occupation
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Don’t turn away. Stay soft.
I just watched a reel of a mother rocking and singing to her deceased child. Her hysteria was heartbreakingly calm, like shattered clay settling to the bottom of the sea. In the last two seconds of the reel, she buried her face in the shroud, still singing so very softly, and I find myself hoping… Continue reading
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Abandoned Verses from News of a Ceasefire
How do I carry you to the next expanse of silence Push these disheartened vessels towards the next markers of safety a cubic mile of sky visited only by kites and feathered friends Can you run to living at a walking pace to the home whose walls are lonely bones of a defaced promise but… Continue reading
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Drops in a Bucket
There are not enough tears to cry for all of them but I will cry for them on my lunch break and my bus ride home and the hour before I fall asleep the rest of the day requires a straight face and full command of my vocal chords but I will allow my heart… Continue reading
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Throw yourselves on the gears of the mass killing machine
Some days I am the body that stops a bullet. Some days I am the path of the bullet missing its mark. Some days I am clarity, unaccounted for and loaded into the chamber, primed for its moment. Some days the collateral is an entire universe. Some days exit wounds are lifetimes. Some days there… Continue reading
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Midwifing the Dawn
While you were sleeping, a new world is being born. While you are carrying on like business as usual, there are those laboring through the endless, eviscerating darkness to push this painfully evolved, radically imagined world into being, carrying what’s worth saving across the threshold and leaving everything else to burn. The new world is… Continue reading
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The People I was Raised to Look up to are Silent During a Genocide
I struggle to be around people whose hearts are not breaking at this time of great sorrow. I struggle to find peace these days, whereas some have identified a person of authority to tell them they are Good People, and that is enough to let them sleep at night, certain they are doing enough. Every… Continue reading
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What shape does erasure make of memory? What direction is the future if you amputate the past?
How far along a carpet bombing before you stop recognizing your own school, your route home, the corner store you get your morning coffee from? How shelled the concrete, how drenched in blood and screaming the walls, how altered the sky, how exposed the ordinary secrets until a structure loses its soul? How much decimation… Continue reading
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White Kites and MQ-9 Reaper Drones
One day they are standing in uncomprehending horror on the unsanitary floor of an overcrowded hospital, having recently been pulled out of the rubble that had been their home, looking up at tired strangers, desperate for familiar faces, crying for their mothers, yelling for their fathers, but their mothers and fathers can no longer hear… Continue reading
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For the Poets of Palestine
for refusing to let these ripe conditions for despair condemn their metaphors, for the collective memory of generations, for olive trees only uprooted in this world (this dunya is temporary) for love in the shape of roots calling to the land, connected to the land even in the gnarled grace of diaspora even as they… Continue reading
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Ten Thousand Martyred Children
are on my mind along with bus schedules I am the lady crying on the CTA challenging my seething heart to not turn away from the images of hospitals under siege, white sheets enshrouding somebody’s beloved, gaping wounds and howling, sky-tearing grief while listening to street names rationing my breaking heart into the handful of… Continue reading
Rampant & Golden 