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“It has been almost two years since we were waiting for you to take action. We expected you to not be just a viewer,” Shegofa Shahbaz wrote to the UN. But because she wasn’t sure the UN would read a…
I am writing this letter on behalf of all Afghan girls. I am Shegofa Shahbaz. I am twenty years old. I grew up among the dust and smoke of explosions, gunshots, fire, war, and sad stories. I grew up with…
Karachi, Pakistan—1997 “How many times have I said—don’t put spices in the food!” My father’s voice ignited my nervous system, scorching through the oppressively humid atmosphere. My mother, who had cooked the food, stared silently at her plate. He pointed…
I am writing this on Israel’s seventy-fifth anniversary, its democratic future shrouded in fog. Sections of society that failed to gain recognition, excluded for years from the main public discourse and centers of power, are now seeking to dismantle it…
I had reached a new low. The heights of the literary profession had never seemed more distant, unreachable. In fact, I lived in an attic. It was a hot and unbearable Istanbul summer. I woke every morning and sometimes every…
[…] My hair could have been held in court as evidence of child neglect. My birth was preceded by an endless list of questions concerning paternity, but the dark, coarse corkscrews that sprang from my crown only served to lengthen…
Traversing boundaries, cultures gained and cultures lost, and sensations across time and space are continual themes in my work. I left India at age eight and, ever since, have worked to reconcile what has been lost and found. My work…
I spent the better part of a month in 2022 in lower Manhattan on a wooden bench in the back of a courtroom, observing a rape trial. Early on, I’d concluded my testimony on behalf of the victim, but, emotionally…
[…] Alarm and outrage surged again. This scare tactic was having its intended effect, and it took every bit of those panic-reducing approaches I share with my patients in times of high anxiety to calm myself. […]
The mayor called for an investigation into the amount of horseshit that’s been accumulating on Central Park West as of late. ‘It’s a veritable dumping ground,’ one disgusted resident said. ‘It’s a lot of shit,’ the mayor was quoted as…
Stephanie Niu is a poet and digital storyteller from Marietta, Georgia. She is the author of Survived By, winner of the 2023 Host Publications Chapbook Prize, and She Has Dreamt Again of Water, winner of the 2021 Diode Chapbook Contest.…
I met Carol when I was in my early twenties. She was sweet and funny, with a gravelly Jersey accent and a streetwise tomboy persona. I don’t know how she ended up homeless and turning tricks on the streets of…
Twenty minutes passed. The doctor had been testing Carmela with small cuts. She screamed in agony each time. She was feeling everything, and she could especially feel every slit, stealing that initial resolve. Cut by cut, her screams grew louder…
For me, artmaking is the documentation of what I see and seek to understand. Watching, synthesizing, recording, I lay it all down with paint, no words, just light, color, shape and space.
My mind keeps returning to an image of myself sitting in my chair at the office—my therapist chair—in March 2023. Only the dim winter sun and the murmur of passing cars filtered in through the window on my left. Inside,…
Diane Raptosh’s collection American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press), was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award in poetry. The recipient of three fellowships in literature from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she served as the Boise Poet Laureate (2013) as well…
Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine is written by Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi a psychoanalyst and a humanities professor, respectively.
I love this name, the space it brings with it. It feels ready for me to fill it with whatever I need to. Sometimes, that’s all we need—a space, and time to fill that space and maybe just the silence…
