NO PARENTS, NO POWER LEFT IN JABALYA
by NADI ALI, TRANS. BY L.F. KHOURI
Sitty strikes a match and feeds the taboon’s mouth: tree trimmings, fall leaves, crushed bitter biscuit cartons, tattered textbooks, shriveled roots of sage. The clay crackles tangerine and charcoal into her creases, the folds of her smoke-blue dress. She croons ayats as she waits for the clay to cough crimson cherries into my cheeks. She slaps the dough on the taboon’s wall and bakes me something fleeting of the morning, something sweet and sour of the sun and the sea, something fragile of a filament that flames into the nightfall, into the moonlit blue.
“What else should I bake you, Rami?” she asks.
Anything firm of a father to soften the flapping of my feathers. Anything round of a mother to latch onto in the dark.
Nadi Ali is a Palestinian writer whose work centers on war, loss, inherited trauma, and the quiet forms of resistance that persist in daily life. His poetry has circulated in few Arabic literary circles such as: Al-Hilal, Arabicon, and DarsFan and elsewhere, but remains unpublished internationally and in English until now.
L.F. Khouri is a Palestinian writer whose work explores war, memory, and the inheritance of silence. His creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in literary journals such as New England Review, The Missouri Review, River Teeth, Michigan Quarterly Review, Wigleaf, Alaska Quarterly Review, North American Review, Guernica, Brevity, The Rumpus, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Two of his pieces were selected for Best Microfiction 2026.
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