İlhan Sami Çomak speaks to reporters outside Marmara Prison, formerly known as Silivri Prison, following his release on November 26, 2024, after more than thirty years of incarceration.
. . . A mad tailor stitches
an ugly sleeveless, headless jacket.
But we are people down here,
not mannequins.
I was on the train, watching tiled and metal roofs, stations, and passersby. Deep inside, my nerves were taut. In a few hours, I would arrive in Moscow and see the woman I’d been in love with since my early youth.
Maybe it’s these mass deaths that push me to live—truly live. You might not fully understand what I mean. But here in Afghanistan, “living a normal life” means something else entirely.
They have an inaudible whisper,
They don’t make noise anymore
Than that of the growing of grass,
Happy where man didn’t pass.
The story you are about to read is not an ordinary tale. It is the life story of one among millions of Afghan women who, simply for being women, have endured oppression, violence, and erasure.
America. The name heavy in her mouth, a destination and salvation. She’d mortgaged the land once, back when she was singing in a bar down Ermita in Manila. That was where she met the white American man.
To be a Palestinian mother,
you must learn some simple things:
how to hold your wounded child until he sheds
his last drop of blood;
crafting words to turn a child into a man
when the soldiers wake him for arrest;
The following three poems are part of a cycle Olga Bragina wrote in 2023, a year after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In the spring of 2022, after several weeks of intense bombing, she and her parents left the country.
It tells the story of an international group of hostages being held by rebels in an unnamed war-torn country in the Middle East and focuses on the day-to-day experiences of the main character—a Portuguese writer researching a project.
The following are translations of five poems she posted on Facebook after the October 7 Israeli invasion. She was killed in her home in south Gaza by an Israeli raid on October 20, 2023. Hiba was thirty-two years old.
“How We Spent the Fifties” is a satirical short story from a collection of humorous stories written by Miloslav Šimek and Jiří Grossmann that tells the tale of the turmoil and absurdity of a family that’s bending over backwards in support for the communist party.
