by Mara Jebsen

Or, I Did AWP All Wrong, And This Is What I Learned:

Every year, thousands of writers collect at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs convention. In some great origami-like structure, panels and panels unfold in every direction, and lovers, rivals, business partners and strangers rub shoulders (and egos) in a heady atmosphere of nerves. The scale of it, the booze of it, the ambition, and the camaraderie of it, taken together, give the “emerging writer” an occasion to a) lose her mind b) consider the ickiness of networking; the fascinating collisions between the inner lives of artists, and the surprisingly high costs of costly educations. Here is a sort of dream log-book of my not entirely representative experience, and a list of take-aways.

Initial Impressions:

Bus

New York is far behind me, and the bus has clunked down heavily in Boston. Here, the entirety of the available air is taken up with snow that arrives sideways, softly in drifts. The first thing I do, made immoderately confident by my new smartphone, is stride trenchantly off to the wrong convention center; one at which no conventions are being held; one I will find out later is near the airport, and which I sense is near the airport, because of the eerie white nothingness of the landscape, and the deepening sense of ‘wrongness’ growing in my stomach. Snowflakes are matting against my glasses. The hand holding my little weekend bag is red—and I wish I hadn’t come. Off in the distance is a parking lot in front of a hotel, manned by a warmhearted guy in a little toll-booth dealie. I approach him through the blizzard for hours, and when I get to him he chuckles: “You look like you ran away from home.”

This feels correct. Trips that you worry about bring out the superstitious side in most of us. “Is this an auspicious start?” we ask. “Are the signs good?” Being lost is a bad sign. This nice man is a good sign. Already I’m off-kilter and have entered into the zone I call “the agony of interpretation”; the one that will mark two of my three days at AWP. For some reason, the stakes feel high, as though what happens in the next three days will define my attitude towards the literary world that simultaneously allures and repels me, a world I and so many other hope to join.

The man pulls out a series of ever-larger maps, and eventually rights me like a little wind-up toy so I'm ready for Take Two. All my urban slickness rubbed off, I find I'm cowed by the cold and austere geography of Boston.

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by Maniza Naqvi

Perween, once, I heard you called pyar. A play on two words, perhaps, love and friend: pyar. It was a perfect term of endearment for you. Your friends, those, who love you, those, who worked with you, those, whose lives are better because of you, those, for whom you are pyar—are devastated.

I too am devastated and I too am shattered even though I am at the margins of the golden circle of friends and comrades: my teachers, my role models, that very special group of mainly architects and urban planners in Karachi. A very special small group with thousands upon thousands of concentric intertwining circles created in three decades of careful planning and organizing and teaching, thousands of students and practitioners who will collectively defeat the assassins' conniving mean spirited brutality and act of murder.

There will be much written about you and some of it is here, here, here, here, here and here.

I remember in 1987 meeting Dr. Akhtar Hameed Khan in Orangi when I worked in Karachi. And after spending an hour with me he directed me to you. So I climbed the stairs up to your office on the rooftop of that slim three story house whose interior was painted a hospital blue and there up there as though it were a bird's perch– I met you.

Perween Rahman—a slender young woman, long hair down to her shoulder blades, boney, gaunt—dressed that day in a slate colored shalwar kameez, silver bangles jangling on her wrists keeping time with the rhythm of her voice—a dust colored landscape of an architect's tools of trade spread out around her: maps, rolls of drawings, a large drafting table. I can never forget that moment–up there on the rooftop–the settlement of Orangi all around–the hills right there—clay colored. Welcoming, happy—graceful, passionately focused Perween Rahman with a tinkling voice…..so completely content and excited with her work—completely in her element, in her place, with her world spread out all around her, planner of all she surveyed, completely committed to what she was doing–changing the lives and living conditions of an entire locality—and later the entire city and towns and localities around the country–then an experiment in self help, self finance and governance in the times of a military dictatorship when the country was afloat and awash in foreign aid.

Perween it was clear then as it was in all of the last three decades, that you were having the time of your life! The first time I met you I could not help notice the sound of your voice as though your whole being and body were one instrument which sang because it was in its element, in the right place, bent to the purpose and meaning of what you loved. Your whole being hummed and sang and pulsated, breathing in the city spread around you, breathing it in and breathing out to it your commitment and love.

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by Carol A Westbrook

Obesity has become an epidemic. Over 55% American adults are overweight. We have always regarded this as a self-imposed condition, blaming gluttony, lack of discipline, or a sedentary lifestyle. But as a number of recent books have pointed out, it is not how we eat, but what we eat that causes obesity. What we are eating is a normal American diet.

Why stop obesity? Isn't it okay to be fat, as long as you are fit? The answer is that the health consequences of this epidemic are not due to being fat, per se, but eating this diet. Our normal American diet is leading to increases in diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, fatty liver disease, and possibly some cancers, in addition to obesity.

Yes, eating the American diet is making us fat and sick, and shortening our lives. It has become our most pressing public health problem. Let's consider what is wrong with the modern American diet, and what we can do to change it. And we'll see how energy independence may contribute to the solution.

What is wrong with the modern American diet

Years ago, you ate what you liked, stopped when you were satisfied, and didn't get fat. This is how our biology is put together in an ideal world. Nowadays you must continuously count calories, exercise, and diet merely to maintain your weight. The biologic mechanisms that prevented us from overeating have not changed. What has changed is the food.

We may think we are eating the same food that we always have, but in fact we are not. Our diet has changed more in the last generation than it has since we first climbed out of the trees and became omnivores! Our biology is optimized to subsist on a diet containing a wide variety of foods, but it doesn't deal well with our current diet because we are no longer eating food. Up to 70% of what we now eat is processed food or, as I prefer to call it, synthetic food.

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by James McGirk

Going West is an adventure. Maybe not as much as was when you had to take a covered wagon and float across the Mississippi and shoot bison along the way for food, but still, it’s a thrill. My wife and I decided we’d had enough of New York City. She’d been there almost fifteen years, I’d been there ten, and as ostensible creatives it seemed foolish to work 90 hours a week before we even began our “real work.” So we scraped together as much money as we could, borrowed a bit more from my folks, and piled our belongings into a 20’-UHaul—which is about as long of a truck as you can drive without needing a special license or a third axle. Our cats, we chased down and crammed into pet cages. We strapped the three of them into the seat between us, a tower of cat cages, and set off. Destination: Oklahoma.

Half an hour in, one of the cats pissed himself and it dripped all over the other two and my wife’s trousers. I had to admit that I felt a bit defeated. I could rationalize leaving the city as much as I liked, but it hurt to go. Coming there I had a vision of success: a sleek penthouse perched high above midtown and the sort of artsy, exciting life you’d imagine accompanying it—something with awesome city views and sleek modernist furniture and lots of restaurant dining. I’d wanted that life since I was a preteen. And after ten years in the city I never even came close to living it. And it’s hard to abandon a fantasy, but it was harder still to imagine ever being able to afford to live a comfortable life in New York, let alone a luxurious one. Oklahoma, on the other hand, was completely alien to me. Not quite the South, but not the West or Midwest either. We had a few connections out there and the cost of living was so much lower. If we were serious about making a life for ourselves as artists, why not go somewhere completely new?

The first day, the cab reeked of piss and the cats yowled every time we went over a bump or revved the engine too hard for them. We drove south. The weather was fair, cold but clear and not too windy. I hadn’t realized there was a trailer mode that automatically engaged when you started the engine. The truck kept trying to compensate for a non-existent load. The brakes were touchy; the acceleration so slow it was frightening trying to catch up with traffic after merging onto the freeway. Cars and trucks would race around us–it took minutes until we were going as fast as everyone else. We made it as far as Winchester, West Virginia that first night and found a comfortable inn to stay in. The manager let us bring our cats in. We let them roam free the room—a huge mistake. For the hotel and us.

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Bibliophile

They say Hitler housed 16,000 books
in Berlin and Obersalzburg—
his dark jewels

In Obersalzburg and Berlin
his books did nothing for his soul
but drag it through the muck of his mind
so that in the end he became as much a victim
of his own immurement as Fortunato
did of Montresor in Amontillado

Predisposed, he heaped word upon word
building an edifice to suit himself. Unable to relate
he read everything that greased the skids of hate

He owned the Racial Typology of the German People,
the works of anti-semite Julius Lehmann,
and any pamphlet that arrived at preconclusions
—which proves:

a bookworm’s library may be vast
and worms may be well-read
but still be worms
at last
.

Jim Culleny
2008

INTERWEB

From: Linda@coolmaildotcom
“Dreamed about you and Sarah.
Never thought I’d miss you.
Thanks for watering the palm.”

From: Sarah@hootmaildotcom
“Bought you the perfect jumper,
It’s Cashmere, large, maroon.
The best is yet 2B.”

I float up Broadway
to tend to Linda’s palm.
Kneeling by her kitchen island
last year I said: “Marry me.”

Had she been cooking sole
in the juice of tangerines?
“O dear. How odd.
No, for the time being.”

To: Sarah@hootmaildotcom
“Yearn for your hug, luv.”
To: Linda@coolmaildotcom
“Chill out. Palm alive.”

by Rafiq Kathwari

More poems by Rafiq here.

by Sousan Hammad

In May 2010 I was invited to a small exhibition in Nazareth where poet Taha Muhammad Ali and his former neighbor, both refugees from Saffuriya (a village 15 km from Haifa), were to speak at an inaugural museum on Nakba Day – the day on which Palestinians commemorate the nakba, or Disaster, that befell its people in 1948. ^[1] Before speaking, the neighbor, an elderly woman, wandered around tables that exhibited household items from historic Saffuriya: pots and scissors, mortars and mirrors, carpets and irons. Items that lay bare the very history she was going to speak about. As she walked around the room, crying, moving from object to object, the past emerged, not as a collection of artifacts, but as a nightmare, and it occurred to me that I was witnessing traces of the woman's first imaginations, where memories of her childhood soared around our bodies in a presence colliding with absence: the presence being the objects, and the absence its history. I wanted to reassure her, to tell her to ignore the fluorescent lights on the ceiling and our commemorative slogans and banners taped on the walls, to tell her this is it: this is the real Saffuriya. Perhaps she would think she returned (for it is every Palestinian's dream to return to their respective, but destroyed, village) but everything became a blur once she began to speak; she forgot her name, her age, her location. In Mohammad Bakri's film 1948, the poet Taha Ali is asked what Saffuriya means to him, and he responded: “When I visit Saffuriya I become excited and burst out crying, but when I think about Saffuriya the picture that forms in my memory is virtually imaginary, mysterious, hard to explain.”

This anecdote illustrates a recurring theme: much of the Palestinian narrative published today deals with the particular space of the past and, in so doing, raises questions of justice: the act of remembering historical Palestine is by definition an ethical act. The conventional literature and storytelling of Palestine serves thus a moral purpose, stemming from the fundamental sense of catastrophe, and tells again and again the story of a nightmare that occurred in, and is still trapped in, 1948: The Nakba.

But beyond the commemoration of the past, for Palestinians, the 1948 War dramatically and irreversibly changed their lives. Beyond the determinant moment in their lives, not only in history but also in memory, and thus identity, the Nakba has become a key site of Palestinian collective memory and as such a determining feature of identity. For the Palestinian, catastrophe is not just something of the past, it continues into the present.

[Photos by Larissa Sansour from her current project Nation Estate.]

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Dear Abbas,

I'm sorry for disappearing so suddenly a few years back. One day I'm still there on the East Coast busily discharging the duties of my profession, while also, I'm sure you remember, circulating in something pretty close to what you could straight-facedly call a 'demimonde': publishing, blogging, tweeting and getting retweeted like a star. And then, the next day, silence. As you probably detected, it was a challenging time for me at many levels, personal, professional, etc. I've been meaning for a long time to write to fill you in on what's been going on, but I had to feel like I was starting to get back on my feet again before I even dared.

I've got my own place now, in Sacramento. Not Sacramento exactly, but Carmichael. Which is basically Sacramento. My upstairs neighbors are a couple of skinheads. It's a good thing I'm white, I guess. They mostly keep to themselves, always loading asbestos-removal equipment into and out of their pick-up truck. It's not so bad. I was living with my mom for the first two years or so out in Fair Oaks (also basically Sac), but she eventually pushed me to get a job at Best Buy, drawing on some connections with the middle-manageriate at our local outlet, connections that also seem somehow to involve Timothy, her Vietnamese manicurist who always works with a parrot on his shoulder. I don't know all the behind-the-scenes machinations that went on, but somehow a job was procured for me, and I guess it's around that time that I started feeling like I'm my own person again. Actually that's a bit of an exaggeration: I'm still so steeped in debt I'm not anywhere near being my own person. I can't afford to be a person for anyone but the credit-card companies and their collectors.

At least I've paid back everything I owed to Best Buy. That's right: for about 9 months I was basically an indentured servant, having ruined a few Bluetooth Cochlears the first week on the job while trying to show some customers how to insert them (I didn't know you had to have a wax-removal certificate from an ENT first). They docked the cost of them from my pay. That was only like half a paycheck, but the real problem started when some of my co-workers (half my age, of course) figured out how to hack the Acer Goggles we had on display in order to get high on the deep-brain-stimulator stuff they were emitting, before the FDA or ATF or whoever handles this sort of thing put a stop to it.

What a crazy story that was! I couldn't believe it when the scandal broke, and Acer's CEO held a press conference to admit they had come up from behind and beat Google at the enhanced-reality-glasses game by including a little photon beam or whatever that travelled directly to the limbic system and induced a low-grade sense of bliss. My co-workers were a bunch of stoner idiots, but to their credit they were some of the first kids in the country not only to figure out what was going on, and why all of a sudden Acer's profits were going through the roof, but also how to up the photon dosage and stimulate the shit out of the hypothalamus. So picture me: a former philosophy professor, 42 years old, lying on the floor of the Best Buy break room wearing those stupid goggles, acering like a teenager, stoned out of my fucking mind, when the manager bursts in and yanks them off my face. All of a sudden, no more bliss. Damn. And he says to me: “Hey genius, I hope you know it breaks 'em when you unblock the photon dosage. You're gonna be paying that off for a long-ass time, professor.”

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The Buddha’s doctrine is thus proven:
nothing in this world is created.
……………. —(Octavio Paz, per Dharmakirti)

Same Difference

Nothing in this world is created,
said Buddha looking into a lotus bowl

Nothing is created

In this lotus filled to the brim
is nothing which has been created

Nothing is created

From the bottom of this lotus brimming with nothing
but filled with hope open as a door

Nothing is created

Nothing in Buddha’s lotus is created
This lotus has been overflowing always

Nothing is created

Something mounts the sky like a sun
in no time wave by wave ladened with light

Uncreated

When I woke this morning it was
flooding Bald Mountain lapping
its stone tower

Uncreated

When was it not created?
Could it have been

Uncreated?

Buddha says
Nothing is created

Buddha is
Uncreated

What created creation?
Nothing

or the
Unknown

same difference

.

by Jim Culleny
8/18/11

by Leanne Ogasawara

Last month here, my illustrious 3QD associate Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash) asked the following question: Can America survive what our 1% and their useful idiots and the dems have done to us?

His answer, in short, is no. He says:

We used to be a Ford economy: at the outset Ford decided to pay his workers enough money to be able to afford the cars they made. Today we're a Walmart economy: Walmart doesn't pay its workers enough wages for them to get off food stamps. We're forced to live on credit. When our 1% of rich folks inflated the housing bubble to create their fraudulent derivatives, regular folks had enough equity in their homes to finance their living standards. For a short while. Then that Ponzi scheme collapsed. Today we Americans don't get paid enough for us to have an economy. The rich have plucked the goose so bare, there's nothing left but the bones.

Nothing but bones about it. I arrived back to the US after twenty years overseas during the height of the Occupy Movement. Two decades is not all that long, and yet the change in America was staggering. I was only surprised the Occupy Movement was as restrained as it was. I have heard it said that during the time I was away occured the largest transfer of wealth in this country's history. I don't know if that is true or even close to being true, but that one class of the population had grown significantly wealthier to an exponential degree while the majority had sunk to a “nothing left but bones” state, I think is undeniable.

When I left, this country was just as Cilliers describes: a Ford economy. As he suggests, there has always been upper management versus labor/staff and ruling elite versus the masses–but back in the old days, the non-elite could basically make a living, had benefits, and could survive. That is, a family could manage and their children be educated on the salary of factory line worker. Also at the time I left, medical bills didn't often completely wipe a family out either.

What on earth happened when I was away?

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by Amardeep Singh

Dear Chief Minister Modi,

You don't know me, but I'll spare you a Google search: I am one of your loyal subjects! I'm a proud Indian –technically Indian American, but never mind that. I may have been born in America but at heart I am a true Indian.

Respected Chachaji Modi, I heard the story about how you got invited to speak at a conference called the Indian Economic Forum at the Wharton School of Business, only to have the invitation get cancelled this week because of Marxist Professors who were acting as the Sepoys for the Whites (as Mr. Rajiv Malhotra has written in a Tweet). Quite shocking! Disrespectful behavior!

Chachaji, I have heard many of our friends, referred to by pseudosecularists and their ilk as “Internet Hindus,” complaining about this incident as a problem of freedom of speech. The pseudosecularists, for their part, say we have to remember the past. But like you I am a man of the future! I think it is time to put the past behind us. We have to think of India's development, not the immediate past!

However, there are a couple of things bothering me about the recent past that I was hoping you could explain to me. I have been wondering about some things people say you did a few years ago. The word “riot” is so dull, it doesn't really explain what happened does it?

Anyway, no one is saying you caused the riots – or whatever they were – but… There is some talk, Chacha, that you told your Bajrangi goonda acquaintances they could do whatever they wanted for three days. Is that true? Some hack journalist at Tehelka taped a bunch of thug types saying things like that in 2007. I never heard you say it didn't happen, or explain why all these guys would say this when they thought they were speaking in confidence, among friends.

Also is it true what they say about your refusal to send help to Ehsan Jafri? That you said something about him “firing” at the mob to Sanjiv Bhatt? The number of people who were killed at the Gulburg Society alone makes me a little hairaan – 179 people, was it? I wonder why you didn't respond to his direct call to you, or even to L.K. Advani who called you from Delhi specifically to find out what you were doing to protect him?

Chachoo, do you ever feel just a little bit bad about what happened to those 179 people, or the other 800 who were killed in those riots (or whatever they were)? Do you ever lose sleep about this happening in Our New India? I do, which is strange, because I didn't even have anything to do with it.

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by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

Hugo Chavez did two great things for Venezuela. He wiped out illiteracy, and reduced the poverty rate from 80% to 20%. In other words, he empowered the poor. He had the imagination to think big (like promoting a South American Bolivarian Union) and the cojones to act big (like nationalizing oil, banking and land).

And what do our leaders do in America?

Nothing big. Nothing much. Unless it's wasting time and money and words on fake problems like the deficit and “reforming” Social Security, or trying to stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb.

What are our real problems?

I see four big ones: unemployment, rising health costs, income/opportunity inequality, and Wall Street fraud.

So how can we solve them?

There's a simple solution to rising health costs: Medicare for all. Put it out there as an option, and watch everyone sign up except the rich who can afford to pay doctors, hospitals, Big Pharma and the health insurance industry the exorbitant rates they like to get away with. The state of Vermont has Medicare for all already, and maybe other states will follow suit, so that the Feds won't ever have to get around to it, which they are constitutionally unable to do anyway.

As for unemployment, we don't ever have a real discussion about it. Add up the officially unemployed of 12 million, the underemployed of 8 million, the 6.8 million who are not counted in the labor force but say they want a job, and you have 26.8 million unemployed and underemployed. That's a pretty big chunk out of the 155 million employed Americans.

What's to be done? Perhaps we should be talking about some imaginative solutions, ferchrissake. Just for starters.

Like maybe we should be talking about a four-day work week. What with machines taking over, there might not be enough work for everybody anyway, so we could employ more people if we shorten the work week.

Or maybe we should discuss a massive investment in a new Public Works Administration. Here we are paying out gazillions in unemployment insurance to our millions of unemployed, when our government could pay them wages instead to work on fixing our infrastructure (rated F by our engineers), and building new infrastructure.

Those are two real solutions, and they're not even being discussed.

Then there's the fact that Wall Street gets away with fraud (and laundering drug lord money and terrorist funds), and therefore will continue to do so, which will continue to sabotage our economy. When he had the chance, Obama lacked the imagination to nationalize the big banks, fire their management, break them up and sell the parts back to private industry, as advocated by no less an economist than Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz. And this week Eric Holder admitted that Wall Street banks are too big to jail. In other words, he's not man enough to prosecute Wall Street fraudsters. Doesn't have the balls. Take them to court if you can't take them to jail: that might be enough to scare them into behaving. He doesn't even have the balls to prosecute HSBC for laundering millions in drug cartel money despite being warned not to. But he does have the balls to go after medical marijuana suppliers. What an asshole.

As for income equality: well, at least Obama has put raising the minimum wage on the table — except he wants it to go to only $9 an hour, when doubling it will inject a huge amount of spending into our economy, which our big corporations are not doing, even though they're making bigger profits than ever before. If some of their big profits were diverted into the pockets of their employees, our entire economy would benefit.

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Congress, I do hate to pester
But this fuckfest that you've named Sequester
Just the latest dumb tiff
After the Fiscal Cliff
And this time the wound will long fester

Is it really so much to ask
That you stick to the important task
Concentrate on Job One
Get the People's work done
Not just the people in whose money you bask

Can enough of you vote for each judge?
And nominations you can't seem to budge
It's what you demand
When you're in command
But to this President somehow begrudge

For once I say, “Hurray to Rand Paul”
And no, I'm not busting your balls
Be more than lackluster
For your filibuster
Have the guts to stand till you fall

I know you live in fear of your fate
If you vote against the will of your state
But just grow a pair
And do what's right and what's fair
America can no longer wait!

by Jalees Rehman

“For every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency.”

Jorge Luis Borges, “Library of Babel“

The British-Australian art curator Nick Waterlow was tragically murdered on November 9, 2009 in the Sydney suburb of Randwick. His untimely death shocked the Australian art community, not only because of the gruesome nature of his death – Waterlow was stabbed alongside his daughter by his mentally ill son – but also because his death represented a major blow to the burgeoning Australian art community. He was a highly regarded art curator, who had served as a director of the Sydney Biennale and international art exhibitions and was also an art ambassador who brought together artists and audiences from all over the world.

After his untimely death, his partner Juliet Darling discovered some notes that Waterlow had jotted down shortly before his untimely death to characterize what defines and motivates a good art curator and he gave them the eerily prescient title “A Curator’s Last Will and Testament”:

1. Passion

2. An eye of discernment

3. An empty vessel

4. An ability to be uncertain

5. Belief in the necessity of art and artists

6. A medium— bringing a passionate and informed understanding of works of art to an audience in ways that will stimulate, inspire, question

7. Making possible the altering of perception.

Waterlow’s notes help dismantle the cliché of stuffy old curators walking around in museums who ensure that their collections remain unblemished and instead portray the curator as a passionate person who is motivated by a desire to inspire artists and audiences alike.

The Evolving Roles of Curators

The traditional role of the curator was closely related to the Latin origins of the word, “curare” refers to “to take care of”, “to nurse” or “to look after”. Curators of museums or art collections were primarily in charge of preserving, overseeing, archiving and cataloging the artifacts that were placed under their guardianship. As outlined in “Thinking Contemporary Curating” by Terry Smith, the latter half of 20th century witnessed the emergence of new roles for art curators, both private curators and those formally employed as curators by museum or art collections. Curators not only organized art exhibitions but were given an increasing degree of freedom in terms of choosing the artists and themes of the exhibitions and creating innovative opportunities for artists to interact with their audiences. The art exhibition itself became a form of art, a collage of art assembled by the curators in a unique manner.

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by Maniza Naqvi

I search for you– you’re lost somewhere, somewhere beyond my realm. I listen to the sound of distant thunder—or is it— I wonder fireworks for a celebration? Or an explosion or gunshots targeted for yet another murder? The drum roll for a roll call—the toll to be tallied up by Dawn: Zaidi, Abbas, Raza, Jaferi, Naqvi, Abidi, Mehdi, Kazmi, Haider, Husain, Hasan, Husnain, Sadquain, Saqlain, Kazmain, Rizvi.

In this city torn by violence, where my neck hurts from stiffening in fear and anxiety when a motorbike with two riders comes abreast to my car—at traffic lights—and as I panic about what’s next, I wonder if I’ll see the bullet coming, in a country where so many are killed every day, where those with names like mine are being singled out to be targeted, shot dead.

In this city—I stand in the cool night—with the sea breeze kissing my face– mussing my hair, I look out at the half lit city across the mangroves and I spread my arms out as wide apart as I can and shout out as if to the entire city and to nobody—“I love you!”

In this city why is it that I am a stranger now, that I never see you, in this town where everyone seems to have my name. The city, which captures my imagination, the place which I think I know intricately, where I pine to be—the place where I want to be the better—good and loveable me—is the place I never wanted to stay in when you had wanted me. But was there ever a question of Shi’a and Sunni between us? Never, right? No matter now, a matter of detail, like a miniscule amount of arsenic in water, so many years ago. But in truth there were so many other excuses. Me. And you.

And all this time, I ran away, expecting that you would stay—be the one I returned to. I was the one who was supposed to return and you were the one who was supposed to have stayed for me. I remained faithful—did you stay with me?

In this city, this time as the mangroves trilled with sound in the early mornings I sat and talked about language and tales with Intezar Hussain, Kishwar Naheed, Iftikhar Arif and I.A Rahman. I chattered away. At the edge of the breakwaters of the Arabian Sea, across mangroves and the busy happy sounds of literature’s festivities, at Beach Luxury Hotel— I sat at a lunch table across from Steve Inskeep, sharing his modestly served helping of makai ki roti and a too spicy saag. Here—there, we were Steve Inskeep and me, well I’ll be damned—away from our circle, Logan, away from the early morning “traffic backed up on the inner loop to the beltway”, here we are, discussing Karachi. Back there, we share a zip code and a circle, and a loop and I am used to listening to his voice on the radio telling me of news of places including this one here, my home in that home—while I foam at the mouth with Extreme Clean, toothbrush in hand at seven a.m every weekday. And here, because I’ve written Mass Transit and that book called On Air, of Naz soliciting stories in a late night talk show, here I was the Karachi Literature Festival to talk about a book of short stories, by Karachites—Karachi-walas, here I was in conversation with Steve Inskeep.

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Burning Bush

At twenty I danced the tops of walls
Najinsky of the double top plate

bent in-two like an onion shoot
unbending up through an earthen gate

lifting sticks to be put in place
nailing their tails held against my boot

walking the wires of gravity’s net
as a spider commands the filament web

hung in the crotch of the jamb of a door
between one post and its lintel head

From the crow’s nest of my wall-top perch
poised to get the next piece set

in air as clear as a baby’s thoughts
surveying homes unlived-in yet

fresh-footed, balanced, without a clue
assessing my recent work and worth:

shadows of studs plumb and true
lying like bars across up-turned earth

Sweatskin slickkening in the light
breath as sure as the bellows of god

biceps built by the truth of weight,
muscles doing their natural jobs:

arms of sinew, bone and grit
reaching to haul the next board up

to be lifted and laid wall to ridge
and fixed by hammer blows on steel

fueled by blasts of a burning bush
in the orchard of god that has ever spun

like the fire that made big Moses reel
the burning bush we call the sun

.
by Jim Culleny
2/22/13