share


You Arrive at A White Checkpoint and Emerge Unscathed

after Mahmoud Darwish 

 

Why is a boy an exclamation, 

and why are his dead a period?, 

why do his sinews tighten when he sees 

a Palestinian body? Does his vision narrow 

because of their flight, 

or because their world is raining with salt? 

Why is a boy with a gun different 

from a boy with a jail cell?, 

if the tools of rupture are our arms for 

repurposing the body, and the arms of 

the state are our means of repurposing the male, 

are we finally useful and breathing and nervous…? 

Does the white mean Night’s arrival?, 

or does night signal the white’s escape?, 

and when that white city boy becomes 

a White City man, 

does the hate in his heart subside?, 

or does it become an ellipses, 

a Bauhaus history of stories started 

and left unfinished 


ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR

has written about art, film, and literature for the New York Review of Books, The Nation, and Artforum, among others.



READ NEXT

Art

January 2017

New Communities

Robert Assaye

Art

January 2017

DeviantArt is the world’s ‘largest online community of artists and art-lovers’ and its thirteenth largest social network. Its forty...

Art

July 2014

Operation Paperclip

Naomi Pearce

Patrick Goddard

Art

July 2014

‘I began at this point to feel that politics was not something “out there” but something “in here” and of...

fiction

July 2015

Scropton, Sudbury...

Jessie Greengrass

fiction

July 2015

My parents were grocers. For twenty-five years they owned a shop with a green awning and crates of vegetables...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required