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Devotion In The Time Of Genocide

 

The world was a wet lung gasping for the salt on your neck.
Six hours lost in sheets that smelled of bleach and damp wool.
A trap where I buried my face in the heat of your thighs to taste the copper.
The musk and the slick raw iron of the body.
You were a masterpiece of tendon and soft light tearing in my hands.
Your smile performed a frantic alchemy transmuting the lead of the era into gold.
For a heartbeat the world was good.
A biological lie.
The curve of your spine was the only architecture I inhabited.
Drowning in the rhythmic grinding of bone against bone.
Skin sticking and tearing in a deliberate and frantic erasure.

The drone was a ghost.
The statistics were locked outside the door.
I silenced the scream of the north with the weight of my chest against yours.
I silenced the sound of the bulldozer with the sound of your coming.
The wet slap of our bodies was the only music.
Six hours of biological treason.
My hands locked in your hair.
Pulling the world down to the size of this mattress.
There was a terrifying beauty in the way your eyes rolled back.
A perfection of the flesh that felt like a prayer.
The room was a cage.
The room was a bunker.
And I did not want to be rescued.

Then the name broke the skin like a jagged shard of glass.
Gaza.
The word is a splinter in the eye of the world.
While I was tracing the blue map of your hip.
The white phosphorus was sizzling the fat from the ribs of a child.
The sky is a bruised throat.
Gasping.
While the tanks grind the history books and the soft tissue of the dead into the silt.
Your skin is the only document I trust.
The only border I am willing to cross.
But the document is stained with the ink of the massacre.
The smell of your arousal is mixed with the smell of burning plastic and old blood.

The guilt is a cold stone in the gut.
My tongue in your mouth is a theft of air from the suffocated.
Every drop of your fluid on my skin is a calorie stolen from the ledger of the starving.
Shame.
Nausea.
And the terrifying.
Electric.
Explicit enjoyment of it.
The betrayal of the orgasm while the bodies are being stacked like cordwood in the heat.
The way the muscles contract in pleasure.
The involuntary spasm of the womb.
While the muscles of the disappeared contract in the finality of the flame.
There is a leaden weight to this heat.
A biological betrayal in the way my pulse quickens.
While the sirens scream for the dead.
It is a crime to want the warmth.
It is a sin to find the pulse.
In the middle of the statistics.

Outside.
The bulldozer is the only architect left.
They are measuring the rubble to calculate the volume of the meat.
The mass grave is a spatial reality I cannot fuck my way out of.
I press my face into the crook of your arm.
To drown out the roar of the F-16.
The vibration of the engine in the floorboards.
A frantic seal against the vacuum.
Love is a terminal disease.
In the time of the mass grave.
The heartbeat is a drum.
Played in a room where the oxygen has been revoked.

They want us to be ghosts before we are cold.
They want the landscape to be clean.
Empty of our names and our fluids and our noise.
Your touch is a sabotage.
We are skin on skin.
In the shadow of the gallows.
Holding on.
Because the machine cannot manufacture this heat.
And the state cannot map the blood in our teeth.



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