Rifqa

by Mohammed El-Kurd

I saw the audacity of evil and how it can be rationalized.

I do not need to tell his story for him. He has been telling his own story for many years, and now the world is finally starting to listen.

With soft-spoken political finesse, these poems choose voice. They embrace the urgent life of words in service to the emotional landscape of resistance.

a living room of poems seats us in the home of what remains,

May these poems challenge and awaken you. May they shake you into action. May they help you find the words for what you already know to be true. We cannot afford to be silent. Mohammed’s poems confront and reveal us.

After she’s worn Jerusalem and been worn by it,

into punch lines in guts,

My name: a bomb in a white room,

Birth lasts longer than death. In Palestine death is sudden, instant, constant, happens in between breaths.

I was born among poetry on the fiftieth anniversary. The liberation chants outside the hospital room told my mother to push.

sometimes dipping my bread in indulgence, knowing a child is breadless, in Khan Yunis, dipped in a roof’s rubble

Birth begins to halve you.

Your father was a bullet away before a bullet took him, came home a martyr never a father.

A chain is corseting the tree’s waist and hers, flesh in flesh, olive skin on olive skin, fingersbranchesintersections rootedness jars their storms, wraps them in her unbreakable word we will not leave. Leave!

In Jerusalem, every footstep is a grave.

This was only love: her skeleton is that of the tree’s, roots stitched into land into identity.

Separation is like unmaking love ungluing names to pl...

Two martyrs fall. One martyr falls.

In my lonely I spend time shoving ghosts off of balconies.

Jerusalem strangledwith strangers, virusat the depths of its throatcough blood debris as if confetti.

I talked to God but God never wore my shoes.

Portrait of My Nose Arrogant with height.

mine is one nose away from beauty, oneaway from Anglo-Saxon.

Wrinkled faces hide inside the wrinkles of her face,

Could’ve beentoday.

drowned in this life, soaked in salt.

She left poetry. What I writeis an almost. I writean attempt.

She worked, worked, and worked until survival was a funny story to tell on eveningswith what remains of the family.

Jerusalem bride of the fantasy once more.

Years passed and the vines of the roses werevines of grapes, vines of barbed wires, ripping open the veins of this city.

I cried—not for the house but for the memories I could have had inside it.

On the same day fifty years later, there was a Friday in my eyes.

TV said her brother was a martyr, but martyrs go with intent. He went bullet to the head. From fist to flounder.

dead girl shouldn’t have found her rage in the kitchen drawer. She was reaching for crayons.

Was it because our cemeteries need cemeteries and our tombstones need homes?

No place to run. No Moses in siege. Waves stitched together, embroidered, weaved un-walkable, indivisible, passage—implausible, on most days we weep in advance.

Here, we know two things: death and the few breaths before it.

This Hebrewed land still speaks Arabic.

The man says the boy’s walk looks too much like a song and too little like a man walking.

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

What is fear to the ferocious? I ask him to stop selling gum. He tells me I don’t know a thing about this. Don’t know a thing about the sun’s fingernails clawing the back of his neck. I’ll be quiet then. I don’t know a thing,truly, Not a manyet.Not a manoften.

Blood doesn’t wash away despite the faucets despite the color of washing.

War machines are coin-operated arcade games, and your penny sprays and juvenile plays are just as greedy as a bulldozer’s mouth chewing life into debris for me to dish-wash and make poetry of.

Surf their boats in drought. Their knuckles stiff, cold is this verse.

She wants to carry thirty-five mountains. I tell her I’ve got both bags, not as heavy as they seem not as heavy as she’s lived.

blonde and sunburnt,

And before my breath could take a seat, she walked away as if she once knew purple shrouds.

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

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

She holds onto the concrete reef like it’s a blanket, like it’s Mary’s sage.