Listen to a reading of this piece (reading by Tim Foley):
They killed a two year-old girl in the West Bank on Saturday.
Laila al-Khatib was shot in the head by Israeli forces in Jenin, because I guess they needed one more dead Palestinian kid.
One more dead Palestinian kid to add to the mountain.
One more small Palestinian face raining down upon us in our nightmares like meteors on the dinosaurs in the prequel to this apocalypse.
One more screaming, blood-spattered mother.
One more grandfather with boulders for feet carrying the tiny shrouded form of someone who should have buried him.
It’s one more dead Palestinian kid.
One more snowflake in the blizzard.
And yet here I sit, mouth agape,
a mortally wounded polar bear in my chest
and a cry of despair turning into a ghost and leaving me silent and slack-jawed like an imbecile.
I want to crawl into my childhood crib and fall asleep forever.
I want to turn into a crystal punch bowl and fall and shatter on a marble floor.
The air is full of flapping, and there’s seaweed in my hair.
There’s an angel with a mushroom cloud head in my doorway.
They killed a two year-old girl in the West Bank on Saturday, because I guess they needed another one.
I write her name on some paper and send it off into the wind,
and stride back into the suburban ghost town
with my body on fire.
________________
________________
________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to find video versions of my articles. If you’d prefer to listen to audio of these articles, you can subscribe to them on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud or YouTube. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2