In Rafah lies a girl
And for this girl, a brother
And for this brother, a kite made of cloth scraps
And for the cloth, a seam stitched by their mother
And for the stitch, a spool of red thread—
still rolling across the broken tiles
In the sky, not a kite,
but something heavier cuts through the clouds
One, then three, then eight fall
The thread snaps in midair
But a wind—
gentle as her grandfather’s sigh—
pulls the girl beneath a cart
She calls out: Akhoyy!
Brother, come, the flag still stands—
But her brother doesn’t answer,
his hand still clutching the wooden spool
Thread in the rebar
Thread in the olive pit she finds in her pocket
Her voice climbs like a ladder with no rungs
She shouts into the night sky
stitched with sirens
No echo for the echo
And she becomes the fraying thread in the headlines
Looping each hour
until they bomb the house again—
the one with the kite,
the one with the door half-sewn shut by her mother’s last thread
