The Sound Of Bo Belle

They voted today in the Knesset to kill Palestinian children legally,  and Ben Gvir handed out sweets, Let me say that again they handed out sweets, they handed out sweets, they handed out fucking sweets, like it was a birth, like his wife just pushed out something worth celebrating, passed candy hand to hand, sugar dissolving on tongues while the law passed, making murder clean, making murder parliamentary, making murder something you can taste,  But this isn't new, this is the echo, this is the rope still swinging. 1930, Mandatory Palestine,  Fuad Hijazi, Ata al-Zeer, Mohammad Jamjoum, hanged in Acre prison by the British, their necks snapping, clean, legal, parliamentary.  The British measured the drop, calculated the weight, made sure the neck would break, not strangle, efficient, humane,  that's what they called it, humane hanging. for resisting occupation.  Then they hung more than 100 Palestinians,  kept the rope warm,  kept the gallows bus...

 The island is a suppurating pelvic floor. A hip bone rising from the grey silt of the Atlantic, pinned under the weight of a fifty-storey phallus of glass and steel, an engorged monument to the theft of breath and the industrialisation of the womb. This is the medical report of the siege. The light is a brownout. The light is a flicker. The light is the dying pulse of a patient on the table. It is the smell of sweat, diesel, and the sharp metallic tang of a speculum in a cold room. The blockade is a catheter of rusted iron, draining the vitality of the state into the gutters of the north. Donald Trump is the rapist in the room. He is a creature of cold fat and expensive grease; His pores leak black industrial oil onto the pale linen of the bedsheets. He does not look at the face. He looks at the soil as if it were a slit in a dress. He looks at the child as if she were a map to be folded and tucked into a pocket of debt. He’s a man who knows a little about small islands. He knows ...

They gave the boys the soldier with the eagle eye And the hollow crotch The Action Man with the scar on his cheek and the kung-fu grip A plastic preview of the violence they would later call protection. We were the static brides in the cardboard boxes The ones with the painted-on knickers And the legs that never bent. They taught us the shape of our servitude Before we could even spell the word. A dress rehearsal for the pleasure of the architects Who carved us into the little men and little women they needed To fill the kitchens of the houses they built for us. They defined us by the weight of the air between our thighs A cacophony of silence where the map was blank But the borders were strictly enforced. We grew up in a house of euphemisms Where the body was a series of rooms, we were forbidden to enter. They taught us to be defined by our genitals Whilst never giving us the language to name them. But in the shadows of the toy chest, we were already playing rebellion. Every girl grin...

  The sun is a jaundiced Eve bulging over the city a yellow cyst ripening in a sky the colour of a bruised lung The developers are pouring liquid lead into the throat of the soil asphyxiating the earth until the worms turn to grey ash They are harvesting the shade and bottling our panic for the shareholders The concrete is a calcified tumour growing over the common while you sit across from me in your bias cut spite My mirror leech My shadow twin with the structural tailoring and the serrated smile You look at me like a sample sale you can’t quite afford to mock Every word you speak is a fine needle under my fingernails Your envy is a starving animal snapping at the light Bewildered by the way you want to harvest the salt from my scars just to season the flat taste of your own boredom You want to wear my breath like a vintage brooch I am a toxic acre you can't gentrify with a grin You want to wear my face like a filter and my voice like a trend Your solidarity is a starched collar ...

The city is a broken jaw spitting teeth of glass and scorched limestone We are huddled in the throat of the city waiting for the state’s iron machinery of debt to lay its eggs of fire Your hand moves beneath my coat not like a lover but like a surgeon seeking a bullet The siren is a long grey needle stitching our nerves into the floorboards I feel safe in the heat of you a desperate furnace against the coming frost of the blitz You taste of smudged kohl and cheap perfume The grit of the mortar on your nape is the only seasoning left in this starving town We are a mess of silk and shrapnel Your stockings torn by the jagged edge of a fallen beam I am tracing the line of your Adam's apple where the powder has cracked into a map of trenches There is no man or woman in the dark of the shelter only the frantic animal and the chemical scent of the chemist’s shop We are the trash of the empire glittering in the mud of the black market Your mouth is a bruised plum bleeding into the collar o...

I’m sitting at the feet of a dead soldier who never asked to be a monument and a man at the Roma Memorial this morning said he didn’t understand why GYPSIES had a memorial said in the way you say why is there a step here when you’ve never been made to sleep in the rain My blood is older than his question My blood has been answering his question with its absence for five hundred years and my phone buzzes Someone’s fingers sending me sweet things I’ve been thinking about you — and I’ve been thinking about them too about the architecture of their hands the particular weight of want that has no politics Just skin animal fact Just the weight of it Just — but I’m sitting here at the feet of a man made of stone Who died for something or was told he did and Europe is voting again and the votes are looking familiar and I wonder what he knew about that the boy they cast in bronze the boy who bled in the snow for something called the future before the future learned to goosestep again in Italian ...

 They're bombing tehran for women's rights the same men who bought girls on islands the same men whose names are                    [REDACTED]                    in court documents the same men who know the price of a thirteen-year-old the same men who know what a girl sounds like when she stops screaming the same men who know how long it takes they say liberation i say the smell of burning hair and textbooks and flesh they say freedom i say a mother digging through concrete with her bare hands six hours fingernails breaking one by one first the left thumb then the right index then then then finding her daughter's tooth just the tooth still bloody at the root still warm here's what liberation looks like: a girl walking to school 7:42am her backpack too heavy with books she'll never open her friend making her laugh about something stupid a boy's name maybe or a teacher's hair somethin...