Joel Traylor began making art in 1996, following a strong inner need that has guided his work ever since. His paintings have moved through many subjects over the years — narratives, landscapes, fruit, florals, and abstraction — always led by color, texture, line, and curiosity. Since 2000, he has been a regular artist at the Art Market at Eastern Market on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. His original paintings now live in hundreds of homes, offices, and a few public spaces across the country and around the world.

Sidney Anderson

long awaited

beyond the panes their tiny trills

tick in tandem with little footsteps

hides all soft and prickly

a daring pair among the rest

honey fur nuzzles gray and brown

a stare, one thought: “don’t you dare”

plucked from the shadows

a timid cry in the bush around the corner

asking for food, asking for love

when the dahlias and daises reach up

to greet the sunrise he will find

a hand ready to say “i love you”

About the Author

Sidney Anderson is currently an undergraduate student at the University of North Florida majoring in English and double minoring in creative writing and professional and public writing. After graduation, she plans to pursue a master's degree in technical communication at the University of Central Florida. She has previously been published in the Polk County Public Schools Poetry Anthology in 2023.

Alexis Czencz Belluzzi

Sea Song

A fever of rays

darkens the crest

as it rolls against the sandbar.

From the shore, I watch

the shadows wax and wane

as my daughter, unaware,

plays in the shallows.

She dips a scallop fan

into the foam. Buffs it

dry between her fingers.

Imperfect shells pile

beneath our beach umbrella.

Broken bits of sunset.

Grace can’t hear my call

above the din of gulls and wind.

Intuition turns her head

to spot me standing far off

down the beach. Her arm

lifts toward the sky in triumph,

waving the pink shell

as she sprints toward me,

tripping and kicking up sand,

but never stopping.

Ars Poetica

for Grace

When I die, there will be words left to say.

Clipped syllables that didn’t slip from my tongue–

Hissed esses of anger. Soft murmurs I forgot

to whisper at bedtime on a Monday.

I’m sorry. Death will come as a caesura

in my legacy of language. An enjambed

line, no longer moving the poem forward.

Wield your own pen and endure.

You’ve learned your lessons well. You

want, but do not need. Remember.

Breathe and hold it in. Still the train-rush

of sibilance in your chest and hear anew

my voice; what endures beyond being.

Hold the heaviness of my love in your hands

like a polished piece of jasper. Fashion it into a

paperweight. Secure your loose-leaf thoughts of me

into memory

until each page yellows, bindings break,

and the only story left

is yours to tell.

About the Author

Alexis Czencz Belluzzi holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from Hollins University. Her poems, short stories, and essays have appeared in various journals, including Pif Magazine, Essay, The Susquehanna Review, Muse, Crazy Days, Ghoti, and Boston Literary Magazine. She is the recipient of the Andrew James Purdy Prize in fiction, and the author of one poetry chapbook; Practicing Distance. Lex lives in rural PA where she enjoys embroidering, baking, birdwatching, gardening, and other simple joys.

Colin Ian Jeffery

Prowling tiger

Tiger, tiger, prowling fierce and silent

Creeping sly among jungle shadows

Following scent trail between trees

Seeking prey to fill empty belly.

Tiger, tiger, sleeps then to hunt again

Camouflage, strips of yellow and black

Blending with jungle’s symmetry

Unseen, deadly, beautiful big cat supreme.

About the Author

Colin Ian Jeffery is an English poet of the modernist movement with development of imagism stressing clarity, precision and economy of language, and has a strong reaction against war, tranny, and oppression of truth and innocence, but unlike other poets in the modernism movement like Dylan Thomas and Ezra Pound he has a profound faith in God.

Kate Maxwell

These Figs, I Like

Before coming here, I’d never really enjoyed them.

Over-rated, a tad pretentious

something you pair with cheese or status

to show a semblance of educated taste.

My tastes: unschooled and simple.

I like what I like.

Now, gradually, I learn

about the garden, take care to net the tree

before season. There’s no great yield

but each plump fruit, a lucious

gift — bruised purple on their heavy

bottoms, drooping toward flagstones

with an almost-ruptured, ripe

delight. You have to pick them

before they drop and become a splattered

feast for ants and flying things.

One magpie managed to nudge

beneath the net’s mesh folds. I found it

fat and squawking on an upper limb

after its slashing, stabbing

frenzy — bloody juice, flesh pieces

dripping down the accidental aviary.

Freeing the bird, meant letting in the wasps

which buzzed and hummed

in wild, drunken ecstasies of pollinating

death. A few, no doubt, dissolved

inside the rich, dense pods — sweetly, horrifically—

digested back into the clutching, seedy fruit.

A softer, more squeamish soul, might resolve

to spurn these crimson-hearted

morsels for such lurid entrapments

but these figs, these figs

so fecund, lush, and bursting

aren’t like the ones: bland and spongy

that I’ve been served before, those best

reserved for making jam.

These figs, I pluck tenderly

ignore the depravity

of their carnivorous desire, wrap my lips

about their bounty and devour.

About the Author

Kate Maxwell grew up in a small, rural community in Australia. Now a teacher and a city dweller, her interests include film, wine, and sleeping. She has published in journals such as Australian Poetry Journal, The Galway Review, Books Ireland, and The Threepenny Review. Kate’s poetry and fiction have been listed and awarded in various Australian and international anthologies and competitions. She has recently published her third poetry collection, Thistle (2026).

Stephen Mead

The Silence

There is the white t-shirt from across the darkened room,

the sigh of that the only sound-----

In a bit your silhouette whispers, indigo limbs gaining shape,

gaining nakedness as a void. It is a leaving which I hear:

your departure in the black look

surrounded by crescents as nearly pupil-dilated.

Who, where are we now with this much density

filling the solo occupations of once shared sheets,

your left behind t-shirt a shower of dampness flung to the earth?

I could go, fetch it as a compass of glow-in-the-dark directions.

I could even wear it as though sound enough might yet arise

from all that we held & did.

Instead I hold my piece of letting you go, the room, the bed again,

just a place, just furniture, & the dark of you, the dark of me

a memory to ignite in the soul of this tourniquet room.

About the Author

Stephen Mead is a retiree whom, throughout his employment still found time for creativity. He is the resident artist/curator for The Chroma Museum, artistic renderings of LGBTQI figures and allies before Stonewall, https://thestephenmeadchromamuseum.weebly.com/. Occasionally he even got paid. Currently he is trying to sell his 40-year backlog of unsold art. Visit: Art Collection from Stephen Mead.

T. Morrow

Reserve

Alone but not lonely.

Exhausted but alert.

Free.

About the Author

T. Morrow is a writer from Natchez, Mississippi.

Yvette Neisser

Unrepaired

February 2026, Washington, DC

Can mountains understand the swamps

or slow plantations grasp

the speed of cities?

We are a network of linked nuclei,

one subculture attached to the next.

Links tenuous, edges frayed.

Our histories overlap and try

to overwrite each other.

I hold the trajectories of rivers,

the roots of oaks that know their place.

They will outlive us.

We are woven by a web of hatred:

Everywhere I travel, flags are torn

and unrepaired.

In solidarity, nature has borne down

on us the heaviest winter. Snow turned ice

holds on for weeks and does not melt.

If I believed in gods, I’d say they’ve cast

a plague to force our Pharaoh to relent:

Unlock the prisons, let go the innocent.

Stop the drills and the warships.

Even the rivers are frozen.

They refuse to flow.

About the Author

Yvette Neisser is an award-winning poet, Spanish translator, and co-coordinator of the DC-Area Literary Translators Network (DC-ALT). Her co-translation of Venezuelan poet Maria Teresa Ogliastri’s From the Diary of Madame Mao won the 2025 Carnegie Mellon University Press Translation Prize and will be published in 2026. Her poems, translations, and essays have appeared in Foreign Policy in Focus, Tikkun, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Split This Rock’s The Quarry. She lives in Silver Spring, MD. https://www.yvetteneisser.net/

Clarke Owens

No Sentient Thing

places you in my care

your thighs and belly

bare and tan in summer heat

with our backs to the wall.

You are no offering

a fact nothing more

or less a sentient traveler

kissing a moment.

We are not led directed

but free to stumble

over phantoms themselves

not sentient like thought

uncreated in us

dust motes before the postman

in the unfurnished room.

About the Author

Clarke Owens has published poems in literary journals for many years and is listed in the Poets & Writers Directory. A chapbook, Thaw, was published in 2023 by Finishing Line Press

RJ Shepherd

Distractions

We were warned, the message clear and cold.

"Give them bread and circuses," a cynic said,

"Keep their minds filled, their spirit dead."

For simple pleasures hold a static sway

to numb the soul and turn the eyes away.

And so we stand, amidst the quiet lie,

underneath a vast, indifferent sky.

Leaves dance to the sound of a spring breeze,

fleeting selfish freedom rustling through the trees.

Nature persists, complacent in our fate

whilst apathy seals shut the heavy gate.

The broken fence bends to sun rays, wobbles to time,

as a splintered structure past its youthful prime.

A silent monument to what we left undone

worn by the seasons, bleached by every sun.

It holds no barrier, a symbol thin

to show how structures we rely on begin

to yield and fade until the final hour

when all that's left is nature's simple power.

About the Author

RJ Shepherd describes himself as a son, brother, and a student of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Florida. As an out transgender man, he serves as the news editor at Spinnaker, a student-run media outlet. This is his first publication.

Ralph Spurgin

The Corporate Conglomerate

I blink the sleep from my eyes.

I shower and shave,

tell myself to behave,

and prepare to live a day’s lies.

I stop. I look. I listen.

I check, recheck, and triple-check.

I muss. I fuss. I sometimes cuss.

I lurk and smirk and work.

I concentrate. I regulate.

I malleate, manipulate, motivate.

I concentrate, stimulate, dedicate, placate,

gesticulate, assimilate, facilitate, capacitate—

and incapacitate.

But never—oh, never—vacillate.

For one must never waver

if one’s life is to labor

at digging his deep, deep rut,

protecting the corporate conglomerate.

About the Author

Ralph Spurgin is a poet based in Cave Creek, Arizona, specializing in noir and urban realism. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Killer Nashville and Poetry Pacific, and he is currently developing a four-volume poetry series.

April Willey

Artemis II

Our breaths hold in unison

guiding upward, a trail of flames,

sky splitting in two,

a foaming crevice between the blue.

Once plucked but sprouted again,

offering new discoveries,

the blushing rose moon

has gone into bloom.

Little wisps of cloud

whispering good luck,

a rainbow the size

of a quarter in the sky,

grab hold of the ship

and give a final push,

as she passes by,

with an anxious sigh.

All our hearts beating

to a familiar song

I call Humanity’s Hope.

About the Author

April Willey is an English student at the University of North Florida with a concentration in Creative Writing. She’s been writing creatively since the moment she could hold a pencil but has kept much of her work to herself thus far. Other than writing, she is a bird mom to her green-cheeked conure, Chicken.

Bazruh

Shaki City Panorama with Beautiful Sunset at Evening Time

Fiction by

Akram Ayliski (Azerbaijan) / Translation by Katerine E. Young

Excerpt from People and Trees: A Trilogy by Akram Aylisli (Azerbaijan), published by Plamen Press, 2024. English 2026 translation reprinted by permission.

Winner, 2026 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) Literature Prize

In July 2026, People and Trees: A Trilogy by acclaimed Azerbaijani writer Akram Aylisi, translated by Arlington poet laureate emerita and translator Katherine E. Young and published by Plamen Press, was named the winner of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) Literature Prize. The EBRD Literature Prize honors outstanding translated literature from diverse regions of the world and celebrates both authors and translators who bring vital international voices to English-language readers.

People and Trees takes place in the mountains of Azerbaijan just after World War II. Akram Aylisli’s trio of linked novellas chronicles the wrenching transformation of traditional Azeri society under Soviet rule. Private land is collectivized; mosques are converted to silk factories or bulldozed to build “palaces of culture.” The young narrator, Sadyk, fantasizes about striding hand-in-hand with a beautiful girl into the bright, socialist future he’s seen on the movie screen. The village women, meanwhile, navigate religious, economic, and social upheaval, including famine and the loss of an entire generation of men to war. Drawing on the rich folkloric traditions of the Caucasus mountains, this timeless collection of tales is the work that put Azerbaijan’s greatest living author on the international literary map.

People and Trees

Part One

When Aunt Nabat’s son, the storehouse keeper Yakub, was sent to prison, it immediately grew very quiet in the village. The degree of quiet in our village really depends on what’s happening on the square, and every evening, Yakub had collected the boys near the mosque. For about two hours they flailed around on the ground, and that whole time nothing could be heard in the village except the delighted howling of fans. After the wrestling, they turned to belt wrestling—and again there were shouts, noise, laughter. Yakub didn’t belt wrestle, of course, because he couldn’t find a partner for himself among the kids, but he directed everyone in this amusement. It’s quiet on the square now because Yakub has been arrested. And near the collective farm storehouse standing at the foot of the mountain by the very edge of the village, it’s also quiet now without Yakub. Except that water makes noise: breaking free from under the cliff, it rushes through the pipe under the storehouse and falls from the high, raised stone gutter into a deep reservoir. Its muffled, measured hum in some ways reminds me of Yakub’s bass voice: every time I pass near there, I think of him.

And yet there wouldn’t be such quiet in the village if matters were limited just to Yakub. Things don’t happen that way: if people have been caught stealing, it means the accountant is involved, and the chairman. The accountant isn’t important, of course, but the chairman being arrested is very noticeable—the bathhouse has been closed, and once the bathhouse is closed, life on the square in front of the mosque simply stops. The bathhouse will open when there’s firewood, but where does the firewood come from if there’s no chairman? This means that people have to wait until a new chairman appears. And in his absence, a lock will hang on the bathhouse because if you leave it open, God forbid, people will get into mischief there: write obscene words, draw smutty pictures, and all kinds of disgraceful things.

Our bathhouse is closed, closed again. A new chairman has appeared, but the door remains locked, as before. And the square in front of the mosque remains quiet, as before.

***

After Yakub, a few more people returned from the army, three of whom I remember. One of these was Yusuf, the son of Aunt Azra. As it turned out, he didn’t set foot out of the house for a whole week after his return: they said he was tired, that he was sleeping.

But even after a whole week, he evidently hadn’t had enough sleep, and he appeared to be somehow unhappy, drowsy, on the square in front of the mosque. He said hello to the old men, leaned his shoulder against the wall, and hanging his head, fixed his gaze on the water, which babbled quietly as it ran between the flagstones. As if he’d appeared solely for that reason: to look at the water. He looked, looked, and left.

After Yusuf, Husein returned from the army. “Beanpole” Husein, as we called him. For two whole hours, music played at his house, and he walked around his own iwan and talked at the top of his lungs, just like Yakub, and roared with laughter, too, and I’d already begun to think that now the battles on the square would begin again, and the boys would belt wrestle—in a word, that the quiet would come to an end. However, the next day, I caught sight of Husein in that same spot where Yusuf had stood not long before. The most surprising thing was that Husein leaned his shoulder against the wall in exactly the same way and stared fixedly at the water. I saw him there several days in a row, even in the most intense heat, when there wasn’t a soul on the square; he stood, leaning his shoulder against the wall and looking at the spring. One of those evenings, looking always in that same direction, he suddenly said, loudly: “Our village is gone. Gone.” I understood: this was the end. There wouldn’t be any wrestling, no belt wrestling—there wouldn’t be anything. And it suddenly struck me that Husein’s words were somehow inexplicably connected with the water—they’d probably also come into Yusuf’s head when he looked at the water that way, but he’d just kept them to himself.

I really didn’t like what the men coming home from the war said about our village. Look at Yakub! It would’ve been great if everyone who returned from the front acted like he did—collected the boys on the square, organized wrestling and belt wrestling—and most of all, if there hadn’t been any of those pitiful conversations. And what, exactly, had happened, what had changed in the village during the war? I couldn’t understand this. When Husein said what he said about our village, looking fixedly at the water, I also glanced at the spring: water is water, it doesn’t decrease or increase. And the almond tree bending low over the spring from the neighboring garden was the same as always. And the vines twined thickly around it—nothing special had happened to them, either. Except that someone had planted a thorn bush around the sweet cherry tree, fastening it to the trunk with wire. That was because of the war, of course, but thorn bushes are no big deal at all. Even the locked bathhouse—that was bad, but it had also happened before the war—I had seen it locked many times.

The third soldier who’d fought at the front was Uncle Nazar. I met him at the mill and immediately noticed his black suit—no one in our village wore those. Uncle Nazar asked whose son I was, and when I named my father, he perked up and cheerfully exclaimed, “Ah, Nadzhaf! Bulldozer Nadzhaf!” I was a little taken aback by those words and quickly started thinking about what they might mean. The miller, Uncle Masum, apparently decided that I was upset, and he began to sing a happy little song to distract me.

***

After that, I often met Uncle Nazar near the spring. In contrast to Yusuf and Husein, he didn’t lean his shoulder against the wall, and he didn’t say pitiful things about our village. He’d been in different countries during the war, and he’d seen how clean the springs were there. He tried very hard to make our spring the same. Uncle Nazar sternly forbade the women to do their washing near the spring. He marked out a special place for doing laundry: he outlined where to wash dishes, and he’d sit whole days near the mosque, on the steps of the locked bathhouse, making sure the women didn’t break the rules.

It was quiet in the village, very quiet. Only the water, bursting from the pipe into the reservoir—very much like its counterpart, the letters Yakub sent, one after another, from prison—reminded everyone of how things had been before. “First things first: I send greetings, Honored Mama. Second, of course, I want to know what’s happening with you. Don’t be too upset about me, and don’t worry that I’m enduring the torments of martyrdom here. Everyone should be lucky enough to live the way I do: I eat hot food three times a day. I’ve even put on some weight, may my enemies choke on it! I’m satisfied with my situation. God willing, I’ll return soon. Honored Mama, if possible, have Hasan circumcised. He’s a big boy already, it’s embarrassing… Husein will wait, we’ll celebrate the occasion when I get back. Keep a closer eye on Rakhib, don’t let him be lazy: times are such now that we can’t do without learning. God alone can help the ignorant!”

***

And once again, Aunt Nabat tramped around the fields from morning till night with a bag, collecting dropped sheaves of wheat, seeking out potatoes left behind in the ground, picking up spilled peas. But in the evening, she tied on a new sateen chador, donned new slippers, picked up her gleaming red tea kettle, and headed to the spring for water. Aunt Nabat stopped in front of every house, shoved yet another letter from Yakub in front of everyone she met, and announced loudly, so that all her mortal enemies could hear, that her son was just about to return. Sometimes, going a bit over the top, Aunt Nabat would suddenly start carrying on about something ridiculous. “I have mutton simmering at home,” she’d throw out, offhandedly. “I ordered my daughter-in-law to put the samovar on, and decided to come to the spring myself… We wanted some fresh water.” And it was done so convincingly—the air even started to smell of mutton cooking, just like before the war! And you’d also start to believe they had a samovar, and that Sadaf was adding coal to it right now, although everyone knew that when Yakub was arrested, the house had been completely cleared out: they’d managed to conceal the tea kettle somehow.

It took Aunt Nabat a long time to reach the spring with her kettle. She kept talking about her son, and although her voice had already long grown hoarse from tiredness, she tried to speak as loudly as possible. “I’ll wear myself to the bone, and I’ll raise Yakub’s sons—they won’t be hungry or cold!” she repeated over and over.

The “mortal enemies” for whose ears these words were intended were, for the most part, old women like her, who also wore the chador and slippers. The only difference was that roses grew in pots on their iwans, and real samovars smoked in their homes. Catching sight of a person with whom it wasn’t necessary to stretch the truth, Aunt Nabat immediately dropped the pretense, her voice growing quiet, her movements weak—the old woman’s strength deserted her. Forgetting about mortal enemies and about the tea kettle, Aunt Nabat leaned back against the wall or sank onto a stone in exhaustion. “I suffered through the soldiering, but prison—I can’t take any more!” Aunt Nabat only said that to those whom she considered friends.

And the tempting smell of lamb immediately melted away, and the samovar disappeared, together with the kindling with which Sadaf had lit it. I’d see Yakub’s empty yard; the sunken eyes of Sadaf; Hasan, whom his father hadn’t managed to have circumcised; little Husein, Aunt Nabat’s favorite; and Rakhib, who was settled somewhere in a corner with a schoolbook, choosing the more difficult problems. Today’s Rakhib was absolutely not who he’d been a year ago—when his father egged him on, he could have laid anyone flat on his back. He’d turned into a lamb, not a guy. It hadn’t been necessary to say a thing about his studies: it probably hadn’t even entered Yakub’s head that his Rakhib—a “D” student, quarrelsome, the terror of the whole school—now solved problems in a way that simply amazed the teachers.

If even Yakub understood in prison that “you can’t do without learning,” it meant times had truly changed. It was all they talked about in the village: “Study, children! Learning will bring you bread. God alone can help the ignorant!” Maybe Rakhib took to his books because he believed those words, and because nowadays he wouldn’t be able to grab hold of any of the goodies of life without an education. Many reckoned this way, but it seems to me that the reason for Rakhib’s new-found interest in his books lay elsewhere. His mother, Sadaf, had recently started coming to the school as a cleaning lady. And when she swept the yard, washed the toilet, or carried wood from the shed and lit the fires in the classrooms, I noticed that Rakhib hung his head each time she bent down, reddening in shame—threadbare dark-blue pantaloons with large, gray patches peeked out from under her skirt. Other people probably had patches, too, but no one saw those.

***

We studied. And not only because “learning brings bread” or “God alone helps the ignorant.” It’s possible that Salatyn, who lived over the river at the other end of the village, had never even heard those words, and all the same, she didn’t miss a single lesson: even in a hard frost, she ran barefoot to school. We teased her, but not because she ran barefoot in the snow. It was just because her name immediately reminded us of the words to the song:

Salatyn is coming—a white swan is swimming…

I don’t know which Salatyn those words were meant for: perhaps that Salatyn really was a swan, but when I hear that old folk song, I don’t ever imagine a proud, solemn beauty, but our barefoot Salatyn, chilled to the bone, and no matter how merry the song, it doesn’t give me pleasure. Even now, looking at flocks of elegant, satisfied girls coming out of school or the institute, I sometimes hum this song under my breath. Each time, the stove appears before me. I even hear how the firewood sputters in it, because while Salatyn warmed herself, no one dared say a word. The bell had rung long ago, but the lesson still hadn’t begun, and you could hear how Salatyn’s teeth chattered and how the firewood crackled in the stove. It sometimes happened that Salatyn’s feet wouldn’t warm up: her blue toes didn’t want to turn pink, and then the girl would start to cry, unable to hold back. There were so many tears that it seemed something had frozen in Salatyn’s head, something that was now thawing in bright drops, coursing down her cheeks: from her face, it didn’t look like she was crying, it seemed that the most ordinary water was flowing from her eyes. While the little girl warmed her feet, Teacher Leyla, who’d just graduated from the Baku Pedagogical Institute, paced quietly behind the blackboard and, clicking her bright, elegant shoes, listened to the crackle of the firewood. Then she stepped out from behind the blackboard and started the lesson as if nothing had happened. Leyla spoke more than once of some shoes she had lying around at home, unused—she very much wanted to give them to Salatyn. But as soon as the shoes were mentioned, the little girl immediately started to cry, and those tears no longer looked like thawing ice: those tears were completely real.

***

It was quiet in the village, very quiet. And in this quiet, Aunt Nabat stole to the cemetery in the mornings to where the orchards began, a small bag in her hand: at dusk she returned, hiding behind the walnut trees that grew thickly on the slope. And a little later, she’d bustle around the quiet village streets, red tea kettle jingling, and the latest letter from Yakub rustling. Then she’d go home and smudge the letter with herbs for protection from the evil eye.

In the evenings, the shrill voice of Ebish could be heard in Aunt Sadat’s yard from beneath the dense thicket of almonds. Aunt Sadat’s son was hard of hearing, and therefore he tried to sing as loudly as possible:

New samovar, no one to shine it,

No one to tell about my sorrow…

It was just a song, but it was impossible to listen to it with indifference: everyone knew about Ebish’s troubles. It even seemed to me that Ebish was intentionally lying about the samovar: they didn’t have a samovar, and you couldn’t get married without one. For years, they’d been talking about when to buy one, but it didn’t depend on Ebish or his mother. The problem was the almonds. They had plenty of almond trees—the whole yard was full of them—but the almonds had to ripen. Then they’d earn enough money for tea and sugar and a samovar. But for five springs in a row, frost had killed the flowers, and Aunt Sadat couldn’t buy a samovar and marry off her son. The trees were right in front of me, just over our fence, and I knew for a fact that Ebish didn’t possess a samovar.

Across the street, just opposite the thicket of almonds, was the yard of Teacher Leyla, and during the quiet evening hours, her wicket gate stood wide open. Each evening at exactly the same time, Leyla diligently swept the yard, watered it from the doorway to the iwan, even watered the street in front of the house. Then she covered the table with a snow-white cloth, put out choice, washed pears and apples on a plate, washed her hands, combed her hair, and sat down at the table. During those hours, Leyla usually corrected our workbooks or read. She left the door open so that Beanpole Husein, walking nearby, could see her—each evening, he showed up on our street. Leyla didn’t talk to Husein: they didn’t even say hello to one another. When he approached, Leyla lifted her head and smiled—that’s it. I never heard Leyla sing, but for some reason, each time I passed by her home, I recalled the same song:

I pour water on the street

So there’s no dust on my love’s feet…

It was quiet in the village, very quiet. Returning from the fields in the evening, Aunt Medina would stand a long time by the wall dividing our yard from Ebish’s, thinking and thinking. When I banged the door latch on returning from the street, my aunt shuddered, straightened up, and putting on a carefree face, began picking pebbles off the wall, chucking them at the birds that were making themselves at home in the trees. That curious woman—as if I didn’t know what she’d been thinking about! As if I understood less well than she did that this fall, again, the collective farm wouldn’t pay anything for days worked. That if winter didn’t surprise us today, then it would tomorrow…

About the Author

Akram Aylisli is an Azerbaijani novelist, playwright, and editor. His works have been translated into more than twenty languages. He and translator Katherine E. Young won the 2026 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) Literature Prize for Young’s translation of Aylisli’s People and Trees. Other publications in English include Farewell Aylis, a trilogy of novellas that includes the controversial Stone Dreams, which explores themes of understanding and mutual accountability among Azerbaijanis and Armenians. The publication of Stone Dreams in 2012 led to public burnings of Aylisli’s books in Azerbaijan. Since 2016, Aylisli has been the target of a politically motivated criminal investigation that imposes significant restrictions on all his activities; he lives under de facto house arrest in Baku, Azerbaijan.

About the Translator

Katherine E. Young is the author of the poetry collections Woman Drinking Absinthe and Day of the Border Guards (2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize finalist) and the editor of Written in Arlington. She has translated work by Russian-language writers from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. She and writer Akram Aylisli won the 2026 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) Literature Prize for Young’s translation of Aylisli’s People and Trees. Other awards include the Granum Foundation Translation Prize, the Pushkin House Translation Residency, an Arlington County (Virginia) Individual Artist Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship, and a Hawthornden fellowship. From 2016-2018, Young served as the inaugural Poet Laureate for Arlington, Virginia.

Joel Traylor

Finding Balance

About the Artist

Sidney Anderson

long awaited

About the Author

Alexis Czencz Belluzzi

Sea Song

Ars Poetica

About the Author

Colin Ian Jeffery

Prowling tiger

About the Author

Kate Maxwell

These Figs, I Like

About the Author

Stephen Mead

The Silence

About the Author

T. Morrow

Reserve

Yvette Neisser

Unrepaired

About the Author

Clarke Owens

No Sentient Thing

About the Author

RJ Shepherd

Distractions

About the Author

Ralph Spurgin

The Corporate Conglomerate

About the Author

April Willey

Artemis II

About the Author

Bazruh

Shaki City Panorama with Beautiful Sunset at Evening Time

Fiction by

Akram Ayliski (Azerbaijan) / Translation by Katerine E. Young

People and Trees

About the Author

About the Translator

Alexander Melnikov

Mosque in Azerbaijan