THE SUNSET MEANS REVIVAL FOR THE MOON // NOUF ALHIMIARY

by the sea, you watched the most beautiful
sunset of your infinitesimal life. it was
all shades of pink and blue and orange and red and god,
and as it progressed the colors hatched into prayers,
prayers that unraveled the product of a
metamorphosis you never realized you’ve undergone. 
relish in the holy spirits of resurrection inhabiting your very being.
butterflies, might grow by feeding on the nectar of flowers,
but rotting fruit, and decaying flesh are just as nourishing,
just as growth inducing. 

GOOD MORNING CHERRY BREATHER // HAYAT

Good morning cherry breather,

the flowers in my garden have been deciding to let us be for the construction workers’ noise these days, I told my father the reason of them doing so is that the noise stole the morning from us so now we are too busy being “modern humans” rather than keeping the little habits that keep us in our skins like singing for the flowers, making sure to kiss them, never mind the moths, never tell anyone if there is a bee around any sun flower so no one would avoid saying hello to it. If you were here, I’m sure you’d help me create a hideaway for the flowers and collect piano keys from chitchats so we’d never have their colours washed off of our days. If you were, tonight would be less about me hearing the walls and having my knuckles turned into secret chambers to write what was I told later into pavements and more about our bodies shouting to all the buildings who are trying so hard to barely exist more than we are. I feel like that is pretty selfish of me, to not want any other creature to compete with us humans and try to exist for a mere moment, but at the same time what are we if we are not the only ones known to bother with that matter?

CHERRY BREATHER // HAYAT

Cherry breather,

didn’t you know? This is why we exist, to put these things into fiction, poetry and ink and define it as magic.

This is why we are storytellers, because we get to bring complicated biology and mathematics into another form and make them look as what they truly are: magical.

DEAREST TIME TRAVELLER // HAYAT

Dearest time traveller, 

I think you are just trying your best to romanticise what is and what barely is along with us to feel more human and less selfish, the bees and moths and all of what is waltzing in the same harmony or creating its own is too busy creating and keeping life on this life to bother with the matter of existence, I think. Just like you and me when touching, we are too busy creating poems, getting a grip on the details being born within the details and trying to keep all of what is around us every time we gasp and pant and kiss and decide to tell an iloveyou.

The vanilla tea I made doesn’t like being sneaked into my throat, perhaps I should feed it to my eyeballs, or thighs? Perhaps it’s a better home for it there. Hey, do you think birds would rather hop on our eyelashes, ribs, laughters and toes instead of trees? Is it odd that I feel like that they hop and live on trees and places that aren’t our bodies because we chose that? What if birds are beings some magician made while exhaling kisses to his loved one living in a cloud that promised to not to fade? What if the first bird was the magician himself? I think the first bird might be the magician himself, and the second bird was something the first just cried after discovering that clouds never, ever stay.

OBLIVIOUS // OMAR ENEZI

Death, throughout the millennia, has made its message loud and clear; “I take all, I leave none.” To this day, he keeps his word; all he took, and none he left. Every sentient creature spends its life attempting to avoid the unavoidable, but when the Harvester swings his thirsty sickle, he never misses.

Now, imagine a man who has never known about death. At all. Not even as an afterthought. He was never told, he was never taught, and for whatever reason, the very idea of that infamous inevitability has never even occurred to him.

Picture his childhood. A child who was not told, was not taught, and could not figure it out. Would his days have been more joyful or more sorrowful? Adventurous?  Disobedient? Mischievous? Or perhaps, simply normal?

His adulthood. A grown man –who has a job, a family, hopes and dreams– does not know of the crypt he so aimlessly prances towards. How would he spend his days and nights? How would he treat his friends? His family? His wife and children? Cruel? Merciless? Homicidal? Would he even think of murder if he never knew there was an end? Or perhaps, simply normal?

Envision yourself telling him that undeniable fact. That one day, and one day very soon, he will die. That the older he grew, the closer he crept to the edge of the cliff, where we are all pushed into the hungering abyss.

“What is ‘die’?” he asks you innocently.

Remembering everyone and everything death has ever taken from you, you tell him exactly what death is.

Would he believe you? Would he laugh and shrug it off as an impossibility? Or would the truth finally hit him like a ton of bricks?

Prove it to him. Kill an animal before his eyes. Its body shudders as the precious soul seeps out like an impalpable gas. He now knows. He now believes. He now realizes.

The bitter afterthought that we all forbid our brains from processing –for fear it would overwhelm us– is now all he could think of.

How would he react? Curl up next to the carcass and wait? Try to live what precious little time he has left as fervently as he could? Run into the streets and repeatedly yell the truth of mortality, thinking it was news to everyone else as they were news to him minutes ago? Or perhaps, he would be happy? Happy to know there is an end to it all?

And you.

Would you have told him in the first place? Unleashed him from the cradle of his lethal ignorance?

Or would you have kept it to yourself? Giving him the greatest surprise of his entire lifetime?

OF MARTYRS WHOSE BLOOD CEMENTED MY DNA // NOUF ALHIMIARY

you are a product
of all the bravery your ancestors
harbored at the south, carrying
the mass of ancient prejudice
upon the twists of the ropes of
their DNA. singing in the nilo saharan
to the melancholy of the african diaspora
of the indigenous people, songs of
the maxim of justice and liberty.
don’t you dare apologize for your
unrelenting pursuit of justice. don’t
you dare apologize for basking in
the liberty your ancestors shed
the nucleus of their souls fighting for.
you, are not an apology

DOWN THE WRITING BLISS // SHAIMA ALSSLALI

It’s empty stares all over again. Your hollow eyes take leave as the breaking dots of every word in every dictionary chain themselves to your neck, and you caress the markings because masochism is creativity. So you plead to your ears: “anything that doesn’t wreck me,” and your ears, sensitive and selective, cast your words away.

What is your destination? What are you left with?

Weights of words that nestle themselves on your left shoulder, taking refuge in the back of your neck, straining every last nerve with the possibility of an idea, or at least an ending.

The words string themselves to your hair, adorning your face with every little failure at eloquence, or just basic wording.

The letters, the weld themselves to your skin, reiterating every thought of self-doubt that takes the midnight train to your mind with black circles and favourite lyrics as side-notes.

Writing is a parade of self-mockery you’re the stunt-double in.

Writing is the bruises you photograph for memory.

Writing is your skin inside out.

1. // JOUBRAN

We’ve distanced ourselves from our conscious and we called it God, and we’ve distanced ourselves from our instincts and we called it Satan.