There are 29 days in February this year. The GBU-28 missile, classified as a laser-guided bunker-buster, is manufactured in upstate New York. No fewer than 27 Palestinians were killed by Israeli airstrikes at the Abu Hussein school, in Jabaliya refugee camp on November 23rd 2023. The death toll in Gaza as of two days ago topped 26 thousand. At 25 miles long, Gaza is about as wide as the city of Atlanta. Manufactured by Russia, the 9K38 Igla surface-to-air missile weighs roughly 24 pounds. In three days, Ahed Tamimi will be 23 years old. Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip during Operation Cast Lead lasted 22 days. The RQ-21 Blackjack surveillance plane receives some of its parts and guidance technology from Elbit Systems. Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad had so far seen 20 years of life before they were shot in Burlington, Vermont. The funeral procession for 19-year-old Labib Dumaidi happened on October 6th. Inhabitants of Beit Sahour hid 18 cows during the 1980s because the cows and the collective who cared for them were considered a national security threat. On Dec 1 2023 the United States sent bunker buster missiles to Israel mainly on C-17 military cargo planes. Gaza has been under a blockade for 16 years. The walk from Gaza City to Khan Younis is roughly 15 miles. It was easy to see the lioness in then-14-year-old Ahed Tamimi, resisting that soldier such that she seemed ten feet taller. After Israel killed his mother and abducted his father, 13-year-old Mohammad Al-Yazji takes care of his seven siblings—the youngest of them barely six months old. 12 months in a year and not one of them should see this much death. On average, Israel kills 11 Palestinians every hour. Mohammad Ibrahim Fahed Bahloul, 10, was shot in the chest by an Israeli soldier on November 23. Due to its so-called inexpensiveness, the AIM-9 Sidewinder missile is used by 48 countries. At least 8 types of olives are harvested in Palestine. October 7 was not the beginning but the beginning of something else. Iris haynei, the national flower of Palestine, has 6 petals. 5 fruits that are more than fruit to Palestine: watermelon, strawberries, oranges, olives, eggplants. The deathly inconvenient lie: believing there are only 4 regions. Given they last upwards of thirty years, 3 generations of Palestinians have seen the devastation of apartheid. Between 2 bodies of water—a river and a sea—is an ocean full of futures. Only 1 outcome will suffice: a free Palestine.
-
waking up
the first few golden fingers
glow on uncut grass
one hundred thousand crooked steeples
parishioners en masse
no stranger at these altars
all their unfamiliar sizes
microbial populations
offering excuses
people use to think ourselves
down from tops of trees
and onto thrones
those same golden fingers
reach through chloroplasts
that with a bend of light
possess another reason
we cannot yet die
without feeding on them
while they feed on us
asking we believe in seasons
we already know from dust
will confiscate
an endless plate
of years from which
we cannot pick
I need there to be something
slow enough
to hold on to these terms
that is sensible to touch
to heat
that can sit with all this
immolation
the boundaries of which
might be called
surrender
rendering
fat and marrow
muscle skin and bone
more than things
a government works
until exhaustion
a surrender
sent from somewhere
that to watch it coming
means one would go blind
but witnessing it land
takes far more than the eyes
surrendering a throne
to kneel
before these hundred thousand
crooked steeples
no taller than my biggest toe
where
golden fingers
peel back the blue from hedgerows
careful not to linger long enough
the night
might be convinced to stay
leaving the sleeper
to awake and witness
over everything
a light that sayswake up—the garden is on fire
you should be out here dancing
between flowers and the flames -
every night in this world
we disavow the knives of our opinions
soon forgetting or rarely turning our heads
to thorns in other gardens
the sharp sensation
of a young girl’s throat
for whom her final bite of bread
becomes a ghost
shortly after her mother does
before her farmer father full of life
was taken
and returned an empty room
before her brother
never seen outside the womb
soon understood the architecture
of a mausoleum
from withinthat the still of the night is bathed in steel
every night in this world
means some town goes down dark
forgetting
someone will be born inside a prison
whose fire formed at the bottom of a ditch
or always often sometimes not at all
we are amongst a world
forgoing the shape its wears
when viewed from a particular distance
here where a home so often is before it isn’t
leveled out like algebra
flat between gnashing teeth
a cache of duty-free megatons
at terminal velocity
and greasy palms with pencils
far more names erased than those
taken by tsunamis
but fewer still than international lawall these nights cannot
forgo this world forever
any world that far gone
can never ever stay
somewhere with sure dimensions
mint tea and intrinsic value
a series of gravitationally bound layers
of mud minerals and oral generations
out from which a fire speaks after the dark itself
has spoken
somewhere that sunlight
disinfects and defines
denatures and demarcates
drenches in radiation
drills down below roots
dresses up the most beautiful
as much as it reflects off death’s white tools
giving a name for every hour that unspools
into the sea or swamp to rise with mountain smoke
no, every night cannot
forgo this world forever
a world forgone
can never stay a world
it can never remain somewhere
anywhere at all
at the very least
a place worth living -
how do we do this daily
we do this thing we do daily
where we doom this day
to deadly repetitions
groom this thickness
around the rooms
between two ears
downing ruminations
how we wound this
one blue room we
winnow it from green
run gangrene through it
in this daily doom we do
this undoing where
pragmatically you assume
a shattering’s good news
if it doesn’t end in shrapnel
in your own living rooms
a field with more bullets
and blood than blades of grass
in scars we trust
in blooms in plumes
of gypsum signaling new ruins
mothers kneeling down
before their children
tenderized by missile fire
while we render certain faces
of annihilation
palatable leaders
pass them off as harm reduction
read up on what those faces
say yes to
what they sign off on
how they do people
how they undo them
from any room any womb
every tomb they sanction
tell me why we do this
you listen to them daily
don’t you
wading, waiting with
your mouth hanging
wide as any moon
on what they tell you
what will happen
when your mouth
a wide blood moon
gets filled up
by those plumes? -
I can assume no form in lands I can’t be seen. Presume that crowns of brush and grass imagine other feet than these. Such failure cannot reach across this world, feel its coordinates as it lands. Become a shield against the gravity of malice. Of fear. Touch a solitary branch of Gambeya albida, much less a single sweetened sphere.
There: forces chase down the land as if a throne, draping every home in tears. There are, into every crevice, at this hour, crowds of people never to be known, knowingly rounded up and forever fed to silence, but unable to outgrow the memory of all their aching. All their transmissions come through those ejected from the land. For to chronicle welcomes crosshairs and crosshairs offer exits from the world. They, who are distance, who, still surviving, are satellites on fire. Lives impressed into their languages, languishing, angles of light so distant one is only stricken blind in dreams.
All that I could ever lay before them is an echo bound to die against the chorus at two shores. Nothing I say about Kinshasa or Khartoum will never touch them—and may well sting. I could bleed and it would not be enough to levitate a solitary boat. But the cut is open and, lovingly, I hope. Lubumbashi and Darfur evade my grasp, not the laceration. Compassion may fail to submerge its hook but urges a bleeding. A fog befalling glasses, of a rose’s hue some say but, in this land of selves spread far too thin across, the red over my vision is a wall of thinning blood. Dark enough to weigh down, stain the air, to curdle at curb-sides.
The implication here is that care is by default magnetic, in all its limited attentions. Despite the declarations, my mentions still feel as spare as swaths of desert. I cannot help the ache of knowing I can’t stretch my hands across Atlantic waters, cup the face of every person burned by wars inside my hands.
Catastrophe is a howl of lightning. Bowls are insufficient. Bottles offer little hope to hold it, lest they overflow with something flammable, half-swallowing a dull white rag. They must have clearances to travel. Familiarity with brick façades and glass. The necessary stamps on their passport, pressed against a world in need of scattering, of thinning out, a shattering of the terms like ghosts in rain, a world where tenderness can stay—and suffering, too, as it must—but cruelty blots away into the late harmattan dust.
-
Proof arrives on the television. Two minutes in, a Sunday morning. Is a world bound to images of endlessly open eyes piercing through shrouds, of children frozen between birthdays. Neighbors as vacant buildings, their work-less hearts are flame-less ovens, caked in smoke. Is a world bound to images many in the world are made to overlook. Finding amnesia in their navel or their favorite song. Some narratives will be printed on thin paper, the kind used to sign warrants, wills, eulogies, life sentences, death sentences.
Elsewhere, paper will fall from the sky, announcing the terms of a people’s undoing. Across a stretch of water none of them can drink, someone else, in their most comfortable chair, is watching this, watching the ticket they punched punch holes through families, blotting out generations—their recipes, recitations, reticence, repetitions, rebukes. Their right of return between a river and a sea.
“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” they say. But perfect is not the enemy of the good. The enemy of the good is the death of warm light between cousins sharing bread in a makeshift tent, the endless cold of nothing spoken into night by missile fire. The silencing of babies yet to see the outside of an incubator or, for some, the world beyond their mother’s ocean.
Perfect is the enemy of all beginnings. It is the denial of oblivion. But the good is not the pen that etches suffering across presidential stationery, effortlessly signing away life on every landmass it can imagine. It is the ink which refuses inscription. It’s the nib that rebounds from the surface of undoing and pierces through the heart of the ghoul who holds it.
No, not even this. They are not the good. The ink and nib which refuse bleed beyond this binary cage. They are not the good but the necessary.
Proof arrives on a television, on before the city is awake. It rides on every word for thirty seconds of a grandfather’s loss, the crater in his arms, the roses still remaining of his love, spoken over a single image: the breath of children leaving trails of icy vapor as they play about the dust-stained winter air.
-
There is a memory in water. Not a recollection of the world’s substances but a memorial to the lowest of all desire. Terminal with rhythm. In earth’s erotic audience. Energy that names itself. Freedom. Yielding its face in foam. It tells a riddle we are told we can’t unfold.
How we, too, arrive unfolded, formed beneath a hidden ocean. We have our amniotic departures. Into a sudden prism, a tumbling of light and might and stone. Spilled into a multitude, we pry a fissure in the face of every clock. By the time we take our final breath there are two clocks. Both of them are wrong.
A rain falls. Another memory of water, of throwing itself into water. The water throwing itself against the world. Turning into narratives of mud. Stories that forget themselves by morning but have earned themselves a myth in the mouths of grass.
Between a river and a sea, the rain churns over needful things. Sparks on wood. Beloved and loves and lovers without shelter, amongst a sea of burials. Shrouds of blue and white. Bluer and whiter than the greatest painter’s sea. A beckoning that burns away at unquenched throats. The energy that names itself. Freedom.
Water here is a weapon, a toy withheld, the housing of a child’s electrocution. A solution’s name is salt in a shrapnel wound. Bleeding and drowning become mirror images. The rain is never—ever, ever, ever—just the rain.
Calendars have turned today. What is the calendar to those for whom even vapor slights the fingers? For this, too, water has a memory. When a world observed another wheel of high, exploding light. When its mythology of a ruptured door alights, turning in ash in midnight’s air. Someone else’s morning. One year must die in another’s arms, we say. The water will remember this. From the water to the water, it will remember.
-
The edge of the garden marks the end of ambition. Here we can no longer turn to old names for elevation: taproot, thatch roof, Capitol, canopy, mesosphere, breathless ink. Here we lose the war on limbs. Between follicles and lignin. On flesh, melanin, collagen, fear, the sharpened attitudes of night against the skin. The colonial carvings: the sunbird’s room, the jaguar’s den, the peafowl’s drinking hole. How soft black knuckles of manure introduce our ligaments to risk. The stems become our stillness. The death that rises realizing stems are themselves never still. Tannins, terpenes, condemnation. Small, nephritic chemistries. Trichomes. Shattered reams of cork. The Pyrrhic victory of a shattered home. In the fray and fray and fray that a home must always bleed but need not be lacerated. That there must be a secateur, a dull spade’s thirst. That a mound of earth to a pitchfork or a missile is as much a home as it is a mausoleum. How the sun deveins desire, unveils mycelial hunger, unravels every tax on cenotaphs and phyllotaxis. How, when their due is due, is subdued and done, is undone, unmade, and made anew, renewed in the alchemical wheel inside the viscera of worms. The alchemy of upturned palms, the hands of comrades to meet them.
The edge of the garden is an echo in a crowded room. Where every name for the lost maintains its right to be forgotten. Where to cede the whorl to rage is to dare to keep it warm. To translate every rune given by shovels to the soil. Its metallic sentences, multicellular replies. Here the disembodied always requires a new burial. Brief pneumatic curves of superficial scars undone by rain. Scrawled at intervals to moss, to resin, rheum, spurs. Buried next to international law, rule of order, a grandchild with softly kissed eyes. Underneath a bog of reeds, salty sands, the mouths of deltas, ever-greening fields. Cardioid arrangements in kaolin, in ultisol, in coal-dark tundra ice. We are all perennial witnesses to absence—and the abscess of rebirth. Tides of nematodes move through our fingers, leaving and coming again and again. Fingers that can lift to light, that also must depart, that part the world but in their time can seed it with tomorrow; that, despite these fissures, these genocides, these spiritual excavations, arrive and arrive and arrive and arrive and arrive.
-
This is the seventh week I’ve awakened early. 5:45 am, the phone reads. I ease out of bed, put on an old blue robe and let the dog out for her morning business. While she is outside, I get dressed in the dark, return to the kitchen, let her in, and fill a bowl with the first round of her food.
I turn on the television (looking to watch Al Jazeera) and a local station is playing. It is showing a televangelist reading out a verse for Christmas Eve. The one about how “for unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given”. He gestures simply, his hands cupping the air around him as if he is holding a world. He is holding his world, the one an audience has somehow agreed exists and gathers to watch it in orbit on a large, multi-paneled sound stage the size of a large apartment. The serenity on his face isn’t serene. It’s empty, like an actor’s. His gestures are a performance. A hook some are convinced should be allowed to penetrate the skin. The soot gray suit he wears is too long. His hair-sprayed hair so neat it looks as if fabricated by a company that makes brightly-colored plastic toys.
The room in which he reads is dimly lit, covered in red and silver baubles hanging from the ceiling, catching every studio light at once as if each bauble were covered in a hundred pearls. Props line the back of the sound stage: a small blue tent, too small even for toddlers, in a fabric imitating mercury glass; a Christmas tree decked out in large green, gray, and purple ornaments, each one (at least) the size of a grapefruit; white Doric columns wrapped in wreaths of plastic pine needles, each one stippled with pale white lights and copper, wire-rimmed polyester bows.
In this room, people’s faces range from attentive—hanging on each of his words as if they had never before been uttered, some even taking notes—to pensive. Some are nodding their heads in agreement. But no point is being made. The televangelist is merely reading words written by someone else centuries ago. It’s his delivery that washes over them. It’s a routine and the marionette strings are visible enough to shimmer against the lights.
In this room, there is only false light. Nothing that is said addresses the world outside its walls. Words like spirit and peace and goodwill fly into that densely packed auditorium and die there seconds after exiting his mouth. During this performance, the churches (and mosques and people) of Palestine—the home of that child of which he speaks—receive nothing from this transmission. No support, no mention, no words, not even a passing reference.
I change the channel to Al Jazeera. Images of darkness abound. 166 people killed by the IOF (Israeli Occupational Forces—there is no defense) in the last 24 hours. Another nightly raid in Nablus, the West Bank. The overnight storming of Al-Aqsa mosque. Another journalist assassinated, bringing the total to 103. Interspersed with these reports are videos of Palestinian families who have lost everything but their spirit. Families, friends, neighbors, neighborhoods, whole communities have been lost to time. An undefeated despair, as John Berger puts it, remains.
But the calculus is nevertheless devastating. Generations, genealogies, futures—gone. Lack of food, water, electricity, fuel and shelter are killing people slowly while bombings do it quicker and in larger numbers. It is nothing short of a cruel spectacle of extermination, undoubtedly worse in real time than what appears on the screen, one facilitated and funded by the nation-state in which I currently watch Al Jazeera and write this very sentence.
Images of darkness abound. Seemingly endless darkness. Sanctioned by the Global North, the West, and its supplicants throughout the Global South. But there, in Palestine, amongst these images of darkness, with a second Nakba (catastrophe) in medias res—perhaps a continuation of the first—, in the eyes of a besieged but indefatigable people, there is light.
Real light.
-
Has the air run clear? you ask, the excuse
being you cannot see across the oceanthough you know why too many have lost
their wings in a city wiped with smoke;how the signatories of fire define each
new hollowed house of their world,
not only by those for whom their houses
become sarcophagi, but for who remain,seeing their language cleaved from the earth.
It depends on who’s reading the book, I say.I, myself, am made illiterate by tears,
the cover burning, becoming ash in my hands,yet its stories—never finished—which still
pull against their mouths, deserving air,seem, despite the world, no less visible
and whole beneath the smoldering pages.