Rifqa

by Mohammed El-Kurd

I’ve been meaning to sleep for a few weeks.

I’ve been meaning to eat today but I spent a thousand mornings since sunrise insisting upon my integrity.

Do I believe in violence? Well I don’t believe in violation.

I’ve been meaning to dream. Closed my eyes in the Uber & dreamt of the Haitian Revolution.

I’m bored with the metaphorsChildren threw stones Sirens were lullabies / fireworks; bombsand we were sick of it

Zoloft makes my face swell up a choice betweensanityand slimness What does that say about me?This isn’t an epiphany, though Poems aren’t for that

This is one of those poems that start with “she,” those poems that break bread with their topics, offer ibuprofen tablets and tables for those sick with September wind and those sick with G4S.

That’s talent that you knew. I’m from the land of Christ cross-wearing woman. I’m from a land torn and abused by the company you work for. I spat out storms coaxing her into war,

“How far is Palestine?” She asks. It’s a fifteen-hour plane ride away, a dozen unresolved UN resolutions away, a few history lessons away, a hundred and some military checkpoints away, too much G4S-provided asphyxiation.

mostly of certain wrists: wrists that bend or slice open or contemplate deathscarred by cuffs or leashed to a misfortune or a debt.

and I have fled a different kind of heartache than that my mother had pickled and jarred and served for me.

I am reluctant to say what I write about: I don’t know anymore. The question is about the earth— primates over prose

Most daysI’m in psychosisspine to my storms bait to my rage tired metaphors.

I am but the institution, the prestige, the watermelon.

Who took poets off my shelves to put pills where poets once were?

I gulp metaphors without counting. My poems become mosaicsunintentionally, messy roomshabitually. A cluttered bedroom isn’t poetic it’s melodrama.

This is a yearning for rage.

I am but my obedience to my mother.

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.

They couldn’t run in my rhetoric. Run as in rule, as in campaign, as in sprint.

These people make me feel in third person. Over there, minarets call for prayer, and here, their mouths recite emails.

I ask about the office where opinion shapers rhyme my country with its cancer,

I have mailed you fire last week, did you receive my flames?

what if I told you I distrust civilization and the civilized, that I’d ratherpick lice off my brother’s head thanpick the sanity off my own?

Grief the teacher and shame the compass.

I can only describe this guilt with similes that would invalidate it.

I wish I were a landlord to the tenants in my head.

Where am I from jasmines and the fig tree? From plants prostituted by poetry?

the ultimate anti diaspora poetry line lmao

To wait by a phone is to be killed.

Comical is crows offended by stones. Where am I from offense? Somewhere in this poem Edward Said throws a rock. What’s a resumé to a tank?

I sat there in my adolescence, watching the sky turn bruised. Next time I’m in Palestine my grandmother’s name will be on stone. It’s finding the joke in the jasmine.

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. 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.

Great Britain was beaten. You will be beaten too! —Rifqa El-Kurd

Icon

After patience there is but a grave, Teta says.

Her punch lines intacther smirk unwavering.

She does not remember my name; unkindness is much more memorablethan blood

Tell them, “Drink the sea.” Let them ride their tallest horses. Jerusalem is ours.

Her spine will recover, I hope. It is those who are spineless who cannot buy themselves a spine.

cavalry came to confiscate our balloons. They looked ridiculous getting off their high horses to climb up the settlers’ ladder, untangling the balloons from the electricity wires. We laugh as much as we can before the teargas. There’s a circus in their brutality. At the interrogation they asked me how we dare paint Palestinian flags on a children’s faces.

I am heartbroken that she died without having seen a free Palestine, though I promise her that the grandchildren have not forgotten. This fight is a revolution until victory. Rifqa embodied that until her very last breath.