Palestine gave birth
her pavements smiled with groves of olives and roses
her children were shepherds, farmers, jewelers
she became pregnant with hope
          It would be enough for me to die, here, on her soil, 
                    Be buried deep in the earth of my country,
          Only to sprout forth again as a bright bloom, 
          Waved gently by a child who calls this land home.
          It would be enough for me to remain home, 
          Alive, 
          existing as a trace in her fabric … 
So, they targeted her womb
And Death greeted every child she had. 

I want to be surrounded by splendor, but beauty is capitalism. This is to say
purchase power is how I was taught to love things & now I am exiled
in a country where living is only spectacle & roses, never bread.
How do I feed a village when my only skill is personal acquisition, not
distribution? My god, how wrong I was to covet dresses over firearms,
poetry books over agriculture. Ross sends me sunchokes from his garden
& I squint my eyes at them, trying to imagine the texture of drawing
food from the earth—my hands in dirt turn into rope pulling Good & asking
for forgiveness. They are killing us & we are all just going to the office,
watching tv & ordering out. I thought we were supposed to be resisting.
The deaths will accumulate like the snow & we will all be forced to forfeit
our lives for the revolution. I’m tired of hearing how nuanced it all is. It’s not.
They say it has everything to do with money & power, but what they want
us to forget is that it is about how we love. We are fighting for the right to
 

spend a storm inside
making soup & sourdough
& no one gets shot—

At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like he’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she’d been released at last from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching—
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn’t look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after—if she beat you or left you or
you’re lonely now—you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that woman’s middle-aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.