the middle east is not a metaphor for violence

says my Lebanese friend who saw her neighbor, blood-stained and gutted by the explosion’s knuckle

her insides out and her eyes looking into ours like she’s just discovered a bruise she doesn’t remember getting. We reach for her, for our people, and our fingers hit a pixelated screen,

bas it doesn’t feel real, the losses my people in Beirut in Syria in Palestine on the other side of the earth’s cheek, where there are no more homes

to rupture to sword to displace

any longer the pain migrates to the arch of my spine, in the same place where I’ve saved phantoms of late nights with my cousins, lips coated in sugar and aunties who hand me jewelry off their arms when I see them once every two years

I must still be there, cushioned in the lungs of an arab sun, daughter of hayaa, from the people of hayaa, who from their open palms offered me hayaa all this hayaa, where you only see dead.

bas = “but” in Arabic slang hayaa = life / lively

Nardine Taleb

Nardine Taleb is an Egyptian-American writer, speech therapist, and Prose Editor of the online literary journal Gordon Square Review. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Passengers Journal, Yes Poetry, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and others. She was a fall, 2020 Brooklyn Poets fellow.