Photo by kashishArtandGallery / shutterstock For as long as I can remember, my mother had wanted to mother a son. She dressed me in blue every chance she got. Even before I was expected, she bought baby boy clothes off thelas around Tariq Road and Hyderi. She could...
I arrived in Antakya with my partner during Türkiye’s kurban bayramı, a week in the thick of summer that everyone takes off to celebrate Eid al-Adha. The city was sleepy and quiet, with heat rising up from the cobblestone streets. After a twelve-hour night bus from...
Photo: red mango / Shutterstock.com There was a comfort in not knowing where she was. It felt like evidence that the menaces in her life—menaces tied tightly to a place and the people of that place—didn’t know where she was either. The beard that cushioned his chin...
Photo by LouiesWorld1 / Shutterstock.com First Touch:Heat swelling against my skin likegasoline rainbows in crevices of dirtroads. Remnants of homeseep through cotton. First Impression:Divided, multiplying geometric fields,steady, simple and pulsatinglike the rise and...
Photo by Sean D Silva, GNU Free Documentation License, via Wikimedia Commons A woman in a pink kurta settles in the seat next to mine, stirs, and stretches her legs. My writhing desire for a hunk occupying a space this close is now crushed. Standing right before me in...
Photo: LouiesWorld1 / Shutterstock.com I live near the Li Shui Qiao subway stop in northern Beijing. Subway line 5 was built just before the 2008 Olympics in order to make this expansive, polluted city easier for tourists to navigate. The other day a taxi driver told...
