Mariam Mohammed Al Khateeb, ‘After’


After twenty years
vineyard
orange trees
or the moon
I will find it there
stretched out
behind the sea.
The children are sharpening their teeth with the salty water.
The moon is gloomy like a lonely child living through genocide.
After twenty years and a quince
I will open a door from the sky
to return
alone
laden with last wills.
I will come back without feet
I planted them in the ground of death
may I escape from the shrapnels/
the sands/ the roses/ the sky/ the pale houses.
Far away
there are two women
chewing the grapes of freedom
they are waving at me
and telling me
there is no use for me
no use for my returning
no use for the home after twenty years
no use for the smell of bread to the hungry corpses
no use for the path after the rubble
nothing will be further back than twenty years
and a kiss on the cheek of a child who melted in the sea




Yazeed Shaat, ‘A trip toward the wind’


On the seafront road
I sit
chained at the neck to fear and worry
I look around
turn my gaze to the right then to the left
no direction leads to any direction

the horizon is thronged with heads plucked from their bodies
faces on which fear blew
stigmas of flowers from which life flew.
Confusion is staring at me
sucking me dry
to the last drop of my blood
it tears me apart
panic scatters me on the pavement
each piece takes a different road
each road is an abyss that throws me into the maw of loss.

‘Where?’
The harsh questions start.
Where is our shelter?
Where is our destination, where our destiny?
Death surrounds us
the cold stings our naked bodies
relishing our mortal souls.
Leisurely
it finishes killing us
and with exaggerated sadism
releases a sharp exhalation
wounding the pure air
and then…
it laughs.

All roads
their beginning, middle, and end
are covered in mist.
As the sting of the hours is about to complete a cycle
the conflict intensifies
the solution is further away
and the abyss gets deeper

I run
paralysed like a man who lost his son in the genocide
I look for the path to the end
and the road to salvation

Am I still alive?
Am I alive among the dead?

Will the tent be my home for ever?
Or is it my grave above the ground?

Like a person looking for his left eye with his right eye
I look for the answer
for the drowned person’s straw and frayed ropes
I look to see God in the horizon
and in the corners of the sky
I look for my heart which fell from me
on the doorstep of my home when I escaped

too many questions
few answers

maybe
the answer is within the question
and the question was submerged in confusion like me.




Tamer Khail, ‘The birth of an absentee’              

Batool Abu Akleen is a Palestinian poet and translator from Gaza City. At the age of fifteen, 2020, she won the Barjeel Poetry Prize for her poem ‘I didn’t steal the cloud,’ which was published in the Beirut-based magazine Rusted Radishesthereafter. Abu Akleen’s poetry has been translated into several languages and featured in numerous international publications, including ArabLit and The Massachusetts Review, amongst others. Her poem ‘Gunpowder’ was awarded third place in the 2025 London Magazine poetry prize, and her work was included in the July 2024 issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, ‘Salam to Gaza.’ Abu Akleen was Modern Poetry in Translation’s 2024 ‘Poet / Translator in Residence.’ Her poetry has appeared in editors Mohammed Al-Zaqzooq and Mahmoud Alshaer’s anthology, Letters from Gaza (Penguin, 2025) and—alongside Nahil Mohan, Sondos Sabra and Ala’a Obaid—she is one of the four Gazan authors included in editors Caryl Churchill and Gillian Slovo’s Voices of Resistance (Comma Press, 2025).  

Cristina Viti is a translator and poet working with Italian, English and French. Among her recent publications are Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger (Tenement Press, 2022), a co-translation of poems by Anna Gréki, The Streets of Algiers and Other Poems (Smokestack Books, 2020), and her translation of Elsa Morante’s The World Saved by Kids and Other Epics (Seagull Books, 2016), which was shortlisted for the John Florio Prize. Viti held collaborative translation workshops within the Radical Translations project run by the French and Comparative Literature departments of King’s College; Tenement’s imprint No University Press published an anthology of texts resulting of these workshops in 2024, An Anarchist Playbook.