Roshan Elqurashi, Burdened Void

No sooner has the animal of night mated with the planet,
than I imagine all that might have been.

A nation of birds will be on the other side
if at last you decide to emigrate.
Yes—I say—and I will never, ever return
to the golden shores of my hapless homeland.

Look now at this breast that will not reproduce.

Somewhere, someplace,
perhaps you are walking, daughter, with the girl I once was, who died.
Perhaps Jizo and his children of mist
walk with you, hand in hand.
But you wander, falling behind time, and cannot find me.
Ethereal and eternal, silent sphere;
thousands of unborn beings seeking
the breasts of their mothers in the dark.
Moving through fog with shining eyes,
swimming in the shadows, wondering aloud.
Yet you don’t find me, my daughter.

I can’t make my l’s give you eyelashes,
or my periods give you freckles.
My poems don’t pull at my sweater,
they won’t awaken me, frightened, in the middle of the night.

And my humble homeland and its golden shores.

Your face falls apart as if in slow motion,
you’ve been falling apart since I turned seventeen.
I’ve been unbuttoning your muscles,
unpicking your stitches.

Daughter, o daughter of mine: I cannot clasp you to my breast.

Remain where you are, stay calm.
Descending the stairway of lines in this poem,
in the faint voice threaded through these verses,
I’ll speak to your unborn self even when I’m dead.
I’m taking apart your features,
untying them thread by thread,
to make you a world where nothing can harm us.

Stop wandering and sleep, we’ll find each other there.
I have nothing, I ask for nothing.
A fleeting glimmer and then nothing.

Yolanda Castaño
Yolanda Castaño is a Galician poet, essayist, editor and cultural curator. Winner of Spain’s 2023 National Poetry Award, she has published eight poetry books, among them Materia [Matter] (Xerais, 2022) and A Segunda Lingua [Second Tongue] (PEN Club Galicia, 2014). Her work, translated into nearly three dozen languages, has reached audiences across four continents. Castaño lives and directs a writers’ residency in A Coruña, Galicia.

Samantha Schnee
Samantha Schnee is the founding editor of Words Without Borders. Her translation of The Goddesses of Water, a collection by Mexican poet Jeannette Clariond, was published by Shearsman Books in the UK (August 2021) and World Poetry Books (September 2022) in the US. Her translation of Carmen Boullosa’s penultimate novel, The Book of Anna, was published by Coffee House Press last year, and her translation of Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft was shortlisted for the PEN America Translation Prize. She is a trustee of English PEN, where she chaired the Writers in Translation committee from 2014–17, and she currently serves as secretary of the American Literary Translators Association. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, she lives in Houston, Texas.

Roshan El-Qurashi
Roshan El-Qurashi is a visual artist based in Cairo, Egypt. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Faculty of Fine Arts. In 2015, she joined the Student Council Program at Studio Khana for Contemporary Art.   Roshan’s artistic practice explores the fragility of the human condition. Her work reflects emotional shifts and inner conflicts, focusing on instinctive responses to change, tension, and vulnerability. Through painting, she examines the layered nature of human experience and emotional resilience.   Since 2016, Roshan has participated in numerous group exhibitions across Cairo and Alexandria. Her work was also selected for the Venice Land Art Prize. Most recently, she presented a solo exhibition titled Burdened Void.