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Despite what you might read in this fourth issue of Rusted Radishes, what’s really on our minds is garbage. 

As I write, on what could have been a welcome rainy, finally-cool, October evening, there are streets across Lebanon that have literally transformed into flowing rivers of bobbing plastic bags filled with our household waste. As we worry about the air we breathe, the mosquitoes that make their way into our flesh, or how our beloved fresh vegetables may be contaminated by our fellow countrypeople’s rotted – and now wet-and-seeping-into-the-ground – waste, I wonder what role can literature and art have in times when worrying about our health is the most urgent thing our environment has offered us to think about.

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