Fall 2009

[Download entire issue as PDF document.]

Fiction

Tamuz and the Beggar
Marc Brenman – United States

All day the beggar sat by the door, asking for alms as Tamuz’s customers came and went. Many gave him kurush, and Tamuz made sure to charge his customers odd amounts, so they had change in hand to give the beggar.

 

Math-Phobic
Mary McLaughlin Slechta – United States

The math paper was different today. There was a woman with a baby kneeling among the equations. Fatma thought the woman looked a bit like her mother, but her mother was math-phobic. “Hopelessly math-phobic,” she’d tell Aabo, Fatma’s father. That was long ago in the old Mogadishu after she’d overspent on clothes and entertaining her colleagues at the university.

Poetry

Seeker
Omar Azam – United States

I've approached God in
so many ways,
you wouldn't know what's right.

Night Journey: Riyadh-Dammam Highway
Martin Bennett – Italy

Sun slotted somewhere inside the sky's back pocket,
Dunes like clouds, horizon sheer black on black,
Our car's a convertible low-powered rocket ...

 

On the Middle East
Pradeep Chaswal – India

A morning in the desert
A street
Two girls playing marbles ...

 

Palestinian Driver – New Orleans
Mike Maggio – United States

thirty years
from Jerusalem
City of God
here in the City of Sin

 

A Poem After Rumi
Richard Schiffman – United States

I hereby announce, publish and declare
that I will not, I say not from here on out, consent
to be the dumb punching bag
of my own moon-mad mutant mind.

 

In Which You Tell Me You Have Set Islam Aside
Joanna Catherine Scott – United States

I used to dream, you say, that one day
I would take a pilgrimage to Mecca …