POETRY

Facts on the Ground

By Lena Khalaf Tuffaha     VOLUME 53.1

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After February’s fallow clouds, a fraying
whip snaps the air, our bones
a winter kingdom. Silence,

our shroud, no longer softens hunger,
absence. The phone lines were always crowded
and now new frontiers for listening, for the theft

of our whispers. The unmarked van that arrives
at the end of the road is the only country
that never hesitates to take us in. Why

this particular corpse? Why this
particular death, and not the many
before it, emblazoned with cigarette burns

and lacerations? What makes us think
it will be this particular boy’s jaw
unlatched from his tender skull that turns

us outward, finally wrests
the machinery of slaughter
from its masters? How many generations

of our children chasing after news
cameras, waving victory signs
with grimy fingers, chanting Take
My Picture Look
Over Here Tell
People What Is Happening

To Us. What happened
to us? our children’s bodies
are infamous. The halls of foreign galleries

draped in our spectacular deaths. Is spring
simply the son of winter? Has the earth
swallowed its fill of us?

 


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LENA KHALAF TUFFAHA is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her first full-length collection of poems, Water & Salt (Red Hen, 2017) won the Washington State Book Award for Poetry. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Arab in Newsland, selected by poet January Gil-O’Neill for the 2016 Two Sylvias Prize, and Letters from the Interior (Diode Editions, 2019). Her essays have been published in Al-Ahram Weekly, Kenyon Review online, Poetry Northwest, and the Rumpus. Her poems have received the Robert Lawson Literary Award, and multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations. Most recently, her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Adroit, Cordite Review, New England Review, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day feature. Tuffaha is a Hedgebrook alum and a recipient of a 2019 Artist Trust Fellowship. She lives in Redmond, Washington.


VOLUME 53.1