Mizna Online

Letter to a Disabled Brown Transsexual with Endometriosis

July 15, 2026
by Zeyn Joukhadar

After dinner, when Baba goes to wash up, I tug on Mama’s sleeve. “When you go,” I say, “how will I know who I am?”

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Excerpt from THALASSA – Three Poems 

July 7, 2026
by leena aboutaleb

Love will reinvent you. I am made from all the people who love me. I know exactly who I am. Why do you still believe we are made out of images and not hearts? Are we all martyrs? My brother will take seven. Only God can dissolve me. Only God can judge me.

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Silver & Black Terrorists, Steve Kerr’s Dad, Green Wristbands &...

July 2, 2026
by Robert Farid Karimi

I understand. This is a self-identified Male story. I claim this because sports taught me how to be a Male within its context. I wanted so badly, as a young man, to become that Male: an American Boy. Think, Estelle.*

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The No-State Solution: Histories and Realities

June 26, 2026
by Mohammed Bamyeh

If a call for a “no-state solution” is theoretically valid anywhere, the current situation in Palestine provides us with empirical verification that humanity benefits more from the absence of the state than from its existence.

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I Am Not Your Translator

June 19, 2026
by Fady Joudah

Without the untranslatable the translatable is nonviable. The untranslatable, too, is a biologic imperative. At the gene level, an intron is a noncoding sequence that indicates where the translatable sequence is. And the untranslatable is a cosmic imperative as well. The Arabic dark matter with which English light seems unwilling to interact.

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Excerpt from My Center Is Not In The Solar System: Tributes to...

June 4, 2026
by Aria Aber

Don’t we all move and imagine
if we stopped someplace, we never would?

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Poems from Emily Ahmed's On Distance

May 28, 2026
by Emily Ahmed

Don’t we all move and imagine
if we stopped someplace, we never would?

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Postmortem—An Excerpt from The Skin and Its Girl

May 19, 2026
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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Wahmi—An Excerpt from Conjoined States

May 19, 2026
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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Poems: "On the Other End of Translation" & "On Sunday Night I am...

May 19, 2026
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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Poems: "Come From," "Learning to Write in Arabic," & "Arabic...

May 19, 2026
by janan alexandra

janan alexandra’s “Come From,” “Learning to Write in Arabic,” and “Arabic Abecedarian” take us to a language-place full of questions and paradox, presence and absence, intimacy and estrangement all at once. Illuminating these contradictions and the ways they exist simultaneously is a unifying seam that runs across all three poems.

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Tongues Untethered: Cross-Cultural Writing and Identity Beyond...

May 19, 2026
by Elina Katrin

We exist within an indispensable asset—language. Sooner or later though, writers who belong to multiple tongues, cultures, and heritages come across a curiosity: how to break away from English and honor our ancestry through the plurality language asks of us. In this folio, four writers of SWANA heritage —janan alexandra, Key K. Bird, Sarah Cypher, and Elina Katrin—share their strategies for doing just that.

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letter to fadwa tuqan

May 15, 2026
by Safa Khatib

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

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Spring in St. Paul

May 7, 2026
by Tarik Dobbs

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

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The Cat's Cradle, or How to Play a Tongue

April 29, 2026
by Layla Faraj

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

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