 My name is Lois, and I'm a nigger. I'm speaking because it's the 21st century, and though I was born in the middle of the previous century, I was born a nigger, and I will die a nigger. I have to be afraid every day that my son is going to come home or not come home because he's been gunned down by the police for acting sassy. I have to anticipate that there's going to be some disastrous event that pertains to me as a person of color. This is the 21st century, and this is still going on. I wrote a poem today in which I tried to express my desire for freedom from repression and discrimination for people the world-wide, and in particular my hatred and loathing for discrimination against people in Europe and America who are tortured and murdered because of somebody else's religious beliefs and because people in the ISIS organization feel that other people don't deserve a chance to live because they are in the wrong religion. So I come here because of my hatred for Christians, Jews being cut down, being butchered, because they in theory have the wrong religion. And I wrote this poem about a victim of repression and hatred in Jordan and a victim in particular of the ISIS organization. In the council tent, the warriors gather quietly to squat in a circle upon the grooved blood-red clay floor of the hut. Thirteen or fourteen men summon desert camouflage, pants and shirts. Some in ragged, soiled, white caftans. The council tent sways in the febrile thirsty dust that swirls in eddies in the stale meager wind. On his feet in the center of the circle, the commander pronounces the fate of the condemned man, the captive. Then the leader watches carefully for reactions from his group. The circle of common fighters seems to shrink down, way down into the ragged, soiled garments. Some men grind their yellowed, carious teeth. Some cast back their heads on stiffening, juiceless, scrawny stalks of necks. Some warriors take up the fringed tails of their kafias once proudly, cleanly checkered red and white, now frayed and dingy. They nurse the tails of the kafias between parched, cracked lips, stuffed the dirty cloth deeply into blind mouths, cauterized with fear. One man folds his hands together as though in prayer, then unfolds them time and time again. Finally, one skinny dark-skinned man begs permission to speak. The leader nods. A black scarecrow rattles the bars of the cage. Once his apparition bathed in the fjords of blue sky, once he robed himself regally in fleecy, cumulus clouds. Now his singed skull drums frantically against the iron bars. Now screams flee from his cage. A black cage, clumsily hoisted on a scaffold. In the center of the marketplace, now voiced, unlike a natural man's, rides heavenwards to greet a few lonely hawks towering upon thermals. While robed of gun-scrapped men watching from the ground, shout, Allahoo Akbar! The betel nut-skinned man chained to the red and yellow waves of light and heat, thrust from between thick, hot iron bars. Fingers like forks of fire, which clutch at and try to shake the unyielding iron. Like naked brown rabbits, his bare feet leap and scurry within pools of gasoline on the floor of his high prison. Black soaked with gasoline, his trousers cling to his starved sticks of legs. Bicycle feet set up a clamor as the ankle chains rock against the rusty iron floor. The smell of roasting human meat seeps between the bars and fills the nostrils of the hungry villagers on the ground as they watch from behind the black clad lines of soldiers. I too watch and wait, observing the murdered deer of my safe stand in the global village where I am informed by television, by newspapers, by the internet. And now, a continent, an ocean, a heart beat away. Roasted human meat gluts my throat and I choke on the fiery meal that I cannot swallow. Thank you.