Straw Widow 

for Hebron
We a land without a people. We skeletal

olive trees, oranges with sunken

cheeks, we mundane and metal

netting prostrating the streets, we ancestral

deeds and keys welded shut, we car honks when

they pass their tests, for the brides, for

the births, for the funerals. They set 2am

fires for us to lick, and drive away with

blindfolded fathers.
They cannot be fathers anyway.
We biblical, we descendants

of Galil, we mouth full of half-languages

and sumac gaps, we sacrament with

more holy than any of us ever wanted.

We nothing but other sides, and truth finds

another way to sterilise us. We wait for hours

in our underwear. They make bets

on who will be the difficult ones.
This is the sidewalk where they

shot her, insides clapped out like hot

coals and our confessions, coaxing us to

watch, to film their Sunday

entertainment, before

we are archived again.
The official story is a shiv crowned

her palm like rosary beads, there will be

no burial rites, our daughters and sons

 are often the shape of beasts, we

turpentine and turbulent grief.
The world hails it peace plan.
Today that 21-year-old conscript

brings a different God to each obscenity.

There is a God for obscenities

like this. The occupiers decide

not to convict, they say they are pleased,

“Soldier was doing his job. Your videos

show this, too.”
W-Allahi*, the neighbours swear they

heard her cry, “I am growing

a new Palestinian body.”
Let’s drag her body through five

decades of colonial scaffolding, they need us

to remember, we spectacle, we quiet

the dead and marinate

the Street of Martyrs

with its namesake. This is how

to keep it ours. What are we

but a eulogy for our children.
I, chequered black and white cloth

cradling my eyelids, they spearlike

spines, cock guns when

they see me, they hiss

“whore” and spit, we fingers

pulled off and split. On garbage

day, their trash and piss

staccato over us. Mama says,

“This is the only way they

want to know Arabs.”
There is no good reason

to end apartheid, we won’t

let them in our buses, our souks, our

schools, our factories, our

theatres, our sermons.
Who else built everything in this country.
Baba is a pulpit of rage, his legs

pretzeled tight from

the state’s raping, soon we will

beat them senseless, eat at their rind.
We loss and loss.
We metastasising over this city like an infection.