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. 

Evan Dekens is a graduate student at Montclair State University’s Urban Teacher Residency Program, an English teacher in Newark, New Jersey, and winner of the Apogee Chapbook Prize for Anatomies of Disappearance, forthcoming from April Gloaming Press.

Featured image of the student protest at Montclair State University by Evan Dekens.