Ashen face in a doorframe and a memory of flame (something unresolved)— Would you know me? Would I know you in your new form? Is this an invention, a number I didn’t call? My cowardice as doppelgänger given form A violent rainstorm leaves the earth upturned —I wanted them back but not like this. It’s always…
was a strand of scenic overlooks.
I first wrote strange
—a strange of scenic overlooks—
my mistake, and strange enough was everything bathed in the red Mars dust of Sedona, the iron in the rocks aligned with iron in our blood, they say, so it tugs on us. It tugged. Every night on Airport Mesa, a crowd gathered and the Milky Way made a white mess of the sky. Was I the only one who’d wanted to polish it black again? Our honeymoon was a scene of stranded overlooks. We posed for panoramic photographs minus the photographs. Behind us the canyon was banded red, copper, purple
—millions of years
of compressed sunsets—
where the river had gnawed down to bone, down to its strange, scenic marrow.
The soybean fields flooded and froze over,
and the boys—not yet their father’s sons, not yet
worrying about crop stubble beneath the ice—
skate, twilight settling in their hair,
until their mother, watching at the window,
calls them in for supper. When it’s dark
they’ll sit elbow-to-elbow at the worn farm table
each son will want when she’s gone,
ringing spoons against the sides of bowls,
that silver-on-ceramic note. But now they glide
across the ice, not yet worrying about surfaces
that barely hold them, and there is nothing
between them and their mother but the clear
syrup of old glass. It moves so slowly, no one sees.
Beloveds, I keep picturing it
this way: we’re standing, all of us,
between the Bear and every creature
the Bear calls prey, and half of us
step aside. Half of us aren’t enough
to hold the Bear. It lumbers,
then, in a blur of claws and mange,
charges through. What did you think
would happen? The Bear would lose
its appetite? The Bear might be tamed
with a tiny bicycle, a propeller hat,
a gold sphere to balance on its nose?
I don’t need to describe what happens
next: the smell of blood, the surprise
of white femur. Ones I have called
beloved, I keep picturing you
this way: sitting off to one side,
watching the Bear work, waiting to see
if it leaves any meat on the bones.
“…And I should love you the more because I mangled you And because you were no longer beautiful To anyone but me.” – The Love Song of St. Sebastian T.S. Eliot Lining each path, each road stop and roadway we traverse here, wake-robins exhibit folds thick with lashes of redemption. Coarse flint beneath supports our beatific…
We were neurophobic and perfect the day that we lost our souls Maybe we weren’t so humanBut If we cry we will rustAnd I was a hand grenadeThat never stopped explodingYou were automatic and as hollow as the “o” in god—“Mechanical Animals,” Marilyn MansonNo, no notice arrived in the mail. No, we did not convene…
Imagine you have a story to tell. It’s a story about hope, loss, tragedy, and courage. It’s your story. Now imagine trying to write this story having grown up in a country where education was denied to you, where telling your story has been criminalized. And then picture writing it in a second language.
The women of the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, some not even teenagers yet, are doing exactly this: fighting to tell their stories. Despite the risks, these developing writers are driven by the need to share their voices.
F(r)iction is proud to present the work of these brave women.
Hey there cancer pills—
though you give life and kill my illness
my hair falls out like an angel
descending into a sinful city.
I have nothing left
since locusts attacked the farm
and Uncle became allergic to air pollution
after moving to Kabul.
My indisposed body desires red wine
to pour into a head filled with memories of you.
It wants to burn a cigarette and watch
as such beauty strikes the darkness.
Have you ever wondered about the peaceful
highways where tired taxi drivers rest?
Maybe I am tired...
and you are a glass of bitter black tea
that makes me moan like a wounded insect.
Maybe you are inelegant...
and I am inspiration
making your emotions affordable.
Do you remember that painter?
What a couple he said, a comely combination
of gray and happy colors on his canvas.
You shined neatly
but I was busy thinking
about how to pay for Uncle’s medicines.
The other day Uncle and I bought cheap ripe
peaches
I thought of you with every bite
as the national bank defaulted.
The absolute silence of political history
reminds me of my stupidity—
I want you and nothing more
nothing less.
Since you are my over-the-top edge of the feeling called attachment from which I’ll soon be detaching.
Her heart breaks
its core vein torn
an eruption of blood
the helplessness of white cells.
Here are her hands holding such pain.
See her tears sliding across the tracks of her face.
There’s the sound of a heart breaking
like flies making love, punishing her ears
annoyed nails declare war
the bomb explodes
into the flavor of his lips
Red Bull in mouths, she loses again.
Covered in a blanket
hiding her eyes from the lamp—
its grin, a shameful white.
When her heart rips apart
she walks off into a donkey skin.
She add wings to her shoulders
prepares to fly away
and the lamp vomits its brightness
Flowers on wallpaper
become her only friends
and hit her head with petals
the extreme wounds turning their heads
black and blue like hers.
When a woman’s heart crashes
it reminds her of suppressed people’s rights.
Instead she watches the Gandhi film
though justice cannot calm her down
even the end of Mom’s aching moans
Homework won’t save her.
Terrifying failures don’t provoke her.
When people’s hearts shatter they tire of rules throw stones at others’ shoes.
When the impoverished heart
wears out
no one blames capitalism.
When the feminist’s heart smashes
she doubts the story of a woman who survived
the husband’s knife – the damaged heart
in a southern province.
When the poetry warden’s heart escapes
it travels too far, frightened.
It marries the moon
then dies in the road.
She finds a faithful dog’s spirit
in thoughts of a gentleman’s shirt
and some white flowers
from where no one ever dared to go.
She realizes her heart is a copy of herself:
Homeless, hollow, unlucky
dreaming of a shelf
in a safe room to rest.
A true love may come
if time does not preserve her future
risking messages
on Facebook profiles.
Two smart sentences, a smart IQ
those are her dreams of him
along with a sexy dress to wear
Like seaweed floating on the water’s surface
greedy pieces of her heart reassemble to one another
in a hope shop; she bought something to
feed a love so no one will mind.
She googles: Why are so many hearts broken? Each reason resembling the next and the next She adds the faithful dog spirit to her own quiet heart: Oh look! A suit and a wedding dress— in the closet of her imagination.
Lying carelessly on my unmade bed
I lost consciousness for a time
Immersed in daydreams
I forgot my unbearable being
In a society of lost dreams
Where visions easily fade away
Replaced with duties, to take care of others.
I gazed on the title of a book about someone
I had tried so hard to imitate.
I swallowed all the words
Sending them to remote corners of my brain.
Witnessed a vision of myself
Lying carelessly on the bed.
Drifting away to a strange new country
Where the mornings are blank
In a place I don’t belong
And sunrise will not awaken me.
The spin of life, too short,
Without dreams is like empty
Pants pockets in a shop
Money gone, spent on unnecessary things
Dreams gone, nothing to live for
Life over, too soon.
Yet my heart longs for a dream
To swirl and spin me away
From the world where I am living.
The shape of this book inspires me
To not fear the disgrace of my dream
But to find release in success.
Suddenly my body shakes ruthlessly My daydream ends. But I have found a place To dream my dreams In an unmade bed As sunshine travels off to sleep.
This is a beautiful collection of poems, Hajar. Can you tell me a little bit about what inspires you to write?
I started writing after my mother passed away in February 2014. Initially, writing was my way of mourning. I began to write about my surroundings: the injustice women face in my country, political issues, corruption, and my everyday life as a woman in a country which is named the worst for women.
There are so many taboos in Afghanistan which require you to act in a way that doesn’t harm your reputation. By writing, I create a completely different world where no one can tell me what or what not to do. As a writer, I have the freedom to decide for myself. When I was a child, I began to notice that the reality of people is covered, and that you needed time and energy to dig that out. I hated that. I wanted to be simple. In my writing, I have nothing to hide. To express what I crave to be is my inspiration when I open my notebook.
Your writing is very personal and introspective. How did you develop this style of writing? Why do you choose to write this way?
I like to write in a way that my subjects are interchangeable depending on the reader’s situation. However, I want my writing to be solid enough to transfer my point of view. I want my reader to feel like they are in my place, so I provide them a key to enter to my world.
Writing, like all other skills, gets better with practice. Reading the work of other great poets influenced me to adopt this form of writing. I choose this way because I want my poems to be real and alive, and I want to advocate my thoughts through them. I believe writers are so closely involved in bringing change that it’s their responsibility to notice the things that people don’t normally see. According to the old proverb, you have to lose something to gain something else. Perhaps, therefore, I sacrifice the blood of my personal stories to grant life to my writing.
What do you hope that American and other Western readers will learn from your writing? What do you hope to help other people understand through your work?
I want Westerners to know that we are trying to bring change. We do raise our voices. We do go out on the street and ask for justice. We want peace. We love everyone, and we are tired of war.
I want people to read my work and learn that although I am a woman far away in a war-torn zone, I worry about the things a normal woman worries about. I challenge myself like any Western woman does. I go to work, despite the obstacles. I talk to people. I expand my network. I want to have a career, and I am fighting for it. I want to have children one day. I want to have someone to trust. Ultimately, I am no different than any other woman a thousand miles away.
In your experience, how does writing help you to deal with the challenges of life as an Afghan woman?
Writing helps me to overcome so many challenges and issues I face as an Afghan woman. As mentioned earlier, creating a world often seems like the only solution to skip the daily sorrows of poverty, inequality, and harassment, not to mention war and suicide explosions.
When I write, no one else has power over me to dominate me in one form or another. I assume writing plays the same role for everyone. Sometimes, I find communication difficult. I cannot talk about so many things, but I can easily write about them. No one judges me. This fact helps me to deal with problems. It also helps me to fight my depression. I can say I am healthier ever since I began to write.
What are your goals for the future? Do you believe that writing has had an impact on those goals?
I want to devote my life to writing. Writing is how I acquire peace. I want to become a professional writer and publish my work, write op-ed for major media, write screenplays for films. I feel every opinion and form of writing is as beautiful as others. I want to explore my writing skills in different forms and themes.
I also think there are so many people out there who are dreaming to hear us. I want to find them and deliver to them what they are searching for. I want to see an Afghanistan where people young and old, women and men read. I dream big, and I have noticed that. But I want to be in my countrymen’s bookshelves one day, in each and every library of Kabul. This is my future goal—though perhaps unrealistic, through my writing, I can picture such a day.
IA Moment in Eternity She jumped. She was here just a moment ago, looking beautiful and full of life. He squinted as he forced himself to look over the edge of the eighteen-storybuilding. She didn’t look beautiful anymore. Their relationship up until then had been a fairy tale. Talented Hollywoodscreenplay writers are paid very handsomely…
The Veterans Writing Project provides no-cost writing seminars and workshops for veterans, service members, and their adult family members. It publishes their fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in a quarterly print journal and online. You can learn more about the Veterans Writing Project at veteranswriting.org, and read O-Dark-Thirty online at o-dark-thirty.org.
if they wanted me
to collect a check
buy expensive
shoes wear a tie
pay taxes sleep
at night raise
a son teach
him how to be
a man if they
wanted me
to live
why did
they give me
this gun
This war can’t be all bad. We sing karaoke on Mondays and Wednesdays and sit by the pool behind Saddam’s Presidential Palace after work and smoke cigarettes. By midnight we are watching others smoke cigarettes and drink and jump off the high dive naked. Jokes that any teenage boy would roll his eyes at explain the meter-wide butt- shaped flattening of the sandbags behind your buddy’s trailer. It’s another episode of “Operation Green Card Get Me Out of Here Sex,” and today the happy contestant was the Kurdish woman who works in his office. By dawn KBR, that American multinational corporation providing support services to our war, is doing our laundry, and by day we go to meetings where the Iraqi employees cry with fear over the sentence of death imposed on them by the insurgents for the crime of working for us here at the Embassy.
This war can’t be all bad. We get visited by senators, representatives, and university professors who arrive by night to write books, collect hazard pay, and earn their sand cred. We acknowledge their positions and provide thank-you notes for the well-meaning people in their districts who send us collections of the worst books and magazines ever published. We get mail from the trailer behind the palace and buy paintings from the PX whose creators rarely sign their work. We buy rugs made by children imported from somewhere else and purchase Saddam Hussein watches at the Hajji Mart from the smiling man in the washed-out dishdasha until the whole thing was blown up by that suicide bomber on the same day that other suicide bomber blew up the Green Zone Café and all the people in it. We always get our hair done in the palace by three liberated Iraqi women in tight jeans and a KBR employee from San Diego. We play piano and guitar for parties and eat Chinese food at the “Bad Chinese Food” restaurant until it was closed because of the chickens hanging in the toilets and that guy who got hepatitis. Nobody notices the massage place above the kitchen but everybody knows that there are no happy endings there. And yesterday afternoon the general’s translator told us over lunch that the young female translator who helped us in Mosul was shot dead outside the gate on her way home from work.
This war can’t be all bad. We get good food, except for that week when the delivery trucks were delayed by too much death, that week we ate MREs and multi-use potato dishes. Now we get yummy food; we get mint chip ice cream and avocado salads and made-to-order omelets and lattes by our Pakistani cooks, and catered parties with martinis at noon and beer and wine and music under the awning and pizza in the parking lot and steak and crab on Thursdays. We only have to hide under our tables and desks when rockets land in the courtyard.
We get to hang out of windows celebrating football and soccer and gossip about who is doing what to whom and how. We go on dates at the Blue Star Café and talk to friends a million miles away on our cell phones and have screaming debates about fixing the country. We watch the Academy Awards and the Grammys and The Daily Show and we get up early to watch the election and stay up late to watch the game and I got cake on my birthday and flowers when I sang, and I always haggle over prices with the black-clad ladies minding the bathrooms and everyone always politely listens when an old Iraqi man tells us he is afraid for his life. Two weeks later someone asks me if I have seen him.
This war can’t be all bad. I got here by showing up at my Army Reserve center in California in time to jump aboard the Baghdad bus with my unit and here I am, a thirty-something Army broadcast journalist with an M16 on my back and a Sony video camera in my hands, doing television stories for the American Forces Network and the Pentagon Channel. I live in a trailer behind the palace, take a Blackhawk to work, and get to hang out with reporters from the Western and Iraqi media. Members of our group operate cameras at press conferences with Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman Dan Senor and military spokesman for the Coalition Forces General Mark Kimmet, and when we were under a credible kidnapping threat we got to walk around the office with our M16s loaded.
This war can’t be all bad. We watch DVDs on huge TVs and roll over and go back to sleep during alerts. We get to eat at the outpost restaurants in the Green Zone and laugh at that guy in the gorilla suit and buy toys and jewelry from the locals and feel good about ourselves for spreading shoes and pencils and candy and democracy and by sending emails and keeping blogs and taking pictures. Sometimes, one of us, in a fervor of hopeful, democratic consumerism, jumps the fortified fence to go shopping in the Monsour district. And sometimes the shopper even comes back and sometimes that shopper even shows me pictures of their field trip and feeds me sweets from the shops. And the music at the embassy memorial services is always beautiful and the deceased always looks so happy in the memorial pamphlet picture.
This war can’t be all bad. Because of it, all of our résumés look great and will find us high- paying jobs back home and everyone here thanks me personally for giving them their freedom and everyone at home thanks me for my service and I get to mourn in silence. We get to drive cars and pick up journalists at checkpoint three and every American wants a pet Iraqi and every Iraqi wants a pet American and it is not even strange anymore when you know someone who has been killed, kidnapped, or kidnapped and killed.
This war can’t be all bad. The pundits should know that God is taken care of here. We have church on Sunday, synagogue on Friday, prayer groups on Tuesday, witness services on Wednesday, a Muslim prayer rug lives behind a screen in the chapel under the ninety-nine names of Allah. Buddhists meditate alone and the Wiccan stays indoors on Saturdays with her boyfriend. Someone said to someone in the bomb shelter next to the parking lot during an attack that Mormons do their best work in war zones, and I believe it. The fun of it all is that we all get to boss the Iraqis around and feel important by telling them what we are going to do for them and what is good for them and we never have to take no for an answer and we always assure our diplomats that we have Iraqi buy-in and our diplomats always assure their secretaries that they have Iraqi buy-in and their Secretaries always assure the President that they have Iraqi buy-in and the President always assures the American People that we have Iraqi buy-in and the American People don’t care. And the Iraqi who works in your office and thanks you personally for granting him his freedom from Saddam Hussein plants IEDs on the roadways by moonlight while the movie theater downstairs plays Ocean’s Eleven six times a week and Breaker Morant twice and later in the Big Office someone important takes notes for the eventual PowerPoint presentation as a man pleads for us to do something about the Christian genocide and mentions in passing that there are only 85 Jews left in the country.
This war can’t be all bad. Big men growing weapons from their armpits give us protection when we go on missions in the Red Zone and we get to feel like celebrities in large white SUVs as these hunks and their guns open our doors and scan sectors while we gather phrases for government documents from obsequious Iraqi officials who become glorious resistance fighters after we go home. On our days off we play volleyball and horseshoes and Marco Polo and on the Fourth of July we eat too much and feel good about ourselves, sing in the chorus and tape together empty water bottles for the “Empty Water Bottles Taped Together” raft race. We also hide in the basement or under our beds or not at all during rocket attacks on those days. We can’t be the ones to die, not on those days.
This war can’t be all bad. The President’s plan for success in Iraq is working and we don’t even need to know what that plan is this week and Zal once stopped me in the hallway to tell me he saw me perform last night in the Baghdad Idol semifinals and what a talented singer he thought I was and I shook hands with Colin Powell, Condi Rice, John McCain, Senator Barry Obama, Senator John Kerry, Governor Jeb Bush, a beauty queen, Geraldo Rivera, an actor who used to play Superman on TV and some folks with earnest smiles that I had never heard of. I also exercised in the same gym and ran on the same dusty track behind the palace with Dave Petraeus and waited in line to see President Bush when he came to Baghdad and the soldiers assigned to AFN, who had to clean the blood off of Kimberly Dozier’s cameras, didn’t know who she was.
We all had cameras and took pictures of people around the palace and Iraqis around the rubble and ordered clothes from Gap.com and condoms from Drugstore.com and DVDs and yoga mats from Amazon.com and partied at the British embassy, enjoyed pizza night at the Italian Embassy, danced with the Ukrainian Ambassador and laughed at the Iraqi women who wore all the makeup ever made all at the same time all the time, and men who thought we were in Washington and wore dark grey and black wool suits and went to redundant meetings and car bombs went off in the middle of Iraqis waiting in crowds to get in to see us and the pictures of dead Americans hanging from a bridge frightened little children alone at night watching television.
This war can’t be all bad. Once you’ve been there you’ll be back again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and then Iraq will live in your dreams and be the most exciting horrible thing to ever take over your life and then you will have the right to declare with a clear conscience and a steady mind and the moral sense born out of 9/11, and YouTube video clips, and statements from the Dixie Chicks, and Sean Penn and Ted Nugent’s guitar and Cindy Sheehan’s campground and the Occupy movement’s rants, and Obama’s mother and my mother and your mother and all mothers, whether or not, all and all, with all things considered, in the conflict between good and evil, lock, stock and barrel, under the eyes of the Global War on Terror, the mind of God, Osama Bin Laden’s ghost and the sinking economy, this war can’t be all bad.
At the violet hour, you found azure icicles hugging
The bathroom vanity—diving, splintering bodies
Resonating with D minor’s deep blue when they struck.
You picked up their shards,
Constellated them into shapes of dying stars,
And pinned them together like an antique wedding dress.
At the violet hour, they sang unrivaled eulogies
of beauty and felicity, the tonic and the subdominant
of black and grey.
This is cactus land
At the yellow chirping of the fail-safe alarms
You awoke to a dappled snow.
Cinder-speckled drifts incompletely refract
The dim light of a put-upon heaven
You began this vigil two anemic weeks ago.
Weeks when moments of indigo still seemed
To drift between ash clouds
You awaited the shadow like a guest.
He’s as skinny as I ever saw him
in that black and white photograph
Shirtless against a handwritten sign
B’s Chicken Farm, Korea Division
On a hill that never had a name or
he was never informed of the designation
Running radio wire, not so
different than chicken wire except
for the guns and dysentery and
frost biting bitter and black-hearted
Back home, he worked his family’s Jersey farm
he knew how vicious
the chicks could be
ready to pluck one another’s eyes out
for an extra spike of grain
It’s strange how many countries and futureshave receded from you like the tide and that you, once so restlesswill now have to stand still.I used to picture you on some Chinese mountain your hair brushing the sky’s blue domeor in some other sceneyou painted with stories of your travels:glittering cities, lantern-hung alleys.You direct my fingers…
On Believing the Night Has an End When the Night Has No EndThe quarterback spits in his shoe and believes therefore he’ll win today. In this story I am the believing, though once I thought I was the shoe; I thought my father was the spit; I thought the quarterback was very bearded and flanked…
Breath & Shadow is a quarterly journal of disability culture and literature. A project of AbilityMaine, Breath & Shadow is the only online literary journal with a focus on disability. It is also unique in being the sole cross-disability literature and culture magazine written and edited entirely by people with disabilities. While some literary journals may devote…
I found out I was pregnant the same day you got an abortion. We were both seventeen. Back home, high on pot, you swayed in the living room of the small single wide humming Beatles’ tunes. I listened in my terror from the back bedroom. We both needed a little help from our friends. Life…
Ad HominemThe Poet: Fugitive lung, prodigal intestine— where’s the pink crimp in my side where they took you out? The Octopus: It must be a dull world, indeed, where everything appears to be a version or extrapolation of you. The birds are you. The springtime is you. Snails, hurricanes, saddles, elevators— everything becomes you. I,…