My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter

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My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter Page 5

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
r />   we are descendants of the end

  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

 

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