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For Fadwa Suleiman   While the same rain fell on suburbs of exile and motherless children,   whose courage was certainty whose impatience turned to doubt,   she came in the door like a comrade, lover, friend, and took off her shoes –   older than my daughter but too young to be my sister.                    ***   Sister of someone who was forced to denounce her on television;   pacifist in keffiyeh,       but they got guns anyway –   She rolled impatient exilic cigarettes, wrote fables of mourning :   the mother tucked the child in her bed, and slit the dove’s throat.                     ***   Slit-throat, cutthroat sun slashed wrists of early spring rain. Wolves at a distance   give up verse panegyrics and howl like politicians.   Is hope a fatal disease,

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       We sat together during recess      Purple nails laughing on the piste      of your knee, a lifespan of wild whale laughters             Friends in uniforms as twins Big-tooth, dumb-love   Distance makes us crave milk our bones no longer need We are old now Not in rocking chairs                                                                                              We wrote with fingers in the fog                                                Signed imaginary names on a willow                                                We weren’t kids, simply spirited   As time passed our hugs retired It hurts when we’re just an Image Can you help me find what fell?   It’s too abstract to search for something Cubist                         We are people we don’t know                       Conversations are hard to knit                       Without alphabets     Stranger,

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my mother thinks trump is the dajjal  calls the non-arab men in my life “international”   she does not understand isis  because “prophet mohamed said be mindful when eating garlic  so as not to harm others so why does daesh think it is ok to kill people”  like her nephew at 19 right before christmas of ’14.   i tell her about a time i was turned down by a boy because i wear hijab she says “ohhh you mean       the way that you do”  i say “no mama, i mean           the fact that i do”    i overhear my father on work calls,  tossing in ya3nis and yallahs  too engrossed in the topic to realize  he’s using arabic.   i

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