this poem suffocates on my tongue, one of the many tongues of the executioner

Not yet sunset, the porches keep their broad hips turned toward evening,

To mark the end of National Poetry Month, column editor Layla Faraj offers closing thoughts on the why and how of the editorial project.

After Israel bombed Tehran in the summer of 2025, thousands of urbanites fled to the Alborz Mountains. Amu offered food to the shaken arrivals, going hungry when there were the inevitable shortages. Eight months later, the U.S. and Israel brought war to Damavand: to late winter snowpack, icy rivers, and Amu’s honeybees, clustering for warmth in the apiary Amu built. My family has spoken to Amu only once since February 28, and we haven’t told Baba about the war.

This absence, like the blank spaces in Zan newspaper, contains the potential for liberation. This absence leaves her films on the verge of collapse, but in doing so, it forces us to hold them together ourselves, and gives us space into which we project our desires, our visions of freedom. The silences in which the soul can take refuge.

Continuing National Poetry Month, the accompanied original prompts push Mizna's readers to convey struggle with, through, and as language.

Continuing National Poetry Month, the accompanied original prompts push Mizna's readers to convey struggle with, through, and as language.

Moving from the visual into the linguistic, for the second week of National Poetry Month Mizna is highlighting grammatical, poetic, and oral storytelling structures as they move/are moved between languages.

Mizna begins our Poetry Month column with an experimentation of the visual, the borrowed, and the seemingly misunderstood.