Apex Magazine November 2010 (Issue 18)
Page 5
Me and Rumi’s Ghost
bySamer Rabadi
One day, sitting in a café with Rumi’s ghost
over mint tea and biscuits, he told me about Shams;
rhapsodized over his eyes, his fine voice,
his heart that opened like a flower
breathing in and out his lover’s scent;
the whole body responds to that kind of ephemeral fragrance.
On and on he went, until finally,
“Rumi, my friend, you have to stop.
This is a poem about you, not Shams.”
“Samer, my dear, we are one and the same.”
Bio
SamerRabadi was born in Jordan, but his parents soon traded one desert for another, making their way to Los Angeles. Years later, he finds himself in Santa Clara, CA where he lives with the love of his life and works to change the world. Even though he writes for a living, “Me and Rumi’s Ghost” is his first published piece.
TurDisaala
byJawad Elhusuni
If Tordesillas were TurDisaala
And the ‘New World’ were Moorish
Would the yearning have been so tacit
for the treasures of an unknown empire
The sailing ships westward from Al-Ishbuna
Would the gold have been so tainted
Pizarro’s venture to El Dorado
A mosque in Cartagena
And a madrassa dedicated instead
To questioning the value of ‘yellow stones’
If Wounded Knee were Al-Rikba Almu’aafa
Hoh-pong-ge-le-skah
may not have left us
with a void.
Koyaanisqatsi.
Would it be Requerimiento
To accept the Pope’s ‘Holy Faith’
The vanquished slaves of Yucatan
instead as princes in the enclaves
of Gharbiyya
I wonder, if Pocahontas were Abu Qahanta
Would she have been so submissive
as a Powhatan speaking Muslima
Dying not in Kent
But settled, in Matoaka
Bio
JawadElhusuni is an architectural designer and writer from Libya. He has contributed political writing for the Sunday Tribune in Ireland, but prefers to write about history and architectural history and theory. He is currently working on a research project at the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL London to redesign and re-imagine new hygiene narratives for a future Marseille. Apart from architecture, he is greatly fascinated by the nuances of Islamic Law, Reason, Theology and History which he studies in Eastern Libya.
Al Manara Dirge
by Sara Saab
Al Manara Dirge: Beirut, 10pm, lighthouse enduring power outage.
Twelve hours in the city of my infancy on a night endeavoring to portents.
Without its sweeping beam, the flinty stack of Al Manara lighthouse wears the night. It juts among seaside apartment buildings like stale loaves, but there is no pterodactyl wing of light to chase away the heavy shadows of these rooftops. Somewhere below, waves gnaw at Pigeon Rock.
I put the sea at my back. Contrary to rickety traffic, I head up Caracas Descent.
Beirut my precious and new thing, blood of my blood, you are more ancient than my bones and ashes, and I love you harder than my surprised heart could bear to admit.
I stride.
My legs tense against Caracas, muscles recalling this street, a remarkable paved cliff, a severe angle. My sterile everyday lungs are fierce and musical like twin accordions; I gain ground and grief in perfect symphony. When I tire I pause to mourn upon the shoulder of geography as though it were a reverend cassocked in decay. In the rubble of the cat lady’s estate I spy my own broken body, curled like a slug or a doused tabby.
This is my heart-street, its alleys aortas. Like this I seep at the center of the world, a ruffian, all my animal ducts stirred by the unthinkable silence.
Heartbreak is toxic in my plasma.
§
Beirut, your crevices and pocks dare students of science to enumerate them. There is a whole astrology of your bullet marks and crumbs, and it is through you that I come to know – love-letters are made for cities, not men.
I walk.
In a bull’s-eye the size of my heart sit an elderly couple in neon supernova, half-hidden by merchandise. Mayan pyramids of apples and oranges shimmer in tungsten, but my fingertips reveal that sticky dust blankets everything. Here I swap crumpled bills for brittle chocolate.
Beirut, your oldest lady turns to me.
“Track the tributaries of my cheeks, little daughter. Souls upon souls rest, fearful of rot, in a netting of cabbages and cactus fruit, powdered baby formula, mosquito repellent.” A smile ripples like a fish in two underwater irises.
“Go out into rivulet streets, turncoat princess. Seek penance, though you were born forgiven. My souls like housefly eyes forgave you the day your birth cries sanctified road dividers and clotheslines. That day you promised me a warble of suffering in the songs you would sing.”
“Grandmother, I’ve learned.” I say. “Sadness grieved hard enough becomes solid and smooth, and when you cast these stones to bounce upon the rolling of the Mediterranean, what splashes up is not seawater, but a choir of reanimated tears.”
I gesture at boxes stacked behind the Marlboro Reds until she brings down a tin of pebbles with her ploughing hand.
I lay more alien currency on the counter, near coils of mosquito repellent arranged in point-of-sale displays.
Toxic heartbreak laces my plasma, nostalgia is ballooning in my joints. It is a night to be with the sea.
§
Oh my oldest friend, we never did save each other from the dark.
Bio
Sara Saab came wailing into the world at Al Najjar Hospital, Beirut, Lebanon, in the winter of 1984. The prime witnesses each recall a single stand-out feature of the event: her mother, the musk of hard liquor on the skin of the attending obstetrician, and her father, the worrying Klingon dent scoring the tiny nose of the ruddy and slick infant. This crease soon disappeared, but little Sara didn’t. Nowadays Sara works too hard and—embarrassingly—aches too much in the heart whenever confronted by rock anthems or perfect sentences. Aside from dabbling in software in San Francisco, Sara is one half of The Shuttertext Project (shuttertext.tumblr.com) and has recently had work appear in Arct, Fantasy Magazine, and Electric Velocipede.
AN OCCUPATION OF ANGELS
Great fantasy from Lavie Tidhar!
After Archangels materialise over the bloodbaths of WWII, they take up residence in most of the world’s major cities. But what would happen if, more than quarter of a century later, something somehow managed to kill these supreme beings? Killarney knows and, as an agent working for the Bureau, a British agency that’s so secret it doesn’t officially exist, she finds herself embroiled in the consequences as, one by one, the Archangels die.
Assigned to trace a missing cryptographer thought to have information on the murders, she travels from England, through France, heading for the frozen wastes of the USSR. But there’s an unknown third party intent on stopping her, and there’s God, who also has an agenda. Not knowing who is friend and who is foe, and with only a brief glimpse of a swastika on angel wings as solid information, Killarney struggles to remain alive long enough to glean sufficient information to put together the pieces of the puzzle and complete what is, without them, an impossible mission.
“Sharp, brutal, cool–yet also stunningly imaginative and perfectly realised.”
–Michael Marshall, bestselling author of The Straw Men trilogy
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Table of Contents
“The Green Book”
“50 Fatwas for the Virtuous Vampire”
“The Faithful Soldier, Prompted”
“Kamer-taj, the Moon-horse”
“Me and Rumi’s Ghost”
“Tur Disaala”
“Al Manara Dirge”
Submission Guidelines