When they see you, they yell,
Eek! A horrid roach!
But I feel sort of bad because
I wouldn’t like it much if someone looked at me and yelled
Eek! A horrid girl!
With the way that
A white man
fears a happy muslim family
Shooting them one by
one
Through the head
And we would forget that
A few days ago they were at least
a Muslim family
The way the man
Spits at the doorsteps
And calls them
A roach.

I existed, once.
More a symbol
Than factory-made cloth.
A symbol of terrorism
Or faith
Or hope
Was decided for me more often
Than not.

Flags wave with the wind.
I wave with the last breaths of
Thousands
Blood spattered
Where no one looks.
And the young boys in the night
Taking the place of the muezzin
But instead of calling for prayer would call for
Rebellion
And then maybe someone would call for them
But they would be lying in a ditch somewhere
Having existed, once
Too.

Teach, I wanna be like an old, sad, dog.
I’ll lie back on the faded, sinking couch
Let it swallow me up as I do something
Random.
Maybe I’ll just watch TV
Or while away the rest of my days
Knitting.

They say 700,000 militants.
They say only 40,000 dead, but
You know how the news lies, ma’am.
Not by faking it,
But rather by loosening it at the seams
And stitching it back up again,
Smoother this time.
They don’t say
How the dog got left on the balcony
Or the father who sells street food on the corner
Used to stand there around this time.

That was a long time ago, teach.

Sometimes the neighbor might leave the lights on
All night
Again.
You knock once, and they don’t answer.
Maybe they’re dead. Maybe they’re sleeping.
Maybe they’re praying in the way only people
Who stopped believing in anything can.

If you look at the city
Now
There’s a way it leans
In a way
Like a person who got bad news
And hasn’t sat down yet.

You know the feeling, right, ma’am?

One time
Twins
Not people, but places
These twins
Were tainted.
Made unclean in a way
Where their limbs were almost
Isolated from their body.
Try writing a poem with no hands.
Try cracking open a walnut.
Try teaching.
Try anything.

Someone famous said something like
To change the world
You have to write.
I used to believe that.
I used to think that maybe words could stop a killing.
A gutting.
An erasing.
I used to think language had some backbone.
But now even metaphors are blacklisted.
Even hope is getting rationed.

I thought
Maybe I could get this frame of a sentence
And let it carry what didn’t burn.
But I can’t.
So when I grow up, miss,
I think I’ll just sit here
And knit.