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A Maya mosaic mask, made of jade and shell. Place of origin: Guatemala, c. 200–600 CE. Collection: Al Thani Collection, Qatar.

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Hermelindo Fiaminghi | Alternado III. Esmalte sobre madeira.

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“The only status I understand is that of strangeness.” - Paul B. Preciado

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we are

inspired by Mahmoud Darwish

years of a sun loving us, solitude is in the wrist of a magnolia tree, hung or lynched in a rose-throated croon of liberty and justice for all except blues people living in the smoke at a crossroads, what really happened that day robert johnson brought his guitar to meet an evil of all hues play with magic and be ready for it to play with you some folks fear death others know better fear the devil don't tell no soul to spite dying we all have to go someday or another death is a family member you hear of but never met until y'all meet some things is meant for tellin other things just is what they was

i have faced worse things than being forgotten tho you call me woman whom you do not know i am a daughter of sisters of pillaged offerings an afterlife of secrets scores of lustering light i summon you bravely beside me marching onward move not for reasons but love any law that deviates from this is as cruel as it is ancient let your words be soothing terrors never mind what was written we will rewrite it an idea of freedom is all we know

our inheritance is to lift one another we shift into a gust or bristles between strands of hair ashes of breath raging in quiet what land is ours to toss and turn over if not our bodies, the dunes across chests the legs all roads, arms a meadow of marigolds

we survive and regret surviving we are descendants of the end we see the end fences, barbed wire, stone walls, and iron gates do not impede truth. nations can not foresee our being

here in this vessel of marrow and sweat having made it across the bayous of a dark mother's womb and all that tried her pushing through treacherous attempts at our lives fear not what of me resides in you a shawl of waiting hankering to be felt what ails is what ails

wild visions leave doors unlocked dazed veterans returned from combat, injured arms slung close to chest, loyal to a beat or nub. i am a country within a country retire rest a while woke and whirring, my beloved we take to the streets as a sort of rain descending atop roofs of all those who make laws to define the absence between us peculiar spirit who aspires for such things, to possess a people what sin hunts hearts? the birds, the fish, the cattle the islands of what is kept sacred. to nurture is to resist. in all forms we heal. we must work the land before we make claims to it what endures the body is the body when we left our mother's belly we did not take any land only thing we took was the weapon of her smile and the elixir of her love.

—aja monet

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Truck on Levee, from the Delta Portfolio, Photo by Roger Minick, 1969

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An elephant sleeps near Kandy, Sri Lanka 1979,  Bruno Barbey.

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take me to heaven | victor m. alonso

[los años, que van lentos | como una noche sin luna]

[the years, that go slow | like a moonless night]

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Sicily, Bagheria, Italy: preaping the tomato concentrate 1963, Ferdinando Scianna.

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A traditional mask highlights rather than conceals the sharp eyes of an 18-year-old Muslim woman in Minab, Iran. (2001) photo: Michael Yamashita

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American sculptor & artist Augusta Savage, 1920s-1950s

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David Galstyan

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"Palestine is a story away.” This is what Refaat Alareer wrote on my copy of the short story anthology he edited in 2014, Gaza Writes Back. The contributors were his students at the Islamic University of Gaza.

When I published my poetry book, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza, in 2022, the first person I gave a copy to in Gaza was Refaat. I signed the copy by writing, “Palestine is a poem away.”

Now Refaat is a world away. He was assassinated on December 6 by the Israeli army. The only weapon in his Gaza apartment was an EXPO marker. If the Israeli soldiers were to raid his house, he said, he would throw it at them, while crying, “We are helpless.”

Mosab Abu Toha, the opening paragraphs of his essay "Palestine Is a Story Away: A Tribute to Refaat Alareer", published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, January 2, 2024. You can read the entire essay here.

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~ Female Fertility Figurine.

Place of origin: Türkiye

Period: Neolithic

Date: 7th Millennium B.C.

Medium: Ceramic

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Mosab Abu Toha, from Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza; “Hard Exercise”

[Text ID: “In Gaza, / breathing is a task, / smiling is performing / plastic surgery / on one’s own face, / and rising in the morning, / trying to survive / another day, is coming back / from the dead.”]

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A Rose Shoulders Up by Mosab Abu Toha

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By the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha

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Rajni Perera