Rifqa

by Mohammed El-Kurd

She weeps, cries her inability to mourn another. She imagines the umbilical cord, a noose.

Atlanta taught me that people will still applaud the bullets puncturing them if they have the right rhythm. This taught me how to look.

It is thosestuffing sand inmy mouth that worry me mostsaying there aresofterwaystosaythis.

If it weren’t for the smoking, the day would be a day.

I’ve been meaning to take all the breaths I need.

Autobiography

Man what an interesting poem

A boy was void this morning. His mother slipped him in the cracks of a vending machine.

I spat out storms coaxing her into war, but what war could she wage when the only wage we know is minimal? What war could she wage when choice left the equation—when voice was robbed from our throats? From her throat, a cough evades conversation.

teeth aching and lungs weaker by the tick.

into sleep’s flesh,

their eyes aftera dollar or a supper but not a dollar nor a supper, not a protest nor a pretense. Not a protest nor a pretense.

They wouldn’t know the truth if it knew them. This is a yawning pattern. The oils, the soils, the lands, the hands. A penetrative bureaucracy. Poverty, a circus. If I squeezed their bread in my hand, my blood would drip out of it. You and I became the other, the minority.

At a certain point, the metaphor tires. At a certain point, I’ll grab a brick.

[Martyr] at the bar and he was gone in two shots.

I indulge in apology sorry at large.

I’d rather snatch the apple out my own throatI want to snatch the apple out my own throat. I want my voice voiceless.

Grief the teacherand I never learn.

We’re literate in peeling off our own skin to sleep. We live like walking debris, swallow snakes, swallow whole pharmacies, wrap our spines around the fingers of bank tellers, while Bush is at a Joanne’s picking the perfect blue.

I got from herher hunch and her hunch.

the tear gas

What a powerful enjambment

In 2009, I saw her rally her body against heavily armed and American-accented settlers and police in our yard, as they claimed our land as theirs by divine decree. As if God were a real estate agent.

But my grandmother refused to be a humanitarian case for gazing eyes.

In truth, I am not ready to eulogize her. Even in writing this, I find myself having trouble with tenses. Some people cannot exist in the past tense.

I learned that poetry is planting a bomb in a garden—a masquerade. Language is not free.

I became the sole anthropological authority, reclaiming her relic, living in cold anger that has sat deep within me and shaped my cynicism. I realize now that a poetry book formed as a didactic tool became one whose merit relies on negating the politics of appeal.

In contrast, we must qualify our dead with reminders of their nonviolence, humane professions, and disabilites. A Palestinian man cannot just die.

I no longer feel the responsibility to give humans eyes for humanity.