NAJIB JOE HAKIM is a documentary photographer, artist, and photography instructor. Hakim is the president of the board for the Network of Photographers for Palestine; a founding member of Class Conscious Photographers; recipient of the Rebuilding Alliance Storytellers Award for a trilogy of Palestine projects; a Political Art Fellow at
Before Time A number of years ago, I drove over the pass on an Oregon logging road: My brother, my son, my girlfriend, and me. Cutting through shards of razor-blue sky until We escaped the fir and pine, and Threw a foam mattress On the breathless spreading desert floor.
The Current Exchange Rate The Human Animal plays at the creek behind her house every afternoon. She feeds the ducks leftover bread crusts. She steals the iridescent plumes they shed in the grass. A fair trade, she decides. She takes a feather home, attaching a pencil tip to the hollow
Braille’s Hands I like the story because it’s true –Thomas Lux When Braille died, braille hadn’t caught on yet. The blind students at L’Institut des Jeunes Aveugles in Paris loved it, but the teachers and administrators, most of whom were sighted, didn’t. Because they couldn’
On the River Today I saw my grandfather knee-deep in the Nissitissit, varnished bamboo fly rod, hand-tied blue winged olive, pipe smoke swirling with the morning mist. He was focused skyward—an osprey circling beneath charcoal clouds, the kind of dark that threatens storms & keeps most anglers
you're too busy for poems & pictures for the beautiful and strange for soft, thick paper and the smell of good ink but if you did have time maybe you could pick up a copy of Halsey Literary Reader maybe you would find a place to lay down
Each issue includes thirty poems and ten pictures from up to twenty artists. Plus at least two short essays on craft.