is the summer after my spleen almost ruptured into the stain of a thousand sunsets. i am sitting in a therapist’s office, and she asks me to start at the moment i wanted to die from my own hands. i could have painted her this body, in all its failed topologies; i haven’t a home that isn’t in love with the way it floods, but instead, i gave her a history lesson: 1967 – the west bank is annexed by israel after nakba, catastrophe, my grandparents, exile in their own home: when i say, anxiety stretches continents: when i say, depression is an ocean we never wanted to traverse: fast f or ward – my aunt falls in love with a woman twice her age; finds mother in her after her own grieved a stolen country, and decades of abuse from a father with rage in his blood; when she comes out, they ask if she needs to see a therapist; a nice woman to excise the devil in her – & today, a stranger with fists in his blood makes a growing country for my organs and i cannot love myself; or perhaps, this is just a topology lesson – a professor who fails me tells the class of exact sequences; of how topological spaces inherit the shape of their emptiness from previous generations of dimensions; a whole lineage of singularities, and at this point, i too wanted to disappear, in the office of this therapist, who was, perhaps, a topologist, who asks me so what shape does this anxiety take inside of you? & i wanted to say tooth of a mouth, eye of a hurricane in my chest, an organ with vast chambers, haunted by its own emptiness, and so much blood, it can almost be mistaken for a country; a newfound inheritance; an atheism found at the intersection of 3 merciless gods – do you pray still? why have you stopped praying? the therapist asks me & perhaps the therapist is my mother; the one who found god at the bottom of liquor bottles the color of bloodied oceans; the hands that prayed for a son who left in search for home; desire, swelling in him like a ruptured organ: father, forgive me my drunk inheritance/forgive the stairs that collapsed beneath the weight of me/forgive the third floor window that tried to swallow me into the night’s mouth/ for give the bodies i swallowed like broken teeth, the knees i spent trying to summon god in my own mouth/forgive the way my DNA strands are sculptors of brief suicides: i’m trying to love the shattered window of myself – the hands, the rocks, the broken religion left behind; my inheritance, this body of vandalized cathedrals: light me on fire; strip my god from my breath; watch as i dance dancing amidst the flames