This edition of The Circular brings together writing about the body – the health denied certain bodies and the stigma attached to others; how society interprets different bodies and how those bodies respond and resist.

Bobuq Sayed reflects on the disjunction between knowing what is good for one’s health and the poor health that is their reality and their community’s. 'Why would they choose to die in front of us?' their child self innocently wonders when they stumble upon the cigarette butts leftover from their parents’ party.

Shakira Hussein observes the #MeToo movement’s reliance on the recounting of traumatic experiences – and, ironically, the concentration of such experiences among women who stood to benefit the least from the movement. Meanwhile, Meryl Broughton conducts a post-mortem examination in a hospital basement, contemplating the emotions and injustices that will remain unaccounted for even after the cause of death has been found.

Eloise Grills – via her own artwork – exposes the exploitation, racism, and abuse behind celebrated Western artistic representations of fat women. In Paris, Yassmin Abdel-Magied watches joggers by the Seine, musing on secular society’s worship of extreme fitness and its concurrent condemnation of healthy Islamic practices as extreme.

And in the last instalment of our WRITER & WRITER series, Arab Australian poet Omar Sakr and Palestinian American poet George Abraham discuss, among other things, the interpretive lenses through which their work is misread, and their respective poetry as 'gesturing to our bodies, where we’ve been placed, how we are relating to that place, and to its abandonment'.