The Kitchen

Prayers are never loud enough, check the pathetic height of
bullets shot from rooftops, or rockets chasing dead men.
All night it was like the stars exploded in our faces.
You and I somehow escaped the line of those to get sent.
At breakfast my hands smell of your body.
The stone bread, broken yolk, crushed salt, tablecloth hiding carven wood,
fork and serrated cutlery...
You peer into your cup of dark coffee...
You've got that bomb blast afterglow, that unseen damage.
Violence makes it's way into our language.

You see,
some emcees rap in newspeak;
bodies appear briefly on newsfeeds too quick to read.
Habibti, this is no test, I need not even say it,
cops mean it when they spray it,
no rubber pellets loaded, yes, it's live ammo.
I don't want you to be one of ones that don't arrive home.

To the pop pop, of firecrackers, followed by tired laughter,
streets are in need of release;

to the masses chanting God and God as scared as I
overlooking a rooftop of the bombed;

to artillery shells fall blindly in the distance, a ghost note in my ear, shhhh-

to other tenants through the air vent going at it after we're spent,
drifting towards the peace of sleep.

It's getting late, above me he's pacing
I gaze past the ceiling, imagine the plate of food waiting:
hummus, pita, olives and aubergine.
In the kitchen he sits, listens for her return to the living.

Even after footsteps, the plate must still be eaten.
Glass, steel and porcelain laid out with precision.
Still something's missing: a sea of hunger, dead zone fishing.
Raise the empty nets up from the depths, dripping...

He thumps his fist down like salt up on the cloth again
Cloth:
A drape over the coffin-lid,
a flag for the tossing wind.

I awake within his skin, I'm him,
eyes opening to the morning in the kitchen.

The food cold on the plate,
It's hard to eat her share.
How do I honor the smell of her hair?
I make a fist
with the same hands I once held her with.




To a single shot ring in the sunrise over Palestine,
a kite set loose with not anchor;

to her anger resurrected in the people's doubled numbers
flooding the streets like she never died;

to the angel fists pound on the stone seals of their tombs,
the baby kicking in his womb;

to the chop-chop of small swords down on the cutting board,
by loves hands this plate is beautified.

Dedicated to the women at the front lines
of our collective liberation
and to those they are survived by.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• henry mills The Kitchen (film)
• stephen fleg
• hip hip hop
• rap underground
• spoken word poetry
• palestine poem
• bullfight academy