« Julian Walks Into The Duomo And A Rush Of Cool Air Washes Over Him. There Is A Small Group Of Students

Beirut and I, we make love like war

"By nature, a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across - each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip - is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom, sometimes a tiny pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar, and served as a piping-hot tale." - Rabih Alameddine, The Hakawati

« If anyone asks you

how the perfect satisfaction

of all our sexual wanting

will look, lift your face

and say,

Like this.

When someone mentions the gracefulness

of the nightsky, climb up on the roof

and dance and say,

Like this.

If anyone wants to know what “spirit” is,

or what “God’s fragrance” means,

lean your head toward him or her.

Keep your face there close.

Like this.

When someone quotes the old poetic image

about clouds gradually uncovering the moon,

slowly loosen knot by knot the strings

of your robe.

Like this.

If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,

don’t try to explain the miracle.

Kiss me on the lips.

Like this. Like this.

When someone asks what it means

to “die for love,” point

here.

If someone asks how tall I am, frown

and measure with your fingers the space

between the creases on your forehead.

This tall.

The soul sometimes leaves the body, the returns.

When someone doesn’t believe that,

walk back into my house.

Like this.

When lovers moan,

they’re telling our story.

Like this.

I am a sky where spirits live.

Stare into this deepening blue,

while the breeze says a secret.

Like this.

When someone asks what there is to do,

light the candle in his hand.

Like this.

How did Joseph’s scent come to Jacob?

Huuuuu.

How did Jacob’s sight return?

Huuuu.

A little wind cleans the eyes.

Like this.

When Shams comes back from Tabriz,

he’ll put just his head around the edge

of the door to surprise us

Like this. »

Rumi, from The Essential Rumi, Translations

by Coleman Barks with John Moyne

“I undressed and left my clothes on the sand. I was not at ease with my body, not even in the darkness of night. It had been unloved, perhaps forever. Untouched by a lover for a long time. I didn’t know what to do with it when it was not in conversation with a piano. Or how to respond to the way Tomas gazed at the green jewel pierced through my belly button.”

— Deborah Levy, August Blue

« I have a complicated relationship with walking. This has a lot to do, I suspect, with having grown up in Aligarh, a city in northern India, where walking on the streets came with intense male scrutiny, and the sense of being in a proscribed space. As a woman stepping out into its thoroughfares, I needed a reason to place my body on the street. I learned to display a posture of ‘work’ while walking, and to erase any signs that may hint at my being out for pleasure, for no reason at all other than to walk. All this means I see walking as a luxury, not something to be taken for granted. It is an act of autonomy and mobility I learned early to seize as a form of pleasure. I also grew adept at the allied skill of reading my terrain, looking out for signs that told me if it was open, or off-limits.

Being told not to walk was another way in which Kabul felt familiar. To map the city, I drew on the same knowledge and intuition that had helped me navigate the streets of my home town. Which is why, unlike the maps of guidebooks that seek to make checklists and establish authority, the routes I took were wandering and idiosyncratic. They were not trajectories of efficiency leading to a predetermined destination, nor were they maps of authority or delineation, offering control or explanation. These were routes of discovery – maps of being lost. To be lost is a way to see a place afresh, a way to reimagine a terrain that feels known. To be lost in Kabul is to find it – as a place of richness and possibility. »

Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul, Taran N. Khan

« What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extraordinary: the front-page splash, the banner headlines. Railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers that are killed, the more the trains exist. Aeroplanes achieve existence only when they are hijacked. The one and only destiny of motor-cars is to drive into plane trees. Fifty-two weekends a year, fifty-two casualty lists: so many dead and all the better for the news media if the figures keep on going up! Behind the event there has to be a scandal, a fissure, a danger, as if life reveals itself only by way of the spectacular, as if what speaks, what is significant, is always abnormal: natural cataclysms or historical upheavals, social unrest, political scandals. »

Georges Perec, “Approaches to What?” In L’Infra-ordinaire

« Growing up, I read a lot. Partly because I loved it, and partly because there wasn’t much else to do as a teenage girl in Aligarh. Given the tacit boundaries of my conservatively liberal Muslim family, the world outside my door was as distant as a faraway continent. I ventured into it like a tourist. To school, family outings to the cinema, a few social events with friends. All of these expeditions were monitored and supervised. Crucially, they all required reasons – a sanctioned purpose that permitted my presence on the streets, which could never be aimless. My male cousins roamed the thoroughfares of Aligarh freely, spending late nights at buzzy tea shops, leaping over walls, gazing at the stars. I cultivated a fluency in occupying interiors. Reading, then, was a path into possibilities; it offered a parallel terrain which I could stride through boldly. »

« Books were thus my private continent, providing both excitement and safety. They were my maps to navigating the world, and also the way I created a sense of belonging, of being at home. They opened up worlds for me, without my leaving the house. »

Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul, Taran N. Khan

« The town looked golden and antique and the mountains next to us were covered with thin pine trees. Beirut, from this bench, was like a dream, a winding staircase of awkward memories and people who no longer were, who one day would no longer be. »

Nur Turkmani, Black Hole (Source: Rusted Radishes)

Christine Lai, Landscapes

"I am jealous of my senses. The air is the colour of gardenias, your smell on my shoulders like laughter and triumphal arches. I am jealous of the peaceful daggers lying sheathed before you on the table, waiting for a sign from you to kill me. I am jealous of the vase, which has no need of its yellow roses because you give it the full benefit of your deep red lips, hungry for my hunger. I am jealous of the painting staring greedily at you: look longer at me, so I too can have my fill of lakes and cherry orchards. I am envious of the foliage on the rug, straining upwards to see an anklet descending on it from above, and of the anklet when it rests on your knee, making the marble in the room as hot as my fantasies. I am envious of the bookshop that is out of sorts because it doesn't carry an erotic book in praise of two small ivory hills, bared before it to a frenzy of guitars, then hidden by a wave of sighing silk. I am envious of my fingers catching the dialogue of darkness and light as it overflows from your hands, the movement of a spoon in your teacup, the salts stirred up in a body that yearns for a storm to spark the fire of song: gather me up, all of you, and hold me close so I can envy my memories of you in the future. I envy my tongue, which calls your name with as much care as someone carrying four crystal glasses in one hand. I taste the letters of your name one by one, like lyrical fruits. I do not add water to them, so as to preserve the taste of peaches and the thirst of my senses. I envy my imagination embracing you, silencing you, kissing you, caressing you, holding you tight and letting you go, bringing you near and pushing you away, lifting you up and putting you down, making you submit and submitting to you, and doing all the things I never do."

- Mahmoud Darwish, from I Am Jealous of Everything Around You.