Rasha Abdulhadi

Sep 11, 2024 | scalawagmagazine.org | Rasha Abdulhadi

"His father, Omar, owned a clothing store off the market square… and the family lived nearby in a spacious if shabby corner home on the Rue de lâ Avenir—Future Street—near the local  police station." It comes and goes, this longing  to carve into the news its overgrown carcass  flayed, across pages and screens,into its constituent parts. Here we are again scrying  for the second text: inset  message, veiled threat, its infidelity to our lives.

Sep 11, 2024 | scalawagmagazine.org | Rasha Abdulhadi

The meaning depends on where you startthe timeline. Who shot first, who got here first, who excels at propelling us into a fearsome future, all greenhouses and teeth and forgetting  all part of the project from moment tomonument to countermonument. Build a museum tolerant of bulldozed graves of the fallen, the murdered, the family stones older than any state.

May 3, 2024 | theoffingmag.com | Mandy Shunnarah |Rajiv Mohabir |Rasha Abdulhadi |Corinne Leong

“If I write love poems, I resist the conditions that don’t allow me to write love poems.”— Mahmoud DarwishLast summer, I began writing love poems in earnest. I’ve been enamored with romantic love for as long as I can remember, though last summer is when I unequivocally knew I was in love—and the person I found myself in the throes of ardor for was not my husband. The heady torrent of feeling poured out of me on the page, and for once, I didn’t loathe my love poems.

Nov 14, 2023 | smokeandmold.net | Rasha Abdulhadi

. I count the joints of beetle legs, green black shimmer,and I can’t remember the proportions that keep people sane. I come to the party so I can find the backdoor, lay down with the rabbits, and lust for the dresses of trees. I wonder if I have come to just this: a dissolution into the taste of doberman kisses the confection of small faces set with large eyes the blackstrap licorice all-sorts of serious young children ​..

Oct 21, 2023 | poetry.onl | Rasha Abdulhadi

... how much of the weight of time we carry is the burden the murderers gave us, and whose ends do we serve to hate ourselves for not dying as easy as they wanted? ... what firekeeper can scrape the char of guilt from this burnt offering, pull air over embers of grief & longing, find some flint in the heart left to light? ... how can we untie living grief from the longing to have done more, and find instead what more could yet by our breath be done? ...