issue 1
Koukash Review
2022
Dear Joumana
Mariam Bazeed
Dear Joumana,
platinum bride of Dearborn,
city named after secretary of war—
How does your golden hair flow?
In America’s Arabest
city, adjacent America’s Blackest
city, highways extend Ford’s dream
of efficiency, while Arabs convert
garages into outdoor
18-person every-season banquet
halls,
then skin their knuckles
harvesting frost
-bite digging out cars
from wintry clutch of cold—
America’s tubers,
then hear themselves later
blown to smithereens,
news from somewhere
the American dollar is hard
at work—
some other Muhammad—
some different Wafa—
& the cousin Elias who stayed.
While Joumana—
platinum sentry of Dearborn
from billboards upon highways
spewing death into air,
as [car] exhaust,
& high school recruitment for faraway
oil war—asks
Injured? Call Joumana\
Mariam Bazeed
Bazeed is a multi–award winning Egyptian immigrant, poet, playwright, performance artist, stage actor, editor, curator, and cook, living in Brooklyn. An alliteration-leaning writer of prose, poetry, plays, and pantry lists, their work across genres has been published in print and online, and their plays performed in festivals on both sides of the Atlantic. Their first play, peace camp org, an autobiographical queer anti-Zionist musical(ish) comedy about summer camp, is published by Oberon Books, UK, and won them the Andrew & Eleanor McGlinchee Prize in 2018; the Fresh Fruit Festival’s Spirit Award in 2019; and the Dramatists Guild’s Lanford Wilson Award for Creative Promise in 2021. Their work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Sundance Institute, the Arab American National Museum, Asian American Writers Workshop, the Center for Fiction, Lambda Literary, Queer Art Mentorship, and Trans Lab, among others. They are currently at work on a new play commission, Sisters at Sunrise, and on their first novel, The Boy Made of Air. To procrastinate from facing the blank page, Mariam curates and runs an occasional world-music salon and open mic in Brooklyn, and is a slow student of Arabic music.