alalehbanu
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The Many Faces of Annika
1620 My name is Annika, but it was not always so. I was born in Safavid Persia in the Gregorian year 1620, and was made vampyr some twenty years after that. In those days they called me Anna Khanum. As you can see, I was a great and very dangerous beauty. That is why Mother…
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Don’t Skip
Every night, I hold up my magic mirror. Show me Gaza, I whisper into the darkness until they appear. Familiar faces, I’ve seen them now for over a year. Some smile, some plead, some weep, some hold up their children in despair. “Don’t skip” “I know you are tired of us” “We know you are…
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The Flour Massacre
“What cannot be said, will be wept.” – Sappho If I were a mermaid, I would weep large paisley tears into an ocean of black gold. If I were a pari of the sea, I would shed black-moon pearls from the warm underbelly of the world. If I were a mermaid, I would not comb…
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Preface to White Mulberries
Every family member who visited us from Iran in my youth, with their smoky blazers and suitcases full of embroideries, pistachios, handmade trinkets, saffron, and gold for our future wedding days, also brought with them a far more precious collection of family folklore and personal memories that were shared over cups of tea as we…
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Little Tree, Prelude to White Mulberries
Mahin Banu Sameni came from a long line of wealthy bazaari merchants. With hair like a soft, swift death and eyes that just knew better, the Sameni women married well above their social sphere. In 1938, at the age of fifteen, Mahin Banu, the most luminous of her sisters by far, married Asqar Aqa Moftakhar,…
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The Fool
Divinity: Asmān, Guardian of the Sky Manthra: To the high, powerful heavens; to the bright, all-happy, blissful abode of the holy ones. ashnô berezatô sûrahe vahishtahe angêush ashaonăm raocanghô vispô-hvâthrô. (Flowers, Original Magic, 96) Sometimes numbered zero, sometimes twenty-two, often not numbered at all, the Fool is a card of beginnings, or pre-beginnings. A carefree…
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It’s What They Say
April 7th, 2026, 17:45, Landskrona, Sweden Written in response to the President of the United States’ threats today. With notes based on Annie Jacobsen’s book, Nuclear War. They say your skin melts. And your clothes. And your shoes. Melt right off. And your insides become your outsides. I think of their pretty olive skin. Hers…
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We Had Lives
We had lives. Palestinian ones. In the silk grass curls tousled in the wind the smell of the sea Yemeni ones. Sitting on chairs too small for us a coffee and a friend a tasbih of cold carnelian between rough fingers We had lives. Syrian lives. Fresh tobacco in a crowded cafe hovering above a…
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The Doomsday Clock
Coleridge’s clock made of marble and of stone with a little man who strikes the hour Azrael in his cloak of rag and bone. ‘Beware! Beware!’ he cries from the top of the stair. High up in the Great Chamber of a fine country manor, a rickety old elevator will take you there. They’ve built…
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West Asians in America
We flee the Empire’s breath of fire and run into its mouth for shelter. Once swallowed, we take a seat in the Monster’s belly and watch from his beady little television eyes as our loved ones who are left behind burn and die. And so it is that we exchange our vulnerability for culpability. The…
al-majus 