Rifqa

by Mohammed El-Kurd

The boy is eight, which is twenty-two for Americans.

Ouch

The soldier, blonde and sunburnt, asks her for her permit. My permit: these wrinkles older than your country’s existence. My smile is a sun.

Weeping and cradling a sidewalk, she pushes out a statistic.

The soldier tells her a chance at an ambulance is nonexistent, passage requires permit.

She pushes out a security threat; its first sight is a bullet hole.

She imagines the umbilical cord, a noose.

Zoloft makes my face swell up

for whom jail cells are mandatory motels for when the city decides to dust its pillows.

I live by people whose mattressesare memory, are substance, are made featherless, fatherless

The comedy, though, is in the language. The things they deafen and defeat. They renamed the streets, the tombs. Hell, whole cemeteries.

This morning the phoenix made sure its ashes were damp enough to never rise again.

They brought divinity to the crime scene to avoid justice.

One of them promised to put my rags in the museum.

Biden livid at the Palestinians once more.

but [martyr] is in the fridge still.

and Washington spat on Mandela a few breaths before it kissed him.

where opinion shapers rhyme my country with its cancer,

Place gems in my sockets and I’ll pretend I can see.

I can only describe this guilt with similes that would invalidate it. I no longer want to language, no longer want to tongue.

There are prophets in psych wards, plowing the ground.

Shoe to the head I’ve never felt pride like this. Bushshoe to the head.

Bush sits beside me on the train. Iraq veteran cites his fear of fireworks. They think they’re the only ones with PTSD.We’re literate in peeling off our own skin to sleep.

American settlers find their way into the front yard, and their billionaires take us to court.

A dozen Kyle Rittenhouses patrol my street. Cowards if not for their M-16s.

As if God were a real estate agent.

Ironically, the regime with one of the world’s most lethal armies does not require humanization. The world can grieve Israeli loss without qualifiers, despite the disparities in the death toll. In contrast, we must qualify our dead with reminders of their nonviolence, humane professions, and disabilites. A Palestinian man cannot just die. For him to be mourned, he must be in a wheelchair or developmentally delayed, a medical professional, or noticeably elderly at the very least. Even then, there are questions about the validity of his victimhood.