 33.90238 E Smudged fingers with

splintered nails inspire me to write about white fire

Kindling is a damaged heart some shattered wishes

a little hope as hot as white fire Wood stove ashes for eyelids

this house means knees are stable we are unthreatened by white fire

Drape lazily over my father’s shoulders I know he will teach my husband how to make white fire

The sky screams clouds dawn after dawn like my imagination is tinged with the colors of white fire

54

Open the edges of my father’s lessons

lodged in my toe crevasses

they will never be burned by white fire Unread newspapers

sunlit faces distracted stares

stolen by contained, flickering late night white fire

Ayah wrote her father’s favorite piece of prose while dancing on orange pulsing tree skin unscathed by the whitest fire

55

Untitled Nada Al Mosa

56

Get Off My Lawn Tzy Jiun Tan

You people with your cheerful laughter

Your half-hearted jokes and your synchronized steps Your self-help books and favorite Ted-talks on selfappreciation

Your reusable coffee mugs and unlimited enthusiasm for life Your neon-colored, mandala-patterned leggings and bright Nike shoes

Your career goals and mass-produced entertainment

Your blinding positivity, your support groups, your modern adaptations of Shakespeare

Don’t ask me how my day was or How life is going

I have nothing to offer except my waving fist Stop ringing my doorbell I’ll call the police on you I’m warning you

Don’t fly your kite or bounce your ball on my turf Let me have my tea in peace

57

Faceless Flower Nada Al Mosa

58

The Dancer: A Villanelle Zoe Jane Patterson

My head is a cloud of hairspray and bleach My arm- a paper’s edge in the spotlight

Inside me there are bones I cannot reach.

Heart flutters like the insect we did teach

Caught in the glass; I shine into their sight

My head is a cloud of hairspray and bleach.

After the show I know that they will preach.

Steer me wasting away from public eye

Inside me there are bones I cannot reach.

They ask me did you eat, their words a screech But ink and glitter pool over my eyes.

My head is a cloud of hairspray and bleach.

Try diet coke, a cube of cheese or peach.

The world is black with little stars ‌ knees shake-Inside me there are bones I cannot reach.

Did you notice how small my wrists were white?

The lightest. Did you notice how they cheered?

My head is a cloud of hairspray and bleach Inside me there are bones I cannot reach.

59

Dementia I Maria Paula Calderon Acon Watercolor on paper 60

Goals and Stuff Shamma Al Bastaki but I just kept walking following not stalking just following two adolescent nerds in matching star wars shirts one with yellow braces the kind that looks like icky plaque from a distance they were typical nerds movie nerds the stereotype come alive in the form of two blubbery mushroom cut crane necked peachfuzz pubescents fourteen or fifteen waddling about on 6th ave debating the purpose of life the meaning of life the reason we

were alive dodging still sticky chewing gum blobs on the sidewalk yeah but I feel like the purpose of life is to HAVE a purpose like goals and stuff yeah but like what does that

61

even mean like having a vision and knowing what you wanna do but that’s dumb I love philosophy but in reality it’s much harder to think about the meaning of life but like if you search for life’s purpose and you find the thing you wanna do and have support you have a purpose my purpose right now is to write a book if you wanted to do it just do it and accept that there is no one purpose in this whole life like stop hiding it’s so dumb to think about it like people who think about life like sure this is my purpose that’s like shitty though like imagine a middle aged

62

white man looking in the mirror everyday and being like I hate my life what is my purpose and— the subway took them away

63

Dancing Flames Mariam Raslan

64

The Poet Adele Bea Cipste Pastel and pencil on paper 65

Lilies Nada Al Mosa

66

Abecedarian on the Limitations of Language Rosy Tahan

Afterthoughts are all we have, I’d like to tell you. We’d like to

Believe that we all think in a specific language, that our neurons Carry whole words and phrases

Directly to our mouths to then meander to the intended recipient’s Ears. But that doesn’t explain the frustration of being unable to Find the right word or why we memorize the

Gist of what someone has said but rarely retain the sentence verbatim.

Honesty and horror nestle where I hold you,

In abstraction, a place they cannot stay long, but there Jesus is a stream of light you cannot package and Killing is not a present tense. I think words, I think Language is an overworked seismograph. We are Miniscule in this world and we

Need to refine our communion. Even lying On your chest I’m not

Privy to your earthquakes, though I feel them Quiet as wars in faraway cities

Ravaged by words. It’s a miracle I understand this Staccato of speech so unlike

The flow of blood in your veins or

Under bridges in cities belonging to the Voiceless. I’d like to drown in What was before, I’d like to X-ray the planet, I’d like

You to understand why I’m quiet as you Zip up your pants and leave.

67

Consumerist Tzy Jiun Tan

People of Kuala Lumpur forget time the moment they step foot in malls,

where air condition blows so cold it freezes time. Today they go in young.

Tomorrow they come out old. They print their happiness on receipts and leave it in shopping bags, which will be thrown out and gathered in a growing garbage pile.

I hope someday this pile will collapse on the city.

68

Roots Nada Al Mosa

69

Ode to Socks

Zoe Jane Patterson The clothesline contraption is like an Umbrella inside out; A pole

Grown from the ground

With four metal tree limbs and Twangy cable between.

Ancient clothespins quiver in a spring breeze Still wet from recent rain.

In a day already lived

Small tennis shoes shuffle on the Drizzled grass.

Fingers with nails smaller than the end of a pencil Grasp a peg.

Fumble with damp fabric.

On a cobwebbed line a sock is hung to dry.

Then another. The lowest cable reached on tiptoe.

A grin on ruddy child-cheeks.

On this day the rain fills boots left

On a sopping deck and scares away the birds.

A lesser-sized mind can still conceive of flying.

Brains grow and skulls expand and we learn how to lie But the lose how to dream.

70

Under small feet it would seem

The world moves at startling paces.

Large eyes widen easier when our gaze is directed At everything. With wonder-Slurping the world.

Striped socks cover childhood’s feet To keep them warm.

Mismatched because it’s more interesting that way And dirty because they’ve been playing.

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Staged Fright Tzy Jiun Tan

You stand in between roads: one busy; one not so.

The street light is above you like a spotlight.

You are center stage. Dash!

Your audience cheer your speed with their honks.

Wet with tears your face contorts. It screams! Then sliced off!

You right arm did a little pirouette round the joint. Snap! Lift off! Slam down!

Your two eyeballs wiggle out of their snug nest. Kiss the nerves goodbye and off they go! They might have splattered on a windshield, moving wipers paint awesome red, then roll off like deformed marbles.

Your front teeth let go—they’ve had enough! Then they shoot off somewhere.

Your tongue tenses, relaxes, gives up, and one half splats somewhere.

Good riddance!

Your left foot playfully rotates like a merry-go-round and crack! Goes soft.

Your lungs deflate like a balloon, punctured by your pokey ribs. Squish squish.

Blood enthusiastically spurts everywhere like a water fountain accompanied by cars honking—a musical performance!

Your body folds into a bow on the divider.

And then the curtain call.

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KZ Luis Carlos Soto

73

Wo Durbar / Aik Durbar / Ye Durbar Hafsa Ahmed

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The Rock Kevin Mokhtar

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Long Distance Tzy Jiun Tan

Wheels underneath taxi meters that’ll be 30 dirhams madam keep the

change we liked it like that on the leather seats burning sakura candles smell of old shoes and musk—

Painful clawing period blood gliding down the sink an IUD it hurt so

much I fainted my friend brought me hot chocolate and stroked my hair I thought only of your face—

Within myself quick movements soft moments gentle nudges pushing forward a push and a pull—

The joint at Beirut an Airbnb twirling on Hamra street singing atop Kazbegi feeling cold in KLCC pigging out on greasy noodles on the streets of

Penang fighting to loud music walking 6.2km for a mojito sleeping on foreign beds listening to each other’s foreign accents—

I want to be buried next to you please plant orchids on my grave that’s

ridiculous child my mother boiling chicken soup this will help ease your pain drink up—

Buy me nothing your eyes all I want a glimmer a happy spark a prickly

warmth goosebumps from coolness of your toes on mine you will need a flight ticket for that—

Pills left in the drawer thoughts spiraling out of control long runs you on the streets me on the treadmill crying too much on Thursday nights— Anger sorry sorrows you looked like everybody else god help us I am

leaning over a toilet bowl I forgot my hair-tie hurling the sandwich across the room giggling when I couldn’t catch it—

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Laws (Erasure of Sartre’s The Emotions) Shamma Al Bastaki

77

Kestane Ethan David Lee

78

Pass by Romance Paula Brečak

We dream in ships Talk in flight Write with our feet A pass by romance A one week the one A whole life in a glass of sour whiskey We have learned how to fall in love In a night How to move on in one bus ride We don’t hold any grudges Speak of our lovers as teachers Never call them lovers

Our mothers do not understand The secret to not being lonely Is just keep on going We name people after cities In languages we’ve never spoken In tongues we’ll never understand

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We’ve said “I love you” In more dialects than we can count But never out loud We hold hearts like maps Paths and road signs We do not know how to read Moments stolen in time Initials scratched into airport terminals Fairytales where midnight never comes

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Untitled Nada Al Mosa

81

Daniel in the Desert Jamie Uy

EATING BREAKFAST IN THE kitchen is like trying to move in a

sarcophagus. Harsh, hard light from an overhead lamp makes the milk

look filmy, almost embalmed. Daniel has to make an effort to breathe as he shuffles from the cupboard to the chair. Even with the floor-to-ceiling glass doors hinged open—begging the sea breeze to come in—the

humidity in the apartment stays put at stifling. Every room swelters with despair; the thickness of it seeping through the dusty walls, almost too much for the floorboards to take.

In the bathroom, there is a broken shower-head with only two settings,

hot and scalding. The plastic caddy beside it holds a small tube of mint

toothpaste that is Daniel’s favorite, cooling and soothing, but even that is running out; it has been folded over, squeezed to its last jolt of gel.

In the living room, there is a desert that will not stop growing. The coarse

sand glistens under the glare of a small sun, suspended where the ceiling fan used to be. The dunes remain unfazed by even the most violent of

gusts swelling from sunrise to sunset. They never fail to rise at least an

inch higher before Daniel turns in for the night. First they buried the family photos, then they engulfed the dining table, then the television. Now the sand has begun to encroach the bedroom—Daniel lets it be.

During the last few months, Daniel has learned to walk half-held back in the sand. The living room is airless. When he stands for too long in the desert, his lips begin to crack and his mouth becomes too dry to say anything of meaning.

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Daniel is always unnerved by the freshness of the sky when he leaves for work in the morning. The clear blue hangs over the apartment building like a misplaced picture.

DANIEL IS AN ARTIST of few words; his gray, sunken eyes match his ratty

shirts. When he does speak, his beard smothers his sentences. (If he were a better artist, perhaps the beard would have been remembered fondly as his quirk.) Daniel is also a chronic sleep-talker. He kicks the bedsheets off when he mutters intangibles about his brother, and wakes up, suddenly,

in sweat. Ever since he was young he has been extraordinarily sensitive to temperature.

The heat makes this moratorium seem unreal. Reconciling “before the

plane crash” and “after” gives him headaches. Daniel goes in and out of

his days blinking in the push and pull of air. He feels half-way human. An ache has wormed its way into the marrow of his bones and the sponges

of his brain, burning his blood. He imagines creating a retrospective of his missing holes.

He moved to this country to be closer to the crash site. He frowns at

himself now when he glimpses his sallow skin in the mirror. What did he

expect, that he would find his brother swimming in the sea, not drowning but waving? In his free time, he drinks cheap wine and crumples up

Classifieds ads for teaching art. He ignores the neighbors’ complaints

that they are beginning to find sand in the elevator. He stays, doggedly persistent in the blistering heat.

DANIEL HAS THIS ROUTINE; that by midnight he phones his mum, to tell her he’s found nothing, yet. After work, he scours the underbelly of the

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city for his brother’s cocky grin, his lucky shark tooth necklace, anything that might be his. He gets used to recounting small stories about him,

feeling like a fool. His brother never fails to wear him down. Throughout it all the desert grows. Daniel gets in the habit of writing down what he remembers from the last twenty years on the margins of yesterday’s

newspapers; any scrap of perfumed memory to preserve his brother. He writes down things like this: 6 years old, Jonah and I skinning our knees playing Airplanes; 14 years old, watching Jonah shoot hoops from the sidelines; 25, eating cold turkey at Thanksgiving, waiting for Jonah.

He rewinds the crash video again and again as the sand shifts under his feet.

Daniel picks up the phone one day and cringes, instantly, holding it apart from his ear. The world spins on and on without him. He’s gotten used to hearing but not-quite, seeing but not-really. Black box, hell’s gate, little words that won’t escape. He wonders, why does this still bother him?

HE SINKS DOWN in his Salvation Army couch sometimes and wonders why he majored in art history and not engineering instead. His mother

says he’s always been sensitive. His mother likes making excuses. He

dreams of fighting the whales that swallowed up his brother, demanding

they spit him back whole. Whenever he takes a step and sees the mound of sand piling up in his living room, he buries a little bit more of himself there.

WHEN AT LAST they find Jonah, Daniel has to check him three times.

It feels like Sunday School, him playing St. Thomas again, doubting the resurrection. The doctors have called it a miracle. The demand that he stick his hands in his wounds, just to feel that terrible pulsing of blood

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around useless muscle, almost escapes, unbidden, from his tongue. He

struggles to make himself look like he hasn’t spent the last few months in bitter, hot exile, and that he’s capable of taking this broken man back to

heal him. The nurses almost stop him from entering the IC unit, because he looks bewildered and he’s causing the ventilation to stop—

Jonah is awake when he slams the door open. He has always been the

first at everything, so it figures that he would be the first to die and come back. He looks like Lazarus, sick and battered, but his first words to him are a terrible joke about the desert. Daniel almost collapses.

ON JONAH’S LAST DAY at the hospital, he asks, “What did you do while I was gone?”

“Made a desert.” Daniel, for the life of him, cannot lie.

“Oh,” Jonah’s eyes are bright around the scars. “Like we used to when we were younger?”

“Yes,” Jonah falls back into a dreamless sleep. Minutes go by, and he

does not disappear. Squares of light rest on his bed-sheets. Daniel stares at him and pictures a plane aflame, a small island, a sea—and somehow all he can really think about with the buzzing noise in his head is how he will have to find a way to get rid of the heat when Jonah comes home.

“The deserts I build are much bigger now,” Daniel says quietly.

He does not expect Jonah to understand the desert he’s in, just as he

doesn’t expect to understand the storm Jonah was in, but they’re both here. Lungs breathing in the same cool, foreign air.

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WHEN HE RETURNS to his apartment later that evening, Daniel turns

the key in quietly and stands in the doorway for a moment. He takes in

what he has made. The sand is as high as ever, up to his ankles, but for now the insects have scuttled away. The sun beats down on the room

relentlessly, reflecting spots of light into the dark windows. He knows that if he stands in the center of the room the heat will strip him clean. If he closes his eyes he can still see the desert for miles and miles.

But if he focuses he can also see the winding path back to the house by

the woods where he grew up with Jonah, with its heirloom flower patches and the vegetable plots. When he wakes tomorrow, he will bring his

brother back, crown him with sunflowers and pop a cherry tomato into his dry mouth. His father will embrace the prodigal son with more tenderness than he deserves; his mother will weep like Martha. If he closes his eyes he can feel every individual grain of sand, every dimension of guilt and fear and longing coming full circle. A breeze has started to pick up, rustling the curtains with intent.

That night, Daniel dreams of rain.

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Echoes of Faith Asma Balfaqih

87

Oceans

Vamika Sinha

the sea was my first friend.

i was three years old when it taught me what colours were—

the silver of still waters at dawn,

the cotton blue of late afternoon, a copper sheet at sunset, the ink of waves at 10pm.

the sea was my first teacher.

it taught me how to count—one … two … three … the ocean has a music

older than our bones in the sand.

a rhythm more ancient than the pulse in our necks. in the evenings, i would sit by the hem of its skirt.

my father would bring the fishing line

and we would reach into the ocean’s lap for gifts, return home with dinner

spend the days washing salt out of our fingernails.

the sea taught me the most ordinary of loves there is: friendship. of trust—give and take, give and take

out and in, rise and fall, tide beneath my toes, tide beneath my feet,

tide and its music.

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and to feel.

the sea taught me what it is to feel. peace is that blue womb

where everything is all at once meaningless and meaningful. happiness is the spiderwebs of sunlight on morning waves.

sadness is the tide coming out, coming in. a tune without feeling.

and i learnt from the sea what fury is.

a different kind of fury than my father’s

when i steal an extra piece of fish. this kind of fury

could make the world stop breathing, my mother said the earth is a clay pot

but we won’t stop baking it. she tells me

nature is sweating from the heat, it weeps with fatigue. the oceans threaten to tip

like tears from under eyelids. far away, brazil shaves off its beard

and china smokes a cigarette.

i ask her, what am i supposed to do with these fairy tales? she takes my hand and tells me the ocean is boiling.

don’t you believe it?

one day, this womb will break.

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but we will not be born again. today, it is quiet.

mother always says be afraid of too much silence. this earth was made for music.

in the air there is a violence. the sea trembles like the mind of prince hamlet.

the dogs and chickens are perched on higher ground. eyes wide open, mouths agape, while my mother stares at the water. for

once this amnion

of the world ruptures,

we will not be born again.

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North Padre Island Ethan David Lee

91

Tusk Maria Paula Calderon Acon Pencil on paper

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Roach

Shalini Corea Cockroach: I like the dark. I like being inside among the cutlery and under the cupboards and hidden and quiet and safe. Humans—humans are the light in my life. They shine their torches and scream their screams, and I know they’re trying to frighten me and—it works. Stay still, run, stay out of reach: all three at once? What do I do? They come closer, or often a

replacement human comes closer, the other seemingly shaken? Often still shrieking. Probably the one to intimidate while the other strikes. And you feel the horrible irony of having darkness again, darkness you love, but

only because for a moment the massive slipper blocks out the bulb before the guillotine slams down, and it’s only darkness then. The bad kind.

The kind that Aunty Anita will go through forever. The end to Appachchi

Kamal. I saw the sign of no hope once. Head up, darkness rimmed with

light, no slam came. The human was summoned quickly by her black box, called by the light, saved by the light. My life weighed the same amount— less than—the opening credits of Modern Family? Expensive. But why?

Because I eat the garbage she will throw away tomorrow?

Today is terrifying. It is close, closer than ever before. I can almost taste the poison: it is all around me, but her aim is as bad as her intentions,

and she misses over and over, the fog driving into the floor around me. I have an uplifting, but frightening, realization that if she had bothered to

pick her glasses up, I would not be alive now. Why is every day a battle?

I am tired. I do nothing to harm; I know her and what she values. Maybe

it would be better if she had just worn her glasses. Quicker. Simpler. But base urges govern me, I’m used to them, and they They Want

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To Live I don’t move—she can’t know I’m alive, maybe if I stay still long enough she’ll—

Bad strategy, not now I run Towards her As if I could attack As if I had any power, as if one step couldn’t crush every fiber of me But it’s true, what they say There is something in us Something we don’t even know A weapon That scares the fucking shit out of them She screams She jumps

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She runs I hide Safe—for today I am so glad. I have things to do, arrangements to make, and I am so

glad. It’s finally my time to do something, for somebody else. (Pause.)

Who am I kidding? It’s me I’m doing it for, me and of course my to-be children. I have a purpose now, I have a— (Sound of stomping from off stage.)

What’s that? Honestly, this human can’t make up her mind about whether she should sleep until half the day is done or get up and jump around on her mat.

I have never understood her. And now that doesn’t even bother me,

because she finally won’t be my only companion—although “companion” wouldn’t be the most accurate way to put it, considering she has tried to kill me at least once a day—even when she sleeps in till the afternoon.

(Thud. Cockroach looks in the direction and then snaps out of it shaking her head.)

But, no matter, no matter, her lifestyle, her cleanliness, even her slipper: none of that has to be my main focus anymore. And I cannot wait, I cannot wait till my children are bor—

(Thud. Cockroach turns her head immediately and speaks abruptly.)

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That does not—does not sound like a yoga mat.

(She walks towards the direction of the sound. Suddenly her eyes widen in shock and she begins shaking with grief.)

No No, no, no, no, please (Stomp.)

Please You don’t know how— (Stomp, and she winces.)

This is not happening this is not true no(Stomp.)

PLEASE We’ll go away, I promise, I swear, we’ll find another house, we’ll scavenge in the dumpster, just— (Stomp) And I stay rooted to the spot—what more can I do? The sight of me will

only increase her triumph, and I don’t have the strength to protect myself.

I feel like, like, like I should go for that very reason. If my children never get the chance to live then how do I deserve to be here?

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(Two and a Half Men theme song begins from behind her. She begins laughing hysterically)

I swear, I swear, if she goes now hahaha if she goes to that damn black box to see her fucking shows now, I swear No No, you’re joking I don’t believe that bitch At least spend a moment thinking about what you’ve done AT LEAST They’re everywhere, all over here, I won’t, I can’t even say bye because they never got a chance to even exist because of you

(A huge shadow moves across the stage, and she watches it silently. The theme song ends “Men men men men, manly men, men ooohhhh.”)

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Therefore (Erasure of Sartre’s The Emotions) Shamma Al Bastaki

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A Commentary on Dualism J. Karolis Degutis

Rick sat in his kitchen, stuffing a ham sandwich into his mouth. No

thoughts were entering his head; all he was consciously experiencing was the perception of red sand through his window. After a few bites, he was

ready to go to work. He crammed some documents into his brown leather

bag without caring if they got crumpled and left his house slowly, with one shoe still untied and the middle button of his dress shirt undone.

On the bus from Lower Crater to Syrtis Major, the hub for engineering

companies, he remembered that it was almost the five-year anniversary of the procedure. He wondered how the original was doing. Rick had always despised the term “original.” He thought that both he and his

original were equal, and the term was discriminating, but there was no alternative in the English language so he kept using it. For a moment

he became interested in how his original’s life had continued after the procedure. Such thoughts had previously entered his mind, but he

applied arduous amounts of cognitive control to suppress them, fearing depressive symptoms. “I wonder if I actually married Josephine,” Rick

mumbled to himself. Failing to stop the thoughts, he began reminiscing; neuronal pathways connecting his fusiform face area with other parts of

the cortex coding for his memories activated, bringing forth vivid images

of Josephine. Rick had not seen her nor his original for the past five years.

He would most likely never see them again.

He looked out of the window, observing the newfound colony of

Transcratia. Buildings were being constructed every day to accommodate the drastically increasing population. “A few years ago, this whole place was just red dust. It’s unbelievable how much humanity can achieve,”

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Rick mumbled again. A Tesla drove by with the face of Elon Musk on the front. On its side were the words “Musk for President!”

Rick arrived on 28th Street and 5th Avenue, where there were a few

apartment complexes built for the upper class of Transcratia; most of

the people living there were originals who had decided to move to Mars for higher wages. Rick didn’t notice the financial disparity between the

originals and the copies; he had lost interest in social issues and politics since his placement on Mars.

He still had a ten-minute walk to his job. Every single morning, he passed

by the infamous fax machine station; a term that came back into use after the invention of the operation. As he was walking by, he heard the usual cries and screams of disbelief from the newcomers.

“Where am I?” screamed a young woman.

“You have just been placed onto Mars,” answered a robotic voice.

“Oh my God … Why did I do this to myself? Oh my God … Where’s my family? Where’s Joe?” Rick could hear her sobs.

“Ma’am, the original wanted this for you. Please, calm down,” the robot continued the same monotonous voice.

“What the hell do you mean by original? I am Samantha Kramer. I for some fucking reason wanted this. Take me back now! Goddammit,

Samantha, why did you do this to yourself? Oh shit … I just referred to myself in the 2nd person!”

“That’s the first step,” Rick mumbled. He slowed down, still curious to

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hear what would happen next, despite hearing similar spectacles every other day.

“SA-MAN-THA, you are already not the same as your original on Earth.

One whole minute has passed after your reconstruction here on Mars.

You and your original still share most memories, but as time passes, you will diverge further and further apart. Now please, stand up and stop crying,” the robot replied in the same cold voice.

“Ugh,” said Rick under his breath. “We should give those robots at least

some appearance of having emotions; but then again, they’ll rise up and kill us all as they did in Westworld.” It occurred to him that it was quite smart of them not to employ real human beings for this job. “No one’s

empathetic system could withstand this constant expression of suffering,” he mumbled. “Unless they’re psychopaths, of course.”

Rick remembered his own experience with the fax machine. Some of the memories came from the original: lying down on a table next to a

large machine and being put to sleep by the doctors. As he found out

later, the machine used high powered magnets to change the magnetic spin of each atom with an odd atomic weight. Based on the rate the

protons realigned to the magnetic field after the specific pulse sequence was turned off, the type of atom in a specific area could be determined.

Since most of the atoms in a human are carbon and hydrogen, both

being or having odd numbered isotopes, these atoms in the body could be accurately determined and mapped, while the rest were filled in by

models that had been developed based on previous patients. Hence, after a long ten-hour scan, every single atom in Rick’s body was characterized by location, connectivity, and type, and uploaded to the cloud. This file

was then sent through radio waves to Mars where the fax machine picked it up and reconstructed Rick. At that moment, his first memories formed.

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Rick remembered his shock upon gaining consciousness. Josephine

was the last memory that he had of Earth; her smiling and waving at him as the anesthetic in his bloodstream slowly took effect. That moment

had become a flashbulb memory: the colors of the lab, the smell of the

room, the light buzzing sound of the halogen lamp above him, even the

tactile sensation of the spongey bed he was lying on. This memory must have reconsolidated while he was on Mars reminiscing about Earth. He wondered if the original remembered it in the same vivid way.

Rick, still unable to control the thoughts that came to his working

memory, finally stopped thinking. He quickened his walk and was soon at the steps of his office building. Parked outside was a large black car and

five officers standing beside it. One walked towards Rick and asked, “are you Rick Stanislawski?”

“Yes, sir. Is there a problem?”

“No problem at all. You’re our lucky winner! You’re heading back home

to Earth for a week! You’ll get to meet your original! We have already told your boss, so don’t worry about missing work.”

Rick was perplexed. He had been told of the yearly lottery, the winner

of which would get a week-long trip back to Earth, but he had forgotten about it. No one he knew had ever won it, and the winners were never

announced, just informed individually during their anniversary. Rick even began to wonder whether this was some kind of scam, but the number

of personnel present told him to trust the officer; a usual fruition of a type of cognitive fallacy related to authority figures. Also, the officer had a

trustworthy face: high eyebrows, a slightly perceivable positive parabola in his lips even when he was not smiling, and prominent cheekbones.

Rick’s amygdala, a part the emotion brain pathway, had activated responding to the salience of this individual.

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“We’re leaving now! Are you ready?” the officer asked.

“I guess so. Am I actually physically going there or will I be copied or reconstructed?”

“You’ll get to experience space travel! Not many people get to do that

these days! Won’t be needing the copier or fax machine stations,” grinned the officer.

Rick was cautious of the officer’s overly welcoming smile. He wondered

whether the officer was an original or not, but he put those thoughts out of his mind. For the first time in his existence as a being, he was going home. Or at least, the place he thought was home. *** Rick took a last look at the Red Planet from the window of his spacecraft.

“I guess I’ll unfortunately have to see you again soon,” he mumbled.

Being in hibernation, Rick experienced none of the five-week journey from Mars to Earth: his consciousness was completely off, as it was during the operation. When he woke up, he was on a chair in a green field. In the

distance was a forest, and a playground atop a cliff. The spaceship was nowhere to be seen.

Rick remembered this area: this was where he, or at least his original, had grown up. He had not seen green trees in five years. Mars did not have

any plants; all of the oxygen was produced by mechanical photosynthetic machines, which were much more efficient than natural lifeforms. Rick

had heard that these machines had been introduced in Brazil and Russia due to the ongoing deforestation and decrease in Earth’s oxygen levels.

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The officer from Mars was there, looking at him with the same huge grin.

“Welcome home! Your original told us that you’d appreciate seeing some nature and, of course, this memorable place! So here we are!”

Rick had not felt this amount of pleasure in a long time. Neuronal

connections in the ventral stream of his visual pathway were firing, reinstating this location and all the memories connected to it, then transferring to the reward pathways and generating his euphoric

subjective experience. Rick had never been physically present in this field, but he still retained most of the connections the original had five years ago and presumably still had.

Rick inhaled. There were hints of fresh cut grass and salt from the

ocean nearby. In the distance was a flock of seagulls, wailing as they

made sinusoidal flight patterns towards and away from the water. His

nonconscious mind, embraced by the multisensory stimuli, brought a

vivid memory rushing back: Rick was throwing a Frisbee around with his childhood friend Steve, as his father cut grass with an old lawnmower.

This memory did not hold objective value, but the emotions that engulfed him were of great magnitude. He remembered playing basketball on the

small concrete court outside, and his father cheering him on as he scored.

These memories were mere reinstatements of the same neuronal patterns that were active during the experience itself, reactivated by the mere smell of the grass.

“This didn’t even happen,” Rick thought to himself. “At least, not to me.”

These memories had not been activated for a long time, since he had

never experienced the right stimulus. Until now. He breathed in, feeling the memories were truly his.

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*** The meeting was held in an Irish pub by the name of Donnegan’s, recommended by the original.

The original walked in dressed in a suit with a light brown scarf wrapped around his neck. He was smoking a pipe.

“You smoke?” Rick blurted. It was the first thing that came to his mind.

He was surprised by the immediate discrepancy between himself and the original.

“You don’t? I knew that stress from the new job was the main cause.

Goddamnit,” the original replied with a microexpressive frown.

“You’re not an engineer anymore?”

“I work in consulting. It pays well,” said the original.

Rick sat there for a few moments not knowing what to say. Silence had

never felt this strange yet calming; he was sitting with a person who knew and shared most of his experiences.

“So how’s life on Mars?” the original asked Rick.

“What do you mean? Don’t you know? Don’t you have some kind of

connection to me; a metaphysical one? Don’t we share a soul and the soul inhabits you? That’s what they told us after we were placed onto Mars.”

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“How the hell could I possibly know? We were the exact same person

only the instant you were copied to Mars, but now our lives have diverged and, hence … we have changed. Most of our memories are still the

same. That’s why both of us love this bar. But in no physical way could I ever ‘sense’ what happens to you! You and I are separate biological

organisms; we have separate neuronal connections in our brains. That is why I began smoking and quit my engineering job, while you did not.”

Rick was both confused and convinced.

The original continued, “Imagine a machine that can learn some new

code by itself. Artificial intelligence, essentially. Now imagine you copy

this machine part by part and build a new one. The first machine will in

no way sense what the other machine is experiencing even if it’s an exact replica of the first. Same with you and me. We are nothing but biological machines that can encode new information with neurons. It’s as simple

as that. There is no function or behavior that needs some kind of soul to explain. You are as much human as I am.”

Rick didn’t know what to say. “This theory kills all of the romance behind life,” he said finally.

The original laughed. “Yes, it does. But who needs romance when you attempt to understand objective reality? It eradicates the lies

that we tell ourselves. Humans are in no way special in comparison

to other organisms. We just evolved a slightly higher intelligence that has allowed us to develop language, efficiently communicate with

each other, colonize Earth and, now, the universe. Actually, I would

disagree that it kills romance,” the original amended. “The world that

we live in provides greater awe than religion or spirituality. Look at the cogs of the universe that we have uncovered: kinesin motor proteins

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walking on our microtubules in our cells, Feynman diagrams predicting

unobservable virtual particles forming and annihilating themselves, small genetic mutations that when combined over millions of years lead to the

formation of new species and their adaptation to new environments. That is what’s actually romantic about the world!”

“Did you marry Josephine?” Rick asked. He was done listening to the original’s philosophical views.

“Yes. I proposed to her a month after you were copied to Mars. We have two children,” the original answered.

“I’m a father,” Rick mumbled to himself, loudly enough for the original to hear.

The original laughed for a while. “A genetic test would say that, yes.”

Rick’s mind flooded with depressing thoughts of his lack of

accomplishment. His original was married, had children, and worked

in a high paying job. His life was everything Rick had hoped for since childhood.

Recognizing his own facial expressions of sadness on their shared face, the original said, “tell me about your life on Mars. How’s the job?”

“The job’s fine. We’re literally building the colony from the bottom up.

Around a hundred thousand people already live in Lower Crater and Syrtis Major combined. It feels nice to be part of such a historic event.” It was

the only reason for Rick’s existence, and in the depths of his thoughts, he recognized that.

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“What about your love life? Did you find anyone special?”

“For the first few years on Mars, I could only think of Josephine. You have

no idea how difficult it is to be placed into a brand-new place with all your former connections cut off. Imagine that a month before you proposed to her, you were transported to a new planet without any possibility of contacting her. Try to imagine how you would feel.”

The original fell silent.

“After a few years I got over Josephine, but it has left a mark. And, as you know, humans living on Mars cannot have children.” The scientific tests

on whether a fetus can develop properly in Mars’ gravity and atmosphere had not yielded conclusive results, so a full ban was still imposed. “You

know I have always wanted to be a father. So now, I only focus on work.”

The original’s eyes were lowered, seemingly staring at his half-finished

pint of Guinness. After a long silence, he took another sip of the molten bread beverage and looked up.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“It’s okay. Really. See, since my creation, I kept telling myself that I must

make as much as I can of the opportunity given to me … by you, I guess.

The opportunity of existence. I cannot be angry at you. Without you, I would not be an individual.”

Rick recognized how Stockholm-Syndromic he sounded, but he meant what he said. Just like individuals cannot blame their parents for genes that predispose them to certain diseases, Rick could not blame his original for the memories that he inherited from him.

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The original took a long breath. “I think it’s time for another beer.” *** By the time Rick and the original finished their respective fifth pint of beer, they were highly and equally intoxicated.

“You should come over to my place” the original exclaimed. “Come meet the family!”

Rick accepted immediately, being in a happy state of mind. The alcohol was inhibiting most of his frontal lobe decision-making areas.

The original’s apartment was completely unfamiliar to Rick. The original

must have moved here after he had been copied. With his half-functioning mind Rick noticed how big the place was. There was a staircase leading

up to the second floor right next to the entrance, and redwood engravings around the top of the walls. On the right side was a hallway hung with

photographs. He remembered a few of them. There was one of Josephine and the original after one of their first nights out. Rick remembered the night perfectly, especially how his initial insecurity faded with every second with her.

Rick dropped the thought from his working memory using the last remaining cognitive control reserve.

“Nice place you got here. I guess they really do pay you good money,” he exclaimed, turning to the original.

“Yeah, yeah … It’s not bad! I bought it a year ago! Josephine and I

needed a new place after the kids were born!” The original’s drunken

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shouting bounced around the redwood and marble, echoing throughout the apartment. Rick heard footsteps on the stairs, and a figure emerged into his left visual hemi-field.

She looked exactly as he remembered her: long blonde hair, green eyes, and a round face that looked like it was always blushing. Now, as he

stared at her for what felt like an eternity, Josephine’s pink face turned pale. She stopped in the middle of the stairs, her eyes making quick saccadic movements between the two Ricks.

The original looked at her, finally realizing his mistake in bringing Rick

home. Josephine turned and slowly ascended the stairs without saying anything.

“Honey, wait!” shouted the original. He moved towards the stairs, then

stopped and looked back at Rick. “Sorry, Rick. I think it’s time for you to go. We still have a whole week, so I—I guess I’ll see you later.”

Rick was left alone staring at the staircase. Then he turned around and left the apartment.

*** Rick walked down the cold and strangely familiar streets of his home

town. His eyes were low, staring at the pavement that passed by him as his legs moved without conscious control. He clenched his fists and his insular pain pathways fired as he reimaged Josephine’s reaction. A tear ran down his face.

No complete sentences formed in his mind. He could hear himself reiterating in his working memory’s phonological loop, “useless, incompetent, worthless.”

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His depressive state increased—the causality being the unfortunate end

to the evening, the large amounts of alcohol that he had consumed, and

the reasoning, rational and irrational, that had followed, combined with his devastation. He felt unwanted, an alien in the world of other humans who had real relationships.

Rick kept walking; he had the map of his town ingrained in his brain,

though he had never physically been there. He approached the cliff top

playground he had seen sixteen hours ago. He had memories of himself playing with other children on the seesaw there, now rusty and broken into two.

He breathed in the fresh cold air and regained full consciousness.

Yet his consciousness held no thought nor attention; a state-of-mind

unachievable for most. For a brief moment, he existed separately from his memories, experiencing only the present.

Without hesitation, without emotion, he walked towards the fence

surrounding the playground and stepped over it in one large stride. He

looked down without seeing the bottom, only hearing waves crashing into the rocks. Then he looked towards the horizon. Unlike on Mars, there was no red reflection from the dust, only complete darkness. He placed his

right foot on the edge of the cliff and shifted his weight forwards, taking his last step.

*** Five individuals stood over his body. “Damn, this one took a while. They usually kill themselves in the first few hours of being on Earth, without even meeting their original,� exclaimed

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the officer who had accompanied Rick to Earth. “Ech, but good riddance.

His productivity numbers have decreased drastically over the past six

months. Thank God for our lottery program. It’s quite easy to get rid of these copies without making a big political fuss.”

“You should tell Rick that the copy left for Mars. Come up with an excuse.

He doesn’t need to know of his suicide,” the officer ordered two of the four men next to him.

“And you two,” he turned to the others, “dispose of the body somewhere.”

He grinned. “Maybe just dump it into the sea.”

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Human 20140111 Matthew Tan

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Day of Judgment Reem Almenhali

you notice them staring at you

from behind their fake lashes and colored contacts you smile politely as you soak up

every bit of confidence their eyes offer you you, who were told to feel guilty and offended by a man’s gaze, love how women stare you receive stabbing looks

sharper than the heels of their Louboutins you walk in and out of the gatherings room

expecting compliments to get louder as you exit the door you come back, head towards the center of the room, ask the host to relax, “I’ll pass the coffee” you say.

carrying a tray that smells of spiced caffeine you get asked, multiple times, if you’re engaged

by mothers measuring your proportions from every side you, who check all the boxes of their boxing up standards bust size, hips, hair texture, tone … respond with a no.

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you are then told about a son or two, “wealthy” “decent”—sexist, racist—

you remember last summer, when a relative proposed for her son the son suggested moving to a women’s college nearby you remember his cousin, who proposed too

asking you to not teach your kids your mother’s tongue you glance at women throned on white sofas

where deeds are discussed, mouths are open you hear them talk about your close friend, a male you posted a video of yesterday

you are impressed by how many synonyms the word disgraceful has in their book

you look at the corners of the gathering room

where girls covered in jewelry, play anxiously with their engagement rings you judge them too, as you hear repeated conversations about plastic surgeries and expensive vacations

you, who refuse to get baptized with melted gold see them as rigid figures plated with one shiny color

you look at them, they look at you you pity them, they pity you

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Free and Wild Alice Huang

1

One thing I realized three weeks after moving to New York City is that I

see more people crying while walking on the streets than any other city that I have been to.

The first girl I saw wore thick eyeliner behind a pair of wire rimmed

glasses that seemed even thicker with her swollen eyes. She stumbled as she tried to talk to the pale, slim male walking next to her as we passed

by each other in front of a closed flower store. Her teary face was free and wild.

The second woman cried a lot more softly. She was wearing a loose

dress, the color of dusk. Her tears were silent but when her eyes met mine she did not flee.

2

My discrete math professor speaks with a strong Vietnamese accent. He paces in front of the classroom the whole time and writes down every

trivial thing with extra large messy handwriting on the dirty blackboard.

His left hand constantly scratches a spot on his neck, touching the nonexistent itch.

He has a smile in his eyes throughout the entire two-hour class, as if after years he is still fascinated by the simplest mathematical proof he must have demonstrated too many times already.

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3

I was sitting on the floor of a small church on Thompson Street watching a middle-aged woman spin. Her blouses and pants were loose, with the same bright, silky red, and her shoes were brown, soft, and slim.

She wore a frantic look in her eyes. At the beginning I interpreted her

movements as the representation of aging, the circulation of her hip as

joint pain, but as the music turned into a forest festival in the Amazon, her leaps were that of an eleven-year-old girl at her end of year recital. She

kept her frantic eyes all the way, from withering to puberty. Then the lights went o. Applause. The lights went on again, softly, and she faced her

palms at each other in front of her chest in response to the applause. She still had her frantic eyes.

Then when she turned away and walked o the stage, she looked like a middle-aged woman.

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Perspective II Maria Paula Calderon Acon Photoshop CC 2017

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Why I Envy Your Guitar Leanne Talavera

I confess that shamelessly, I envy your guitar.

The way you hold it in your arms as if it were a fragile flower;

The way your fingers trace its hourglass outline with the gentlest of touches;

The way you serenade it with tantalizing whispers of passionate romance;

The way your eyes cast on it a look of endearment stronger than that of a dumbstruck lover’s.

I envy the way your lips dance flawlessly to its siren’s spell;

The way they graze across its wooden physique in flitting kisses;

The way you allow it to rest for hours on your lap amidst the warmest of temperatures;

And the way you constantly anticipate the end of every day, just to feel its body against yours.

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Prison Mice

Paula BreÄ?ak I meet her on my third night here. It is around 4 a.m., but in here, you

know no one is asleep. White noise gets a whole new meaning, how it

is never silent. But you get used to it, the moans and the sighs, after a

while they just seem like winds blowing through the bars of the walls as

through the hollows of your ribs. I spent my first night trying to decipher

the sounds: are they crying, or masturbating, or ripping their nails off with their own teeth? It doesn’t matter anymore, it is just wind.

There is no ticking of the clock in this house, soft and steady like a

heartbeat of a mouse. But it is around 4 a.m. and I know this because I read the moon like some people read the sun. It stayed with me

from those long nights when we would just drive and drive and drive.

I was never sure if we were running away from something or looking

for something, Mama never wanted to say. She wanted me not to say

anything. So I would keep quiet and watch the moon, and the darkness,

and the green digital clock on the dashboard blinking like static, and the empty road before us lit only by the headlights of that rundown drive.

On those nights, the world turned gray, like a TV show that lost all color.

Three nights ago, I entered the world of grayness again.

I meet her as she is nibbling on my hair around 4 a.m. Pulling and tugging, and I am not asleep but I do not move. In another life, the one before this one, the one before grayness, I would have smacked her through the

wall. But it is my third night here and it feels like the third grade of new

school. And no one talked to me the first day. And no one talked to me

the second day. And I would be annoyed at all the biting and the hauling,

but instead I am just grateful, so grateful there is another heartbeat in here beating together with mine. I clasp my hand against her softness and pull

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her into my chest, close to me as if we were two hummingbirds hiding

from the storm. She doesn’t move, maybe she is afraid, or maybe she is just grateful to hear another heartbeat as well.

In the morning they jolt us awake with drumming on skeletons. You jump and you spasm and you think the whole world is coming down. Three

nights is not enough to get used to this alarm clock. She is still asleep,

she could sleep through all the racket and all the Titanics of this world.

I step over her, her heartbeat fluttering, her breaths tiny tornadoes. The door opens with a crack and she is still asleep. They yell out my name,

say “Get your sorry ass down to the kitchens! Now! Now!” As they pull me out and push me down the corridor I can still see her sleeping in my bed, where the nook of my neck was just moments ago.

I bring her back peas I lifted from breakfast, small pieces of corn after

lunch, walnuts from dinner. This is what we do. She waits in the bed for

me to come back so she could nibble on something other than my hair.

And we talk. She tells me of all her hideaways, all the secret passages.

How there is a hole in the wall behind my bed that leads to a meadow that is now a lake. And she cannot swim so she cannot go back. We are both stuck here.

She brings me things too. Crawls into the opening behind the rusty sink and runs twenty cells south to that blond-hair-brown-roots 50 year old

rich woman—she always got cigarettes on her, that’s how we know the hag is rich. She steals a cigarette and comes back to me carrying gifts

like the three wise men. So I smoke and she nibbles on the walnuts and sometimes my hair when the walnuts are all gone. We talk of meadows

and lakes and how I know how to swim and if I could just fit through her passageway I could get us both out of there. We talk of the place she

used to live in and how it was like running away from cops laid down on

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the floor waiting to trap her, and I know something about that. She says

this is better. I say it is shit. She says that is why it is better, no money for cops waiting to trap her, all they worry about is keeping me trapped.

I tell her of my mother and our night drives and all the rocks on her

fingers. I tell her how she left, dived into the gray. “But she came back?” she asks, and I don’t answer back. She asks what I did but I never tell her. I think I forgot. After 30 years, she says, she understands. I laugh and chuckle and say “Is the time passing faster in your world? I have

been here for three days!” She looks at me, her eyes blue jays, our hearts turned heavy under all the grayness. “You have no more hair left to nibble,” she says.

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“‫ جیسا بھی ہو گا اچھا لگے گا۔‬،‫”بادلوں کے نیچے اپنا گھر ایک ہو گا‬

(“Under the clouds, there’ll be a house. Whatever it’s like, it’ll feel nice.”)

Hafsa Ahmed

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Afternoon Valeriya Golovina

124

The Tailor

Emma Kay Tocci

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Home//Despair Lateefa Almazrooei

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After Midnight Jazz Paula BreÄ?ak

There is a cat screeching outside in the park. A thousand lighters click in the night, fires start and die.

There are ten moons following you home tonight. They trail behind the car, balloons on strings up high.

There are flowers that breathe only in the dark. A lover walks home alone, her heels in her hand rubbing against her thigh.

There are jazz bars that come alive only for the after-afterparties. In sound proof basements, ten stories down below, where you can see the sky.

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Something Charming about London in the Rain Valeriya Golovina

128

Father and Son at Fish Market Emma Kay Tocci

129

Beyond the Fence Kevin Mokhtar

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Pregnant Bitch

Sudikchya Shrestha With my friends, I was entering a parking lot When I saw a dog, clearly a bitch On her back, her nipples dilating

I wondered if she was about to give birth

And I motioned my friends to share in this wonder We watched the dog, clearly a pregnant bitch To see if she would give birth,

We momentarily planted our feet at the entrance of the parking lot

The bus swerved in at that moment My friend went under it

I do not know if the dog ever gave birth

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If Only You Knew

Yu-Chieh (Andrea) Chung Dear Sean, I killed an elephant today. You know, it’s one of those things that you

think about for a long period of time, convinced that you will figure out someday, but can only really do on an impulse. The killing itself was

unexpectedly simple: I took a deep breath, waited for the adrenaline to rush through every vein of mine, and with impulse came unimaginable strength. I took a stab. It stopped moving. Its eyes stayed wide open,

but there were no tears. I felt no sense of sorrow or shame, just anger.

“Angry at what?” you’d ask. I’m not sure. Perhaps at myself, for having

no patience with animals and their lovers; or maybe I just have an innate aversion to elephants.

I didn’t just kill it. I was so hungry afterwards I ate all the bananas we used to feed it with. I guess anger is a state of emptiness, just like

hunger. It’s not a real emotion, but an impediment to accessing our real

feelings. One banana at a time, I tried to fill the void inside me. I finished the dead elephant’s portion and then moved on to the rest. No one was there to stop me, for they were all trying to figure out how to move on

with life after such a tragedy happened. And you just looked on in silence unfeelingly. How I wish you’d be proud of your little sister.

Remember when we always complained to our parents about our tiny apartment as kids? After every playdate or someone’s birthday party, we would come home and went on about how Isabella’s house was

two-story, Nick and his siblings all had their own rooms, and Gabby’s

bathroom came with a jacuzzi. They told us we didn’t need any of that.

What we needed were nice shoes for Sunday school, funds for the

next summer missionary trip to Asia, and devotion—to God or to their

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expectations, I still don’t know. We were wired to believe from an early

age that everyone was assigned a different reality, and our reality was one that obliged us to follow their rules. So, we stopped complaining, and our apartment felt smaller and smaller with every day passed.

I didn’t figure out why that was until you made a decision for yourself without anyone else in mind for the first and last time. Was it also

something that you could only act on an impulse? I strive to never find the answer, but one thing I do know is that I started seeing elephants

everywhere around the apartment. Nobody believed me when I told them.

To them, I was just an overly imaginative twelve-year-old, and my unease over nonexistent creatures of my dreams was the least of their concerns.

But they were hypocrites. They loved those elephants, nurtured them in a way they never did me, so terrified of the possibility of any harm that

could be done to them. They were so occupied with the elephants that

they didn’t notice how at church, when everyone clasped their hands to

pray, I held hands with the boy sitting next to me, unable to take my eyes

off him. Mom never wondered why grocery shopping always took so long, and Dad never looked at me long enough to notice the ring he gave me went missing.

I probably had a smell on me. I started attracting elephants, and I

couldn’t stop them from following me home. Sometimes it’s a newborn, sometimes a herd. Our parents continued to pretend that they couldn’t

see them, and I was guilty of the same crime. I could never have imaged

how quickly they propagated without witnessing it, but I guess you knew about that already. You were able to see them years before I did, weren’t you?

I killed an elephant for you today, Sean. Our house is too small for so

many to be walking around, occupying spaces of our minds and feeding on our bananas. When our parents were saying their evening prayer,

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asking God to forgive your sins, I let words fell out of my mouth, “He

would still be here if you listened.� The killing itself was incredibly easy,

yet the aftermath messy. I should help them move the body out, because only when the elephant is out of the room can we start fixing the things it broke.

Sean, if only you knew how simple it was to kill an elephant. If only you

knew I would believe you and help banish them from our tiny apartment. If only you knew your fear for elephants was the opposite of weakness.

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Last Words/Lost Words Amal Al Shamsi

Silence has a mouth,

And frankly, lots to say.

Find it in the corner,

Hidden, stashed away.

An organism with origins Before petty ‘time’,

Void’s loyal companion.

That Sound came that suspended It, At the brink of being expelled …

Binding rope thins– as it snaps, Empty voices, synthetic din, Pandemonium.

Congested; words, words, words,

Rupture the dam, a warning: “Make way!”

Amassed on our person,

What doesn’t need voice,

Numbing, heavy, formidable force, The racket of bustling livelihood, it can no longer outweigh— Silence!

That dark matter of sound, A prepared casket awaits, Farewell to the profound.

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Book Love Nada Al Mosa

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Paper Cut

Salha Al Ameri A paper clip.

A little slit.

Thunder jolting.

Piercing rage.

A4-sided

A little discarded,

A piercing caress– against my hand.

A rose’s smile,

A devil’s sneer.

An echo of thundering pain.

A pressing matter, A paper slip, A sliver–

against my skin.

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Sparks Mariam Raslan

138

Half Baked

Yu-Chieh (Andrea) Chung My love, It never occurred to me to look up the definition of “half-baked,” until

today. You probably don’t know this about me yet—there are days when

I simply have the urge to look up a word in the dictionary. Today is one of

them. Most of the times, I know what the words mean, but I want to know the official definition, what they really mean.

I would have leafed through a physical dictionary if I had access to one, because I have a special fondness for the type of paper most

dictionaries are printed on, and I love to be distracted by the possibility of encountering other interesting words along the way. But just like you are several thousand miles away, there was not a dictionary within my

reach when I wanted it. Just like we had no choice but to communicate

through screens and apps and the Internet, I reluctantly looked the word

up online. The Oxford Dictionary defines half-baked as “Not fully thought through; lacking a sound basis.” I chuckled as I read on, “Foolish.”

I think I’ve heard more compliments in the past month or so, since

our relationship started, than in the first two decades of my life. That’s

probably not true, but I feel this way because I’ve never heard the ones you give from anywhere else. You’d probably deny it, but you do have

a way with words. Perhaps it’s because of all the Rumi you read. “I like

your smile,” you said, “half-baked. Not full, just half.” I told you I liked the word, “Half means there’s more to look forward to.”

I surprised myself that day the conversation took place. I didn’t think I was capable of coming up with a comeback so swiftly and couldn’t

understand how, as a person who always gives her all and aims for the

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best, I was so quick and happy to be associated with something that’s

just half. My professors will not accept half-written papers, a half-knitted

scarf won’t keep you warm, and I certainly won’t eat a piece of cake that is only half baked.

The other night, over Baileys and some fancy dark chocolate that was sweeter than the potion, some friends and I began a discussion on

relationships. Kyle had just had a huge fight with his girlfriend whom he

has been with for over two years. He looked at me and said, “Believe me,

a relationship is the best at the stage you’re in.” Fresh and nice, as you’ve been telling the people around you. Or, I thought, “yeah, half-baked, not full.”

As it turned out, I thought I knew the meaning of half-baked, but I didn’t.

When I found out the official definition of the word, I couldn’t help but

wonder if that day you actually meant to say I smile like a fool. Maybe I’m a “half-baked chick”—it’s a real term mentioned in the example sentence in the dictionary. And is this a half-baked relationship?

My friend Joyce won’t need to think about it before saying yes. Yesterday, we finally caught up after spending more than three months apart from each other, and rescheduling the call for three times. I took my time

recounting to her how we first met at a party, and didn’t meet up again

until the last day of my three month stay in New York City. I told her about the jazz bar, the diner with horrible pancakes that gets a rush of drunk

people between 3 and 4 am, the big Christmas tree by the seaport, the

lemon ginger tea at the deli, your office, the sunrise, the first kiss in that POPS, the last dinner at Saigon Shack, and the goodbye. She listened quietly, and finally said, “It just seems … so sudden.”

I was never in a relationship in the five odd years that Joyce and I have

known each other, so I knew where she was coming from. But beyond her

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words, there was an air of disapproval. How can you be with someone

whom you’ve spent fewer than twenty-four hours with? What about the

gap in age and the difference in the color of your skin? The conversation went off on a tangent and we didn’t go any deeper with our discussion. I know there will be many more Joyces, and you do, too.

I like how we don’t talk or think in depth about it, but simply acknowledge the facts and let them sit aside. This is probably a privilege that only belongs to lovers in a newly blossoming relationship. We know the

gravity and complexity of it all, but we still get to say with a nonchalant

smile, “It’s going to be an uphill battle, if we get really serious.” We like to consider ourselves rational adults, but love is a fundamentally irrational

concept, and in the face of it, we will probably always be half-baked: we can’t think straight, let along think through. But I think that’s okay. I feel like some things are not meant to be thought through. Sometimes it is

necessary to allow ourselves to be emotional creatures, and let feelings run through our bodies.

Have you ever felt so sure about something in life that you start to think there’s no way there can be anything wrong with it? It’s a terrifying,

dangerous thought, but you make me think it. Therefore, I am learning to embrace the idea of being just half, not full. It’s beautiful, being one half

of a whole, when I know you’re the other half there. Although I don’t agree with Kyle’s pessimist view on relationships, I will cherish this half-baked stage of ours, while looking forward to all that is to come. I will keep on

smiling that half-baked smile, fully convinced that I never misunderstood

the definition of the word. I’ve always known what the word really means, since the first time I heard you say it. I know the only meaning that matters to me, the meaning you defined.

Love, A.

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Perspective I Maria Paula Calderon Acon Photoshop CC 2017

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If the City Were a Movie

Alice Huang

Predisposition We are predisposed to think of New York City as a place where

pedestrians are posh, and adults are rude. We are compelled to walk fast, speak fast and forget fast. We are predisposed to feel lonely and lost.

We are predisposed by the people that came before us and those before them to see this city in a black and white photo frame on the living room wall of a suited man’s apartment on the twenty-second floor on 6th and

27th. We are predisposed against the idea of breakfast. But today, on my way to Washington Place, I saw a man standing at an intersection, doing a vocal warm-up at the morning traffic while waiting for the light to turn green. And I had breakfast.

Beige With a Touch of Gold

On the corner of Astor Place, an old car roared by with country music

playing. A mid age woman was driving with her windows down. Her hair, her glasses and her old car were of the same beige with a touch of gold.

She isn’t trying to be the young man with neck tattoos or the young lady with purple hair. She dislikes grayness, so she applied her own filter.

The Slow Men

His shoulders were slightly lifted as if he were a puppet, arms hanging on his sides. He walked very slowly, carrying with him a storm of silence, in

his own mismatched frame, a mismatched frame in a film of leather shoes and footsteps like shooting vectors. I watched him as my feet kept on

moving to keep up with New York. Then he raised his hand with the same slow motion and greeted another old man, who was also walking in his

own mismatched frame. I wonder if New York City seems to them always in fast-forward.

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B&W Valeriya Golovina

144

Strolling Mariam Raslan 145

Life Sentences Rosy Tahan

two months ago when we were in New York my friend broke her leg a fractured tibia

in a cast solid as Alcatraz

if visitors could write on the walls two weeks ago she told me she no longer remembers what it’s like to walk

even in her dreams she walks on crutches even in her fantasies of the future she hobbles,

as she always has. my parents say

I have been walking on my own since I was ten months old

and now I’m in San Francisco, where I have always been leaning on the railings of the Golden Gate Bridge

as concerned police officers approach me

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I don’t yet know you

you live less than an hour from here

but I will meet you 15 flight hours away in a city that treats our footsteps as equally temporary

as your room there, bare, like a cell you say and you will walk out every night to lie barely beside me

until the sun warms our bodies I will sink into

you like a saltless sea I will think for life

you will leave after two months but right now

I am telling the officers

how hard it is to leave somebody behind bars of another perpetuity unlike cities and walking

and walking and walking alone and

the Golden Gate Bridge seems interminable until, suddenly, it isn’t.

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Untitled Nada Al Mosa

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Callejones Luis Carlos Soto 149

The Horse in Battle Shalini Corea

Horse in battleground: I am walking

But I know it won’t be walking for long Something is in the air today

It feels like the day I was taken

Of course I don’t remember much of that, not even the feeling I know the feeling now because I feel it again

I had a different herd, a mother, and we followed the leader. When

they twisted their ropes and brandished their guns I didn’t move, was

paralyzed in shock until the leader began to run and then I began to run and I became aware that I couldn’t.

I am walking

Humans whispering close to me, the man on me to the man next to him, to the man in front of him

Screaming from the front and the back, to the front, to the back, and places I can’t place

Clip clop of artificial hooves, a clamor of the tight pain we are used to and we share

Birds’ unruffled chirps BOOM I hear

I run, instructed by the leader on my back I process

I realize I am running towards the threat Action correct, direction all wrong

But the leader directs the herd and I am merely a part of that I am wrong, the human is right.

Then chaos.

Bang bang bang bang break

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Soon no breaks

If not towards me, from me

Invisible blasts I’ve heard all too often But this time they seem to die Not just them We too BANG I skid

I stop

I think it has hit me

I am afraid to move, to fall like those men around me But it is not me

A huge old fighter falls in front of me I hear his scream of pain

The ground seems to shake in fear and grief I shake in fear and grief

The human is crushed under the weight of the fallen horse, struggling to

move and I wish it was the other way around but even my leader does not care whether salvation exists or not for this man

I feel the repeated pain of his sharp banging into my side, twisting my hide, doesn’t he want to help his struggling partner slowly dying I will not move, I am terrified That could have been me

Then I see an old friend approaching, his human motioned here by mine He moves forward

“Come. Follow. Do not get left behind, do not leave the herd behind” I follow behind

The herd is moving onward I must too

On my left I see a horse rear up

“Move move GET AWAY don’t come any closer”

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Evident fear, evident anger I want to help but I can’t

The herd is moving onward I must too

On my right I can see a man be trampled under horses escaped from their leaders or with dead leaders

“What do we do?” “I don’t know” “Keep going, follow the rest” “Don’t get left behind”

Running panicked in the direction of the herd No matter what

One must follow the herd I wish I was released

I wish I was free to run

I would run the other way No I don’t

No I wouldn’t

I am helpless, that is the worst thing

The human wears a shell, the human bears the gun I am a vehicle, I realize

If I am injured, if I die, it is unfortunate But it does not matter

In the bigger picture that they speak of What does that mean?

Why die for a big picture you can’t even see

Why ask for more than the big picture right here

The trees, the grass, the forest, the birds and their unruffled chirps That which is being crushed underfoot right now In the name of the big picture The big picture

The bi— It strikes me

I can feel no pain at this point

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Around it— hot metal they drive us with Except this time they don’t take it off I have no control

I am on my knees and I can feel the world shake See the pretty sky

Blue and wisps of cloud Forget the sound

My human leader rises up covering what I can see Clearing my image of being away Relief

My leader is alive

My leader is here for me He looks on horrified

I can do nothing but look back Waiting

He always knows what to do We protect each other A unit

He turns

He is gone

I recall something I am a vehicle

If I am injured, if I die, it is unfortunate But it does not matter

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Age (“The Old Courtesan” by Auguste Rodin in a Charcoal Interpretation) Adele Bea Cipste Charcoal on paper

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Alone, not Lonely Hafsa Ahmed

155

Ephemeral Asma Balfaqih

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Soup (Cento—Snippets Taken from Sappho, Reznikoff, Maya Angelou, Ancient Egyptian Love Poetry) Shamma Al Bastaki

157

Dancing Girl Gabrielle Branche Ink with Arabic calligraphy pen on paper 158

Threads Mariam Raslan 159

Consequence

Thirangie Jayatilake Kettle screech jolts his two-minute nap. Five a.m. Half asleep, he pours boiling water into coffee-drenched mugs. Half asleep, it takes him two

seconds to realize—the hot watered surface had become his skin. These white walls stifled him. He found his excuse, at eighteen, to leave the

house, even for a little bit. He took the bus, an hour and a half away, to get to a pharmacy.

Half asleep, they say: first degree burn slightly red skin almost like a sunburn Summer was here and she was happy. Busy. Her heels, rhymed steps against dirty gray sidewalks. She waits for the white man light and

crosses over to the flower shop. Her second favorite in the city. Red, yellow, white tulips for her stopover. Before her important dinner.

She rings the bell, shouts out her greetings, and drops the flowers in someone’s arms.

As she leaves, she looks back. And over her shoulders, she sees Guilty flowers A happy child And herself—the absent mother.

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Untitled Nada Al Mosa

161

From Above Ethan David Lee

162

Anxiety Deconstructed Hatim Benhsain

163

Stranded

Harper Cho He had already gotten used to the sound of planes. The sound of people.

Most days, he did not hear anything at all.

“Cette place est-elle prise?”

“Monsieur? Excuse me, sir?”

He sits in a corner. The benches are full. There are no spiders (why are there no spiders?), but there are some ants. He remembers drawing

chalk circles around them and watching them crawl around in a panic to escape.

“Pardon, never mind.”

He does not hear things anymore. But he sees. The sounds don’t change

but the people do. People with sunglassed faces and large brimmed hats like sunflowers reaching for a glassy sky. There are suitcases, always

suitcases. People rushing, rushing, rushing, always looking forward or behind. (Why don’t they look down?). They carry colorful bags.

Bags.

Bag. A bag.

A woman.

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A flutter?

Yellow.

The flutter.

A bag?

This is where it happens.

A young woman. A large green bag.

The flutter.

A yellow boarding pass.

A gate.

The boarding pass.

The floor.

(The gate.)

A plane?

He remembers the ants. He remembers drawing chalk circles around them and watching them crawl around in a panic to escape.

Escape.

The boarding pass.

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He sees people, but they had already gotten used to the sight of him.

Most days, they did not see him at all.

He crawls forward.

Reaches.

He remembers ants.

(But why were there no spiders?)

When he was very young, he watched a spider build a web by his bed all

summer. Watched it swing, and weave, and craft, until one morning there was a beautiful patchwork of shattered sky hanging over his window. It glistened in the sun.

It had been so long since he had seen spiders.

He grasps.

The boarding pass.

Ants.

He had already gotten used to the sound of planes. The sound of people.

Most days, he did not hear them at all.

He lives in a corner.

He remembers spiders.

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The boarding pass!

He remembers drawing chalk circles around ants and watching them crawl around in a panic to escape.

Escape! ….

A thought: (A gate?)

Two thoughts: The gate.

A passport. …

A pause. …

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

His voice is hoarse like the sound of rusty benches being dragged across polished floors. He does not recognize it. It had been too long.

“Yes?”

167

A young woman. A large green bag.

“You dropped this.”

“Ah, thank you.”

The woman.

The gate.

The plane takes off in half an hour. He does not hear this.

He had already gotten used to the sound of planes.

168

Loris Maria Paula Calderon Acon Scratchboard 169

Ink Practice Maria Paula Calderon Acon India ink on paper

170

Taking a Break Thirangie Jayatilake

171

Young Street Musician Ethan David Lee

172

‫ربابة‬

Valeriya Golovina

173

pre-departure Jamie Uy

in a few months you will call another place “home.� learn how to stretch your arms around the ocean in a transatlantic hug when, on your laptop screen in the dark of the dorm room, your mother's smile is glowing.

what is a kilometer. what is five thousand eight hundred ninety two of them. how many brothers' heights does that make up.

don't think about the shine of your empty plate under the dining room

lights. don't think about how much you will ache for rain, living where it rains once a year.

try to be grateful. bury yourself in books, sleep when you can feel your mind already far away from the place your body demands you stay.

exclaim at every opportunity, what a country, what a country, what a country.

commit to memory every train journey where you know exactly where you are going, every walk down tree-lined streets you have walked thousands of times before, every pastel-painted government subsidized housing block your eyes used to gloss over.

learn how to sort and hand-rinse your anxieties. when you should soak your worries in cold water, and hang them out to dry in the sun.

how to cash in hope when withdrawing from your local bank account

overseas. how to chart your flight path back home and back to your loved ones.

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what parts of you will you pack in your suitcase? how will you ever

manage to fit your family's love—bulky and messy and beautiful and

way over the baggage allowance? what parts of you will you throw away, untranslatable, worn-out? you must be brave. you are so scared of the emptiness of the desert, the veneer of an airport city.

but you have been doing this since you were born: baby daughter reaches out, moves, mother tongue awkward on her lips,

accent all wrong, grown-up patchwork flag quilt, no pledge of allegiance. a foreigner in your own family: you can make family out of foreigners. perhaps you can. no— you can. you can. you can.

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Conflict in Identity Nada Al Mosa

176

Pillar, Pillar in the Wall Thirangie Jayatilake

177

Filthy Hatim Benhsain

178

Morning Poem Alice Huang

I wonder when I’m going to get hungry

Since everything I say sounds so poetic

I rinse my mouth and spit out your bad breath that’s stuck between my teeth

Toothpaste running low, I squeeze

Flush, down goes the poetry

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Draw (Erasure of Sartre’s The Emotions) Shamma Al Bastaki

180

Retrouville Asma Balfaqih

181

Night Shift Luis Carlos Soto 182