Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying
By Noor Hindi
Colonizers write about flowers.
I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks
seconds before becoming daisies.
I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.
Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.
It’s so beautiful, the moon.
They’re so beautiful, the flowers.
I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad.
He watches Al Jazeera all day.
I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy Ramadan.
I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies.
Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.
When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.
One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.
Breaking [News]
By Noor Hindi
We’ll wake up, Sunday morning, and read the paper. Read each other. Become
consumers
of each other’s stories, a desperate reaching
for another body’s warmth—its words buoying us through a world. We carry
graveyards on our backs and I’m holding a lightning bug
hostage in one hand, its light dimming in the warmth
of my fist, and in the other, a pen, to document its death. Isn’t that terrible?
I’ll ask you, shutting my fist once more.
In interviews, I frame my subject’s stories through a lens to make them digestible
to consumers.
I become a machine. A transfer of information. They become a plea for empathy,
an oversaturation of feelings we’ll fail at transforming into action.
What’s lost is incalculable.
And at the end of summer, the swimming pools will be gutted of water.
And it’ll be impossible to swim.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/154659/breaking-news
