When people see this on the news, they feel sorry that this is the place I call home.

but look at the sky! how it 

spreads! a thing in vastness

A woman leaned her back on a broken wall/ her face a deep secret in her hijab

That was the first time she learned that she had to set herself on fire to make other people happy.

I’ve watched mothers  / Break into rivers / Before their children’s / Sprawled bodies.

Once my life was brilliant with you in it

When the sun came back/ I was a full tree/with all the room in the desert to grow,

I hope when they take my picture/I am filtered with bright exposure

Stigmata on his hands/ a needle in his vein

A small portion of your wings / Housefly, lies here before my eyes.

Here eats young and old.

We become our parents’ dreams. / We must now find a way to be free.

Maybe these streets swallow us whole

She leaped from her window and became a swarm of bats.

and the girls all carry something common in their dirge/

These men all knelt between their thighs.

The guard whispers to his colleague in a tongue I’m too familiar with, the one whitened with otherness

Why fit in if I lose myself?

I walked around the casket and saw Grandma’s distorted body.

I wonder if I could pray for it, but would God honour a prayer of death? 

I want them/to break and contort, come alive with a/fire that cannot be quenched