Mizna Online

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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Boghz بغض as Re-memory: an Iranian American Counternarrative to...

April 24, 2026
by Mahru Elahi

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.

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On Maryam Tafakory

April 22, 2026
by Saeed Taji Farouky

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.

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Week Four: Complicating Linguistic Traditions

April 22, 2026
by Layla Faraj

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

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Week Three: Struggle as Language

April 15, 2026
by Layla Faraj

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

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Week Two: Translinguistics

April 8, 2026
by Layla Faraj

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.

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