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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Solidarity is a feeling and a doing.
It is a series of choices we make with one another. It can only be felt. It cannot be contrived or manipulated.
Poetry is a home for the dispossessed; it is our belonging.
A poem is a life, and a life is a poem that calls us inward.
“I cried not for the house but for the memories I could have had inside it.”
These words remind me that home is a series of shared memories, not brick and mortar.
My mother has always said: “The most tragic of disasters are those that cause laughter.”
My name: a bomb in a white room, a walking suspicion in an airport, choiceless politics.
In Palestine death is sudden, instant, constant, happens in between breaths.
My father told me: “Anger is a luxury we cannot afford.” Be composed, calm, still—laugh when they ask you, smile when they talk, answer them, educate them.
This is why we dance: Because screaming isn’t free. Please tell me: Why is anger–even anger–a luxury to me?
In Jerusalem, every footstep is a grave.
because the screams make me nostalgic: I almost don’t fear the sirens.
they harvestorgans of the martyred, feed their warriors our own.
I tell her I’ve got both bags, not as heavy as they seem not as heavy as she’s lived.
My permit: these wrinkles older than your country’s existence.
She imagines the umbilical cord, a noose.
White girls are the absolute best at shoplifting, for reasons Atlanta knows.
I learned that poetry is planting a bomb in a garden—a masquerade. Language is not free.
Jerusalem was a perpetual reminder of the Zionist occupation’s actuality and terror, and my grandmother represented a time in which it didn’t exist. And she clung onto that time.
It is to “women and children” Palestinians to death—to infantilize Palestinians in hopes of determining that, indeed, they deserve liberation.
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.
