poetry

from the article:

The Night the Election Robs Palestinians is Afternoon in America

no, this isn’t about the 2016 election that I may or may not have taken part of —but that’s a story for another time— This is Bibi runs against Gantz: boy can’t take a loss, so we’ll do a re-election is what the running headlines should have read.

I want to run and find a way for the future to smother me with the hug of a mother reunited with her children at the border, and tell me, “These borders are in your head. You’ve made this whole story up. It’s okay. Here’s some medicine that’ll set your mind straight.”

But here we are.

I’m not at the polls for this one, even if I wanted to— even if the 4.75 million Palestinians wanted to. We are not at the polls, so where’s this democracy we hear of?

Here we are.

Bibi promised that if he is given more power than he has, he’ll annex (read: steal) the Jordan Valley. He showed us a map. Not much, eh? Tell that to the person who’s been watching the settlement fence get closer to her grandmother’s home, waiting for the day she receives an eviction notice in a language she can recognize but not read.

Here I am.

The night the election robs us is the afternoon for me in America. I’m sitting at my desk, calculating time for a colleague’s two-week notice, so we can throw her a party, and I’m writing this because I want to tell my colleagues that sometimes, I feel guilty for celebrating because sometimes —today is one of those times— my friends back home aren’t able to throw a goodbye party to their arrested/murdered/exiled colleague. It was last minute. And sometimes, I wonder if my home, the home I have conflicted feelings about sometimes, will land on a map one day, bartered and bargained for, in a language I never bothered to learn. I only learned the language of maps. Would that be the day my colleagues understand that my land is stolen, or would they tell me America is my second home, that I’m not really homeless?