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Literature, PoetryFebruary 23, 2017

Midnight Train to Georgia

Artwork by Fariya Zaeem. Image courtesy of Gallery 6.

My cousin the Army Captain
didn’t say much,
then one day he wrote to her:

Didn’t I adore you harder
than silence?

Didn’t you know
I kept trying to reach you

but kept appearing on the
other side of wherever I wasn’t.

Didn’t you know
I tore time into pieces

to understand how
I harmed you.

Kiss me one last time.

Who can really escape the heart
well enough not to leave a trace.

Kiss me one last time.

Didn’t you know
I was afraid to count the music

on your side of midnight,
to count the steps

that would never lead me
to where I could tell you, free me.

~ Nathalie Handal

Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France and the Arab world, educated in the United States and United Kingdom, and has moved between cities in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Latin America and the United States most of her life. Her recent books include the flash collection ‘The Republics’, lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers” and winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and the Arab American Book Award; the critically acclaimed ‘Poet in Andalucía’; and ‘Love and Strange Horses’, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award. Handal is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, Centro Andaluz de las Letras Fellow, Fondazione di Venezia Fellow, and winner of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature, among other honors. She is a professor at Columbia University and writes the literary travel column The City and the Writer for Words without Borders.

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Fariya ZaeemNathalie HandalPoems Against Borderspoetry

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One last love letter...

April 24, 2021

It has taken us some time and patience to come to this decision. TMS would not have seen the success that it did without our readers and the tireless team that ran the magazine for the better part of eight years.

But… all good things must come to an end, especially when we look at the ever-expanding art and literary landscape in Pakistan, the country of the magazine’s birth.

We are amazed and proud of what the next generation of creators are working with, the themes they are featuring, and their inclusivity in the diversity of voices they are publishing. When TMS began, this was the world we envisioned…

Though the magazine has closed and our submissions shuttered, this website will remain open for the foreseeable future as an archive of the great work we published and the astounding collection of diverse voices we were privileged to feature.

If, however, someone is interested in picking up the baton, please email Maryam Piracha, the editor, at [email protected].

Farewell, fam! It’s been quite a ride.

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