Issue 002 -wcnsf

Alexandra GIlliam

WCNSF (wounded child no surviving family)

for the 30,035 Palestinians murdered by Israeli soldiers and bombs in the Gaza Strip from October 2023-Feb 2024

When the food poisoning gives you chills — chill the juice — chill your whole body— Annelle Sheline resigned because she couldn’t stand hers ours the USA complicit again bombs something familiar profiting off of war again– over and over watch a people plea for baby formula, flour, a glimpse of the sky–

I pull up Natalie Diaz on my phone, another poet reciting their poem with the repeated line buy a bulletproof backpack, my feed flooded with pleas from Palestinians, comment, write random words, I learned English to try to tell you

I recite their names every night, in my sleep, this poem could be a list of names, arm another name for feather, dove, children learning not to cry, to harden in the light, hear the drone strikes, hunger, hardly healing, heaps of light, fallen hairpins, hellfire, hamburger shaped toys, harrowing, heart attack, most recently a woman clutching her dead lovers muddy black tennis shoes, cradling his shoes, the weight of a pair of tennis shoes

my whole body, I save every article, small artifact, memory, a thousand different openings, to dream at all, under the weight of the rubble, to know the weight of water, every night I say their names

drink your hands, Amal has come to our town a peace piece of you floating in your mouth, want to throw rocks at the the gym screens playing Fox News, the bombs going off, children covered in gray, covered in light, the little boy I nanny and his love of ducks careful to not startle them as we walk closely behind

how we are all delicate — watching a mother in Gaza have a c-section birth to triplets, watch as a Palestinian reporter in Gaza doesn’t have access to hair care products so she had to cut her curls, cutting your visible identity, she posted she finally ate eggs after months, I cry staring at the unopened dozen in the fridge, there are tons of deer on the side of IH10, cruel winter, imagining the deer roaming free rather than their beautiful eyes across asphalt, winter so warm the trees barely know to fall at all.

the papaya still isn’t ripe, stripped with ice and bird song —— the beginning of a poem: a poet who decided to become a sound engineer; or this new beginning: why is Israel dropping bombs on children, you might not have looked closely enough seen a bright face making a kite, does kite spell freedom ? Or just a place without bombs ?

Alexandra Gilliam (she/her) is the author of Lightsheen (sub-sea sheen), Finishing Line Press, 2020 and the chapbook, Femmesturary, dancing girl press, 2016. Find her work in LIT Magazine, Second Stutter, In Parenthesis, Taipei Poetry Collective (TPC Review), and others. Alexandra is a bi-poet who lives in San Antonio, TX and works in video production. Find some of her photography on Instagram @poetsforsound