Rifqa

by Mohammed El-Kurd

Poetry sees us for who we truly are, and what is in that reflection must be faced.

Kuffiyah’ed faces, and bare bodies, stones thrown onto tanks, tanks imprinted with US flags,

If hearing about a world other than yours makes you uncomfortable, drink the sea, cut off your ears, blow another bubble to bubble your bubble and the pretense. Blow up another town of bodies in the name of fear.

Why is anger–even anger–a luxury to me?

Your ambition is ammunition bullet-less.

Jerusalem strangledwith strangers, virusat the depths of its throatcough blood debris as if confetti. They tell us to taunt tanks with resumés not rocks.

I talked to God but God never wore my shoes. Sing me a song of home break a dish or twothrow a stone or two because the screams make me nostalgic: I almost don’t fear the sirens.

My grandmother—Rifqa— was chased away from the city, leaving behind the vine of roses in the front yard. Sometimewhen youth was more than just yearning,

Invaderscame back once again, claimed the land withfists and fireexcusesbeliefs of the chosen and the promised as if God is a real-estate agent.

In 2009, Swedish photojournalist Donald Boström published an essay titled “Our Sons Are Being Plundered for Their Organs,” in which he exposed the decades-long Israeli practice of returning the bodies of young Palestinian men to their families with organs missing. See also: Israeli necroviolence.

It’s the same killing everywhere. Seventy-some years later we haven’t lived a day.

Was it because there were no more graves in Gaza that you brought us to the beach to die?

Here, we know two suns: earth’s friend and white phosphorus. Here, we know two things: death and the few breaths before it. What do you say to children for whom the Red Sea doesn’t part?

white, uniformed terrorism, and that pavements are tiled like a board game or some sort of mundane, alleged raillery, and “national heroes” roll dice, roll corpses after posing with them, homecoming and championed.

A woman tells him a pen is a sword. What’s a pen to a rifle? Another fed him a sonnet. If Shakespeare was from here he wouldn’t be writing.

The boy is eight, which is twenty-two for Americans. The boy knows this. His mother calls him a man in his nightmares. You’re a man now. A painter stands in this, collecting strokes. A photographer offers a helping hand. They want to build a museum in his torture.

War machines are American-made, and they are never thirsty / rivers in their throats. American water is brown and dirtied and children famished, cracked, caged in cages, / in uneducated education.

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. The soldier, accented and unhebrew, asks her what’s in the bag. Figs, bitch. What else you want to know? I stuffed them with storms and bombs and blows.

One day we will write about dispossession in the past tense. I’ve been meaning to take all the breaths I need.

“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. Crossing back and forth like that, that’s talent, she says.

Not a poem nor a post is enough to turn the post they live under into a tent. Not one of them has bent, gathered our prayers, and weaved them into a home or a hoodie.

The word injustice lost half its heft.

Don’t your hands tire of gesturing?

They brought divinity to the crime scene to avoid justice.

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

If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing. —Malcolm X

Doctor, 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?

What’s a resumé to a tank?

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.

My grandmother lived through wars and then some. She was older than Zionist colonization. For this, she was hailed as the “icon of Palestinian resilience” by Jerusalemites.

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.

Some people cannot exist in the past tense. For a hundred years, she walked a tightrope between pride and self-respect. My grandmother taught me everything I know about dignity. She taught me how to launch my sentences like missiles, how to be resilient.

It is to “women and children” Palestinians to death—to infantilize Palestinians in hopes of determining that, indeed, they deserve liberation.

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.

I refuse to wait in the wreck.