Another Journalist Murdered in Gaza
I entrust you with Palestine… with its people, with its wronged and innocent children who never had the time to dream or live in safety and peace. –Anas al-Sharif (1996-2025)
The left one looked good, it bulged with the salt of life, but my store couldn’t fill a syringe.
Balled my right fist. Jabbed, the vein gushed from the river to the sea, it drank the gauze in the crease of my arm, bloomed into a strip of land where babies are born and die before their second birthday.
I promised not to be political. Not to let it affect me.
Your sonogram came back, three polaroids of the child in a hammock, not yet gendered in the visible world, floating continent of hope. Pea pod from crown to rump, covered in peach fur.
Say it’s a girl, ovaries starred with two million eggs. Heartbeat three times faster than yours. Prayer isn’t enough to nurture life, but this one fought. From poppy seed to sesame seed, lentil to blueberry to kidney bean to grape. Form begat form. Wrinkled fig. Lime.
The moon swears she has every fighting chance in the world. She’ll morph into an apple, avocado. Blushing heirloom tomato. The numbers look good. She’ll sprawl in her hammock—lanky carrot, ear of corn. With time she will weigh what a mango weighs,
red cabbage, cauliflower.
One day, aubergine in hand, you’ll think to yourself, this is how heavy she is; this, how robust. You’ll repeat the sentiment for butternut squash. Like the fruit of the earth, she will ripen into the miracle of herself: cantaloupe, honey dew. Small, seeded watermelon. With every plucky ounce of her fibre, she’ll keep waving the flag.
for Andréa
“One day there will be no more looking away.”
— Omar El Akkad
Hours after the demonstration, an eyeglass place
at Mansfield and Ste-Catherine appears
in my photo. Shot at bird’s eye over thousands
of dogged, knuckles-down militants.
I didn’t notice the sign
when I snapped the picture, trying to fit
our giant Palestinian flag in the frame.
“Newlook” in bold sans serif, a call to action.
Return to the Cedars
(Zahle, Lebanon)
In a sepia photo, the man by the ancient cedar
is a fingernail high. Lone soul, proud as Noah’s ark
under the sun’s gaze, the tree casts a stern shadow.
I wondered which house between the dry, naked hills
belonged to my family. They said I looked like an “Eskimo”
at birth, round face, warrior eyes set wide apart—
incongruous bloom of snow, not sand.
I saw my figure on a cave wall and never liked it.
I liked the Latin names of plants.
My great-grandfather was a pedlar, but my father painted him
in suit and tie. Widened pupils, a mismatched pair
of constellations. I altered the picture with AI,
reintroducing the tree,
the ancestors in camel-hair coats, and me. I recognize
the chromosomes, the unbroken endomorphic landscape.
