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  • A Story
  • Hayan Charara (bio)

Some will call the suicide bomber a coward but seeing him you think only Hungry, stumbling as he is toward you, to the tent where pilgrims stop to eat and drink. Behind you a woman in a black robe scoops rice with her fingers. Beside her a girl, restless, runs out onto the dusty two-lane road which the bomber now crosses. You watch him touch where his stomach will slip through a gaping hole. This is happening at the end of forty days of mourning, the anniversary a martyrdom. The girl returns breathless and the mother gives her a glass of clean water. You watch the ripple down her throat, and out of sunlight the man approaches—his eyes, like yours, are brown. You hear someone say, Sit, sit. It is the mother talking to the daughter. Now someone is shouting. Now the noise.

Every person is a story. You are the man who walked out as he walked in, the bomb went off, and you lived to tell. [End Page 1158]

Hayan Charara

Hayan Charara is author of two books of poems, The Sadness of Others and The Alchemist’s Diary. His work has also appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Michigan Quarterly Review, Chelsea, Literary Imagination, Siècle 21, American Poetry: The Next Generation, Present/Tense: Poets in the World, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond, and Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Arab American Poetry. He was born in Detroit.

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