May 19, 2026
Postmortem—An Excerpt from The Skin and Its Girl
by Sarah Cypher
“Postmortem,” an excerpt from Sarah Cypher’s novel The Skin and Its Girl, invites the reader into a mindset where departures from realism enable new linguistic maneuvers, such as subverting calcified stereotypes of Arabs and Arabic speakers in American supremacist culture.
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May 19, 2026
Wahmi—An Excerpt from Conjoined States
by Key K. Bird
An inventive, familial relationship with language is part of “Wahmi,” an excerpt from Key K. Bird’s in-progress novel, Conjoined States. Bird situates us in the prose: “I didn’t know how deeply cultural my family’s usage was, the oaths and the swearing alike, until I started to read fiction by Arab writers.”
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May 19, 2026
Poems: “On the Other End of Translation” & “On Sunday Night I am Tired of Proving I Deserve Languages”
by Elina Katrin
In “On the Other End of Translation” and “On Sunday Night I am Tired of Proving I Deserve Languages,” Elina Katrin, one of Mizna editors and the Tongues Untethered folio curator, explores how poetic form can enhance linguistic dichotomy, question the expectation of fluency, and present languages—Arabic and Russian—as something lived and experienced within the body and outside it.
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