girl
Gaza, 2025

hands with protruding veins and thickened joints claw through the rubble
brush concrete debris from a fresh-limbed fawn, shaded in periwinkle vignette
light pools in the sunken

braided rainbow threads hug her wrist’s extend to barely budding knuckles
clinging photographs of boy band heartthrobs with sun-bleached corners
overexposed and underdeveloped

bodies bloat with the barrel’s hollow as peeping curves swaddle bullets in soft tissue
this red sputters brighter than the stuff you use to scramble to scrub from your underwear
before bleeding was broadcast

this red splatters thicker than the blotches of magenta stain from bitten-off cherry bums
you dappled onto cheeks full as bellies, plump and nearly bursting with things to say
evaporating in summer magma

did your soles overgrow with enough leather callous to sprint across dried bramble
from clomping around in your mother’s heels? as swiped swatches from her vanity
taught red–cherry and crimson and bloodshed

did you learn your strength jamming against your brother’s elbow before school,
for a fragment of shared bathroom mirror, or the great morning race to the shower
before the flow should numb?

the autopsy finds hints of candied wax tooth-scraped from lips stuck in classroom daydreams
orphaned tube of watermelon-scented chapstick rolls about settler rapture in twenty years
unspent on kisses goodbye

playground children will muse folklore in jump rope rhymes, falls cradled in your cartilage
hear them whisper legends of girls in Gaza, as your ashes awaken myths of pegasus
dead sea grazing