If Only She Understood That I Ate Her With Love, And Not Hunger.

Ode to the Red Boy

I see a red boy winking, perpetually still. His right eye is closed, his left open, unmoving. He wears pajamas, the Spiderman kind my brother used to wear when he was small. The red boy is on the floor of a hospital in Gaza, his blood caked on his face with soot and ash. His chest does not rise and fall, his eyes do not blink, but he holds his wink. One eye shut, the other open. A playful gesture, as if he's playing a trick on me. As if soon he would awaken and wash the red from his face like strawberry jam, and go play with his spider-man figurine in the sunlight. But he does not move, the red boy. The fluorescent light holds him still. His swollen eyelid does not so much as twitch. He is determined to fool me, and I am happy to be fooled. If it means he will one day wake up, I am happy to be fooled.

Time keeps passing, I fight hard for change. It does not yield to me, wind against a mountain. I carry on, I carry on, still. There is nothing left for me to do but die.

She was a moth that waited for the light to find her. And when she died it was dark as always.

Out of fear of being exposed, I crawl and grovel and claw at the shell of my old self, desperate for a morsel of comfort, of old. I find I’ve done nothing but destroy it’s memory and starve my newest iteration, in a form of betrayal only one as indecisive and stagnancy-drawn as I could pull off.

Why do I crave love so much that I lie to get it. I dawn facades to taste sugar with a tongue that is not mine. Is it still sweet? Is anything truly my own?

My sister drops her head underwater and I follow shortly after. I close my eyes as tight as I can and with cheeks full as balloons, I hold my breath. We both breach the ocean surface and look for each other. And we’re right where we left one another, of course. I miss that feeling of certainty, of knowing who I’m swimming with. Now we are grown and childhood is a twinkle in my eye. I see broken pieces of it if I look hard enough, disappointed at friends that don’t keep their pinky promises, at my husband for leaving the chores to me when she never would. She hated the dishes, the dirty refried beans dad would let soak in the sink and float into patches of dark pinkish slime. But she didn’t let me do them alone. I sit at the beach with my legs long and in the sun. I am warm but not complete. I look around at the flurry of faces, the assortment of multicolored swimsuits striped and polka dotted. It’s charming, but I don’t think I’d know where to look if I put my head under like I used to.

I need a new wardrobe—I’m running out of time to be young and beautiful. For people to see me and not just look at me out of some mundane politeness. I need to be everything I am right now in these fleeting moments, or it’s like they’ve already gone.

Isn’t it a shame that our empathy can be one sided? That we notice the wound of the beast first, and bleed with him, while his eyes are set on our swollen heads?

What poems do you keep close to your chest like a weak deck of cards? Terrified anyone should know your mind in all its weaknesses and honest throws of emotion. Let me read them, let me know you. I promise not to ruin you. I promise to be kind.

Why is it whenever I am alone I slip my hand beneath my black wool jacket and find any wound I can and open it again, to bleed, to bleed. Is it really my destiny to bask in life so little and ruminate on the scarcity for the rest of it? Is my stomach shrunken and my heart empty, am I a vessel that cannot be filled and can only watch as others are?