Miss hoodoo mother bake me a pecan pie
I’ve been gone for too many Christmases
Blood soaked magnolias splayed before white linens
Smell of a fire just stifled out, stifled out by blood
Cheeks still glistening when I came in the kitchen
“Are you searching for something or running from it?”
Fields crowned in white, soil fertilized with sweat
With heartbreak
You’re fertile, the warmth envelopes me
The birthplace of something blue, something used
I can’t say when I’ll be back again, the road is long
I’ll keep your song with me, chords of pain and comfort
Your scars are visible at the supermarket, whispered about
Billboards of turmoil everyone drives by
Lips ache for a taste of your lemonade nonetheless
I think about my time in that home, in my home
If I should have boarded that casino boat
What number would those dice land on
The one thing that I did wrong

You took everything away.
Burned down our homes,
Gunned down our children,
And built palaces over the dead bodies.
Do you smell it?
I smelled it once.
It was home.
Home to the famous olive trees.
That symbolized peace
And prosperity.
The most eye-catching landscapes,
The beauty in the ancient buildings
That
for so long.
Stood strong.
These.
Were the ones driven away from this land.
We.
Were the ones driven away.
Forced to mourn the day they demolished our nation.
The day they tried to demolish our souls.
The aroma of oud and kanafeh.
Can you smell it?
“I don’t smell it.”
Rubble and dust suffocate the air.
Suffocate our lungs.
Pain.
Despair.
We will not be forgotten.
We did not die in vain.
Oh,
My love.
One day,
I too will gaze upon the grace of that land.
My feet will tread the ancient streets.
And one day.
We will smell it again.
Love.
Because.
From the river to the sea.
One day.
Palestine will be free.

I put some traits of me in this world maybe someone would notice.
Nobody notices. They are asleep.

How draining it is
for this place to be my haven,
yet also the very place
I long to escape.

i get lost on purpose
    drive into the mountains like
    maybe i’m waiting for a cliff

   like maybe route 44 will go off the grid
    unmap itself
from my neurons and from google both

i brake disgusted
    reminded of the guy who took the hairpin too fast
    and didn’t even make a dent in the ridge
reminded how it looms so large with every rev
    till all i see is rock
   , road
   , and impossibly the flightiest glimpse of

   vanishing point

so distant from the guy who escaped the sky

i pull over next to smoking trucks and their smoking drivers
silhouetted against a valley so vast it may as well be nothing
    a pipedream projected somewhere
    beyond
     some etching from the silurian period
    that i won’t understand (not even when i’m older)

i’m sorry i’m late

i get lost on purpose
    but i still repeat myself:
the second the county signs change color
    i’m shivering at the lookout
    i'm swinging around and glancing nervously at the sun
i'm slamming my brakes at the hairpin
    neither earth nor air nor new
   just home.

sorry i’m late
but i’m here.
    i parked at the end of the driveway
   like always.