The Sound Of Bo Belle

 Five thousand blazers in a single quad. A sea of wool and cold entitlement. The weight of five thousand men standing on the chest of one girl. We can hear the ribs snapping under the pressure of the endowment. The alumni. The legacy. The Board of Governors. The organisation. They are not anomalies. They are the curriculum. They are the architecture. The porcelain cold of the dormitory floors where the secret is ironed into the sheets. We cannot breathe under the sheer volume of the share. They starch the collars to hide the bite marks. They use the Latin for reputation to bury the English for rape. The news calls it a guest commentary. We call it the logistics of a war zone. The Kansas City Star is just one witness in a global organisation of silence. Editorial cowardice as a form of active participation. The opinion is a bandage on a decapitation. The ink is a bribe. The paper is a shroud. CNN uncovers the hidden world. Sixty two million visits in a single month. Motherless dot c...

  If Jesus was real, he would not arrive in a halo of soft focus. He would be a postcode in a rubble-strewn district of the Levant. A wet rattle of grey dust returning from the ruin of a Gazan high-rise. An Arab man with the dirt of the occupation under his fingernails. The genealogy of the dispossessed written in the sweat on his brow. He would be the immigrant stumbling through the Kentish surf. Lungs a heavy sponge of salt and oil and death. A stateless ghost in a high-vis world that only counts the dead. What if he returned as Hind Rajab? Six years of light extinguished in the back of a black Kia. Surrounded by the cold metal of his own people’s ghosts. Screaming into a dead phone line while the tanks hummed their low mechanical hymn. The red machinery of the heart stopped by a precision strike. No angels came to the rescue. Only the dial tone and the smell of scorched upholstery. A child’s blood staining the map of a promised land. What if he was the miscarried hope in a water...