I gather a bouquet of flowers
to cradle this grief,
or give it color, at least.
In the summer of 1989, my mother and I drove to participate in Ayatollah Khomeini’s public funeral. His body was displayed in a refrigerated glass case sitting atop an elevated platform in what was then a vast empty lot, which later became the Imam Khomeini Mosalla Mosque. The heat of that summer day was intense, and the sheer size of the crowd was astonishing.
2026 continues to be an exciting year for SWANA literature, with many stunning debuts, new releases and translations from longtime favorites, and experiments in new genres.
As we close yet another Disability Pride Month amidst ever-escalating warfare and ethnic cleansing against Palestinian, Sudanese, Iranian, Lebanese, and many more peoples across the SWANA region and Global South, it is of dire importance to reflect on the systems that debilitize, incapacitate, maim, and otherwise catastrophize both our bodies and our body politics. The impossible, still-opening wounds of the US-Zionist genocide in Gaza, which have surpassed the long-upheld regime of
Your legs obliterated
& collapsing country
here they are, young brown queer crippled and in love
holding hands in the co-op with an adaptive device like it’s nothing
At a distance,
I assume others are kind, and this seems an essential
difference.
I read Palestine
when the news says Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Iraq.
I step around the bodies
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?”
In a time of hatreds. Record this memory of us (not) touching. Our lips (un)locked. Hands (un) twined. Letters braid with mine. Enbrine.
BALTIMORE—Faris Dajani, a Palestinian-Jordanian multidisciplinary artist, stuns in his first solo exhibition, Threshold, Image. Situated in Gallery CA off East Oliver St. in Baltimore, Dajani cuts the thread of an imperial, detached reality at its metaphorical knees.
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?”
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.
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.*
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.