Zoom in on the spine of genocide:
historians of the future left footnotes.
Mute insertions, retrospective corrections
to present, already-manifested violence
ignoring ivory towers held up by bricks
singular and lasting. By the way,
I thought about it. It was bad after all,
in past tense. Scroll for their references
furrowed, troubled, condemnations
belated. Averted eyes
at murder. Murder. Is complicated,
displacement has ancient justification.
Starvation is so far away. Abstract
War Over There. The orphan wide-eyed, shaking,
the girl, her eyes forever closed, the boys’ necks
bent, blood leaking in rivers, they are not mine.
What you really gave was an order:
every family erased and elderly clobbered
not mine, men stripped, butchered
not mine, women kidnapped
not mine, the limbs flayed,
apartments surgically bombed,
poets murdered, teachers massacred,
business owners killed,
journalists bleeding out,
every Nakba set in motion —
a catastrophe for almost a century —
well, go ahead. I’ll just protect my peace
and look away. Theorize the suffering
I can’t bear to witness from afar
even as it pummels a people into the earth.
This is a world of names and naming
so why can’t we just love, the bricks wailed
at the mutilated. A message from the colonizer:
there is no apartheid if I squint
and only count my people
as people. No — you should’ve prepared.
Gathered aid under blockade
before you forced us to kill you.
So you’re saying their throats were slit
in abstraction, in theory? That your hand
wasn’t wrapped around the blade?
That the only slit throat you could widen
your eyes at was your own? You are trembling
and it is your fault — the spine of genocide
is straight amid excuses. Every ridge a brick
laid willful and bare. I think I only hear myself.
Industries corporate and individual
pressed their own names above fresh bones
buried alive, crushed by hands at the wheel
and people, the just-born, the old, and just, people
were strung up for your sympathy
and still the wordsmiths were wordless
on Palestine. But they philosophized on boycotts, protests:
why can’t we just love but who the fuck are you
to police lived experience
to police phrasing, the people in pieces,
to police the dead, loss, to police, to police,
to bootlick, coward, you sell-out heartless
naïve and inflated pseudo-intellectual,
you are every ridge on the spine of genocide.
