On “January 2,” “August 15,” and “August 16”

The poems selected for this issue are from Zakaria Mohammed’s collection Kushtban, one of four volumes written in the last ten years of his life. He once described these works as his “Facebook poetry,” because he first published the late drafts of these poems on his Facebook page, often after his legendary morning walks through old Ramallah, and declined to give any of the poems their own titles. He described this approach as “trial-run publishing,” where the distance between writer and reader is almost totally collapsed. Despite the social media platform’s dubious practices, Zakaria managed to inhabit it on his own terms, to share his ongoing unfinished poems and even to practice his solitude amidst the cacophony of online friends. In Palestine and throughout the Arab world, readers developed an intimate connection with their poet through this page, and his engagement with them was a living feature of his work. We were all there, responding and reacting in real time, in the virtual poetry café he created. And so it feels impossible and shattering to write about our Zakaria in the past tense after his sudden passing on August 2, 2023. Even those of us who never got to have a real cup of coffee with him in Ramallah have lost a poet who lived alongside and with us. In truth, Zakaria was deeply rooted in a liminal space between the known world and another realm. Death was everywhere in the late poems, among the Palestinian stones and plants and birds that he loved. He wrote about it just as he wrote about love and memory and grief and solitude, in the unique language he crafted—an Arabic that manages to be both unassuming and mythological.