POEM WITH GENOCIDE IN THE TITLE

by Emily Khilfeh

I saw a picture of Earth on the nighttime side
with the sun behind it & all the people slumbered.

I buy oranges just to watch them shrivel in the bowl.
An infant’s fist. Nuclear reactors can be entombed

& cocooned which are both ways to say almost
forever. The saint of lost things is only a tongue

& jaw. That’s what devotion gets you. A display case.
In Arabic, Orion’s Belt is called string of pearls.

These days, I am jealous of the girls who post
their sweet little diaries, their smiling boyfriends,

their negronis with droopy, pulse-red cherries.1
The nameless dead line the pages of the Iliad

& the Bible. Fate strings us like a necklace.
Or God does. I put my soul away. A swallowed yolk.

The terracotta statuette of Nike once had wings.
Now she’s headless. Entombed in glass. Myth rots.

I got tired of begging for empathy so I stopped
begging. I want language to curl. Salt on a tongue.

About the Author

Emily Khilfeh is a Palestinian American writer from Seattle, WA. She has been nominated for a Pushcart, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net, and has received fellowships from the Kenyon Review and Tin House. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rusted Radishes, Jet Fuel Review, and Heaven Looks Like Us: a Palestinian Anthology. She is currently pursuing her MFA at Arizona State University and is a Research Assistant at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands.