THE 70s

in

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PHOTOGRAPHY: CHEB MOHA

THINGS I WISH MY SISTER TOLD ME

 

Responsibility is part-human, part-monster. It eats at your brain and makes you overthink every selfish act a million times, and I wish my sister told me how she would silently dump that burden on me unconsciously.

My mother told me I was still young a few weeks ago, but when I confronted her with what I knew, I almost saw the scars at the back of her mouth of when her tonsils were removed 25 years ago. I wish my sister told me how growing up is barely noticed.

I sat with my young siblings today, and made them cry with the weight of responsibility they would be facing a few months or years down the road. 

I never meant to make them cry.

I wish my sister told me how important school was. For myself. For my father.

I wish she told me how important my family is.

I came across a scrawny worker sweeping a stream of water off the streets in the heat, and I can’t wipe the way he looked from my memory. He looked soulless and beaten. How many rejections and roadblocks has he faced? Why hasn’t my sister told me how it hurts to be rejected and beaten down?

My brother told me I was the best sister in the world, my friends once told me they wished they had someone like me in their household, has my sister ever felt that way?

It’s tedious.

It’s an elephant with the skin of Hades on my shoulders.

I barely remember my sister’s presence. I barely remember how she was.

 


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TEXT: RAWDHA AHMED
ART: JUMANA AL RAMZI

MEMORIES

in

If the grains of sand in the hourglass stopped falling, will you be able to tell the time?
Will you be able to count the seconds passing by without recording them?
Will you be sure if every moment you spent was real?
Or will you try to follow the tic tocs of the clock relying on something to tell you that your presence is actually happening in front of you?
Do you need a pen?
A notepad?
A phone perhaps?
Something to help you write down all of the memories, all of the details of your day

But you know what they say
Memories don't live like people do
they always remember you
whether things are good or bad, it's just the memories
memories don't live like people do

But they sure die like them

A Stab by a knife to a heart linked to a mind
a burnt notepad
a broken phone's screen
and everything you went through becomes an illusion
leaving no trace of your memory behind as you get taken away

History is nothing more than the collected memories of the people before us
containing as many lies as truth hidden between its chapters

Memories don't live like people do

But they sure die like them

As you walk down your memory lane realizing what you used to believe in doesn't exist anymore
As your mind and heart walk holding hands listening to the reverse sound of the clock
Your mind recalling and rebuilding events
Your heart cringing and bleeding emotions you once resented
As you recall the memories you once killed
Your heart cringing and bleeding emotions you once resented
As you recall the memories you once killed

Memories don't live like people do

But they sure die like them

As we are nothing but fragile creatures
As fragile as glass
We are made of sand after all

So
If the grains of sand in the hourglass stopped falling
Will you be a human with no memories?
Will you break?

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TEXT: AHMED HAMAD
ART: ZENA ADHAMI 

MEMORY

in
 

When i speak of memory, i speak of;
i aim and shoot
an arrow
into the oblivion (vast
dimensions of space of
the time)
                I draw
it towards that still ocean; tea pot
of age old, rotting cold, forgotten/forgetting flow.

It is the reminiscence
of the struggle
of man against power, is the struggle
of memory against
forgetting.
                   And you see this ritual
is actually a perpetual
struggle of defiance.

As of defiance
as you may listen
now:
        slowly grows in pestilence.

Thus rotten
as it were some fungus grown on breads of silence
or maybe memories unspoken in
resistance
 of fallacies, fiction
and lost relevance:
unbaked dough in oven
resisting heat.
                      Statutory Warning: Contagious Defiance!