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Cities

A photo of a street in Amman, with cars parked on each side of the road. In the foreground there...
Photo by Danil Ahmetşah from Unsplash. Public domain.
A Street or Less
By Maha Alautoom
If this longing could ebb / Only the earth would remain.
Translated from Arabic by Salma Harland
Multilingual
Stray dogs
Photo by Heshan Weeramanthri on Unsplash
Parliament of Dogs
By Nasera Sharma
Seeing their community divided into two camps, some dogs developed a strange arrogance.
Translated from Hindi by Akshaj Awasthi
Multimedia
An old ornate mansion in India with a green wrought iron gate
Photo by Vikram Nath Chouhan 🇮🇳 on Unsplash
Once Elephants Lived Here: Part 2
By Geetanjali Shree
The city murmured in the mazes of her ancient face.
Translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell
Two blue glass skyscrapers seen from below against a cloudy blue sky
Photo by Shubham Sharma on Unsplash
Once Elephants Lived Here: Part 1
By Geetanjali Shree
Here, all things old have been suppressed.
Translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell
Tree of life carving at the Sidi Saiyyed Mosque
Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Ahmedabad
By Bharat Trivedi
Those days of leaping carefree into the Sabarmati / Are long gone
Translated from Gujarati by Mira Desai
Black and white image of Berlin's Potzdamer Platz in the 1930s.
Sludge G, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Toward a Vision of Post-COVID Urban Space: Joseph Roth’s City of Miniatures
By Alexander Wells
Reading Roth’s Berlin miniatures, a sense of the dynamic between sociability and justice feels essential to the urban experience.
Nuestra Ciudad: Writing the City in Spanish
By Ulises Gonzales
Today, a young writer working in Spanish arrives in New York City to find no shortage of role models.
Statistics
By Álvaro Baquero-Pecino
On a bad night, a train car on the red line takes more than half an hour to appear, and no fewer than twenty-one minutes to traverse the eleven stations to the southern tip of Manhattan.
Translated from Spanish by Sarah Pollack
Multilingual
The Common Good
By Sara Cordón
All she can think about is why it ever occurred to her to dress like this in public.
Translated from Spanish by Robin Myers
Reckonings: The Queer Issue XII
By Susan Harris
This year we celebrate Pride Month with seven pieces depicting Queer characters confronting decisive moments.
A dark door cracked open to reveal bright red light
Photo by Dima Pechurin on Unsplash
Yun-Fan: Singing the Variety of Queer Life
By Wanning Chen
When I was twenty-three, I met my first girlfriend, who then went off with a man after just four months—and eventually married him.
Translated from Chinese by Jeremy Tiang
Theo
By Fahmi Mustaffa
I'm not like you, Pak.
Translated from Malay by Adriana Nordin Manan
Blue Days
By Fríða Ísberg
That same month, she realizes that she’s never going to stop striving as long as she’s in Reykjavik.
Translated from Icelandic by Larissa Kyzer
Caviar, Champagne, and Fantasy
By Arménio Vieira
The Esplanada, thick with the scent of fragrant [DDT
Translated from Portuguese by Eric M. B. Becker & Shook
Writing by Kazakh Women
By Shelley Fairweather-Vega & Zaure Batayeva
Kazakhstan is the largest country by landmass to emerge from the breakup of the Soviet Union aside from Russia itself, but it has had an undersized impact on world literature.
The Beskempir
By Zira Naurzbayeva
It was the old grandmas themselves, each and every one of them, who were most interesting to me.
Translated from Russian by Shelley Fairweather-Vega
MultimediaMultilingual
Dismissed
By Zaure Batayeva
Who needs Kazakh? We are moving to Russia anyway.
Translated from Kazakh by Zaure Batayeva & Shelley Fairweather-Vega
The Nanny
By Aigul Kemelbayeva
The technological age regulates social relations with its robotic fingers, and it does not give a damn about your naturally noble spirit.
Translated from Kazakh by Shelley Fairweather-Vega
Chicago: Present-Day Paradise, Future Magic
By Mahmoud Saeed
The Iraqi love of water has inspired me to learn about the rivers of every city I visit.
Translated from Arabic by William Maynard Hutchins
Multilingual
Damascus, What Are You Doing to Me?
By Nizar Qabbani
How do the gardens of Sham transform me?
Translated from Arabic by Shareah Taleghani
Rumors
By Cristina Peri Rossi
The fact that Berlin was surrounded by walls didn't discourage anyone: it gave the city the symbolic quality of dreams that so many other places lack.
Translated from Spanish by Tobias Hecht