4 new poems in Mud Season Review!
I’m excited to announce I’ve got four new poems out!
This is especially meaningful for me for a couple of reasons:
I’ve been rejected by Mud Season Review previously, so to have everything I submitted this most recent round get accepted is a big win!
I was recently thinking about the time a former friend told me in early 2022 that I should just stick to prose because I wasn’t much of a poet and the interest Electric Lit had in my work around that time was a fluke. Yeah, fuck them.
I’m currently laid up with a broken ankle (I meant to shred the bowl at the skatepark and ended up shredding myself), so I’ll take all the good news I can get.
And, most importantly: The reason why these are two love poems paired with two Palestine poems, even though they may not appear to go together on the surface…
I'm Palestinian and so much of the news around my people is about our suffering, dispossession, and genocide at the hands of Zionists. As humans, we experience the full range of emotions—including love, joy, and happiness—-but we're so often reduced to our struggles for basic human rights and longing for a homeland we can't safely return to. As such, I wanted to challenge myself to write about love in a sincere, authentic way because I want people to understand us beyond the conditions that have been forced upon us. What about the conditions we chose; the ones we want? Everyone wants to feel love, but so often, at least for us and other marginalized people, that seemingly universal experience is clouded by destruction. I wanted to write a poem that's unabashedly about love and what an honor it is to be loved by a Palestinian person.
Without further ado, here are my four poems—”my lover is left-handed,” “small delights,” “mary” and “the great falastini”—in Mud Season Review!