This feature, chosen by Guest Editor t.r. san, is a selection from the anthology Sleeping in the Courtyard: Contemporary Kurdish Writers in Diaspora edited by Holly Mason Badra (The University of Arkansas Press 2025).
Jin-Jiyan-Azadî
With lyrics from Säada Bonaire
A man hangs scarves and bags on hooks to make a winter garden—
Or I suppose, a market
Past the white gleam of the new pediatrics on Nostrand a man says baby can I—
In a state of irritation, in a nation of emergency—
None of this, the source, but everything I see I claim and it claims me—
And I can’t really think without etymology
The more I push the language through the automated translator, the more it
strips away
You are free becomes excuse me, then forgive me
Two German women sing flat English over the saz that the DJ “discovered” in
a Communist-Kurdish Community Center
The lyrics bubble up above the melody: you have to face/the facts
Into Kurdish, back again, I am curious about myself becomes I’m proud
Subject becomes object, and object becomes everything—
I follow the thread to a state that is not
***
On the phone Carlos says Kurdistan is a blue ocean market
I say no, the sharks are feeding; the water is already red
And plus, I’m not interested in money
But he still tells me to snap up some property, in case it does become a
country—
The face in the mirror/Talks to me
The mirror in the mirror/My speech
***
A girl says art is the last black market, that art is the quickest way to clean dirty
money
What I know about value is that it rises over time
Like the sea
I propose to no one that even irritation could feel good to someone dead
But then: that’s not how the dead think
I’m born into the crush of the Uptown 4, held in place by the hot populace
We slide up Manhattan like public womb on a track
If prayer exists, I think, then this is it
In Union Square I shout JIN – JIYAN – AZADÎ into the bitter with the anarchists
A man asks who is Afrin?
And I recall that if you google Afrin, every image is of Afrin® Nasal Spray: No
Drip or Severe
City, I say, and it’s burning
And on YouTube, it’s Newroz and a man is playing saz on a chair amid the
rubble
Singing Afrin, malomin—Afrin, my home
***
Of course the saz was just a backdrop for the DJ to play against, to overdub
For the club to taste, a carpet from faraway on which to wipe one’s feet
A single note can start to overtake a song
Posing the question, how much can a single vessel hold?
The more I try to press my irritation into joy, the more the language dries and
turns another
Still I navigate to KurdChat.com, a room with no one in it
It isn’t that I want to feel sublime at every moment
But I just don’t feel things anymore the way I used to
Tracy Fuad (she/her) is a poet and writer based in Berlin. Her second collection of poetry, PORTAL, won the Phoenix Emerging Poets’ Prize and was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2024, and will be published in the UK this year by 87press. A recipient of a 2023 Berlin Senate working stipend and 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Fuad’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere, and have been translated into German, Kurdish, Turkish and Spanish. Currently at work on a novel, she also co-directs the Berlin Writers’ Workshop and teaches creative writing.
Holly Mason Badra (she/her) is the curator-editor of Sleeping in the Courtyard: Contemporary Kurdish Writers in Diaspora. She received her MFA in poetry from George Mason University, where she is currently the associate director of the Women and Gender Studies program. Her poetry, essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Meridian Magazine, The Arkansas International, The Adroit Journal, The Northern Virginia Review, Foothill Poetry Journal, The Rumpus, CALYX, So to Speak, Circumference Magazine, Asymptote Journal, and elsewhere. She has been a panelist for OutWrite, RAWIFest, and Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here as a Kurdish American poet. Mason Badra reads for Poetry Daily. 
t.r. san is a poet and translator currently based on Gadigal land, with recent work found in minor literature[s], The Cincinnati Review, HAD, Smokelong Quarterly, The Offing, &c. read & reach @thoushallkill on Twitter, or trsan.neocities.org.
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