We want memories compact as mounds of tiny cucumbers

Art by Kristina Closs

Tiny Cucumbers 

by Naomi Shihab Nye

Grief is an ambush. You’re walking alone feeling fine, look
down, see a leaf, and begin to weep. –Jack Ridl 

Slim specimens
the size of a pickle—
your excitement lit up the aisle. 

Happy with a salad,
cup of mint tea.
We lived that way for years,
minor days tucked one into another.
But what restlessness underground,
pit of the plum. Nothing worked out
in the homeland, came to fruition
or changed. Depressed stay depressed.
You wouldn’t use a cane though you’d 
collected them for years.
“It will make me look old.”
“You’ll look older if you’re dead.”
Not true. In your last bed,
you became a sleek young man,
skin unruffled after the last horrible hour. 

We want memories
compact as mounds of tiny cucumbers,
mottled green.
But they’re not. They’re dim hallways, 
strange curvaceous aches. The years we’d do
anything to replay.
And here’s a leaf in the shape of an “A” and 
I cannot go on. 

from Transfer, written as a tribute to Naomi Shihab Nye’s father Aziz Shihab

I want to memorize you like that song in elementary school

Art by Kristina Closs

BLACK HORSES

by Ghassan Zaqtan

The enemy’s dead think mercilessly of me in their eternal sleep
while ghosts take to the stairs and house corners
the ghosts that I picked off the road and gathered like necklaces
from others’ necks and sins.

Sin goes to the neck… there I raise my ghosts, feed them
and they swim like black horses in my sleep.

With the energy of a dead person the last blues song rises
while I think of jealousy

the door is a slit open and breath enters through the cracks, the river’s
respiration, the drunks
and the woman who wakes to her past in the public garden

and when I fall asleep
I find a horse grazing grass
whenever I fall asleep
a horse comes to graze my dreams.

On my desk in Ramallah there are unfinished letters and photos of
old friends,
a poetry manuscript of a young man from Gaza, a sand hourglass,
and poem beginnings that flap like wings in my head.

I want to memorize you like that song in elementary school
the one I carry whole without errors
with my lisp and tilted head and dissonance
the little feet that stomp the concrete ground with fervor
the open hands that bang on the desks

All died in war, my friends and classmates…
and their little feet, their excited hands, remained
stomping the classroom floors, the dining tables and sidewalks,
The backs and shoulders of pedestrians…
Wherever I go
I hear them
I see them.

from Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me (Yale University Press) translated from Arabic by Fady Joudah

and which one of us makes it to the border and which one of us will become the story

Art by Kristina Closs

Envelope
by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

It happens that survival is no more than ink
                  and weight of rubber stamps arranging freedoms
into a precision of entrances and exits It happens
                  that a woman named for the camp where she waits
embroiders more than dresses more
                  than the flora of a land that has not seen
eglantines for years of rubble that has unhoused the rock
                  sparrow and starved it that an epistolary
love becomes artifact its promises fading
                  its days a siege of unanswered questions
its pages a street where we decide to finally stay
                  it happens that a beloved might be granted passage
just before the building folds on itself
                  in three sections or just before words dissolve
and shrapnel rain disperses the living It happens
                  that what was taken from us in waiting cannot
be given language that to seal an envelope
                  the tongue though traditionally the site of first touch
may be insufficient a draught or network
                  of acid canyons score its surface and knotted beyond
prayers for loosening it becomes too heavy
                  and which one of us makes it to the border and which
one of us will become the story and
                  and where will they send us
It happens that an envelope can wait
                  in an abandoned drawer it can be too late to write
what we have lived it happens a hunger can live on in
                  a room unpeopled an open mouth a soundless gasp

from Something About Living (University of Akron Press)