…thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.
― Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
Hibiscus petal on your cheek:
America arms Ukraine;
to avenge our forgetful lover’s week,
our Gaza grows insane.
Your whispers are so deafening,
though marshmallows to my tears:
the whispers of the dead are deadening,
but even their stench endears
your subtle Russian breath:
were it you who shot it down?
I can forgive, let even death
on us may cast its frown.
Today someone has called it war,
is it the same thing we do,
in every hint of petrichor,
in our every rendezvous?
He said no one will remember
if no one wrote of the spectral flight,
or how namaazis at Gaza dismember
prayers of missilic night.
Scent of lavender on your knee:
now he just called it battle;
even if we kiss for a century
our kitchen must garnish the cattle.
Do you know they cover their faces
with purdah, even as they sleep?
If twilight erupts there won’t be traces
for their naked bodies to weep.
You look so eagerly at us
and yet you cannot define.
The maiming voices returning, thus
bitterly rile our sacred line.
They spit out their vaporous form ―
while we love regardlessly ―
into your eyes, napalmic storm,
swallowing me flawlessly.
Let us decide a day and time,
before those dregs of Palestine
gush as calciferous slime
into our spillage of seminal brine.
Let us decide our weapons each,
though for our nozzles we thirst.
Let us in our war this war impeach:
shall it be you to kill me first?
