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Apologies to All the People in Gaza
after June Jordan
I’m sorry they told us
your bodies
did not exist.
These are familiar words for my people.
Whose wounds have never stretched
into the shattered switches
of nations.
If memory is a string
of incised moments
what is there to tie us
to what we cannot live through
cannot remember?
It is hard to write poems about the shadows
of shadows
cast in heat and dust.
I’m sorry there is no bleeding map
no smoking hatch
warm like a clean plate.
Just earth cooked
down to bloody rubble.
I can repeat the number of deas
all I want like a prayer
or like a letter whose sender
is long long gone.
Why I Have Never Seen a Daisy
after Noor Hindi
You say colonizers write about flowers.
Revolutionaries throw rocks at tanks.
I know I’m an American because I am alive
for no particular reason. I am writing about ghosts
shaped like flowers. All the small bones I know
sway and quake somewhere beneath the limbs of birches
and build like a fragile wave
of wavering voices.
If it is not shattercane or cattails
or canewood, it belongs to no-one.
Everything that is not a flower is a broken flower.
Everything that is not a flower is a tank. 
