Mahru Elahi

November 19, 2025 - Best of Net nominated "Summoning" [31:07] - In my dreams, I am dressed in loose clothing and rise into the air with a thought, guided by the warmth in my belly. Usually it is night but sometimes the sun is out. I am alone and curious and propel myself high above the landscape, delighting in the patterned streets and rolling hills, the geometry of buildings. When I wake from these dreams, the warmth in my belly is a reminder of where I've gone. I replay gauzy snatches of dream-memory throughout the day, the lightness that filled me. I want to return, to live again suspended above the earth.

June 27, 2025 - How do we continue to write into the horror and despair of the present moment, to engage with our whole self, instead of shutting down? So many of us can't write when we are confronted with genocide, fascism and the anthropecene. Yet, it is often by transforming the difficult and the impossible through the written word that we come closer to—if not hope, then a way of holding—an embodied grief that offers witness and struggle.

June 22, 2025 - In Farsi, multiracial Iranians are called do-rageh. There are other names, less savory, but this one is my favorite. In English, the literal translation is two-blooded. You are doubled, a mirror reflection. Because you are doubled, you follow a variation of the operational protocol. You adapt quickly to rearrangement and combination. You are already separated and not separated from yourself, both. You do not convert and reform as part of some external process, imposed upon you. Conversion is your starting point, an internal combustion.