trans.  Huda Fakhreddine In anticipation of Huda Fakhreddine’s forthcoming translation of Samer Abu Hawwash’s Ruins and Other Poems, Mizna presents … Continue reading "A Box of Dates on the Kitchen Table"

Today, Mizna is honoring the launch of beloved contributor and Palestinian performance artist Fargo Tbakhi’s debut poetry collection TERROR COUNTER. … Continue reading "TERROR COUNTER—Excerpts"

you curl against me like a burning hair as airstrikes pock the hillside, bare earth red as afterbirth. upturned. we knob until we find fairuz on the radio.

                the bouncer of my road house heart            my wild Johnny the first man i thought to love

When you try to speak of home What comes out is kisses, birds

I don’t know mainly how to save myself from my words: I would want them all, alive and well, or at once, all at once, burning.

While omniscience is often equated with divinity, to forget is to be human—it is to die a human death. Remembering, then, works to resist the natural course of decay and extinction. We excavate our mind like we fumble in a wild garden; we scratch underneath family stories, tales, poems, books. To remember is to take an unknown journey and sometimes we come across special objects.

Protect the head, where the algae grow, and the sun screams from the summit.  The head that has stared for centuries  into the sea as it closed its eyelids, and never blinked. 

We are flesh measured in kilograms, my Palestinian colleague says in desperation But you are a thinker not a doer  So you do nothing