by Aja Monet
and leaves as if he possessed the air,
if you listen carefully for johnny’s songs
maybe you can hear the homes torn down and burned
fences destroyed, cattle slaughtered, maybe you
can hear all the flowers scourged, manacled, and fettered
by the hands of settlers.
mobile technology
who coulda envisioned a world
where our subconscious need to connect
would catapult us into a day and age
of mimicking collective consciousness,
creating gadgets and devices to fold our continents
like maps
revolutions are mobilized
picket signs are text messaged
like love letters squeezed in wine bottles
and sent off to sea
we photograph moments
best kept in photo albums
of our memory
and upload them into society
they become fragments we share
while distance dances between us
telepathy misunderstood
dear alexander graham bell,
remember when they called you a wizard for the telegraph
who coulda prepared us for video messaging,
watching a smile form or a an eye tear
listening to laughter
children in dakar with huts for homes
have cellphones
someone to reach across the country
or the continent
someone to say “i miss you too”
“be careful of…”
“remember when…”
“i need you…”
a soldier watches his son grow
through an lcd screen,
a friend text messages a smile
to brighten the day of a coworker in a cubicle
who forgot to send flowers to her grandmother
and remind her daughter
to lock the bottom lock before school
there’s an app for everything.
we are telehistorians
in minutes, even seconds, we use our hands still
to record and reach for someone
when our bodies would have it otherwise
this is what evolution looks like
in the pocket of a hand
we could still affect each other
and mobilize a revolution of the mind
america
the agent said
it made no sense
for me to opt out
of the TSA screening
machine. i told him
it was my right
i intended on exercising it
he sucked his teeth
said i may as well start gettin
used to goin thru the x-ray
cuz soon i won’t have no rights
to exercise anyhow
so proud
he was
so proud so mean
tellin me aboutmy rights
his strut away
when in french country
indulge in a sidewalk stroll coffee sip
midday parisian chatter
hereafter life unimagined
sitting in a castle listening to the crackle of a fireplace
learning the etiquette of a properly spaced fork and knife
courtyards and narrow cobblestone paths
i miss front stoops and neighborly laughs
the hustle and bustle of fire hydrant children
budgeting knuckles and dimes
money can’t buy home-cooked family feuds
and unrequited love schemes
i’m a wandering
masquerade ball of leaving
do-rag doobie dreaming
of boulangeries on euclid ave
fast-talked chocolate bars changing hands on the metro path
pat-down searches and street-smart medicine
for the dirty draws in oversized jeans brothrs
wife beater lovrs, tattooed by strategic poverty
of american politricks,
how much blood does the pavement see in springtime
veins dripping sideways
what other life awaits us
a senegalese elder on simplon
knows a thing or two about bourgeois black
blood spat for fine bread
an algerian husband’s clothes
thrown over a ledge on rue championnet
every city has a slumlord compromising
livelihood with skyrocket rent
big dreams hustling in roofless conversations
every drop counts
ain’t a dimple deeper than a happy face in kenscoff
bucket overhead hauling water from a well, wishing
sad boy with a dress, snot running out his nose
miserable as an earthquake goes
clothes so hard to come by for those with less than
a dollar to a name make me wanna holler
way they do babies raising babies
a diet of american flag rice and united nations filtered water
rally the voodoo priests and their daughters
for fahd
dedicated to the work of the center for constitutional rights
when you and i were young
we believed
in the sanctuary of peace
i wake sweating
strangled by a nightmare
my america begins the day
chewing on my cry
i am twenty-seven
and i have never killed a man
but i know the face of death
as if heirloom, my country
memorizes murder as lullaby
we spoon-feed poison labeled
patriotism from young
the nation grows fat on fury
full on healthy hatred. we are
bloody light and though
the bullet never touched me
i hold it still between my teeth
and spit bodies off my tongue
i confess. we are hugging
ourselves beneath the rage
although you cannot see
the fire, i am a house of flames
i prepare for another hard day’s
work and emerge a massacre
of meaning, marketing industry
of reason. what is treason to
a country called love? fickle
and scared, what is heaven
to a people who never look
above? if there is a movement
let it be a region in the heart
where souls meet to practice
human together though apart
is there a faith for the faithless?
a place for the placeless?
beyond prison bars
a man becomes faceless
a presence more of essence
a wrath more than wreckage.
is there a worse crime than stolen time?
have you words to replace a year or a life
clinging onto phrases, have you a quote
to mend deep-seated wounds
old as cradled breath, to be a casualty
of this endless, endless war
humiliated in forgotten rooms
of this earth. every day is a mourning
every day is morning
i touch the welted mark of an ominous night
the only protest is fingertips
feel this. right here is where they took
my survival. i am the last siren of hope
in a glimpse of this torched town
i linger in your laws
i linger in your laws an unkept promise
when you and i were young
when you and i were young
we believed
we believed
in the sanctuary of peace
and we are old
we are old now
i am gray, wrinkled
by the pain,
i drag my body because there are other
bodies on my shoulders
some cry
others laugh
we mumble stories of remembered paths
have we not learned you can
try to kill a man but you can not
kill the love people have for him?
and through this shred of silent seed
we grow above
above all the greed
there are roaches
there are creatures
there are secrets that know
freedom better than
a detainee in guantanamo bay
there’s an underworld of human oaths
a man hums in the horror
his voice swarms the silence
lamenting for fought breath
the body is a battlefield
he angers for memory
of something before
a lost son
a gone father
a left brother
an old friend
i am a woman watching
my country make enemies
of God, they’d sacrifice
the sunrise for a million lies
if they could
there are lives
beyond the diversion of eyes
his name is son
is brother
is father
there is a village where names
go to wander
when you and i were young
when you and i were young
we believed
we believed
in the sanctuary of peace
they should’ve told us
it was war.
a voice from azadi square
for Neda Agha-Solatan
after Hamid Panahi
a scorching bullet hushes
sparks stanching
small gulps of blood
i hold her and feel her waft away
i plea, stay
light rustles from her face
i grasp a corpse, an utterance of refuge
don’t be afraid, neda
don’t be afraid
remember the song
we rehearsed it
no fear
carry on
freedom is coming
don’t be afraid
the giving tree
after #ddpalestine
at the core of suffering, there is always a door, a wall.
the knob shouting, they came in violently. before
the sun rose, there was an Israeli flag
posted outside. Beit Hanina, Silwan, Sheikh Jarrah. They came in
violently for her home, her dignity or both, veins on
a grandmother’s wrist pleading over a stove that fed
the faces around it, rusted faucets cleansing tired hands
and rinsing cauliflower, potatoes, carrots. picture frames
of memories smiling back to her, knocked down.
doors arrest the body, walls are everywhere. if her wrinkles
could speak, they’d say: is there a country where humans will
find refuge? her dimple would follow, Here
is my grandson, Muhammad, a poet. Please bring him. there
is killing all around, blood thirsts the ground, land littered
by weeping olives, a boy in Galilee demonstrates, runs
as soldiers chase after, they strike Asel with the base of a rifle.
he trips & falls. a seed of peace, face down in an olive grove.
they shoot him—execution-style—his parents cannot rid
the image of when he first discovered his toes out of their bodies,
the baby they brought home together, now a young man,
feet fumbling out of the rubble. witness a child die,
and quickly descend into a realm of demons. witness your child
die, and you become the demon, hurled to the earth, manacled
everlasting to who you are after—They came in
violently. every Sunday is bloody, every mouth is a house
of prayer. They came in violently, every hand is a God
who heals or hurts, heals and hurts. twenty-nine foreheads
kneeled to worship the ground and never rose again. there was no flag,
no supper. one hundred and twenty-five open wounds wail
the last fast, dawn to sunset—an offering? what sort of God
murders during invocation? in their own home? what God murders at
all? tongues torn from praise, mourn. we cried loudly for
who we were before, knowing we could not unknow
what was felt. we listened loudly. still, violently. our laughter
startled their grimaces. we came with our joy, our heartache,
our pain.
shoved through checkpoints with passports
music
customs
beliefs
faith
protest
song
artists
activists
visions
in Hebron, a web of wired mesh flickered above us, shards of bottled
threat, and scraps of garbage thrown by settlers. we were
welcomed
by Umm Yasin for a meal of maklooba.
They came in violently, she says, while placing a pile of plates and utensils
on the table, even a fetus is not protected. tear gas thrown in her
courtyard, soldiers stomped down the door. she was
brought to the hospital. its heart. its heart stopped beating, she says
she serves us olives she stole from her own trees and we huddle
in the bone-clinging cold, witnessing the want
to belong, flung foreign through a door. They came in violently, she says.
we came in violently. displaced, black, and american. still, still.
she fed us.
we are
inspired by Mahmoud Darwish
years of a sun loving us, solitude is
in the wrist of a magnolia tree, hung or lynched
in a rose-throated croon of liberty and justice for all
except blues people live in the smoke
at a crossroads, what really happened that day
robert johnson brought his guitar
to meet an evil of all hues
play with magic
and be ready for it
to play with you
some folks fear death
others know better
fear the devil
don’t sell no soul
to spite dying
we all have to go
someday or another
death is a family member
you hear of but never met
until y’all meet
some things is meant for tellin
other things just is what they was
i have faced worse things than being forgotten
tho you call me woman whom you do not know
i am a daughter of sisters
of pillaged offerings
an afterlife of secrets
scores of lustering light
i summon you bravely beside me
marching onward
move not for reason
but love
any law that deviates from this is as cruel
as it is ancient
let your words be soothing terrors
never mind what was written
we will rewrite it
an idea of freedom is all we know
our inheritance is to lift one another
we shift into a gust
or bristles between strands of hair
ashes of breath raging in quiet
what land is ours to toss and turn over
if not our bodies, the dunes across chests
the legs all roads,
arms a meadow of marigolds
we survive and regret surviving
we see the end
fences, barbed wire, stone walls, and iron gates
do not impede truth.
nations can not foresee our being
here in this vessel of marrow and sweat
having made it across
the bayous of a dark mother’s womb
and all that tried her
pushing through treacherous attempts at our lives
fear not what of me resides in you
a shawl of waiting hankering to be felt
what ails is what ails
wild visions leave doors unlocked
dazed veterans returned from combat,
injured arms slung close to chest,
loyal to a beat or nub.
i am a country within a country
retire rest a while
woke and whirring, my beloved
we take to the streets as a sort of rain
descending atop roofs of all those who make
laws to define the absence between us
peculiar spirit who aspires for such things, to possess a people
what sin hunts hearts?
the birds, the fish, the cattle
the islands of what is kept sacred.
to nurture is to resist. in all forms we heal.
we must work the land before we make claims to it
what endures the body is the body
when we left our mother’s belly
we did not take any land
only thing we took was the weapon of her smile
and the elixir of her love.
a storm in a teacup
heads turn high toward a tale
yolk-eyed and African,
call us home to a wanted place
speak to the world as if every child, boy and girl there
a war song we share on the front lines of a shore
chap-lipped and thirsty, the whistle of a pot boiling
a shaking tray in trembling hands
third-degree burns on master’s face
we do not sit at the table
we are the earth, the quake that breaks a chair
the rumble and yell
a knife to a throat
the fork in an eye
we are in the swamps,
running home
solidarity
sisters whisper as i turn my back,
crickets wiggle thru teeth,
were i born more dark,
more coarse in strand than tongue,
more invisible than more white,
i could’ve been a woman worthy of movement,
a voice that wasn’t merely taking space but creating air,
others rather you disappear than be beautiful
don’t be a butterfly, a thunderbird babe
mellifluous mermaid, an afro-cuban pegasus,
no unicorn the color of myrrh, don’t be