"You will hear and taste her laughter and also yours. Because laughter is 'the excess knowledge no one takes seriously,' the cherished identity smuggled out of psychology and surveilled consciousness."
New Poetry: Rym Jalil’s ‘My Mother’s Kitchen’
"Every day I lie and say / I know this place. / My mother's kitchen / brims with afflictions / I must pretend to befriend it / we all know it can have only one master / from its beginning to its end"
#WiTMonth Podcasts: Poetry and More with Iman Mersal
Meanwhile, in an August episode of the new podcast MAQSOUDA, co-hosted by Farah Chamma and Zeina Hashem Beck, the host-poets discuss Mersal's «فكرة البيوت», or "The Idea of Houses."
Poetry in Translation: Nada Elshabrawy’s ‘In a Bad Movie’
We walk the streets shoulder to shoulder / bumping into plastic mannequins / they break / but we shatter
New Poetry: Samar Abdel Jaber’s ‘Four Years Without You’
"Perhaps you think poetry / is a waste of time, for eternity can't be rendered in languages / and death after death / has a different name."
‘If I Were a Cat’: Rasha Omran’s Poetry in Three Languages
"If I were a cat / I would was my skin with my tongue / like this / your scent passing from my skin to my mouth, so I'd think I'd devoured you"
Rawan Maki’s ‘Waves of the Future’ / ‘أمواج المستقبل’
We “reclaim” land from water, taking back what was never given / We worship our own footsteps, replacing the water’s sheen
On Why Women’s Poetry in Arabic is Where It’s At
"For me, actually, I think we are impacted by male writers who are writing now, and they are writing about broken masculinity, which I don't like either. So maybe women are free of this, relatively. Maybe they are marginalized, so they have more opportunity to think, to write."
Poetry by Ra’ad Abdulqadir: ‘The Song of the Eternal Citizen’
"Angels don't cook / Poetry is inedible / What will we eat today? Legends?"