Everything beautiful lay both forwards and backwards.

Art by Kristina Closs

Everything Lies in All Directions

by Hua Xi

Death is the same in both directions.
It wants to go somewhere. It wants to come back.
Once I came back through a grass. Purple coneflowers
floated there, attracting bees. The whole field was humming.
Once I came back through the dead. This roughly translates
to something my mother lived through in Chinese.
My mother said, “I don’t read. It’s too tiring.”
It’s true–people who wrote things
lied to her. Once I came back through a poem.
Time refused to pass there, and loneliness
drifted down past my window like snow.
Alone, I did not move. Worlds changed around me.
Everything beautiful lay both forwards and backwards.
Everything translated into butterflies, which billowed
into a breath of tall summer. They blew out of the past
and into the future. Was it yours or was it mine?
Then, I was a child. Once, my mother was.
This is how you learn that nothing ends
unless it has to.

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to you the past is us the past the past is everything

Art by Kristina Closs; Photo slice is from a picture of my mom and three of her siblings walking down the street in Damascus in the 1950s.

Pictures

by Ahmad Almallah

we sat together you and I mother next to son
the armchairs worn against the dullness of white walls
you read aloud the same sentence over and over

I place your hand in mine do I let go I stand
there was between us something everything
to you the past is us the past the past is everything

and there I look the beige cupboard full of pictures
it’s still closed up your youth I know almost nothing
I am your son the youngest one the son of your aging

I open up the beige the black and white pictures
your arms revealed and in the sun revealing
the weak and slender hand is aimless on the table

I place a photo in your palm your daughter and your sons
I am a child the funny face I make you point to him
you ask if he belongs to me I say he is your son

you do not know you look at me in wonder
the past the past is everything the present
your mind the nerves the stems of blood bursting

from Bitter English

In the dream-mirror I open my mouth and birds fly out from between my teeth.

Art by Kristina Closs

Dreaming in a language I can’t speak

By Nina Mingya Powles

This is not a souvenir.
This is not what it looks like.

Her name {雯}
means multi-coloured clouds.

I almost tattooed it on my skin  
while explaining over and over

this is what you can’t see:  
the pieces of language that fell out of my mouth

as a child, the crushed-up words I pull back
from disappearing rooms inside disappearing homes,  

the name my grandfather gave me {明雅}
two characters I still cannot write beautifully—

a sun 日 next to a moon 月
a tooth 牙 next to a bird 隹

She gave me a seal with my name carved inside it.
In a room full of untouched sunlight

I let hot wax drip onto my palm
leaving a mark that will fade over time

like the imprint of rain  
in burnt chrysanthemum clouds.

In the dream-mirror 
I open my mouth

and birds fly out from between my teeth.
They do not make a sound.

from Magnolia