Adi Magazine

rehumanizing

policy

  • home
  • About
    • About ADI
    • Our team
  • submissions
  • archive
  • Contributors
  • contact
  • Search
  • facebook
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • Newsletter
Share on Facebook
Tweet about it
Share on LinkedIn
Pinterest

Two Poems

God said (and already you can tell / I’m making this up), / If you lift a rock, I am there.

  • Edward Salem
  • Bayan Dahdah
  • October 2023
Artwork by Bayan Dahdah
  • Art, Poem
  • Violence

New Neighbors

by Edward Salem

My short, pot-bellied uncle
takes me up to the roof of his house
at the top of the hilly village
to show me the far-reaching landscape.

Past strings of his daughter’s laundry,
and pots of measly tomato plants
swaying in the warm wind, he points
to hills and hazy clusters of light,
quizzing my memory.

I correctly name the nearby villages
and Ramallah. I see the spread
of glinting amber light and name it,
Jerusalem. He jibes that I don’t know

what to call the bright white cluster
between the villages—the new settlement,
middle-class villas with manicured lawns
patrolled by scrawny husbands, machine guns
slung over their backs like acoustic guitars.

They’re making a fine Swiss cheese
out of Palestine, my uncle quips.
It’s almost ready to eat.

The Palestinian Chair

by Edward Salem

God said (and already you can tell
I’m making this up),
If you lift a rock, I am there.
If you lift a finger, I am there.
If Blackwater rips out your fingernails,
I am there. God said,

If you’re strapped into the contraption
the Israelis told the CIA they call
the Palestinian Chair,
hands tied to your ankles,
forcing you to lean forward in a crouch,
forcing all of your weight onto your thighs
as if you’ve been trapped in the act of kneeling
to pray, knees suspended above the floor,
arms pinned below your legs, blindfolded,
your head collapsed into your chest,
wheezing and gasping for air,
a pool of urine at your feet, too tired to cry,
but in too much pain to remain silent,
and the chair locks you into a permanent squat
from which you can’t recover,
I am there.

God said, when twenty million Yemenis
are silhouettes under pallid veils of skin
dying of starvation in 2016,
2020, 2024, 2028, 2032
while you scarf down lamb agadah
at Yemen Café in Hamtramck,
I am there.

After life is over,
you realize that

You were there.
For all of it. 
It was all you.
  • ceasefire now family history Israeli occupation palestine violence war

Edward Salem

Edward Salem is a 2023 Kresge Artist Fellow in Literary Arts and the recipient of the 2022 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize. He was chosen by Ottessa Moshfegh as the winner of BOMB magazine’s 2021 Fiction Contest and was selected by Louise Glück as a finalist for the 2021 Changes Book Prize. His writing has been published in Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, The Columbia Review, Best Debut Short Stories (Catapult), and elsewhere. He is the co-founder and co-director of City of Asylum/Detroit, a nonprofit that provides long-term sanctuary to writers and artists who have been persecuted for their work.

Bayan Dahdah

Bayan Dahdah is a multidisciplinary artist, interested in fusing different mediums to effectively tell stories. Using the tactile touch of physical art (sketchbooks, archives), and the freedom of digital art (animations, illustrations and more) she aims to retell her memories and document her journeys. Although hailing from an architectural background, she has dabbled in the fields of photography, graphic design and film. Her experience with these 3 fields has allowed her to understand the fundamentals of narrative storytelling, as well as how to manifest this visually. She currently works as a freelance graphic designer for various brands, companies and magazines, as well as a frequent collaborator with different photojournalists, artists and documentarians. Her clients include National Geographic, UNICEF, Apple, Anthropologie and more. 

‹Also in this Issue›
  • Art, Opinion
Gaza, I Wish We’d Meet Under Better Circumstances

Hasheemah Afaneh , Dalia Tuffaha

I first met the Gaza Strip on a television screen back in 2004, at eleven years old. 

  • Protest
  • Art, Essay
To Live Free

laila r. makled , Dina Fawakhiri

To colonizing propagandists, our story is the American Dream. To us, it’s an ongoing tragedy.

  • Intervention
  • Art
Girl from Ramallah

Mariam Darraj

  • Intervention
  • Art, Essay
My Gifts from Gaza

Yousef Abu-Salah

Baba once mentioned how Palestinians were the patient dough of the Taboon. No matter how much we are kneaded, beaten, and stretched beyond our limits, our capacity for hope is supernatural. Taboon, even burnt beyond recognition, is still Taboon.

  • Intervention
  • Art, Poem
Three Poems

Rashid Hussain , Salma Harland , Dana Barqawi

I’m against my country’s revolutionaries / Wounding an ear of wheat / Against the child / Any child / Holding a grenade

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
I am the stranger

Bassam Jamil , Nicole Mankinen , Bint Bandora

I am the stranger / The shadow beneath the cloud / Adrift and looming over my land

  • Protest
  • Video
Scenes From Home, Memories in Motion

Rania Lardjane

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
(out of borders)

Hani Albayarie , Khaled Jarada

He wears winter and searches for another land, / Where he will say to the raining clouds, / To sow the sea in a land other than the one we know. / Hope was the last breath of the traveler, / Hope was his land.

  • Intervention
  • Art, Poem
Two Poems

Summer Awad , Dana Barqawi

I want to whisper to him that his existence / Is revolutionary, that his sumud is breathtaking, that I see his gentleness

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
Why I Love Secrets and Lies

Veera Sulaiman , Dina Fawakhiri

You learn to make your gods as small as a coffee cup and hide your future in it

  • Protest
  • Audio
Hell in My Home

Suzana Sallak

Have you ever wondered what hell feels like on Earth?

  • Violence
  • Art, Essay
In October, the sky turned white

Nama’a Qudah , Dina Fawakhiri

Why are these babies asking too much when they demand nothing but the most basic human rights?

  • Violence
  • Art
Timekeeper

Michael Jabareen

Time stops. The clock’s pointer, at all times alarmed, stands still.

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
Recipe for Being Palestinian

Alia Yunis , May Grabli

Rise like our bread to speak for those who have no food.

  • Protest
  • Art, Testimony
From the river to the sea

Yara Ghabayen

There was no time to mourn. No time for the dead or the living.

  • Violence
  • Art, Poem
Two Poems

Aiya Sakr , Asma Barakat

You’ve burned the sheikh’s field, worth a lifetime of planting / and fed him a variety of jail cells instead.

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
Two Poems

Edward Salem , Bayan Dahdah

God said (and already you can tell / I’m making this up), / If you lift a rock, I am there.

  • Violence
  • Art
Unprovoked

Ahmad Mallah

We became just numbers with no stories, no dreams.

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
A Farm in Gaza

Kat Abdallah , Mette Ehlers

My grandma had a farm in Gaza where her children played outside. Only her two oldest sons remember living there.

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
Letters to the Unliving and Unborn [for Palestine]

Liane Al Ghusain

We are the land and the land is us. / Its holiness and grime cannot be dispelled from us.

  • Protest, Violence
  • Art, Poem
Two Poems

Priscilla Wathington , Bayan Dahdah

One honey eye got stuck open / watching the burned enter the street.

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
For the Dead Among Us

Lisa Suhair Majaj , Fadia Jawdat

We will open the day for you, and the night. We know that you are beneath the earth, or ash

  • Protest
  • Vignette
A Few Lines

Bader Alzaharna , Fadia Jawdat

At a hospital-turned-housing-shelter, a father wept, cradling his newborn son at the gate of Al Shifa hospital. 

  • Intervention
  • Art, Poem
Homeland

Farah Alhaddad , Fadia Jawdat

is this a disappearing game or stretching membrane?

  • Intervention
  • Art, Poem
I Was Imagining

Mikhail De Palraine , Fadia Jawdat

Planes claim the sky; claim mothers and fathers, / Claim dreams, futures, one last kid's hope

  • Intervention
  • Art, Poem
[ ∙∙∙ ]

Fady Joudah , Fadia Jawdat

This is what faith taught you. / This way, art. That way, God.

  • Intervention

Adi Magazine rehumanizing
policy

  • home
  • About
  • submissions
  • archive
  • Contributors
  • contact
  • Search
  • facebook
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • Newsletter
© Copyright 2025
  • Site Credits